Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski

Author:Emily Nagoski
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

lubrication error #2: genital response = pleasure

A second, more science-y way to be dangerously wrong about nonconcordance is to pay attention to the science and then tell the wrong story about it, to decide that women’s genitals are the “honest indicator” of what really turns them on, and the women are lying, in denial, or just repressed out of awareness of their own deep desires. Let’s call this Lubrication Error #2.

This tempting—and wrong—explanation for nonconcordance lines up neatly with various cultural misconceptions about women’s sexuality, like the Moral, Medical, and Media Messages that I described in chapter 5 and like the men-as-default myth. Like: Women have been socially programmed not to admit that they’re actually turned on by certain things (like violent sex or lesbian porn), so when they report their perceived arousal, they’re lying or in denial about their hidden desires, or possibly both. But what their genitals are doing is what’s really true.

Daniel Bergner’s What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire begins with a description of nonconcordance research, followed immediately by a description of lie detector research. The conclusion readers are forced to draw is that women are lying—or possibly just in denial—about their arousal. Here’s how Amanda Hess summarized it in her review at Slate.com: “Straight women claimed to respond to straight sex more than they really did; lesbian women claimed to respond to straight sex far less than they really did; nobody admitted a response to the bonobo sex.”16

Note the “claimed” and the “really” and the “admitted.”

Of course you know that women’s genitals were just reacting automatically to a sex-related cue—“This is a restaurant”—which has only a passing acquaintance with what a woman “really” likes or wants. Readers of What Do Women Want? didn’t get that lesson, though. They got Lubrication Error #2.

Sex-positive feminists embrace the story that women’s bodies could be contradicting the outdated morality-based cultural narratives about women being “less sexual” than men: Look how much our genitals respond to stuff! Look how sexual we really are!

Right? That’s an appealing story—as if our bodies are showing us a secret, wildly sexual self that could be into anything if we just gave ourselves the permission that our culture has been denying us for centuries!

And after all, women have been subjected to oppressive cultural messages that made it shameful for them to acknowledge and pay affectionate attention to their own sexuality—that’s what chapter 5 was about. In fact this whole book is about paying attention to your own internal experience and trusting your body. And what could be more “trust your body” than “Your genitals are telling you what you like, even when you don’t know it”?

Ah. It’s that word “like” that’s the problem. “Like.” Like, liking.

But genital response isn’t liking. It’s learning.

Your genitals are telling you something, and you can trust them. They’re telling you that something is sex-related, based on their experience of Pavlovian conditioning. “This a restaurant.” But that’s not the same as sexually appealing.

Do, absolutely, trust your body. And interpret its signals accurately.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.