Some guys who’ve never been with a woman or read Virginia Woolf just made this breakthrough discovery in the laboratory: despite the story men have been telling for centuries, female desire is in fact “base, animalistic and ravenous.”
[Daniel] Bergner, and the leading sex researchers he interviews, argue that women’s sexuality is not the rational, civilized and balancing force it’s so often made out to be — that it is base, animalistic and ravenous, everything we’ve told ourselves about male sexuality. As one researcher tells Bergner of all the restrictions put on female sexuality: “Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament. Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that.”
Here’s the book: What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
Here is Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own, surveying books in the British Library written by men about women:
Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women; whether they were old or young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed–anyhow, it was flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention…all such frivolous thoughts were ended by an avalanche of books sliding down on to the desk in front of me.
Jokes aside, just as Woolf uncovered one kind of angel-making prejudice in her examination of the writings of her day (that men need to define women a certain way to support an image of their own power), so Bergner finds another here. Asked to summarize his findings he said:
[I was struck] by the distance between reality and the fable that we’ve been taught most recently by evolutionary psychology, that is, that men are driven to spread their seed and women, by comparison, are more driven to find one good provider, and that, therefore, while men are very poorly suited to monogamy, women are much better suited to monogamy. But that just really doesn’t stand up when you look at the science. The science behind that is flimsy, circular. And the science, when you look at it clearly, that stands in opposition to that is actually fairly strong — still emergent, but fairly strong.