elucidator, I too imagined WV_Woman as the driver of one of those inimitable 70s buses. Now, instead, I’m hearing “Take me home country roads…”
But, please, after reading this post, do not attempt to e-mail me any naked photos of John Denver ;).
** Stoid **, glad we are still the best of e-friends. And congrats to you on the new arrival. 
"Well, we?ve established that we disagree about the double standards, or at least about whether they are a product exclusively of culture or whether they are in part a response to our fundamental natures, so it follows that we would probably disagree about the rest. "
Actually, to be more accurate, we disagree about the extent to which double standards derive from culture, and about the impact that actual biological differences may and do have. I repeat: I believe that there are some basic biological differences between men and women, tied to their different reproductive functions. But I also believe that much nonsense is spouted-- and much self-interest is masked–by what is said to follow from biological differences.
In the nineteenth century, before women got the vote, scores of experts claimed that women lacked the brain structure to be doctors, lawyers, etc. One of the leading scientists of the day, Herbert Spencer, claimed that women needed extra physical energy to bear children and, if they devoted energy to mental pursuits, they would become infertile. (Though interestingly he did not argue that if women did hard labor in coal mines, as they often did at that time, that they’d become infertile. Obviously, at that time, the threat of women competing with men as middle-class professionals was more intimidating to such men than the threat of women underbidding working-class men in blue collar jobs.)
At that time to say that a woman was as mentally fit to be a good lawyer as a man, even to say that she should have the vote, was to say something ridiculous and highly controversial. Many if not most women also agreed that it was ridiculous and highly controversial.
“While I never really went wild for Rod, I thought he was pretty damn hot anyway, and Robert Plant was a sort of sexual milestone for me, in that he was the first famous man I had a crush on that was really sexual, not romantic. Davey Jones at 8 and David Cassidy at 12 were both about smooching and running along the beach in slow motion. Robert Plant was about having a big fat orgasm to the tune of “Whole Lotta Love””
That’s exactly why I mentioned Rod and Plant. They were making very explicit physical appeals to their female listeners. “If you want my body, and you think I’m sexy, come on sugar let me know.” And Plant’s underwearless tight jeans, combined with those extemporaneous "push, push"es that he emits throughout The Song Remains the Same were, to the budding Mandelstamette, major turn-ons.
I suspect that Elvis’s roto-pelvis meant much the same thing to the screaming women of a generation or two before.
(However, as time has been very unkind to poor old Rod, and as The Song, these days, seems like the production of a stoned 13-year-old, let’s let these examples drop lest younger posters such as Guinasastasia lose all faith in our credibility. 
)
“Sure, but how much of the interest [in photos of teen idols] goes straight to [a girl’s] crotch? I don?t believe that for most girls it is quite the direct route from eyes to clit that it is for boys from eyes to dick. For most girls it is a much more elaborate and romantic fantasy. Young girls swoon at pictures of teen idols and write love poems to them and kiss their pillows and imagine him wanting to date them. Young boys see pictures of Britney and go hang out in the bathroom for 15 minutes. (Again, yes, I?m generalizing, I know, but I think it?s a fair generalization.) There is a sexual component to both the girls? and boys? reactions, but they manifest rather differently.”
First, there is a limit to how confessional I care to be in this thread; and I’m already close to it!
Suffice it to say that my own teen-age fantasy life did not culminate in kissing my pillow–whether the object was Rod, R. Plant, an actor, or, later on, a guy in school. I don’t know how unusual my behavior was or wasn’t but, so far as I know, I was hormonally typical: no premature development, not the bearded lady, just a plain-old teenager who thought about sex an awful lot, read about it wherever I could, and had a strong response to rock stars in particular because of their overt physicality.
So, in my experience, the “manifestations” of puberty were very similar.
What’s different, though, is the social consequence of the manifestation: that is, when a 15 year old boy is caught with a magazine, or even caught in the act of, um, auto-eroticism, it’s more socially expected. Hopefully by now most parents recognize that this is normal development for children of both sexes. But I still think there’s more stigma attached to girls’ sexuality, and more alarm about it. If a girl shows signs of being ready to rock, her parents are much more likely, on average, to pay attention and to want to curb her activities than they will with their son–or so I think.
Mind you, I’m not suggesting that either fifteen-year-old girls or boys should be encouraged by their parents to have sex, or should have a full range of erotic materials on hand for their use. I’m only pointing to the way the double standard tends to play out: such materials tend to be more easily available to boys; boys will be expected to want sex as soon as they can get it. Girls’ sexual desires will raise eyebrows.
I had written: “At right about the time that girls might be interested in checking out the Full Monty, what they get instead is a lot of conflicting messages 1) that they’d better invest their time and energy turning themselves into hot babes or no boys will like them; 2) that if they’re “nice” girls they won’t be interested in sex at all, except for “romance,” marriage, maternity, and finding a provider.”
stoid replied: “And with modern birth control,.women are finally able to battle back from these constraints. But these attitudes, let us not forget, were a direct consequence of biology. However distasteful we may find it as sentient beings that can reason and choose, we are in fact animals and part of the circle of life, which means we have urges and instincts and responses that were passed down to us from ancestors that lived in a more, shall we say natural way. And the natural thing for females to do is be picky about their lovers and find one that will help them raise the kids all that lovin? is bound to produce. Biologically, as I?m sure you are fully aware, Mandelstam, females have a whole lot more riding on their choice of sex partner than males do. This affects how we choose. Males?different story entirely.”
I think it’s very interesting how you interpret this evolutionary story. Our animal nature, such as it is, developed thousands and thousands of years ago, millenia before civilization as we know it.
Who do you want hunting a buffalo for you and your offspring? Bill Gates, or the 18-year-old guy you saw lifting weights at the gym?
My point: insofar as women’s sexual instincts are predetermined by evolution, they will favor a male who looks strong and fit. Pre-historic humans focused on survival, not romance. Romance is an entirely modern construct and, if you know anything about its cultural provenance, it developed to foster a degree of individual autonomy while, at the same time, helping to protect private property.
Human biology has not significantly changed for thousands of years: but relations between the sexes have changed dramatically. Therefore what’s telling about the evolutionary reading of sexual nature is the way that human evolution is frequently used–as in your example–to naturalize conditions that are relatively new. Pre-historic humans and, for most of history, historic humans, did not raise two kids in a four-bedroom house while leasing an SUV and contributing to a 401k. Their mating practices were, consequently, entirely unlike that of must humans today.
The more closely you look at biological factors, the more you realize just how much modern (post-1750) notions of sexual difference depend on certain cultural conditions. Recent research on sperm competition suggests that human women are, relative to other primates, moderately promiscuous. Human women are the only females who can “mate” 365 days a year–whether they’re likely to reproduce at that time of the month, or not. Psychologically speaking, humans are entirely unique: our behaviors, our motivations, our communicative capacities are not even remotely analagous to those of any other animal. Therefore, the extent to which you can deduce human psychology from animal functions is extremely limited–and vastly overstated IMO.
Remeber too: before the invention of “romance” and the modern notion of femininity, female sexuality was curbed (as it sometimes still is today) by brute force.
"Science is showing us more and more each day how very great the impact of our DNA really is.
Actually, on the matter of gender/sexuality, I think that genetic science has shown very little. Genetically, men and women are much more alike than not. DNA may predict a given individual’s propensity for heart disease, or fat content; but it appears to have very little predictive ability, beyond the obvious, on the matter of men vs. women.
Indeed, human sexuality is so highly individualized and so culturally conditioned that genetics seems to me to be the very last place you’d want to look to understand it. Knowing what you presumably know about different men’s preferences: do you think there is a gene for leather vs. lace? for big “bush” vs. trimmed? for triple-D hooters vs. a boyish look?
You didn’t respond to Ludovic post on the importance of context but, I tend to agree with him that context is very important to a man’s sexual gratification; and I can’t imagine “context” as something that derives from genetics. So no, I don’t think genetic science has been revelatory here.
“I do not think that most women are about romance-novel sex, I know they aren?t. But I feel equally sure that most women aren?t into the kind of porn that is mostly available for men. We are just more complicated in our sexual response than that.”
Well part of my original point, stoid, was that typical porn offers very little for the female viewer. But, unlike you, I don’t see that fact as deriving from the difference between uncomplicated males vs. complicated females; or males who want physique and nothing else, vs. females who want context and don’t care about physique. To me those are incredibly artificial and inaccurate stereotypes.
The mere fact that so many straight women these days are watching porn–as a prelude to sex with their male partners–testifies to just how adaptive human sexuality can be. Personally, I agree with Freud that both sexes have bisexual potential. But, in our culture, women’s bisexual potential is, I believe, much more culturally developed than men’s. That is, women are constantly in view of good-looking women’s ultra-sexualized bodies and, therefore, respond to them.
I suspect that when a straight woman watches a porn video with her guy she’s being aroused by watching sexual acts, and by the physical attractiveness of the women involved. Perhaps she’s also aroused by her partner’s arousal. And I guess every once in a while such videos actually feature a good-looking guy and show something of him. My point here is that if a woman can become aroused by watching this male-oriented fare, imagine what fare designed from her point of view might do for her.
Once again: I’m not demanding that as part of my personal utopia, because I think there are more interesting things a couple can do during or before sex than watch TV together. Let’s not forget that four thousands of years before the invention of photography, people managed to want sex just fine. The desire for pornography, as we know it, is not “natural”: it is a desire that has been artificially produced by the availability of certain technologies and the social conditions that accompanied them.
What I am suggesting is that straight women’s current sexual habits–including their increasing readiness to watch porn with men–suggests that they might be very interested in a female-geared erotic product if they didn’t feel embarassed about wanting it, and if the men in their lives were willing to be experimental about their own viewing habits.
“I never asserted that men prefer masturbation to real sex!”
I think the confusion arose because you didn’t realize what I meant when I said that I prefer written, verbal and performative erotica to watching the box. I said that in a couples context: I meant couples reading or writing their own particular scenarios, telling stories to each other, and acting out these fantasies instead of, say, watching a video.
I genuinely believe that if more people felt uninhibited enough to engage in this kind of communication that the interest in and demand for passive visual products would diminish.
But that could be bad news for someone in your line of biz ;).
"There has been an atmosphere created where any kind of sexual reference can be considered sexual harassment by someone, somewhere, and companies just don?t want the expense and hassle, so they fold. The fear of sexual harassment suits for virtually anything is real, we have received real-life reports right here in this thread. Where do you think it came from? "
What feminists have wanted and continue to want is equality of opportunity. (That’s true even of feminists who have sought such equality in what we and others in this thread seem to agree are counterproductive ways.)
Are you surprised that corporate culture has responded by covering the legal ass rather than delivering up the substantive equality? And is the fault of feminism?
By all means, complain loudly about the kind of feminist position that you don’t agree with. But also be careful to acknowledge where factors such as corporate self-interest, conservative ideology, and preservation of the status quo fit in to the picture.
And one should also be careful, I think, to examine the basis of one’s own feminist position. In your case, as a pornographer, you have a vested interest in the sexual status quo. In my utopia, couples would not need your product. At the workplace, and in their relationships, men and women would respect each other as true equals. In the bedroom the sky would be the limit because the human imagination is that glorious and human sexuality that kinky ;).
If the male or female CEO wants to spend his or her private time down on all fours begging a sexual partner for mercy, by all means let them. If they’re straight, let the girlfriend of said male CEO be unfazed by her partner’s submissive side; let her enjoy for herself the experience of taking the bull by the horns.
But these kinds of power dynamics, with their tantalizing erotic appeal, don’t belong in the workplace where their real effect is to subject people to limited economic and professional opportunities.
Almost everybody wants to feel powerful (including sexual submissives who are enjoying the power of their all-powerful “top”).
Men have to learn how to interact with and befriend their female colleagues as colleagues; they have to learn how to share power with women, whatever it is they might like to do with particular women in their bedrooms.
Women also have to learn what to do at the workplace, and I think that the current stress on “cleavage power” at the workplace is retrograde–though obviously an attractive professional look can help both sexes. In my bedroom a man panting for my cleavage or chasing the hem of my mini-skirt might be a huge turn-on. But at the workplace what I really want is the power of having my co-workers and clients, male and female, respect my abilities. Too few women experience this feeling.
For all of these reasons, I think that stereotypes about sexual nature are very damaging to men and women. Although repressed and ultra-stereotyped sexual culture is far from the only reason why women have not yet achieved equality of opportunity, it is, IMO, a mitigating factor.
“I think [counterproductive feminist positions] boil down to what I believe is a hysterical overreaction to the effect that sexual images, jokes, etc have on women in the workplace.”
Some might (although I really dislike the term “hysterical” which, for obviously etymological reasons, implies that women are prone to irrational behavior due to the possession of a uterus).
But, once again, the way that the quest for equality of opportunity has been responded to–by corporations, by conservatives, by religious people, by powerful men, by unpowerful men, by frustrated women (to name just a few complex actors)–is so much larger than what “feminism,” in all its many varieties, has been responsible for.
“I?ll buy that for a dollar”
Ah, that’s the beauty of the SDMB. You can have it for free ;).