Episode 38: Let's Talk About Sex (Research)
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Alyson Spurgas
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide
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The hosts talk about the history of sex research, starting with Victorian sexologists and ending with current day sex self-help. Featuring interview clips with sociologist Alyson Spurgas, author of “Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the 21st Century.”
Show Notes
What Ought To Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century by Carl N. Degler
Havelock Ellis and Modern Sexual Theory by Paul A. Robinson
Queen’s University Sexuality and Gender Lab
A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal by Meredith L. Chivers, et. al.
What Do Women Want by Daniel Bergner
Apparently Women (But Not Men) Like Monkey Sex ... Literally by NCBI ROFL
New Documentary Finds Women Turned On by Pretty Much Anything (Except Dudes) by Lindsay Ronson
“Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex” by Mary Roach
“Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the 21st Century” by Alyson Spurgas
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Leila: Anyway, perverts, as Alyson would say—
Anna: You started it.
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 38 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: And I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: So today we're gonna be talking about the history of sex research, a topic that is surprisingly unsexy at times, though that will not stop us from making jokes like 13-year-old boys or girls, honestly, about everything. So it's still gonna be a lotta fun.
Rebecca: Obviously people have been having sex for time immemoria, a phrase the historians hate but is actually accurate in this instance, possibly only this instance. Of course I've talked a lot on this podcast about the ways that for centuries sex was connected to both morals and health. If you look back especially on our episode about bonkers things that men have said about women's bodies, you'll find that a lot of weird diseases we mentioned are directly related to both how much and the kind of sex women are having. So everything from the wandering womb to hysteria supposedly, according to medieval doctors, could be cured by having the right kind of sex, which is of course the kind of sex that got you pregnant.
Anna: Today the scientific study of sex is called sexology. I used to think that was fake.
Leila: It sounds like it could be fake.
Rebecca: It sounds like a fake word. Yeah.
Anna: Yeah. Sexologists are still hung up on what really counts as healthy sex or morally correct sex, even if they're unlikely now to put it explicitly that way. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is important to remember that the struggle to understand sex isn't new and to remember that, like all scientific and social studies, the answers are influenced by the particulars of people's experiences with the world.
Anna: So let's get to it. Like most scientific fields, it's hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of sexology, but most people place it in the 1890s at the tail end of the Victorian period. To get us started, let's talk a bit about Victorians and sex. What did Victorians think about getting it on? And particularly, how did they understand women's sexual desires?
Leila: Despite popular understandings, people in the 19th century were not a bunch of prudes. While men and women didn't speak as freely about sex as we do today, there's enough writing out there by both medical professionals and everyday people to make it pretty clear that sex was an important part of most people's lives.
Leila: Of course there were certainly people who were squeamish about sex and who looked down on the idea of women as sexual beings. For example, according to Dr. William Acton, who wrote Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in 1875, quote, "The majority of women, happily for them, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally." End quote. That sounds right to me.
Rebecca: I love that it's both "Women don't care about sex, and thank goodness, because men care too much about sex." He's just uncomfortable with sex for everyone, I feel like.
Rebecca: Acton is the exception that proves the rule in some ways. In the article "What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the 19th Century," historian Carl Degler notes that lots of medical professionals said that women, like men, required sexual release to be happy while of course making it clear that that should only happen within marriage.
Leila: To men.
Rebecca: To men. Yes. Yes. Hundred percent. One of the most popular sex and marriage guides of the 19th century was Dr. George Naphey's The Physical Life of Women: Advice to the Maiden, Wife, and Mother.
Leila: That sounds like exactly the type of person that I would take advice from about—
Rebecca: I know, right. Yeah.
Leila: George Naphey.
Rebecca: George Naphey, yeah, who talks about maiden, wives, and mothers.
Leila: The only kinds of women there are. Maiden, wives, and mothers.
Rebecca: A hundred percent. No question. Yeah. Yeah. But his opinion of women's sexuality was markedly different from Acton's in some ways. He claimed that when it came to sexual interest, quote, "For the vast, vast majority of women, sexual appetite is as moderate as all other appetites." End quote.
Rebecca: He also said that wives who, quote, "plume themselves on their repugnance or their distaste for the conjugal obligation," end quote, were a disgrace to womanhood. So yeah. He had no time for prudes, which certainly, I can imagine, was also used against women, but it is a hilarious quote.
Anna: "Plume themselves." Just ostentatiously buttoning up the extremely high collar of your very modest dress. "Nobody's ever been in here."
Anna: As that last quote might suggest, this interest in women's sexuality didn't mean these doctors were particularly progressive. Most doctors considered it unhealthy to masturbate or have sex focused on clitoral stimulation. Most of them also disapproved of any and all contraceptive practices. Even pulling out was frowned upon, though the reason that doctors tended to give may actually surprise you. They said that coitus interruptus was bad for women because it would leave them unsatisfied and they would wander around in a cloud of sexual frustration.
Leila: It's like blue balls but for women.
Rebecca: There are literally descriptions where it's essentially like, "Yeah, women will get blue balls if you pull out."
Leila: I like the "Wander around in a cloud of sexual frustration."
Rebecca: For the first of what I'm sure will be many tangents into what is wrong with straight people, their definition of sex, I told this fact to my wife, and she just looked at me, and she went, "Oh, straight people, right."
Anna: The big thing to take away from all of this is that in the 19th century doctors were very interested in ensuring that heterosexual married couples were having mutually enjoyable, missionary positioned sex. Essentially, sex was considered valuable for women, but only if it was the correct kind of sex. So this is the world that the first professional sexologists are walking into.
Leila: Many people consider English physician Havelock Ellis to be the first of these modern sexologists. In 1896 he published the first of 10 volumes of his research and opinions on human sexuality. Notably, that volume was focused on homosexuality, mostly male homosexuality, and argued that homosexuality was a natural, congenital sexual variant found all across the animal kingdom and that it should not be prosecuted or deemed immoral. And lest our straight cis men listening to this feel like the Victorians forgot about them, Ellis has your back. He actually had a lot to say about male sexuality.
Leila: He was significantly less interested in women. In his later writing he did insist that women were just as sexual as men while also explaining that women's approach to sex was naturally more passive. He wrote that women's sexual interest was mysterious, elusive, and complex, while men's was, quote, "predominantly open and aggressive." He even connected the supposed passivity to women's natural modesty and emphasized that courtship was important because essentially women needed time to warm up to male partners. To be totally fair to Ellis, he did encourage slightly more variety in the bedroom, even going so far as to suggest that couples engage in cunnilingus.
Rebecca: Gasp.
Leila: But in a lot of ways, his opinions about women's sexuality line up pretty well with what his predecessors had said.
Rebecca: So even if you haven't heard of Havelock Ellis, you have probably heard of Sigmund Freud. All of us have, even if we wish we hadn't. Today it can be easy to make jokes about his theories like the Oedipal complex and penis envy, but it is helpful to remember that he saw himself as a scientist and that he did have some important ideas about sexuality and desire.
Rebecca: So in her book Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity in the 21st Century, sociologist Alyson Spurgas lays out both the positive and the negative impact Freud and his research had on society's beliefs about women's sexuality. On the one hand, he was very interested in the way socialization and trauma could affect how people understood their desires, which was valuable both at the time and, I think, continues to be valuable. On the other hand, he had some pretty crappy things to say about what constituted natural or healthy desire in women.
Rebecca: So to get ready for the podcast, I spoke to Alyson about her research, and I'll just play a clip from that interview to explain what she said about one of Freud's bad ideas.
A. Spurgas: So one thing that was pretty important for Freud is that he thought that females would go through these different stages, that female children had the capacity to have a spontaneous active desire very early on. It was very clitorally animated. And then it would eventually, in the mature female, become vaginal. And that was attached to this passivity. Of course it ends up being all about motherhood and maternality. So yeah. So he's just a mixed bag.
Anna: Both Freud and Ellis conducted research by doing in-depth case studies on their patients. But in the early 20th century, there was also an effort to study people's sexual behaviors in a broader, statistical way by surveying them. We wanna highlight one of these surveys in particular which was published in 1929 called "Factors in the Sex Life of 2,200 Women." It was conducted by Katharine Bement Davis, who was interested in finding out about, quote, "the sex life of normal women." And by normal, Davis meant white, upper-class, educated women, of course.
Anna: And because of her narrow focus, Davis's survey isn't necessarily interesting if you're trying to understand what the actually average woman actually thought about sex at the time, but it is interesting if you want to know what researchers cared about. So by focusing on so-called normal women, Davis demonstrated, purposefully or not, that proper, well-educated, well-married ladies did in fact have opinions about sex. And among other things, the survey found that 60% of unmarried women and 40% of married women masturbated and that 40% of all women found that sex was essential for, quote, "complete physical and mental health" and 85% believed that sex for pleasure was justified.
Leila: I actually am surprised at the 85% of that. This dirty little secret that these housewives were keeping to themselves or something. I don't know.
Anna: The word "justified" is doing a lot of work.
Rebecca: So the question was specifically—this is part of an attempt, I admit, to shoehorn that into the sentence, but the question is technically "Is it justified to have sex for reasons other than procreation?" But that basically means "Is it okay to have sex for fun?" but it's written in this hilarious double-negative way that I think is also doing a lot of work.
Anna: Yeah. Is it acceptable, or is it something that you can defend?
Leila: Surveys like this one or like the Kinsey reports of the 1940s and '50s made a big cultural splash, but it was a very different set of sex researchers who really ended up influencing the scientific study of sex. Instead of asking people what kind of sex they like or how they responded to sex, they decided to study people having sex in labs, which I don't know what gets you guys going, but having sex in a lab and people watching? Yeah.
Rebecca: This is another thing that I love about Bonk, the Mary Roach book, which I read years ago and rediscovered in doing research for this. But she actually went and had sex with her husband in a lab just to see what it was like. And she was like, "Yeah, it was super awkward and not great, and it was cold." And it was fine. They had sex. But they were just like, "This was some of the weirdest sex we've ever had."
Anna: Yeah. Ugh. I'm very hung up on it being cold. I'm imagining one of those stainless steel morgue tables.
Rebecca: I know. Yeah. And I think for them, there was at least not people standing in the room while they were doin' it. So I don't know. Yeah. The idea of people literally standin' in the room really close to you. Anyway.
Leila: The most influential of these researchers who some of you might have heard of 'cause there was a TV show about them was William Masters and Virginia Johnson. William Masters was a gynecologist who began conducting research on human sexuality at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1950s. Virginia Johnson had only briefly studied sociology at Washington University, and she had little formal scientific training when she answered the ad Masters had placed in the paper looking for a research assistant. They later married in 1971 and then divorced in 1992, but they remained scientific collaborators for their whole lives.
Rebecca: So under the auspices of the blandly named Reproductive Biology Research Foundation—I just feel like, yeah, I love it. I love it.
Anna: "Welcome to our sex lab! This is the sex lab." I guess you can't call it that.
Rebecca: Under the auspices of the blandly named Reproductive Biology Research Foundation, Masters and Johnson invited 287 married, heterosexual couples to come into the lab and either have sex with each other or masturbate or both. Masters said that he screened out, quote, "all individuals with sociosexual aberrancy," end quote. Aberrancy? I don't know.
Anna: I think it's aberrancy.
Rebecca: I think you're right. Yeah. Also the vast majority of the participants worked at the university, so we can assume that like the subjects of Katharine Davis's study, they were also well off, well educated, and white.
Leila: Does that also mean you'd have to see them around campus after?
Rebecca: I do have lots of questions about that. Yeah. I guess that's true, though, of a lot of sociological studies in general. You make people do weird things, but because they're students, then you see them again. I don't know. That seems like a bad plan.
Anna: "Little Billy in my 102 class definitely electrocuted the person behind the window."
Rebecca: Right. That's exactly what I was just thinking.
Anna: "And I can't stop thinking about it while I'm lecturing."
Rebecca: Yep. Yep. In any case, speaking of the logistics, how did this work? Basically, the researchers would hook up participants to machines that tracked their heart rate and blood pressure, which is basically a lie detector test. And then they would also record video of the participants having sex, and then later they would watch the video and use it to make up-close observations about the body's physiological reactions.
Rebecca: If you want to learn more about how all of that worked, you can either watch the TV show or you can read the book Bonk by Mary Roach. And she has some great descriptions of how they got up close and personal with people's genitals, which as Anna noted in a note, did include essentially a dildo with a camera on the end of it, among other things.
Anna: So now along with really pioneering this lab-based approach to sex research, Masters and Johnson made a lot of important discoveries. They completely tossed out the idea that women's sexuality is somehow categorically different from men's.
Anna: So instead they observed that people, regardless of gender, go through what they call the sexual response cycle, moving through stages of excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. They also disproved Freud's old idea that women have inferior clitoral orgasms and superior vaginal orgasms by demonstrating that they are physiologically the same process. It's just an orgasm, man.
Leila: But as Alyson Spurgas notes, they were still mostly interested in understanding heteronormative sex. Not only did they focus their study on straight, white, married people, but they also almost exclusively studied penis-in-vagina sex.
Anna: Leila's making the hand sign. You can't do that on the video while we're trying to have a serious podcast.
Rebecca: Well, everyone listening to this is now also doing the hand sign.
Leila: Especially if they're driving.
Rebecca: Don't do that if you're driving, guys. On so many levels.
Leila: [Unclear 20:03]. So as Alyson puts it, quote, "They believed that women's sexuality should be liberated primarily so that women can fulfill their naturally ordained reproductive duties to procreate and mother. This theme of sexual liberation as a means towards a heteronormative and gender reductive end would occur again and again over the next several decades in sex therapy discourse through today." End quote.
Rebecca: Just this is another one of these podcasts where we're just like, "Everything's the fault of the Victorians." We're just having a giant Victorian hangover.
Leila: Yeah. It's just weird because it does seem like there are, in certain senses, especially with Masters and Johnson, some sort of progress in tossing out the idea that women's sexuality is inherently different than men's, but then they still conclude that with saying women doing reproductive duties also. It's like they just can't completely throw the Victorians out. It's like the monkey on their back.
Rebecca: Yeah. It's like we could think they're more willing to take what turns someone on on its own terms, but at the end of the day, they're answering the same question that Victorians are, which is how can we make sure that people enjoy sex so that they have more babies? That seems like the big, overarching theme that continues to come up, is basically, yeah, it's good for women to enjoy sex because that way they will want to have more of it and that way we will have more babies in the world.
Rebecca: So this way of doing sex research by closely examining physiological responses to sex continued through the 20th century and into the 21st century. The gadgets themselves got a little fancier, and by the 1970s it became common for sex researchers to use something called a plethysmograph, which measures blood flow to a particular part of the body. There are plethysmographs—I did so well the first time; I messed up the second time—that study other parts of the body, but they're now, I think, mostly associated with sex research.
Rebecca: As you might expect, for the purposes of sex research they come in a couple of different forms, penile and vaginal. The penile plethysmograph is just a little loop that goes over the penis, and the vaginal plethysmograph is a tampon-shaped device that is inserted. For those of you who are extra curious about these devices and how they work, we'll include some photos or a link in the show notes from Queens University's Sexuality and Gender Lab.
Anna: By the first decade of the 21st century, these plethysmographs had become the main way that researchers studied sexual arousal. They were the main tool used in a study published in 2004 by Dr. Meredith Chivers which has come to define sex research for the last two decades.
Anna: In "A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal," Chivers and her coauthors describe an experiment in which they hooked up men and women to plethysmographs and showed them a variety of film. Some of the films were pornographic, some showed naked people walking or doing everyday tasks, and some depicted animals having sex. Along with measuring the physiological responses from participants, researchers also asked them to rate how turned on they felt.
Leila: And here's what they found. Men tended to say that they were turned on in the same instances where the plethysmograph indicated arousal, but the same wasn't true for women. In particular there were a bunch of different instances when women said they were not aroused but plethysmographic data indicated that they were, at least based on physiological markers. According to this study, women were physiologically turned on by almost everything but were incredibly unaware of it. Researchers eventually ended up calling this discordant desire.
Leila: I studied this in Human Sexuality when I was a psych major. This is taught as fact, as a way to basically support the idea that men and women are different.
Rebecca: Yeah. This is deep into the culture. Even as happens with scientific research, Chivers and her associates have tried to now pull back and be like, "Well, this is actually harder to replicate. Well, maybe we could use different measurements. Well, we didn't mean for it to come off this way."
Leila: "We didn't mean for it to be sexist. Sorry."
Rebecca: This study spread like wildfire through the popular science press. We will link to some of the articles in the show notes. It's definitely one of those "Don't read the comments" situations, too. I will just say that.
Anna: Heads up.
Rebecca: This idea that women are discordant is still central to sex research today. Frankly, it has led scientists to some pretty distressing conclusions. Alyson talked with me about this topic as well, so I'm gonna let her take it from here.
A. Spurgas: This research is put out there, and it's like, "Oh, my God. Women are discordant." And then it's always, at the end of the article, it's like, "And this is probably an evolutionary defense against injuries that a woman might receive during rape." And so then that becomes what is called the preparation hypothesis, and it's this idea that, well, women have evolved this way and it's a defense mechanism because of the problem of cave rape where there had to be some kind of biological thing to protect women's vaginas against injury. That is the main argument that's used for many, many, many years.
A. Spurgas: So evolutionary psychology is just brought in through the back door, and there is never any deep discussion of, I mean, A, why are we using this technique and what do we expect to get out of it with this technology, and B, if there is this discordance, why might that be the case beyond these just evolutionary kinds of reasons? Or just what are other ways to study women's sexuality? Why not listen to what women say about their desire rather than comparing it against this supposedly objective measure? I just think it plays on these certain kinds of tropes about hysteria, about the feminine neuroses from the worst parts of Freud but then also explains too often early on in these very evolutionary psychology ways.
Rebecca: I had put a note in the script about how now we were gonna have a 20-minute rant about evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology's the worst. For folks out there who have the joy of not hearing about evolutionary psychology, it often ends up in this place where it's saying, "Well, we evolved to think this way because," and usually this way is some very heteronormative thing, and because that was how they had to do it in caveman times. Yeah.
Leila: But it also serves, as in this instance of talking about cave rape, is that men are so sexually aggressive because it is inherently part of who they are biologically, psychologically. And that is just the way that it is. And, I mean, that's really dangerous when we're talking about present-day rape culture and normalizing aggression being a part of sex for men.
Rebecca: It's a sciencey way of saying, "Boys will be boys." It's a sciencey way of saying, "Well, we just have to teach men to be less aggressive" or "Well, we have to teach women to protect themselves from men because they're gonna be aggressive no matter what we do."
Anna: I mean, the entire field of evolutionary psychology is pretty fucking bogus, actually. I mean, it's just built on all of these assumptions about how ancient humans behaved. And the people who actually study that will tell you that there's very little we can actually conclude about that from the evidence we have, which is several-thousand-year-old bones and cave paintings and things of that nature.
Leila: Isn’t that why Jordan Peterson only eats meat?
Anna: I think Jordan Peterson only eats meat for reasons that are specific to Jordan Peterson and what he has his whole thing going on, but I think that's what he tells people.
Rebecca: This reminds me that one of the most popular ways that evo psych has hit the popular consciousness is things like the keto diet 'cause the keto diet is basically evolutionary psychology bullshit.
Anna: Yeah, paleo, all of that.
Rebecca: And, yeah, paleo diets, things like that, where the idea basically is "Eat like a caveman because that's how we're evolved to eat." Which, like all these other things, is based on absolutely nothing.
Leila: Ah, yes, those cavemen who went to the grocery store to get their grass-fed meat.
Anna: If you're gonna eat like a caveman, aren't you eating mostly root vegetables and yams?
Rebecca: I do think paleo diets involve a lot of nuts and berries.
Anna: We can't go down this rabbit hole.
Leila: We can't talk about Jordan Peterson for the rest of this episode.
Anna: I really thought he was gonna die when he went to Russia and was in rehab and was only eating meat and he did that interview where he just looked like the fucking Crypt Keeper.
Rebecca: No, Anna, that's just his face.
Anna: He wasn't the Crypt Keeper. He was just really sweaty. He wasn't dry and dusty like the Crypt Keeper.
Leila: Meat sweats.
Rebecca: The meat sweats. Just constant meat sweats.
Anna: Yeah. He looked like he had been soaking in juice for several days.
Leila: Meat juice.
Rebecca: Pulling us back just a little bit, the other thing I wanna toss out here that Alyson's quote gets at is along with all these baked-in ideas about male aggression that are quite horrifying, there are also lotsa baked-in ideas about women lie or Madonna/whore complex stuff. Women are really super sexual, but they're repressed.
Anna: They're sexy, but they don't know it.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. All the various ways that society has tried to reconcile both female purity and also women are evil sex monsters.
Rebecca: One more thing that Alyson talks about is the way that these ideas have made it into popular sex therapy, particularly for women who see themselves as having low desire. The idea is that, well, since women have discordant desire, they probably have desires they are not aware of, and through practice and mindfulness they can find a way to tap into that desire.
Rebecca: And that's not inherently bad. If you aren't sure what turns you on and you wanna spend some time thinking about it, do it. It sounds like a great way to pass the time, especially when we're all stuck indoors and can't do anything else. But like a lot of self-help out there, especially self-help directed at women, it can get pretty icky and prescriptive pretty quickly. So here's what Alyson had to say about that.
A. Spurgas: It starts to travel under the sign of self-care. So it's like, "You are supposed to do this. You should do this." So it's very insidious. It's almost like, "This is gonna be good for—it's good for you, but it's also good for your relationship. It's gonna be good for your family. It's good for men. Hey, maybe you'll even be able to save heterosexuality itself. You'll be able to save the planet." It's just like, "Be a happy woman. Be a happy, sexual woman, and it's good for you to do that."
A. Spurgas: So I think it really feeds into a lot of these very old ideas that feminists have been theorizing for a long time about compulsory sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and compulsory femininity. To be a good feminine subject, this is what you will do, and it'll be good for you, too.
Anna: I think we are definitely seeing a huge uptake in the sexual wellness influencer economy or whatever. Like Alyson says, this idea that it's within your power to discover your own desire and sexuality, and if you do that and buy these crystal dildos or whatever or this candle that smells like Gwyneth Paltrow's vagina, then you're enacting all of the good and laudable things about being a woman.
Anna: You're a fully realized human being now that you have finally unrepressed yourself and are comfortable talking about sex in public or whatever, posting about it on your Instagram, and that this is tied to specifically wellness culture and "This will make you healthy." Which is, again, just another 19th century idea about if you have the right kind of sex and you do the right thing, then it will contribute to your health and your morality, and you will be an ideal woman.
Leila: Well, I don't know about crystal dildos, but I did download this app, and its tagline is "Grow your confidence, get in the mood, and explore your sexual self." So I had to take this intake questionnaire which read a lot to me like one of those bullshit personality tests but for sex. And it starts with "Discover who you are sexually. Answer a few questions to find out your sexual persona and personalize your journey." I won't go through every question, but there are lotsa questions on there about how self-critical are you, do you have intrusive thoughts during sex, and stuff like that.
Leila: I was not expecting the results to come out as planets and astronomy-type results, but my result was I'm an exoplanet. And it says that exoplanets are “mysterious. We're still exploring all the ways they're wonderfully distinct. They may not live in the spotlight like the sun, but their discovery is what really sets them apart.”
Leila: I found the whole planet and astronomy thing to be—the whole thing feels like it's pulling on, of course, wellness culture but also pulling on those personality tests that people use to screen out employees and shit and then pulling on the astrology that has made its way into certain brands of feminism. It's tryin' to pull on all these different cultural trends. But I downloaded this app, I took the test, and I did it for this episode. You're welcome.
Rebecca: So one of the things also that happens here is there's this trope that goes back forever about women being mysterious and women's sexuality being mysterious and unknowable.
Anna: And also controlled by the heavenly bodies.
Rebecca: Right. You're right. And this has happened in a few different ways in this 21st century version of sex research, where they take something that's an old and icky idea, and then they use it and they change the tone of it so that it feels empowering. So this is using the same "women are mysterious" language, but it's being like, "You're a mysterious planet."
Leila: No. I'm a dead moon. I am a cold, dead moon.
Anna: I'm one of those fuckin' ice asteroids in the Oort cloud just cruisin' along, real dark, can't see anything. Cold, icy, frigid.
Anna: I just have to say, though, that the exoplanet thing, like, "Oh, you're not the star. You're not in the spotlight like the sun." The sun is the spotlight, and I'm just gonna say the only reason we even know about exoplanets is 'cause they go in front of their own sun and block it out, and that's how we know they're there. So just, I mean, come on. Really?
Leila: Yeah. No, I think your point is right. It uses the idea of being mysterious, my sexuality, I guess mine specifically in this case, being mysterious but then also something that needs to be explored and discovered, which I don't know. We talk about that a lot when we're talking about modern science and its investigation into nature and places they shouldn't be. I don't know.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. And also another way to loop this back to the Victorians. As Alyson says, a lot of this is about upholding heteronormativity. So much of the sex therapy that she talked with folks about is basically focused on penetrative, heterosexual sex and about making women more comfortable with a very particular sex act that is considered definitionally sex by a lot of people. One of the things her book is about is she has all these surveys with women who have low desire, and the sort of plot twist of her study is that almost all of these women have a rich fantasy life, but they just didn't like the sex they were having with their partners.
Anna: Ooh, awkward.
Rebecca: But they considered themselves as either currently or in the past having had low desire. And it's just like, "Surprise! The problem was heterosexism all along."
Leila: I think that's a great place to end this episode, to be quite honest.
Leila: And if you liked this episode today, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about any of the topics we discussed, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read articles and essays, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladsycience.com.
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