And God wept
July 12th, 2010
Evolutionary psychology’s
standard narrative contains several changing
contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves
female libido. Females, we’re told again and again, are the choosy,
reserved sex. Men spend their energies trying to impress women…all to convince
coy females to part with their closely guarded sexual favors. For women, the
narrative holds that sex is about the security — emotional and material
of the relationship, not the physical pleasure. Darwin agreed with
this view. The “coy” female who “requires to be courted”
is deeply embedded in his theory
of sexual selection.
If women were
as libidinous as men, we’re told,
society itself would collapse. Lord Acton was
only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he
declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and
society, are not very much troubled with
sexual feeling of any kind.”
And yet, despite
repeated assurances that women
aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures
around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths
to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors,
medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults
about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses
of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any
female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality…
all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the
supposedly low-key female libido under
control. Why the electrified high
security razor-wore fence to
contain a kitty-cat?
