Falseness

The messages our culture sends about female sexuality are a mess.  In large part they are completely wrong, and they almost universally assume that our cultural norms are universal instead of arbitrary.  For example, the idea that straight women just want a man who is a good provider, steady, and reliable while straight men want a woman who is young and attractive is wildly off base.  Women aren't really in it for the sex, we often hear, they just put up with the sex in order to get the other benefits of relationships like security and support.

I bought into these stereotypes when I was young.  They came cloaked in 'science' and a Darwinian understanding of nature.

But then I had sex with a bunch of women, and talked with a bunch of women, and noted that these stereotypes did not well explain the women who were desperately horny, the women who had male partners who weren't interested in sex, and the women who wanted all kinds of wild, kinky sexy stuff that had nothing to do with safety or sustenance.

Plenty of women want sex, (though obviously some do not, which is true of any and all genders) and the myth that women are mostly asexual is just another consequence of patriarchy.

I read Untrue recently and it ably covered the reasons to think that women's sexuality is wildly misunderstood, and happily smashed most of the standard stereotypes to bits.

Wednesday Martin attacks the issue from multiple angles.  She includes lots of science and interviews with experts to bolster her credentials but also talks about her personal experiences with infidelity and desire.  She goes to polyamory conferences to discuss open relationships, attends sex parties for mostly straight women who want to try out sex with women, and otherwise pushes her own boundaries surrounding her monogamous commitment to her husband.

One of the core theories in the book is the idea that the plough and how its development and use affected women's sexual liberation and general autonomy.  It turns out that societies that used ploughs relegated women to a much lower status that societies that did not, probably because of the high upper body strength requirements and issues with child rearing that came along with use of the plough.  The issue is probably more complicated than Martin makes it out to be, but I completely buy into the general thesis that specific styles of agriculture changed society in ways that were bad for women and the problems that those styles of agriculture created remain tenacious to this day.

If you are interested in understanding the history of women's sexuality and examining what science tells us about it, I highly recommend this book.  It is accessible and easy to read while be well researched and informative.  I like the line it walks between trying to be fun and provocative while being strict about the truth.

There is one thing that bothered me though, and it isn't specific to Untrue.  So often in conversations about relationships and sexuality people seem desperate to bring primate behaviour into the mix.  We seem to need to talk about bonobos and their orgies, bisexuality, and promiscuity to justify such behaviours in humans.  A large part of Untrue is dedicated to studies of primate behaviour that strongly support the idea that female sexuality in other species is NOT passive, straight, monogamous, or secondary to male sexuality.  However, this whole thing about primates is just a diversion from the key facts:

1.  Humans having relationship structures that aren't straight, monogamous, or vanilla isn't a problem for other people.

2.  People doing stuff that isn't a problem for other people should be left to do their stuff without interference or harassment.

We don't need to justify our relationships or sexuality by proving it is 'natural' because other primates do it.  We don't need to prove that we aren't the only species that wants to do all these things, because even if we were the only species that had orgies or queer sexualities it would still be fine for us to do it.

If some fool tries to tell people that women shouldn't be promiscuous because females don't do that in nature you can be all scientific and tell them 'LOL wrong!' or you can just circumvent that argument entirely and say 'so the fuck what?'  It is false, but even if it were true it wouldn't be relevant.

It is all well and good to study primates, but let us not think that we need primate behaviour to tell us how we ought to treat one another, or what the range of acceptable human behaviour should be.