Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan
Dear Andrew,
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StumbleUponWhy are you surprised that heterosexual men can't always get an erection? Heterosexual women can't always get excited either. Maybe our culture has unrealistic expectations in this department. I don't just mean about long established couples, but about the automaticness of sexual performance for anyone. Gays, after all, have the thrill of the illicit. When you get gay marriage you'll have more sympathy for us straights!
Don't get me started on "evolutionary psychology"! What aggravates me about the discussion around Viagra and many related points (fidelity, adultery, marriage etc) is the assumptions made about women's wants, needs and preferences. Women's eyes also stray, as Shakespeare's Emilia tells Desdemona in a speech that could have been written yesterday. But as long as women are brought up to see themselves as extensions of men and suppress many of their strongest feelings, as long as they need male incomes to survive respectably and as long as female sex-expression makes them "sluts" while men are "studs" I don't think you can see through culture to nature.
As for Aristotle, this is the man who thought women had fewer teeth than men! I don't think a fifteen-year-old girl and a thirty-five-year-old man (typical ancient greek marriage ages) are very well-matched sexual partners, do you? (Besides, in ancient Greece no one would have expected the man to be faithful--wives were for breeding, prostitutes and boys for fun and love). And what about when the woman is 35, her sexual peak, and the man is 55? Women's needs were clearly not much on Aristotle's mind. Remember, Aristotle held that men could not love women, but women could love men, because it is natural for the inferior to love the superior.
The truth is, Germaine Greer was right when she said a man doesn't need an erection to satisfy a woman. Or a man either!
Time for my piano lesson, for which I'm totally unprepared...
Katha
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