Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan
Katha,
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StumbleUponUh oh. I promise I didn't mention evolutionary psychology and Aristotle just to drive you up the wall. And I'm sure you're right about female sexuality--up to a point. But why can't there be a mix of culture and genes? The mismatch between men and women in our culture is surely a function of both. Men are culturally brought up to think of sex as a series of conquests to be boasted about; women are brought up to think of their sexual needs as somehow subordinate to men's and something to be embarrassed about. I'd like to see those cultural signals toned down a little, and have men develop a greater sense of masculinity as expressed in fidelity, and women acquire a greater sense of sexuality as something to explore, deepen and flaunt. We should certainly do what we can to erode the stud/slut discrepancy.
But...I don't think it's all culture. And I think it's silly to pretend otherwise. Men and women are also chemically and physically different creatures; or rather the differences in sexual desire among men and among women are by no means as great as those between the sexes. A lot of our sexual urges are biological and chemical. I got a sharp dose of reality (literally) on this front a year ago, when I found myself with a sharply lower sex-drive, sleeping a lot, and generally depressed. It turned out, after a couple of tests, that I had almost no testosterone (something that happens to a lot of HIV-positive men). I was below the average for an 85 year-old, and had begun to acquire the sexual morality of Kenneth Starr. But a few days after the first shot, it was hard to walk around in sweat pants. Small animals scurried away from me as I walked down the street. I'm sorry, but I don't think a woman has ever felt like that. Nor will she ever, so long as women have one tenth the testosterone level as men. And it was not inculturation.
A good book I read recently, Sex On The Brain by Deborah Blum, pointed out that the rate of monogamy in animal species is directly related to the levels of testosterone in both genders. Where females have the same levels of the big T as males, monogamy is the norm. Where males have more than females, polygamy rules. The human species, by this count, is mildly polygamous. (Men have, on average, ten times as much T as women). That's not saying we should be polygamous, merely that polygamy is our "natural" baseline. Viagra is merely entrenching that baseline, methinks.
Of course, it also suggests that the most monogamous creatures on earth should be lesbians: low testosterone and equal levels on both partners. It also suggests that, while infidelity might be higher among gay male couples, their stability as couples might be greater than that of heterosexual pairs. The data, such as we have, confirm this. I wonder why George Gilder hasn't cottoned on to it?
yours in heat,
Andrew
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