my comments from an earlier post on this:

i flipped out reading "postfeminist" in the tagline. if we live in a postfeminist world than what the hell do you call posters on feministing?

but to the credit of the author and the researchers, the article was more complex and less sensational than i expected. the three main researchers mentioned gave nuanced points of view, which the author did not trivialize, and some points of the article actually surprised me. for example, Meanna started saying how she thinks women's desires to be desired by men and i thought she was going to support the traditional gendered roles where women place all their efforts on being attractive. however, she took it in a different direction, saying women are perhaps even less relational than men in that they want to be the focus of things. which challenges the idea that women need long term sweet relationships, and supports what many of us know - that women also need "oomph!" i also liked that the researchers distinguished fantasies of being physically overpowered from actual sexual assault. many people, especially men, don't realize that fantasy depends on personal control while rape is non-consensual. there is no such thing as a "rape fantasy." Meanna's interpretations were particularly interesting to be because romance novels, which many women enjoy for arousal, definitely focus on this overwhelming attraction that the characters have for each other. so it's no surprise then that some "narcissistic" women find that arousing, as opposed to most porn which is objectifying and degrading of women. in addition, that explains the huge success of Twilight.

now for the criticism: it is clear from the article that all this research has been done on american men and women, and we don't even know if they accounted for different ethnicities. why then do they keep saying that this is how "women" and "men" act, when they haven't sampled majority of the world's population? an obvious cultural difference that i can think of is: men from many countries might not find sex between women pleasurable, as it is not a commodity and not thought of as attractive. also, some parts of the world, like the arab cultures, don't believe in the victorian ideal that women don't have sex drives, they actually believe women have stronger desires and therefore need to be controlled. that view of female and male sexuality might also impact research results, and interpretation.
secondly, researchers have a tendency to call research results "innate" or evolutionary. scientists know about the plasticity (ability to shape variably) of people's bodies and brains, and they also know that it decreases with age, yet it's hard for so many of them to admit that biology itself is constructed. it is quite plausible that women and men's brains are being shaped differently as they're growing. although the first researcher acknowledges this, she still is trying to think of the "innate." i think "innate" itself is constructed.

a third issue that might complicate the research further is that sexual discourse in america have been dominated by white, heterosexual men, and everyone is taught to conform to their desires. women are taught to find pleasure in their own objectification (girls gone wild, anyone), which could lead to further mental conflicts over sexual desire. also, if women are indeed turned on by being desired, how does that impact american women who don't fit the dominant beauty ideal (i.e. desired) and so aren't able to view themselves as desirable, or believe that men can find them desirable? these are some questions the article didn't broach on, though i understand that it would've been 100 pages longer and counting if that happened.

all in all, i liked the article. i especially liked that in the end things were much more complicated than in the start. admitting complexity instead of patriarchal simplicity is almost orgasmic for feminist analysts. well that and wild sex.