Researching women's desires and sexuality

I want to thank one of the readers of this blog for drawing my attention to an article on the NYTimes.com website by Daniel Bergner “What do Women Want? – Discovering What Ignites Female Desire”.

This article features various pieces of research being carried out into women’s sexuality. As is sometimes the case with research the “evidence” and conclusions reached by the various scientists are often contradictory. I will summarise my understanding of the key findings from this article:

Meredith Chivers is a professor at Queen’s university in Kingston, Ontario. Her research involved volunteers being connected to plethysmographs – for men this is a device that fits over the penis and measures swelling and for women it is a small plastic probe that is fitted into the vagina and measures genital blood flow. Chivers showed a short movie to women and men (homosexual and heterosexual) of bonobos (a species of ape) mating and short clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiselled man walking naked on the beach and a naked woman doing calisthenics. Volunteers also rated their level of arousal on a keypad.

Chivers found that makes who identified themselves as straight responded “genitally” in “category specific” ways. Men who identified themselves as straight swelled when looking at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. Gay men were aroused by the opposite categorical pattern.

The results were different for women. No matter what their self declared sexual orientation was women showed a “strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men”. With the women readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad did not tally.

My understanding of this (I may be totally wrong of course) is that women’s sexuality is more diverse than that of men. The other conclusion one can draw is that women are reluctant to accept/admit what turns them on...

I found the research by Barry Komisaruk a neuroscientist at Rutgers University very interesting. There I was thinking there were two types of orgasms – vaginal and clitoral (referred to in a previous post) and he has indentified four!!!

An orgasm attained by touching the clitoris
An orgasm attained by stimulating the anterior wall of the vagina (aka the G spot)
An orgasm attained by stimulating the cervix
An orgasm attained by thinking (Yes, thinking!!!)

Komisaruk in 1992 collaborated with Rutgers sexologist Beverley Whipple (who is credited with establishing the existence of the G spot) in a study which proved that some rare women can think themselves to climax! I am definitely jealous of this ability.

Lisa Diamond, sexologist and associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah also has some interesting theories on women’s desires. Diamond’s research has led her to conclude that “female desire may be dictated...by intimacy, by emotional connection.”

Diamond’s study tracked 1000 young women who at the start of her work defined themselves as lesbian, bisexual or refused a label. Her research indicated women making many shifts in their sexual identities. Diamond’s argument is that for her

“...participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation.”

So with women who identified themselves as lesbians for example, only one-third reported being solely attracted to women as the research unfolded. The remaining two thirds also felt a genuine desire for men.

So what are your thoughts on these various pieces of research? What does your own experience tell you?

Nana Darkoa

How did you become so bold in writing about sex?

A reader of this blog asked me 'So, how did you get so confident?'. I guess what she really meant was, how did you become so bold in writing about sex? The fact is, I don't think it's confidence that has led to me writing about sexuality. I think my motivation is a continuation of my politics as a feminist. I think women have the RIGHT to have great sex and I think a lack of knowledge prevents a lot of us from having great sex.

There is also a lot of silence about sex (I have to point out that I am speaking from my personal standpoint). My sex education as a child was primarily from watching Obraa or Osofo Dadzie (popular Ghanaian TV when I was growing up). Inevitably a teenage girl will fall pregnant, have to drop out of school and that would be it for her. She was not going to be a successful doctor, lawyer, teacher... she was going to be a teenage mother. The unspoken message was that her life was over. All as a result of having sex. The boy on the other hand could continue his education...and could still be a successful doctor, lawyer, teacher...

At this juncture in the programme my Mum would screech 'Have you seen, have you seen, hmmm, if you become pregnant you will stay at home and the boy will go to school'. The fear of becoming pregnant, being unable to continue my education and the stigma associated with being a girl who sleeps around kept me a virgin for a long time...there was nothing in my sex education about contraceptives, masturbation or pleasurable sex.

How did I learn about sex? Primarily from books, articles in magazines and eventually when I started having sex from trial and error. I still think I have a lot to learn about sex so I plan to continue reading and experimenting. I also hope women share really useful knowledge they hold about their own bodies and sexualities such as 'Do you have vaginal orgasms?' or 'Clitoral orgasms?'. Does one feel better than the other? Do you have a guaranteed way of achieving your orgasm(s)

What are your thoughts?

Adventures from the bedrooms of African Women: An Introduction

I hope you are intrigued by the name of our spanking new blog, 'Adventures from the bedroom of African women'. I am too, even though I am a co-author for this blog.

So what is this blog about? This blog is simply about the diverse sexualities of African women. I have found myself becoming interestingly interested in women's sexuality the older I have got. (I am all of 31 years old in case you are wondering) I am interested in knowing what brings women pleasure, how women negotiate pleasureable sex with their partners, why women put up with 'bad sex'.

I have had conversations with friends who have 'confessed' to faking orgasms in order to be over and done with sex. I always thought 'Surely that is counter productive. How do you then get to the stage where you start to have open dialogue with your partner about what pleases you?'. In the same vein I have had the most open conversations with female friends about sex and sexuality. On a recent beach holiday I found myself skinny dipping with 3 other friends chatting about sex...

So why the focus on African women's sexuality? I think there is a huge gap of knowledge about the sexuality of African women. There is probably a huge gap on women's sexuality in general. Apart from the oft sited Shere Hite Report on Sexuality nothing much springs to mind. So the question remains 'How do you learn about sex?'. The Ghanaian blogger Esi Cleland, http://maameous.blogspot.com/ posed this question some time ago. In the context of 'traditional culture' where sex is often not discussed except to say 'Good girls don't do that' or ' Don't have sex until you're married' when and where do you learn about sex?

This blog hopes to answer some of the questions raised above. I am hoping our readers will be active contributors to this blog. I think as women we need to empower ourselves sexually, learn about our own sexualities and what brings us pleasure. We need to be able to negotiate safe and enjoyable sex. I get so distressed when I read of statistics like '70 % of women have never had an orgasm'. I almost feel like that is a crime. Well, we need to learn from the other 30% what they do, and how they do it. I look forward to sharing my personal experiences with you all and I hope you will reciprocate generously.

Nana Darkoa