These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: . She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder- block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 1. In 1. 99. 6, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias . She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1. Who am I to study women, when I am a man? Cleaning For A Reason. Since 2006, the goal of Cleaning For A Reason has been to reduce the stress. Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. Here's why, and what to do about it. Who are the world’s most powerful women this year? They are the smartest and toughest female business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, philanthropists and CEOs making their mark in the world today. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological studies by women at least as far back as 1. Katharine Bement Davis, a prison reformer who once served as New York City. But the discipline remains male- dominated. In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 3. Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to illuminating the realm of women. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late . Female desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the . Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology. But soon the AIDS epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster. To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women. This search may reflect, as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology, on nature. One study, for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation, certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians. Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to orgasm while lying with their heads in an f. M. R. I. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in considerable doubt, in 1. Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of the G spot in the . And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like . But Chivers, with plenty of self- doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence she has collected . Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male- to- female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren. Inhibition, in Bailey. The liberation of women could help solve many of the world’s problems, from poverty to child mortality to terrorism. UN Women is the global champion for gender equality, working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her human rights and live up to her full potential. New exclusive designer shoes, heels, wedges, sandals, boots, and handbags arrive every month. Shoes starting as low as $39.95 each, plus 50% off your first pair. Get your own personalized shoe showroom, plus fashion advice. Early results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men and women . One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to use Viagra- like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire. By some estimates, 3. In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that. The pills target genital capillaries; they don. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a feeling of power and control, but they don. And for men, they don. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn. The medication was originally meant to treat depression . As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the libido. From Krysten Ritter to Emilia Clarke, these are the women we love to love. AskMen's Dating channel offers you all the advice you need to become a Better Man in romance and relationships. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving depression, it left female . In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment. For the discord, in women, between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture and culture . Chivers said she has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies. Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke . Lust, in this formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, . She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape. And she wondered if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the exposure and tilt of the woman. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go- out- there- and- get- it kind of sexuality, it. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you. You need something complementary. That receptivity element. But it will offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a friend, some with a stranger: . She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that cause physiological response . Though women may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on. Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers.
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