Daniel Bergner
Author, "What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire"
@bergnerdaniel
danielbergner.com
B&N (has pubweekly, library journal)
NYJournal of Books:
The trouble with turning magazine articles into books is that for the most part they have little to add to what has already been written...
In his overhyped book about female sexuality, Daniel Bergner tries to compensate for this fact by offering a plethora of pornographic imagery—all in the name of illustrating research methods—but it does little more than titillate an otherwise bored reader.
And that is the least of the problems with this book about female sexuality, the main point of which is to illustrate that women are just as randy as men when it comes to sex...
Further, any woman born at the time of Second Wave feminism or after knows that females love foreplay, fantasy, masturbation, sexual intercourse in all its forms and positions, and that they can enjoy a variety of partners...
The central premise of the book is that sexologists and others studying female sexual desire and behavior have debunked “the societal assumption that female sexuality thrives on emotional connection, on established intimacy, on feelings of safety,” and that “instead, the erotic might run best on something raw.” Mr. Bergner admits that “this idea wasn’t completely new” but argues that “it tended to be offered as the exception rather than the rule.”
...Mr. Bergner’s journalistic inquiry, if a bit voyeuristic, is no doubt respectable. But for feminists and those who love them, a far better resource for understanding female sexuality and its complexities is the acclaimed Our Bodies, Ourselves or other works written by women and other experts. Their gender lens truly illuminates what goes on in the minds and bodies of women as sexual beings—without the pornographic boost.
Even though sex sells, the respectable HarperCollins should have known better than to go with this cash cow.
publisher's weekly
Experts Fear Too-Effective Female Viagra May Create Lust-Drunk Witches
Amanda Hess atSlate likes it.
Acculturated.com doesn't:
A new book, What Do Women Want: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, apparently makes the shocking revelation that women are actually carnal, wild beasts who have been socially re-conditioned when it comes to sex. In a generally creepy interview over at Salon, the author talks a lot about monkeys and rape fantasies.
Yawn/What the? That’s how I feel.
Yawn because I feel like ever since I came of age all anyone has been telling young women is that we are oppressed and repressed but deep down have the sex drive of apes...
What the? because either the countless evenings I have spent with women drinking wine and watching The Notebook were a farce, the nonstop conversations with friends opining about wanting more intimacy, more sensitivity, more meaning to physicality are some sort of Truman Show set-up, and the outpouring of data about how reducing sex to pure physical contact is causing psychological harm in young women and girls are jerry-rigged—or this author is being overly-reductionist to appear controversial in order to sell books.
Women, in general, may have a sex drive not all that different from men. But people aren’t carbon copies of each other, and sexuality is profoundly personal and differs from person to person. How people feel in the bedroom is not really my business or my interest. But it’s common sense that reducing sex to animal kingdom terms means women lose...
And while there is nothing wrong with pointing out that women have robust sex drives per se, it is problematic to do so without looking at the bigger picture. The bigger picture accounts for real gender differences, biological and emotional. And while there is nothing wrong with pointing out that there are certain similarities between human desires and behaviors and those of the animals, there is something majorly wrong with getting excited about reducing the human sexual encounter to its animalistic elements. A celebration of carnal, animalistic, and base sexuality gives us porn, rape, and human trafficking, all of which severely undermine girls and women around the world.
But honestly, the author lost me at monkeys. I won’t pretend to have the answer to what exactly it is that women really want. But I can tell you one thing. We don’t want to be compared to monkeys.
What Being Editor in Chief of Playgirl Taught Me About Female Desire
The case for abandoning the myth that "women aren't visual.":
What turns women on is not a mystery wrapped in an enigma. The pervasive idea that female arousal is a circuitous, delicate, and finicky thing is a sneaky way of spaying us.
Cosmopolitanappears awestruck.
Slate also has a podcast I haven't listened to yet.
Another naysayer:
A feature article in last week's New York Times Magazine served as an extended ad for a new book by Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire. It's filled with post-fashionable pop neuroscience and simplistic neurotransmitter stereotypes that rival those of Naomi Wolf (including her infamous “dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain” quote). The focus of Bergner’s article is on pharmaceutical treatments for the controversial diagnosis of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), particularly the subtly named Lybrido (along with its younger sister, Lybridos)...
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