Secondo questo autore, Bergner, che riprende le idee di Marta Meana, nelle donne c'è un compiacimento narcisitico nella contemplazione e gradimento dei corpi di altre donne, come un rispecchiamento di sé e del proprio potere seduttivo sugli uomini, il che spiegherebbe anche il successo di riviste femminili di moda ed altro.
Riporto da un articolo in inglese:
"In a similar line of thinking to Chivers, Marta Meana, psychology professor at University of Nevada at Las Vegas, argues that female desire is is actually based on being desired. After all, she led a study which found that while watching heterosexual porn men focus on the woman in the film and women focus in equal measure on the men’s faces and the women’s bodies — or, as Bergner suggests, “the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting,” and “the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.” Meana, a self-described feminist, argues that women’s lust is “narcissistic” and guided by “the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.”
It’s an interesting idea that I identify with just as far as the potential for being turned on by being desired. But I have a fundamental problem with the semantic framework. How is a woman’s arousal at witnessing a man turned on by another woman’s body narcissistic? Why isn’t it simply that she’s delighting in female sexual power? Is it necessarily narcissistic to enjoy driving your partner wild? And might it be that women focus on the idea of a man being turned on by a woman because our sexual culture revolves around that dynamic? The “narcissism” inference seems akin to suggesting that men’s undivided focus on the female porn star being robotically pounded demonstrates an inborn interest in female pleasure. (Please!)"
E ancora:
"Most interesting is a study of men’s and women’s responses to various genres of pornography, including “heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.” Oh, also: monkey sex. The men were outfitted with a gadget that measures how hard they got; the women had a “little plastic probe” inserted into their vagina to measure “genital blood flow.” The participants watched the pornographic clips while rating how turned-on they felt.
Researchers then compared the participants’ subjective evaluation of their arousal with the objective physiological evidence. Bergner explains the results:
“Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern … neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.”
(Some might say they were thinking with their penises.) As for the women? They reacted like total horndogs — everything got their blood flowing:
“No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly … as they watched the apes.”
Even more interesting is that their brains were doing one thing while their lady parts were doing another:
“During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.”
In other words, women were physiologically aroused by a far greater range of sexual images; however, they were cognitively clueless to that fact. I immediately thought: Well, maybe that’s because our culture is less open to non-heterosexual expressions of male desire; as a result, maybe men have successfully fought to subvert polymorphous arousal. But lead researcher Meredith Chivers, a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University, has tried to disprove that theory of cultural interference by studying male-to-female transsexuals. She found that both straight and lesbian trans women responded like males. The Times article points out, however, that it’s possible “to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence.” "
http://www.salon.com/2009/01/24/female_desire/
