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I cant turn this into a group dicussion because I can't reply-all, but here is my two cents:

The claim that women dont get aroused until they are in the act of "lovemaking" is directly contradicted by the fact that women mastrobate. Women are aroused (for no good reason, perhaps by a thought or a memory) and they decide to mastrobate. It's not like we catch ourselves off guard and trick ourselves into arousal. In order to mastrobate, the desire has to come before the action.

There are so many psychological factors and societal factors which do cause women to be ... perhaps uncomfortable with certain levels of sexuality (not that these are things we should be comefortable with, but, you know - more men seem into porn). Some men can go to bars and go home with any old chick, have sex with her, and never think about her again. They do not feel that this situation makes them vulnerable to rejection or criticism or anything else. While some women can do that, most women cannot. Having a good dynamic with a partner is important for women ... it's evolutionary. We need to trust our men, and so it's hard to feel sexual abandon without some level of trust.

Wow, so passionate and angry. I like it. My father always told me that when a woman gets mad she also gets wet, so this article must have been a real turn on for you.

But seriously, I think there is something to be said about the points the article makes. One, this drug is not targeted at you, its targeted at middle aged women. Ironically a perfect drug for helping women and men deal with sex issues was created in the 70s in the form of MDMA, however the government hasn't been to keen in recent years on getting sexually repressed Mom's in the midwest to roll on some really good mitsubishis. Okay, I am not sure this article had really any one main focus but it sure makes me think
about alot of issues. Women in our society,
especially the puritanical WASP demographic, haven't been really encouraged to explore and embrace there sexuallity. All the sexually progressive women I know, such as yourself, and many of my friends in the city, they own vibrators and know how to make themselves come. But still there are many out there who sadly have never had an orgasm, never had there pussy eaten, never sucked a dick. I know a woman like this, my die-hard Catholic Step-Grandmother. She once
asked my Mom if she knew anything about "Blowjobs".
My mom explained to her mother in law, that yes
blowjobs were nice, and that men really appreciate
them, and that there is nothing wrong with two people who love each other enjoying a blowjob. My
Step-Grandmother responded only with the explanation, that she had been raised to believe that "down" was a bad thing, a dirty place, and so she had never done this! Can you imagine 80 years old and never had a penis in your mouth! Incredible.

Anyways, I guess my point is, that is who this
research is for. Up tight people, purantical people, who are too embarrassed to tackle something head on. The only way they can deal with it, is when there doctor tells them it is okay, and here is a pill. And that statistic you sited, a about 99% of health insurance companies covering viagra, and 33% covering birth control, its just evidence of how fucked up this country is.

Although we are all open minded, free thinkers, and we are sexually comfortable. Much of this country is still not having an honest discourse about sex. And if your husband was some ignorant right wing christian red neck, who had been fucking you badly for 25 years, you might lose interest in sex too. And if no one is having an honest open discourse about sex with you, you might begin to think something is wrong with you.
Especially if your husband is an insensitive man,
probably a pro-lifer, who doesn't really respect the sanctity of woman's body, because in his mind he owns it and having been raised in the dominant male hedgemony, he doesn't even question if what he is doing is right. In his mind any action he takes is inherently right.

It's sad. I feel bad for girls who have never cum. I might start a charity for them, where I hire male escorts like Richard Gere in American Gigolo, who come to them and work there pussies for 3 hours straight until they finally come for the first time in there life.

Anyways, thats my too cents. Also your other password for NYtimes online is rebalex/rebalex.

Peace,

Jesse

PS - I am debating some type of multimedia projection to run anti-push video loops during the convention.
What do you think?

You sweet talker, Betty Croaker. All the sweet things you do! With those brownies OooOhhOooohhh. What do I see? Mercy, its Hershey.

How can you say that? You know as well as anyone, that white Caucasian males have had women figured out since the 40's when they would administer Prozac and Lithium to disgruntled house wives (because they didn't get that house work was a blessing, and a proper use of their limited skills).
And the female libido is no mystery at all, and a similar solution would probably do some good. Women thrive on emotion and not attraction when it
comes to punching pillows. You know that men have to propagate these type of thought patterns because if the obvious truth came to light, which is that women are just like men but more
intelligent/analytical/reposed/spontaneous/grounded/lofty/libitious or any other adjective that accurately (although my verbiage isn't) describes
women's vast superiority to men. Heaven forbid that women should have the gall to rob us of our last vestiges of an already shake, but none the less pompous, understanding. You'll see this statement solidified by the comments you easily picked out of the times.
Don't have time to get even farther into this, especially 'cause I love discussions about "the difference between men and women", but I got to run.
Hopefully im the first to respond, cause lord knows its probably not the best.
j

I like the idea of a sex discussion group...

I think that it is all about affective states. That's what emotions are. If you are in a fearful affective state your body will give a very different reaction to the exact same stimulus (say, a clown jumping out and saying "boo") than if you are in a happier affective state. In the same way, anyone's body will give a very different reaction to a exual stimuli depending on what affective state they are in. I think that it is usually physical, sexual contact that is sexually arousing, but this contact can have drastically different effectiveness depending on the affective state of the recipient. It isn't the emotional stuff, like security and comfort and feeling loved, that is sexually arousing, but sexual contact is usually much more effective in arousing someone if that person is in the appropiate affective state (which can often include feeling secure and comfortable and loved).

I don't think that females are less physically aroused and more emotionally aroused than males, but it could easily be true that males are more often in an affective state where physically contact is more effective. Or that they more easily fall into this affective state.
But I can't really confirm this theory, having very little experience in trying to sexually arouse males. If there is a difference in how readily males and females will achieve a sexually receptive affective state, this could easily have a lot to do with cultural baggage, like Rebecca suggested. But I think that biology probably plays a big role in this as well.

I don't agree with Rebecca's deffination of arousal. I think that arousal and desire are very different things. I would view arousal as being physiological: blood rushing into the penis, relaxation of the labia, mucus secretion from the vaginal wall, swelling nipples, etc. Whereas desire is psychological: the psychological state of wanting to have sex with your partner, feeling lust towards them. And I think that although arousal and desire often (maybe even usually) are achieved at the same time, there are still a lot of occasions when these two things are not connected. For both sexes. A male can wake up with an erection and have this not particularly connected to any desire to have sex. And a male can be impotent when he wants to have sex. In the same way a female can become physiologially aroused and not want to have sex, and a female can be desiring to have sex but unable to acheive proper vaginal lubrication.

I don't really know if there is more of a disconnection between arousal and desire in females than in males, having little experience with males, but I do agree with Dr. Legato that often in females you can be well along the arousal pathway before desire kicks in.

I agree with Rebecca that the stereotype of men being empty-headed sex-driven maniacs who only want to fuck everything in sight and have no emotional attachment whatsoever is often wrong. But really, I don't find this in the least bit demeaning. I am kind of proud of it actually. I think you are just jealous. You want society to view you as the sex machine. Well too bad.

As for Pfizer's comment that drugs that affect brain chemistry "could be an extremely interesting area of investigation," didn't we invent that a couple thousand years ago? It's called beer...

And I think that CAKE NYC is right in that at least part of the problem is that a lot of guys are really bad at sex. I don't really understand this, it is relatively simple to make sex at least decent, it's sex for fuck's sake and you have a lot of biology on your side. I think that the problem must be cultural, maybe the pressures that society places on men makes some of them too terrified to receive even the tiniest bit of input from their partner on what they should do. By being embarassed to admit that they don't know anything about a vagina, they end up not knowing a thing about a vagina.

Stu

P. S. How is your date going Rebecca?