Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality

An interesting find via Reddit. Thanks Sigi1, certainly an interesting paper:Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality (2002). I cite:

Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle
each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.

[...]

The most compelling evidence, in our view, involved the direct influences on adolescent female sexuality, because any culture that wanted to suppress female sexuality would probably direct its strongest efforts toward newly pubescent females. These data uniformly supported the female control theory: Almost all influences on female adolescent sexuality are female, and the sole male influence (the boyfriend) tends to operate to promote rather than suppress female sexuality. Put simply, the influences that restrain female adolescent sexuality are female. Evidence about adult female sexuality converged with the evidence about adolescent influences. Adult women seem more disapproving of female premarital sex and other female sexual activity than adult men. Women have supported the double standard more strongly than men. The more extreme evidence about surgical interventions designed to curb female sexual responses likewise pointed toward female rather than male control.

[...]

Finally, sexual deception seemed most consistent with the female theory. Women conceal their interest in sex from prospective partners, which would be most relevant to negotiating the terms of what the man will exchange for sex. The male control hypothesis that men want to stifle their wives’ sexuality is contradicted by evidence that women pretend to have more rather than less pleasure than they actually have (such as by faking orgasms).

Pretty interesting and also reminds me of a study I have floating around, Study: Displaying cleavage, sexiness can alienate other women:

New University of Ottawa research documented women's aggression against other women wearing revealing outfits; women showing too much leg or cleavage are likely to be ostracized from female social circles as dangerous rivals, the scientists claimed.

[...]

In background information, the researchers noted that competition among males over sexual access to females has been documented extensively for many species, including humans, while relatively few studies have examined intrasexual competition among women over attention from males.
According to Vaillancourt and her team, these results fill a gap by providing evidence that women also see their sexy counterparts as threatening rivals and react against them aggressively.

Not gonna edit....I guess I have to ask thesaurus for a good "interesting" alternative the next time. Ah well, it is all about the data anyway.

Once in a committed relationship, men and women have similar attitudes toward sex

Not much to say, but pretty interesting stuff:

“Men experience a lot of pressure in our society to have sex with a number of different partners,” said one of the study’s researchers, Paul Perrin, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Florida, “the opposite of what women experience as kind of the gatekeepers of sexuality.”

Past studies, the scientists point out, have shown that compared with women, men are more sexually permissive, endorse casual sex at higher rates and masturbate more often.

And even in dreamland, men are from Mars and women from Venus. A recent study showed men were more than twice as likely as women to report dreams about multiple sex partners.

[...]While women placed more emphasis on the emotional aspects of sex, men focused more on the physical side of sex. Men were much more likely to find sex personally and physically pleasurable, while women were more likely to think sex violates social taboos.

Thoughts often turn into actions. “Sexually restrictive gender roles too often become self-fulfilling prophecies because women know that they are expected to be less sexual than men,” the scientists write, “and men know that they are expected to be more sexual than women.”

Men gave much higher ratings for risky sexual behaviors, such as “I should have sex with as many people as possible,” than women. And women were more apt to endorse waiting longer and not engaging in premarital sex.

When Mr. Right shows up, however, women ditch society-imposed gender roles, warming up to sexual pleasures, the researchers found.

In the context of an intimate relationship, both genders expressed that sex was important as a way to bring couples closer, to help maintain healthy relationships and to increase one’s self confidence.

“People in romantic relationships give more importance to their own feelings and their partners’ than they do to social expectations about sexual behavior,” Perrin said.

Flirting...

Came across some interesting studies about flirting, body language and sex differences. We start with a study and two articles that are based on the study that come to totally different conclusions. It again shows us not to trust the media that much:

70 percent of college women reporting an experience in which a guy mistook her friendliness for a sexual come-on, Farris said.

In the study, appearing in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, men who viewed images of friendly women misidentified 12 percent of the images as sexually interested. Women mistook 8.7 percent of the friendly images for sexual interest.

Both men and women were even more likely to do the opposite -- when viewing images of sexually interested women, men mistakenly called 37.8 percent of the images "friendly." Women mistook 31.9 percent of the sexual interest cues for friendliness.

"Relative to women, men did not oversexualize the image set in our study," said lead author Coreen Farris, a doctoral student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington. "Both men and women were reluctant to state that ambiguous cues were 'sexual interest.' In fact, men and women utilized nearly identical thresholds for the degree of sexual interest that must be perceived before they were willing to go out on a limb and state that the nonverbal cues were sexual in nature."

[...] "The observed advantage among women in ability to discriminate between friendliness and sexual interest extends to processing of sad and rejecting cues. This suggests that the increased tendency among young men to incorrectly read sexual interest rather than friendliness may simply be an extension of a general disadvantage in reading nonverbal cues, rather than a process unique to sexual signaling."

The study involved 280 heterosexual college-age men and women, average age of 19.6. Seated in a private computer room, the men and women each categorized 280 photo images of women (full body, fully clothed) into one of four categories -- friendly, sexually interested, sad or rejecting. Images were selected for each of the categories based on an extensive validation process.

The study found that both men and women were least accurate at correctly identifying the photos indicating sexual interest. Farris, whose research focuses on sexual aggression in men, noted that the results reflect average differences.

"The data don't support the idea that all men are bad at this or that all women are great at this," she said. "It's a small difference."

Pretty interesting stuff. Another study (pdf warning) had a different finding, women are harder to read:

Furthermore, as predicted, it was on average easier for observers to gauge men’s intentions than it was to gauge women’s intentions (though there was high variance in observers’ performance levels across individual daters of both sexes). The lower overall accuracy concerning women’s intentions was not due to observers guessing or
performing at chance but to a systematic overperception of female daters’ interest (Fig. 3)—surpassing 80% erroneous interest predictions for the five hardest-to-read women.

This dramatic rate of incorrect perception supports our hypothesis that women are harder to read, presumably because
they mask their true intentions: As Grammer et al. (2000) argued, the biologically deep-rooted sex inequality in parental investment (Trivers, 1972) puts greater risks on the females of a species during mate choice. As a result, females, including women in speed dating (Todd, Penke, Fasolo, & Lenton, 2007), are much more critical and picky when making mate-choice decisions. And, in order to evaluate potential mates longer without signaling their true intentions, women behave more covertly and ambiguously during initial interactions with the opposite sex. Men, in contrast, face lower risks and consequently should be less likely to hide their intentions.

And while we are at it, something about women initiating:

He (Perper 1985) made note, however, of the fact that it was the womans's behaviour, that was more likely to usher in the next stage. Similarly, when Kendon (1975) filmed a kissing couple seated on a park bench he found that the womans's behavior particularly her facial expressions, functioned as a regulator, modulating the behaviour of her partner. Cary (1976) also has shown that the woman's behavior is important in initiating conversations between strangers. Both in laboratory settings and in singles' bars, conversation was initiated only after the woman glanced at the man. And Perper (1985) discovered in his filed of studies on couples in singles' bars that the woman was responsible for courtship initiation approximately seventy percent of the time.

Interesting stuff...


EDIT: And a recent one:

The researchers found that:
Men who wanted a short-term sexual encounter were more likely to overestimate a woman's desire for them.
Men who believed they were "hot" also thought the women were hot for them, but men who were actually considered attractive by women did not think this way.
The more attractive a woman was to a man, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest.
Women tended to underestimate men's desire.