posted by petya at 8/31/2006 03:15:00 PM
HELLO! THANK YOU FOR STOPPING BY.
My name is Petya and this place has been my true love since January of 2002 when I thought that I wanted to illustrate children's books for a living. I used to draw little girls with BIG heads. Hence the name of the site.
Since its very inception, the website has been hosted by, Dan of waferbaby.com. Dan is single-handedly responsible for my addiction to all things blog. It all started when he made the seemingly innocent suggestion that if I want to have a website, I might want to learn a little bit of html. And for that, I will love him forever.
After a seven-year whirlwind of adventures in the United States, I moved back to Bulgaria where I now live with my wonderful husband. If you ever see a spastic Bulgarian girl and a skinny American boy taking jumping pictures of each other you should know it's probably the two of us and should definitely come by and say hi.
Thank you for taking interest in my life. And please say hi when you get a chance! That would totally make my day!
email: petya.kirilova at gmail dot com
icq: 108929653
10 Comments:
Like...duuuuh :)
Seriously! I had no idea that the female libido is still a debatable topic
Let's put it this way ... the female libido is more debatable than the male libido. All stereotypes aside, no non-clinically depressed man under the age of 40 has ever given the "I have a headache" line.
Dear Anonymous reader, it is so obvious you are a man. :)
I think it is pretty naive to assume that the 'I have a headache' line is ONLY indicative of the female libido. Could it be that the woman's partner is not that great in bed and she's nice enough to protect him from getting his feelings hurt? Just a thought.
Petya, my natural impulse is to agree with you. However, I don't want to be guilty of succumbing to the Left wing dogma.
For a variety of reasons -- both physical and psychological -- individuals vary in the degree to which the seek and enjoy sex. Agree? If so, isn't it possible that there is gender variation as well? Isn't it actually an unresolved empirical question whether or not men and women have similar levels of sexual eagerness and enjoyment?
Moreover, sex is so socially constructed that I suspect gender differences in libido would vary between social contexts. Do western women have higher libidos than women in societies with more gender-oppression regimes? Does male libido vary between these societies?
What do you think?
I tend to agree with Andrew that there's no a priori reason to think there aren't (or at least, might not be) differences in libido between genders (of course, like all such generalizations, such a difference would be statistical and not relevant to any particular case). Indeed, there are even some a priori reasons (e.g. Selfish Gene-type arguments) why men might tend to have higher libidos than women.
That having been said, I think asking whether person X enjoys sex more than person Y is epistemologically invalid. Not only is there no way to measure how much a person enjoys sex on some objective scale in order to make the comparison (e.g. when I have sex, I experience 97 Sex Enjoyment Units, but you only experience 83), there's no way, even in the abstract, to coherently isolate how much a person enjoys intercourse from a whole network of related issues (e.g. are we even talking about the same thing when we ask whether a person in a loving, monogamous relationship enjoys sex more than a person whose sex life consists almost entirely of one-night stands?).
The only way to even approximate an answer to the question of whether person X enjoys sex more than person Y is to examine their behavior; after all, ceteris paribus, a person who has more sex places a higher priority on sex, which would give some indication that the person enjoys sex more (subject to the caveats in the previous paragraph). Of course, ceteris is never paribus and this immediately leads to problems. For one thing, opportunity plays a big role. For example, married people tend to have more sex than single people, which might indicate they enjoy sex more, but the more parsiminous explanation would be that married people have much more opportunity to have sex than single people, so naturally they'll have more sex. Also, priorities are based on more than simple enjoyment; nobody who wants to weigh less than 500 pounds eats chocolate at every meal, no matter how much they enjoy chocolate, and the various issues relating to sex are far more complex than those relating to chocolate.
Of course, the biggest problem is that, in the case of sex, it's basically impossible to get good comparisons. It's impossible to compare how often straight men have sex to how often straight women do because, assuming everyone's telling the truth, every straight sexual encounter adds one to both the male and female totals (the fact that straight women have slightly less sex, on average, than straight men says nothing about women's sex drive: it derives completely from the fact that there are slightly more women than men in virtually all Western countries).
Thus, the only possible behavior-based libido comparisons would be to compare gay men to gay women. Whereas, as explained above, any gender differences in libido must cancel when studying the frequency of straight sex, the fact that gay men have sex with other men and gay women with other women ought to amplify any gender differences. In fact, just such a study was done in the 80's which concluded that gay men had far and away the most sex, straight people were in the middle, and lesbians had the least sex. This would seem to support the hypothesis that men have higher sex drives than women, but there are so many problems with such a comparison that they hardly even need to be enumerated (to pick just one: even if we accept that the study is an accurate measure of behavior and that the behavior is a good approximation of actual libido and thus conclude that gay men have a higher libido than gay women, does this necessarily say anything about the libidos of either straight men or straight women?).
Anyway, I apologize for the length of this comment; my intent was merely to argue that (a) there's no particular reason to think that the different sexes wouldn't have generally different levels of sexual eagerness and enjoyment, making this, in Andrew's terminology, "an unresolved empirical question" and (b) this is is not only an unresolved empirical question but, so far as I can see, a basically unresolvable empirical question. My personal, and completely anecdotal, opinion is that men have a higher sex drive but that women enjoy sex more.
wtf?! shonk? this is not your term paper, this is a comment section. andrew? why the whole psychological thing?
of course petya is right. the only thing she is not right about is putting this into the context of the whole feminist thing (which, no offence, but this blog is mostly about).
sex is sex -- why do you need to analyze why it happened, with whom it happened or when/where it happened? of course everyone involved liked the idea (at least at the time) for one reason, or another.
simple as that. that's the idea of having sex. or are you really analyzing it *during* too?
andew, shonk, and george: thank you all for the comments.
andrew and shonk, i completely agree with both. there is definitely no reason to argue that the headache cliche is not, in fact, the product of a perfectly accurate biological distinction between us females and males.
the point i was trying to make, both with the entry AND the comment, was to draw attention to the fact that many people still have an idea about women's sexuality that is not reflective of the realities of many if not most women. not only is that idea inaccurate, it is also male-centric and i don't believe that either of you would have a problem with me saying that. if you do care to know what my personal position on the issue is: shonk put it quite well and, in general, i agree with his observation.
george, with all due respect, sex is a lot more than just sex. there is nothing simple about it and i am not going to stop talking about it here. or anywhere else.
oh, and one more thing:
"the whole feminist thing (which, no offence, but this blog is mostly about)"
please elaborate.
the point i was trying to make, both with the entry AND the comment, was to draw attention to the fact that many people still have an idea about women's sexuality that is not reflective of the realities of many if not most women. not only is that idea inaccurate, it is also male-centric and i don't believe that either of you would have a problem with me saying that.
Absolutely not. I completely agree.
By the way, when you say that the headache thing might well reflect some biological reality, you really hit a key point (also addressed by Andrew): it's really hard to distinguish biology from culture. I think any reasonable person would agree that our culture (however you want to define that term) is more tolerant/encouraging of promiscuity in males than in females (for whatever reason), which probably often gets misinterpreted as a "natural" difference in sex drives rather than a constructed one. Unfortunately, since this cultural stance is essentially unquantifiable, any attempt to compare libidos between genders is going to have a hard time compensating for it.
Incidentally, yesterday I thought of one comparison that I didn't think of when arguing that it was basically impossible to get meaningful comparisons of the libidos of men and women: one could compare how often men and women masturbate, which might give some indication of any differences in how much they enjoy sex. Now, of course, such a comparison is fraught with peril, but it might give some meaningful data.
There are two obvious problems I can think of with this approach. First, since masturbation is still something of a taboo with a lot of people, how often they masturbate might not give a good indication of their actual sex drive. This would be especially problematic for such a study if masturbation was more taboo for one gender than another. In fact, I suspect that masturbation is more taboo for women than for men, though I have no real evidence to support that supposition (though I suspect some of you social science types might well have evidence to support or refute it).
Second, as I hinted at the end of my last comment, sex drive and sexual enjoyment are related but not necessarily isomorphic. Sex is a different experience from masturbation in that the latter is almost completely about physical sensation, while the former derives much of its pleasure from physical intimacy with someone you may care a lot about. As a result, people who place a high priority on intimacy as part of sex would probably masturbate at a lower rate than their "actual" sex drive (whatever that means) would indicate, while people who primarily have sex for the physical sensation probably also masturbate more frequently than expectation. My (again, completely anecdotal) opinion is that women tend to place more emphasis on intimacy than men, while men tend to be more focused on the purely physical sensation; if so, a study of masturbation rates would tend to underestimate women's libidos.
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