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Feminists Vie for Female Submission

Lauren

Last week, a study was released on female sexual submission that concludes “women, but not men, automatically associate sex with submission and that connection reduces the quality of their sexual experience.”

Long stretch, in my opinion, especially since their method of study involved free association with words like “sex” and “oven” (fucking oven?) and came to the conclusion that these terms and the speed with which women responded to these terms draw a correlation with women’s passive sexual activity. It is far more workable to draw correlations between passivity and the culture in which women are made than relying on Freudian psychology to determine the nature of female sexuality. ‘Cause you know Freud was real kind to women.

The priming results indicate that women may have unconsciously picked up the message that they should be sexually submissive, raising the possibility that women have internalized societal pressure, said Sanchez, a recent doctoral graduate in the psychology department and women’s studies.

Previous research suggests that social norms promote deference to men, and this extends to intimate relationships. This message is constantly repeated by the media in magazines, television and movies that “commonly display male sexual dominance over women and female sexual submission to men,” the paper states.

I’d also like to point out that many men and women enjoy various states of dominance and submission at different times in their lives and for a huge number of reasons. Although we can’t claim citations of personal preference are always pure, we also know that the range of human sexuality differs from person to person, politic to politic.

Long story short, we have yet another piece of research that amounts to common sense for any sane, thinking human being. Nonetheless, Cassandra of Villainous Sensibility announces that this study, and other recent studies on sex, is fueled by a dirty “feminist agenda.” I agree with much of her analysis on this research but still fail to see why the pointlessness of it should be laid at feminist feet. Why, we’re the crew that ensures you have access to birth control, sex toys, and sexual healthcare! Some of us even like teh cock!

No feminist I know of cheers at results like this — if anything, it means we ugly feminists have yet more work to do.

via Ilyka Damen

16 thoughts on Feminists Vie for Female Submission

  1. Come, come… I didn’t say “dirty” feminist agenda. Or even “we don’t need no stinking” feminist agenda 🙂

    (Of course I might have if I’d thought of it…heh.)

    What fueled the feminist agenda comment was the conflation of “oven” (which to me is just something that reminds you of work – yuck) with “submission”. That seemed to smack of the sillier aspects of rad-feminism, which I rightly, IMO, make fun of. The rad fringes of any movement are usually fair game.

    I was a housewife and mother for 18 years. I didn’t cook because I was browbeaten into it – to suggest that is demeaning. I did it because that was my job – my contribution to our household economy. Now I have a lucrative career and make almost as much as my husband so I don’t cook much anymore. “Oven” is a turnoff, not because it reminds a woman of male dominance, but more because (like “toilet brush”) it reminds one of all the crappy (pun fully intended) chores left undone. It would be like whispering “quarterly accounting report” to a man just before climax – hardly calculated to bring him to a full-on, shuddering culmination 😀

    The other aspect of the study I questioned was the automatic assumption that submission is anti-feminine (also a major tenet of classic feminism). I will freely admit that feminism may have moved beyond me, but in a recent college class I was forced to take by the State of California I was lambasted for daring to suggest that women may be biologically and psychologically different than men (something anyone who has raised kids learns after about 2 months) and that women are *by nature* more submissive (paradoxically something THE TEXT told us elsewhere when extolling how women were better managers and peacemakers. Ironically I’m fairly forthright, almost aggressive, *for a woman*.
    Whatever that means 🙂 Cheers!

  2. PS: don’t be so infer insults – at least wait until people insult you 🙂 Why “dirty” feminist agenda and “ugly” feminists?

    Whatever you believe, some idiot is going to argue with you. I’m a conservative female. To hear most people talk, we’re either the “spiritual descendents of the KKK” (Barbara EhrenReich…lovely woman) or soul-less dupes of the patriarchal hegemony.

    I sort of figure you all are smart enough to know what you think. You don’t have to agree with me – it’s a big world and we’re not all going to see things the same way.

  3. So a poorly written study is “Feminist Agenda”? I think it’s more like “OK, we need something sexy that’ll get us published so we can keep/get tenure” Agenda.

  4. I totally don’t discount this study. Alas, I just heard somethign as I am writing this about “radical feminism.” I think there is quite a bit to be seen there.

  6. It’s a bit unclear, but it looks as if “oven” is the sexually neutral word that women get to associate with terms related to submission, as opposed to the sexual word. Meaning that women associate sex with submission more than they associate housework with submission? I’d be interested to see what the words were that they used to signify “submission.”

  7. Cassandra brings up a fine point. Why not have women respond to sex-passive and sex-aggressive words instead of dilly-dallying around sexual terms?

  8. Hmm…this study seems to prove that I’m a woman in a man’s skin, as I tend to be slightly submissive sexually…this is a very interesting revelation…

  9. Just diving in here. Hi everybody!

    I’d actually disagree as to how much of a stretch this study was, or that it was uninteresting (although I agree that it was not particularly surprising).

    Part of what makes this study interesting is that it is in no way Freudian, and in fact, on the social psychology scale, heavily cognitive.

    Freud’s work depended largely on Freud’s interpretation of what people’s dreams meant, symbolism, etc, and is today discredited in social psychology (though not in literature departments and some areas of counseling psychology). Kierfer, Sanchez, and Ybarra were using the IAT (Implicit Association Test) in order to look at how closely we associate words with one another. Ever thought of one word and said another? Or looked at someone and said someone else’s name (in this instance, it’s pretty likely the name you said was of someone either closely associated with that person – a common aquaintance, or someone you knew who was in a similar demographic catagory as that person). Words and concepts we associate with one another are easier to think of in tandem than two unrelated words – i.e., we do it faster.

    The IAT was originally used to test for racism. Most people in social psychology studies know it’s ‘bad’ to say that people of different races are smarter or what have you. Even those that privately believe it aren’t going to tell some authority figure from a university they think that way. The IAT measured how ‘easily’ they associated African Americans with ‘bad’ words or ‘good’ words, and then how easily they associated whites with the same words. People who more quickly associated African Americans with ‘bad’ words also tended to act in a more racist fashion.

    There’s actually a page run by Harvard researchers that goes into it far more thoroughly than I can – you can even take some of the tests yourself, if you want:

    https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

    In this case, they examined whether women associated sex more with submission than men – i.e., those faster responses. And that’s what they got. But the study has no implications for inherent differences between men and women – just the different way they’ve been forming associations. The kind of thing clearly influenced by culture, etc. They’re only talking about the nature of female sexuality as much as it is grounded in today’s culture.

    And yeah, ‘oven’ was the neutral word – the subliminal prime that would not be associated with sex in the minds of the participants. They probably used much more sexually explicit words in order to prime sex.

    So, the two things I think make this worthwhile is that the (culturally-generated) gender difference that goes all the way down to raw cognitive associations with sex, and that the women who associated sex more strongly with submission not only say they act more submissively during sex but enjoy it less. So while men and women do enjoy varying degrees of dominance and submission as individuals, the mechanism may be different. As I understand it (though maybe I’m wrong), part of the fun with dom-sub stuff is that there are many levels – usually there are safe words, so that the sub, while submissive, also has a level of control. In the same way that S&M sex while someone’s tied up is not rape, the dynamic is different. I’d actually argue that people who engage in dom-sub activities probably *don’t* associate sex with dominance or submission that ‘far down’ on the cognitive level – that implicitly. But the last bit is pure speculation on my part.

  10. But in my thinking-too-deeply feminist opinion, “oven” is not a politically neutral term, definitely a sexually neutral term, but a word loaded with meanings that conjure up associations with often negative gender roles. I can only wonder what other terms they used. Why not “cashmere sweater” and “vacuum bag”?

    Granted I am not trained in any way in psych, but I fail to see how the speed of answer provides a definitive point on sexuality in this study so much as it could be indicative of other factors. I’ve seen the race association tests and have a problem with them in part because I tend to be a thinker-outer rather than a quick answerer.

    And to be perfectly honest with my analysis, I find most psychology to be throw-away even after being on the couch for a number of years, quite useful for some, an indulgence for many.

  11. Re: oven not neutral.

    That’s true – that bugs me a bit. I’d like to see the original study and look at their priming words. What they may be doing is using a set of words associated with chores or housework (or negative gender associations) but not so much with sex (although right now I can think of ‘bun in the oven’ as another way of saying pregnant, but maybe that’s a stretch…). That way they’d have a set of words that primed ‘submission’ in general, inasmuch as chores are usually not performed by the dominant member in any dynamic (this is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but generally true even in non-sexual groups – in companies it’s not the CEO doing the xeroxing), and they could compare those responses to responses to words that prime ‘sex’. I would also hope that they had a control group in there – and I know some of Ybarra’s other work, so I’m guessing they did and it was just too boring to put into the article.

    And I can agree that answer speed is not going to be the end-all and be-all of the way people respond to each other sexually. I’m something of a thinker-outer myself. But I would say that if I were to take the IAT and have negative associations with a certain racial group, the ‘thinking-outing’ process would be there to counteract that association in my head – it wouldn’t get rid of it. And in those split-second decisions we all make, the root association would win out. Damning? No, but it’s certainly going to have an effect in my day-to-day interactions with people.

    I don’t really have an opinion on counseling psychology/therapy. Social psychology, however, is a different beast entirely, and I would argue not merely an indulgence. For one thing, it has illuminated how powerfully the environment we live in affects our behavior, contrary to our naive belief that we will impose our will on any situation we’re in, no matter where or who we are. Things like Milgram’s shock experiments after WWII helped disprove what was then ‘common knowledge’ – the Germans performed those atrocities because of something evil in their national/genetic character. Americans could never do that! Milgram’s research showed that, in fact yes, Americans could and would perform the same atrocities if put in the same situation. It was in large part the social system and the people at the top who set it up which allowed such a horror to occur – not anything inherently evil about the German people. We all know this now, but just after WWII the thought would have been scoffed at.

  13. And, argh, I just checked and the study isn’t published yet. So I can’t get my hands on it to check out the different groups of words used for primes. No fun.

  14. Lauren, I was a sociology major undergrad, and one thing that I took away from my studies was that the experimental conditions necessary to find out how people really act or think in the real world, rather than how they self-analyze, generally get one into trouble with Human Subjects Review. Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments could not be run today at a major institution. Ironically, just about anything is fair game in marketing research, and if you can’t do it there, it is fair game for a reality TV show.

  15. “That seemed to smack of the sillier aspects of rad-feminism, which I rightly, IMO, make fun of. The rad fringes of any movement are usually fair game.”

    Silly is what they used to call Negroes, women, and children. I think no words are neutral, we should all consider the connotations of what we speak.

  16. I think it’s more like “OK, we need something sexy that’ll get us published so we can keep/get tenure” Agenda.

    I think a lot of feminist work has been reduced to this. bell hooks talks about the trend among women with class privilege who move into the institutions of academia and remove feminism from it’s radical and therefore progressive and most powerful punch-delivering position as a movement to change and transform the lives of people.

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