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Never mind the retrograde “women need to be loved to orgasm” story, just when the hell did Jenny McCarthy become a sex expert?

zuzu

From Amanda comes this lovely little “wimmins are such complicated, needy and inscrutable creatures and men are grunting primitives” item from our friends at ABC News.

No animal has to commit to a relationship to lure the female of the species into the nest.

We humans are much more complicated. Women need to be in the mood, which many men don’t seem to understand.

God, it’s such a trial, this having be social animals and form relationships and shit. And then to have to deal with waiting until the woman’s in the mood, on top of it! Why can’t we just rape the bitches if they’re not in the mood?

Ahem. I can just tell this thing is getting off to a extra-special start, with the assumption that women a) need to bribed with relationships to agree to have sex; b) need to be in a relationship to be in the mood for sex; and c) that pesky consent thing is just one more roadblock those fickle wimmins put in the path of men who want sex, want it all the time, and want it NOW!

Ugh. Actually, what I’m not in the mood for is rebutting yet another piece uncritically presenting lazy sexist assumptions as fact. And offering someone whose sole qualification is posing for Playboy as a sex expert:

“I think that most men, and I have to underline the word ‘most,’ just don’t get it,” said Jenny McCarthy, an actress, former Playmate of the Year, and best-selling author of “Life Laughs: The Naked Truth about Motherhood, Marriage, and Moving On.”

She laments that our differences — the ones that can make sex so much fun — can also get in the way.

“It’s amazing to me how much brain work it takes for a girl to have an orgasm,” McCarthy said. “Guys just need to look at a nipple, and they lose it. God, I wish it was that easy for us!”

I thought they only lost it at the sight of a nipple when they were about 13. Most adult men require a little more in the way of friction.

Adding insult to injury, the article, entitled “When It Comes to Orgasm, Women Work Harder” (original title, according to Jessica: “Do Women Really Need Orgasm?” Answer: Duh), has a little sidebar, “Do Women Think Too Much To Enjoy Sex?” which offers the following survey:

The Impact of Gender on Your Sex Life

Can a Woman Have Sex Like a Man?

No, a woman thinks too much to ever enjoy sex like a man. (1,725)

Yes, a woman can detach emotionally and be purely physical. (1,583)

Total Vote: 3,308
Not a scientific survey.

And just like they had an article on discrimination against people with identifiably-black names that didn’t mention racism, they have an article on how gender affects sex in which they never question the basic assumption that women can or should have sex “like a man.”

18 thoughts on Never mind the retrograde “women need to be loved to orgasm” story, just when the hell did Jenny McCarthy become a sex expert?

  2. zuzu, I’ve seen several posts on this today, but yours is definitely the best. Very funny, and exposes and explodes all the inane assumptions of the article very quickly.

  3. The funny part for me, as a student of animal behavior, is that even the statement about the animals is wrong. Some types of albatrosses court for years and build fake nests each breeding season before ever actually clutching, and in many species copulation is not possible unless both sexes cooperate willingly. Don’t you just love statements that are wrong on every single count?

  4. o.k. let me see if i have this, um, straight: we are now hearing the men-are-beasts-but-women-are-more-delicate-complex-creatures from…JENNY MCCARTHY.

    Jen? sweetie? have you -seen- your last few oeuvres? because i don’t think Emily Post -or- Emily Howard would approve. just sayin’.

  5. I don’t think most women go into sex like men do, because I didn’t ever kiss a man with intent to bed him without thinking, even in a transitory manner, about my birth control options and how secure they were. At least, not until I got my tubes tied. I can’t imagine I’m alone on this. And, then, too, I’ve never dated a man that I could, if it came down to it, I could physically overpower. Especially if he was laying on top of my pelvis…that doesn’t help your leverage. And after a rape, you do think about that every now and again.

    I realize the plural of anecdote is not data, and I also know I’m not capable of speaking for every woman in America. But that’s my point of view, for all it’s worse.

  7. Well, this is more evidence that supports my theory that I somehow had a woman-brain installed in my straight-man body. Eye for colour? Check. Know when my friends are bummed, and know the right thing to say? Check. Need an emotional affection to go with physical affection? Check. I guess that’s that. Pop-science says I’m a woman.

  8. Last night after I read this, I showed a nipple to my husband, and asked him, “Did you just have an orgasm?”

    He had not. He was mightily amused, however.

  9. Well I’ve tried having sex “like a woman” and “like a man” and they both messed with my mind big-time. I’m not sure what that leaves – “like a sheep”?

  11. Women need to be loved to orgasm? Well, I guess my vibrator is very much in love with me. Aw, I never knew until now. How sweet. I should send it a card or something. Does Hallmark make one for that?

  12. Well, raging red, you know what Woody Allen says about masturbation: It’s sex with someone I love.

    Seriously, though, women don’t need to be loved to orgasm, but some of us need to be loved to find sexual intercourse worth risking pregnancy for. Even with birth control, “what would I do if the birth control failed and I got pregnant” was a big shaper of my own sexual choices. That’s one reason I can’t agree with choice two of the survey (where “women” in general could be expected to detach emotionally, if only they weren’t so silly about listening to social convention). The other being what KnifeGhost pointed out about how “men” don’t all detach emotionally either.

    On the other hand, that first choice of theirs? Who, really, thinks too much to enjoy sex, once they’ve made up their mind to have it? Maybe some people of both sexes, but certainly not women more than men.

  13. Lynn Sherr: No animal has to commit to a relationship to lure the female of the species into the nest.

    This is really, really dumb. Lynn Sherry needs to turn off the teevee, shut down the peecee, get up off her ass and go outside. I’m not much of a naturalist, you know, but I’ve got two eyes and there are birds that live in my yard – yo Lynn Sherr, you’re wrong!.

    A fence encloses my yard, and vines grow on the gates. Earlier this year for a month or so I had to take my car in or out one gate because a pair of cardinals had built a nest amidst the vines on the other gate and they had eggs in that nest. Those two birds had a more committed relationship that three-quarters of the members of Congress.

  14. Being a celebrity in this country makes you an expert on just about whatever the celebrity wishes to speak about.

    That is just one of the perks of idolatry in our pop culture.

  15. W. Kiernan Says:
    September 28th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
    Lynn Sherr: No animal has to commit to a relationship to lure the female of the species into the nest.

    This is really, really dumb. Lynn Sherry needs to turn off the teevee, shut down the peecee, get up off her ass and go outside. I’m not much of a naturalist, you know, but I’ve got two eyes and there are birds that live in my yard – yo Lynn Sherr, you’re wrong!.

    A fence encloses my yard, and vines grow on the gates. Earlier this year for a month or so I had to take my car in or out one gate because a pair of cardinals had built a nest amidst the vines on the other gate and they had eggs in that nest. Those two birds had a more committed relationship that three-quarters of the members of Congress.

    There are many bird species which mate for life, or at lesat for the life of both parties. i.e. If one bird dies, the survivor will take a new mate. My guess would be because baby birds eat like gangbusters and in many species, if you don’t have two parents working outside the home, you can’t catch/find enough food to keep the babies from starving. So much for the fundie notion that two-parent nuclear families ought to involve Dad bringing home the bacon and Mom staying home to cook it.

    Did you hear about the peregrine falcons in Jersey City a few years back? The male was badly injured (wing severed when he flew through a live power line) and had to be taken to a wildlife refuge with no possibility of rehabilitation and release (owing to birds sort of needing two wings to fly). That left the female with a nest full of eyases and only one parent to feed them. So NJ Wildlife officers were dropping off freshly killed quail to supplement what the female could catch, in hopes that they wouldn’t lose all the eyases. They figured the female would find another mate by the following breeding season, but this year’s batch probably wouldn’t make it (and what with them being an endangered species, one can see the concern).

    Then a solo male peregrine starts hanging around (maybe he read a Craigslist ad?) and the wildlife officers are getting really worried that he’ll either drive the female off the nest, in which case the eyases will starve, or kill them outright to mate with her. Instead, the new guy starts bringing the female his kills to take to her babies, and helping her defend her territory against other birds of prey. Guess he was auditioning for the new husband role and wanted to show he was a good provider. By the end of the nesting season he was bringing home half the food, supervising flying lessons, and generally being a model stepfather. He and the female returned to the nest the following spring and had a clutch of their own. Wildlife officers decided he must’ve been taking the long view regarding a desirable female and the desirable real estate she controlled.

  16. Lynn Sherr: No animal has to commit to a relationship to lure the female of the species into the nest.

    What?

    Has she ever, like, studied any animals?

    Anyone who begins a statement “No animal…” and doesn’t end it with something like “… can do photosynthesis” should have copies of very heavy introductory animal biology textbooks thrown at them. You’d have to be bloody blind to not notice that many, many animals — hell, even some insects, if I’m not mistaken, so not even just complicated “human-like” ones — do, in fact, forge complicated and committed relationships before they get down and dirty.

    As for love and orgasms, I will say that while I’m not personally a huge fan of uncomplicated/uncommitted sexual encounters these days, I’ve had plenty of orgasms within them. Enjoyed ’em fine, too, even if they’re not my cup of tea right now.

    I won’t even step far into what I find to be our ridiculous mythology about men and their completely insatiable and unemotional sexual appetites — one that screws with them like crazy, if my little collection of very honest friends is any guide, anyway.

  17. Sure it’s just more anec-data, but I had plenty of short-term orgasmic flings with women and a few boring flings with men, before I ‘settled down’ with a man who wanted love, a relationship, and to ‘take things slowly’, and ‘get in the mood’. The sex is just dandy here too, btw, so maybe it’s not the love or lack of it, or the gender of the participants, but working out what you like and communicating it to your partner that makes the difference. For some people, the level of trust required to do that means being in a loving relationship, for others it doesn’t. I don’t see any particular reason to believe that women (hetero or otherwise) fall more into one camp than the other.

    I do think that looking at same-sex relationships can be more illustrative of desire than hetero ones. As someone said earlier, heterosexual encounters are (almost always) influenced by birth control, there’s also the difference in physical size (and potential for assault), and I’d add – a lifetime of conditioning about relationships and how they’re supposed to work. All of those factors can stifle desire long before a gal gets her knickers off.

  18. Oh, those birds. Yes, many are socially monogamous, but then again, it turns out that in most species close to 40% of the babies in the nest are fathered by someone other than the social mate. Might as well pair bond with the only loser left in the flock for the child care, but get some lovin’ from the better endowed neigbor so your own kids inherit better genes. I laugh every time someone tries to point at animals for any moral compass.

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