Things Are Not As Complicated As They Seem

A brief preface: I probably shouldn't go here.

The most popular article on today's New Yorker Web site is "Why women Have Sex." (Go ahead and click the link - I did.) This being the New Yorker and not AskMen.com, you have to wade through a lot of large words to get the gist of the matter. Apparently two sexologists (that can't be a job title, yet it is) have written an entire book about Why Women Have Sex.

Based on their interview, I encourage you all not to buy their book. Why? According to them, female sexuality is "nuanced" and "complicated." From reading their interview, I get the impression that female sexuality is like a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with at least 1 trillion pieces in all the same color, and that once you figure it out you can downgrade to things like the Space Time Continuum or currency derivatives.

How do the authors know that female sexuality is so incredibly, inhumanly, inexplicably complicated? Among other things, because researchers can't make a female version of Viagra. This is obviously compelling evidence, from both a logical and a scientific perspective. (Whaa....??)

Let me play the rebel: I don't think female sexuality is anymore complicated than anything else. You don't need a medical degree to map its symptoms, you don't need a state of the art lab to test its unknowns, you don't need a supercomputer to calculate its hypotenuse or its angles. Female sexuality is "complicated" because everyone says it is, and we've decided to take their word for it.

This is absurd. Plenty of women and men (okay, maybe not men) don't think this. In fact, these otherwise happy well-adjusted people might read that interview and think, What am I missing? They might well wonder. Adult female sexuality is the child learning disorder of the aughts. It's that thing we've elevated to the level of obscurity, so that people can sell us books like Why Women Have Sex.

This is great for the millionaire sexologists among us (raise your hands and leave the room, please) but the reason I object is because I feel that most people who say female sexuality is complicated really mean to say, I just don't care to figure it out.

And that's fine! We can all have different interests. The authors say that woman are complicated because they are "less visual" and "less genital." Why is this complicated, instead of just 'female'? After all, we're talking about a little more than half the world's population. Why is that men seem to have claimed the 'sexually straightforward' high ground?

You can knock the Kama Sutra all you like, and I frequently do, but at least the author never makes the asinine claim that one gender is more 'complicated' than another. The central focus is that people (even within a gender, gasp!) display great variety in their sexual preferences and desires, and that this variety need not be cause for frustration.

But I don't know. Maybe I live in a dream world where everything makes sense, and the authors live in the vastly superior and more confusing reality. Could be. After all, they do have medical degrees. And they are "sexologists." What they don't know surely can't be worth knowing.