It starts off by describing an experiment in which men and women are shown videos of sexual content and then asked to report on whether or not they felt aroused by the scene. At the same time, their physical arousal is directly monitored (don't ask -- it involves something called a plethysmograph).
Here are the results of the experiment:
Okay, so women seem to get turned on by just about anything, except, ironically, naked men on beaches. But even more striking, in the author's words: "With the women... mind and genitals seem scarcely to belong to the same person." Conclusion: women don't know what they want.
So here were are, dealing once again with the old cliche', where men throw up their hands and lament that all women are crazy.
My question is: couldn't social factors be at play here? After all, though the women's physical reactions were pretty consistent within the sample group, they are definitely not very orthodox. The standard, socially acceptable, type of arousal is heterosexual (or at least consistent with one's sexual preferences) and certainly restricted to humans, not bonobo monkeys. So it's possible that women are simply misreporting their responses to conform to socially accepted norms.
Going one step further, if women live in a society that constantly condemns what they might feel are their natural sexual responses, it seems natural that after a while they would begin to disregard their physical inclinations, causing a rift between mind and body when it comes to sex.
It's not that women don't know what they want; it's that they've been systematically taught to disregard their natural inclinations by a society founded on a very male-centric understanding of sexuality.
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