psychology of women

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; The Women of Amphissa

Syllabus; Spring 2005

My "An Evolutionary Mind" on Metanexus.

Male/Female brains (Simon Baron-Cohen's test on empaths and systemizers)

‘Meta Study' at www.entelechyjournal.com

The Brothel Creeper

"Sex on Campus" Actual title: "Partway Gay?: For Some Teen Girls, Sexual Preference Is A Shifting Concept"

Study suggests difference between female and male sexuality

(A press release from Ian Pitchford)

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Three decades of research on men's sexual arousal show
patterns that clearly track sexual orientation -- gay men overwhelmingly become
sexually aroused by images of men and heterosexual men by images of women. In
other words, men's sexual arousal patterns seem obvious.

But a new Northwestern University study boosts the relatively limited research
on women's sexuality with a surprisingly different finding regarding women's
sexual arousal.

In contrast to men, both heterosexual and lesbian women tend to become sexually
aroused by both male and female erotica, and, thus, have a bisexual arousal
pattern.

"These findings likely represent a fundamental difference between men's and
women's brains and have important implications for understanding how sexual
orientation development differs between men and women," said J. Michael Bailey,
professor and chair of psychology at Northwestern and senior researcher of the
study "A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal." The study is
forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science.

Bailey's main research focus has been on the genetics and environment of sexual
orientation, and he is one of the principal investigators of a widely cited
study that concludes that genes influence male homosexuality.

As in many areas of sexuality, research on women's sexual arousal patterns has
lagged far behind men's, but the scant research on the subject does hint that,
compared with men, women's sexual arousal patterns may be less tightly
connected to their sexual orientation.

The Northwestern study strongly suggests this is true. The Northwestern
researchers measured the psychological and physiological sexual arousal in
homosexual and heterosexual men and women as they watched erotic films. There
were three types of erotic films: those featuring only men, those featuring
only women and those featuring male and female couples. As with previous
research, the researchers found that men responded consistent with their sexual
orientations. In contrast, both homosexual and heterosexual women showed a
bisexual pattern of psychological as well as genital arousal. That is,
heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female stimuli as
by watching male stimuli, even though they prefer having sex with men rather
than women.

"In fact, the large majority of women in contemporary Western societies have
sex exclusively with men," said Meredith Chivers, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical
psychology at Northwestern University, a psychology intern at the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health and the study's first author. "But I have long
suspected that women's sexuality is very different from men's, and this study
scientifically demonstrates one way this is so."

The study's results mesh with current research showing that women's sexuality
demonstrates increased flexibility relative to men in other areas besides
sexual orientation, according to Chivers.

"Taken together, these results suggest that women's sexuality differs from men
and emphasize the need for researchers to develop a model of the development
and organization of female sexuality independent from models of male
sexuality," she said.

The study's four authors include Bailey and three graduate students in
Northwestern's psychology department, Chivers, Gerulf Rieger and Elizabeth
Latty.

"Since most women seem capable of sexual arousal to both sexes, why do they
choose one or the other?" Bailey asked. "Probably for reasons other than sexual
arousal."

Sexual arousal is the emotional and physical response to sexual stimuli,
including erotica or actual people. It has been known since the early 1960s
that homosexual and heterosexual men respond in specific but opposite ways to
sexual stimuli depicting men and women. Films provoke the greatest sexual
response, and films of men having sex with men or of women having sex with
women provoke the largest differences between homosexual and heterosexual men.
That is because the same-sex films offer clear-cut results, whereas watching
heterosexual sex could be exciting to both homosexual and heterosexual men, but
for different reasons.

Typically, men experience genital arousal and psychological sexual arousal when
they watch films depicting their preferred sex, but not when they watch films
depicting the other sex. Men's specific pattern of sexual arousal is such a
reliable fact that genital arousal can be used to assess men's sexual
preferences. Even gay men who deny their own homosexuality will become more
sexually aroused by male sexual stimuli than by female stimuli.

"The fact that women's sexual arousal patterns are not all predicted by their
sexual orientations suggests that men's and women's minds and brains are very
different," Bailey said.

To rule out the possibility that the differences between men's and women's
genital sexual arousal patterns might be due to the different ways that genital
arousal is measured in men and women, the Northwestern researchers identified a
subset of subjects: postoperative transsexuals who began life as men but had
surgery to construct artificial vaginas.

In a sense, those transsexuals have the brains of men but the genitals of
women. Their psychological and genital arousal patterns matched those of men --
those who like men were more aroused by male stimuli and those who like women
were more aroused by the female stimuli -- even though their genital arousal
was measured in the same way women's was.

"This shows that the sex difference that we found is real and almost certainly
due to a sex difference in the brain," said Bailey.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/nu-ssd061203.php

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory

The following items are from the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Rate yourself on each item, on a scale from:

1 (never or almost never true)    to     7 (always or almost always true)

1.      self-reliant

2.      yielding

3.      helpful

4.      defends own beliefs

5.      cheerful

6.      moody

7.      independent

8.      shy

9.      conscientious

10. athletic

11. affectionate

12. theatrical

13. assertive

14. flatterable

15. happy

16. strong personality

17. loyal

18. unpredictable

19. forceful

20. feminine

21. reliable

22. analytical

23. sympathetic

24. jealous

25. has leadership abilities

26. sensitive to the needs of others

27. truthful

28. willing to take risks

29. understanding

30. secretive

31. makes decisions easily

32. compassionate

33. sincere

34. self-sufficient

35. eager to soothe hurt feelings

36. conceited

37. dominant

38. soft-spoken

39. likable

40. masculine

41. warm

42. solemn

43. willing to take a stand

44. tender

45. friendly

46. aggressive

47. gullible

48. inefficient

49. acts as a leader

50. childlike

51. adaptable

52. individualistic

53. does not use harsh language

54. unsystematic

55. competitive

56. loves children

57. tactful

58. ambitious

59. gentle

60. conventional

Scoring:

Add up your ratings for items 1, 4, 7,10,13, 16. 19. 22. 25. 28. 31. 34. 37. 40. 43. 46. 49. 55, and 58. Divide the total by 20. This is your masculinity score.

Add up your ratings for items 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29, 32, 35, 38, 41, 44, 47, 50, 53, 56, and 59. Divide the total by 20. This is your femininity score.

If your masculinity score is above 4.9 (the approximate median for the masculinity scale) and your femininity score is above 4.9 (the approximate femininity median), then you would be classified as androgynous on Bem’s scale.

The Truth About Love by Michael Lee February 14, 2003

very year as February 14 approaches, we are bombarded with images of hearts and flowers, diamonds and chocolates, and with treacly musings on romance and love. This aggressively peddled vision of love has a tendency to heighten our expectations and cause us to lose sight of the complicated realities of entering into and sustaining intimate relationships. As a counterpoint to the fairy-tale depictions of love so dominant at this time of year we offer a sampling of Atlantic articles that take a more penetrating look at the dynamics of love—and why relationships are sometimes so confusing and difficult.

In "Some Differences Between Men and Women" (March 1988) Ethel Person considers how childhood experiences manifest themselves many years later in adult relationships. Person explains that one of the most important processes in one's life is the consolidation of his or her gender identity. For a girl, the process of securing her feminine identity is more straightforward because her primary caretaker is usually the same-sex parent, who hence becomes the daughter's model. Person explains that "Most women feel the pull to duplicate the maternal identity by falling in love, pair-bonding, and literally becoming mothers." Achieving an ideal love relationship forms "the cornerstone of [a girl's] feminine identity." A girl's identification with her mother does cause some internal conflict, however, because during the Oedipal period the daughter rejects her mother in favor of her father. This means that not only does she give up her first love object, but that love object becomes her sexual rival as well. Person explains the consequences of this conflict:

One could say that all heterosexual women have experienced the loss of their first love object without the hope of ultimately replacing her with someone similar (unlike the situation for men). This early loss (and fear of retribution), along with the threat of the loss of the new love object, appears to be at the core of the female's pervasive dread of losing love. In some women the fear is activated not by any slight on the part of a husband or a lover but by an adulterous impulse of her own. This dynamic, of an adulterous impulse leading to the fear of losing love occurs so regularly among women that it seems to recapitulate some earlier confusion: did the girl renounce her mother, or was she rejected by her? For women, the lifelong problem seems to be uncertainty about achieving and conserving a love relationship.

Boys, for their part, face the issue of achieving a masculine identity while being nurtured by a feminine parent. Person cites French theorists who argue that alongside the boy's pre-Oedipal image of the mother as revered nurturer rests the Oedipal image of the mother whose exclusive love the boy cannot secure. According to this theory, the boy tries to separate emotionally from his mother, not only because he fears his father—his sexual rival—but also because he feels that his mother has rejected him. This experience, Person explains, contributes to the "two very different images of women [that] run through the male fantasy life: woman as temptress, seductress, femme fatale, and woman as nurturer, comforter, eternal mother." For Person, this split image helps explain why so many men have difficulty finding satisfaction with only one woman, and why men have a propensity to separate romantic longing from sexual longing.

A boy's inevitable perceived rejection by his mother, Person argues, deals a devastating blow to his psyche. Thus, some men seek to assert control and domination over the women in their lives in an attempt to compensate for a lingering sense of inadequacy. "Out of a need for revenge," Person writes, "the man reverses his infantile experience: he demands sexual and amorous fidelity while disavowing it himself."

Person outlines some of the lasting effects of these divergent developmental experiences of males and females:

By and large, women escape into love, whereas men fear being made vulnerable by love. Women establish their feminine identity through loving, whereas men must be sure of their masculine identification before they can fall in love. Consequently, women often distort love in the direction of submission, men in the direction of dominance....

In "Intimate Partners" (November 1986 Atlantic), Maggie Scarf likewise discusses the ways in which an individual's childhood familial experiences affect his or her adult relationships. Scarf argues that our experiences growing up within a family unit make such an impression on us that they significantly shape the way we see the world and experience intimacy throughout our lives.

In the very process of choosing our mates, and of being chosen and then, in elaborating upon our separate, past lives in the life we create together, we are deeply influenced by the patterns for being that we observed and learned about very early in life, and that live on inside our heads. The possibility that there may be other options, other systems for being in an intimate relationship, often doesn't occur to us, because we don't realize that we are operating from within a system, one that was internalized in our original families. What has been, and what we've known, seems to be "the way of the world"; it is reality itself.

Unfortunately this means that the emotional baggage that one brings to a relationship can sometimes distort the way one perceives the other person, in a process that Scarf calls "projective identification."

When, for example, a man has been struggling with an underlying, denied, and dissociated depression, he may find himself attracted to—and marry—the very woman who can give expression to this aspect of his internal world for him. He may then play out the role of the logical, unemotional, unneedy husband of the openly vulnerable, dependent, moody, often frankly despairing wife. The problem is, however, that the same underlying motivations that led him to select that mate—as part of an effort to relieve his own anxiety—will inevitably result in his wanting her to remain depressed at the same time that he finds her recurrent depressions unbearable.

Predictably, the more he projects his repudiated, intolerable feelings of dejection and sadness onto his wife, the more he is likely to dissociate his own self from them—and from her as well. She will then be carrying the depression for the pair of them, but the more she does what he at an unconscious level wants her to do for him, the more their mutual estrangement and tension will grow.

This example illustrates the "emotional deal," as Scarf calls it, that many couples strike in coming together and staying together. Scarf believes that all close emotional attachments involve some degree of projective identification. However, the health of the relationship ultimately depends on how much of each partner's self ends up stifled as part of that emotional deal. In relationships where the two partners seem complete opposites of each other (for example, the rigid, moral man who marries the slovenly promiscuous wife), it is clear, Scarf explains, "that ... a trade-off of projections has occurred—an unconscious deal has been worked out in which one partner has agreed to carry the 'badness' and one to carry the 'goodness' of the couple, as if they were parts of an undifferentiated whole organism."

Such a relationship is far from ideal. "Marriages," Scarf explains, "become stronger and more intimate to the degree that the overall rules of the interactional system permit the partners to be separate and different people." If a couple engaged in a damaging cycle of projection wants to improve their relationship, it is necessary for both parties to "re-own and take responsibility for those aspects of his or her internal world which are being put onto the partner. This means learning to experience ambivalence: the good and the bad within the other, and the good and bad within the self."

The ability to accept the intimate partner in his or her entirety and to allow that person the space to grow and develop requires, above all, maturity. "Learning to contain one's ambivalent feelings about self and about other people," Scarf writes, "is a part of growing up; it is a developmental achievement." Thus, by achieving a level of comfort with one's own identity one becomes better able to take part in a constructive relationship with an intimate other.

In "A Marriage on the Rocks" (July 1962), Nora Johnson makes a similar point. "To be happily married," she argues, "requires a maturity that most of us do not have." It means two people "accepting each other as they are and knowing in what ways to leave each other alone."

Unfortunately, she points out, most marriages are entered into under the spell of unrealistic fantasies about romantic love. Given the number of illusions most of us harbor about the subject, we should not be surprised, she suggests, by the high divorce rate.

A whole bundle of our cherished tenets contributes to this situation. Marriages are made in heaven; togetherness is the answer to everything; if we cannot adjust, we might as well be taken out and shot. For a country with so many of the accouterments of sophistication, we remain astonishingly innocent about marriage. We believe in it with a faith that is almost touching, a boundless hopefulness that is rather like the way we feel about new presidents, new face creams, or anything new that promises to change our lives....

We are so deluded by the mass communications glorifying love and marriage and parenthood that we believe solutions to our problems will be found in the institutions rather than in ourselves.

Johnson does end on a slightly optimistic note, insisting that "love in the grand manner" does exist. "But to have it we have to know ourselves to begin with, and believe in it when we get it."

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