What Do Women Want?
by Daniel Bergner
“Sex science” will eventually be viewed as we view “race science” today: as 19th-century eugenic pseudoscience produced to justify oppression. Sexology oppresses women and sexual minorities by describing their desires and behaviors as exotic and diseased. Genital plethysmography and functional magnetic resonance imaging are the latest technologies misused in the service of biological reductionism and neo-eugenics (euphemistically called sociobiology and evolutionary psychology). Meredith Chivers once worked at the world’s largest “clinic” for reparative therapy of gender-variant children, where they are busy revising the psychiatric manual that will catalog the latest “disorders” of women and sexual minorities.
What do women want? We want to stop being objectified by quacks and unsophisticated reporters who fail to provide journalistic balance when presenting critical 21st-century bioethical debates.
ANDREA JAMES
Los Angeles
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/magazine/08Letters-t-WHATDOWOMENW_LETTERS.html