Roy F. Baumeister, Jean M. Twenge. Review of General Psychology 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2, 166–203.
Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.
Sherfey (1966) proposed that the sexual behavior of early human females resembled that of other female primates during estrus, copulating up to 50 times per day and exhausting every available male partner. According to Sherfey, this behavior created social chaos. If a stable, civilized way of life was to develop, it was necessary to institute “the ruthless subjugation of female sexuality”
“if women are insatiable creatures, their sexuality would, of course, require external constraints, or sexual chaos would reign”
Lerner (1986) concluded that “the sexual regulation of women . . . is one of the foundations upon which the state rests” (p. 140) and is “an essential feature of patriarchal power”
The greater the power imbalance in favor of males, the more female sexuality was suppressed.
Full paper:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/26cf/592c500860d43ceab39d21816654e53e9c6c.pdf
The suppression of female sexuality can be regarded as one of the most remarkable psychological interventions in Western cultural history. According to Sherfey’s (1966) respected statement of this view, the sex drive of the human female is naturally and innately stronger than that of the male, and it once posed a powerfully destabilizing threat to the possibility of social order. For civilized society to develop, it was allegedly necessary or at least helpful for female sexuality to be stifled. Countless women have grown up and lived their lives with far less sexual pleasure than they would have enjoyed in the absence of this large-scale suppression.
Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.
Sherfey (1966) proposed that the sexual behavior of early human females resembled that of other female primates during estrus, copulating up to 50 times per day and exhausting every available male partner. According to Sherfey, this behavior created social chaos. If a stable, civilized way of life was to develop, it was necessary to institute “the ruthless subjugation of female sexuality”
“if women are insatiable creatures, their sexuality would, of course, require external constraints, or sexual chaos would reign” (Faunce & Phillips-Yonas, 1978, p. 86)
Lerner (1986) concluded that “the sexual regulation of women . . . is one of the foundations upon which the state rests” (p. 140) and is “an essential feature of patriarchal power”
The quotations by Hyde and DeLamater (1997) introduce yet another important point, namely male insecurity…. In this version, insatiable female sexuality would not strike men as a desirable opportunity but rather represent a threat to them, possibly because it reminds them of the greater physical limitations on male than on female sexuality. The refractory period, the inability to have multiple orgasms, the visible nature of male arousal or lack of arousal, and perhaps other limitations make males less able than females to engage in orgiastic sexual behavior.
To summarize the male control theory: The natural condition of the female is to desire a high amount of sex, including frequent copulations with multiple partners. Men band together to stifle this female sexuality. Men’s motives for doing so could encompass the jealous desire to prevent their mates from having sex with other men (which could be related to paternity uncertainty and property rights), an envy of women’s greater physical capacity for intercourse, and a recognition that unrestrained female sexuality might potentially produce chaos by undermining the social order.
We begin with a classic study by Reiss (1986a) that has often been cited in connection with the suppression of female sexuality. Reiss used a sample of 186 cultures from the Human Relations Area Files. Across these cultures, he found a positive correlation between indexes of greater male power and suppression of female sexuality. The greater the power imbalance in favor of males, the more female sexuality was suppressed.
This finding has been interpreted by Reiss and others as supporting the male control theory. When men have power, women are not allowed to enjoy sex, and so this seemingly implies that men use their greater power to stifle female sexuality. Insofar as these cultural differences would not alter the innate level of sex drive or the dangers of pregnancy, they are inconsistent with the null hypotheses. Unfortunately for the sake of clear conclusions, however, Reiss’s finding seems just as congenial to the female control theory as to the male theory. When women lack political and economic power, they may need to use sex to control men and gain resources, and so they might try to restrict each other’s sexuality very strongly. In contrast, when women have plenty of alternative sources of power, they have less need to restrict men’s access to sex, and so they can relax the controls on female sexuality.
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mothers are the main source of anti-sexual messages for daughters. Libby, Gray, and White (1978) found that mothers were the main source of influence on the sexual behavior of both sons and daughters.
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A theoretically interesting sample of highly sexual women was studied by Blumberg (2000). To qualify for inclusion, the women had to report wanting sex at least seven times per week, and many reported much higher desires (and actual frequencies)
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Who supports and perpetuates these practices of female genital surgery? The available evidence points strongly and consistently toward women.
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Women who engaged in premarital sex were condemned as immoral by 91% of the women in 1965, as compared with condemnation by only 42% of the men.
Oliver and Hyde (1993) provided valuable evidence. They found that the double standard of sexual morality—which is central to the suppression of female sexuality—was more positively accepted by females than males across all studies they covered.
the sexual revolution represented centrally or primarily a change in female sexuality. Considerable evidence supports this assumption.
The male control theory would predict that men would use laws and religion to restrain female sexuality. Instead, it appears that the laws about sex (which are made by men) are mainly enforced against men. Women are the primary agents who use religious teachings to limit female sexual behavior, although the religious teachings themselves are generally written by men.
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The other exception involves the institutional attempts to regulate adolescent female sexuality. We cited some evidence that courts and police seem more concerned with female adolescent promiscuity than with identical behavior by young males.
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Although the courts, police, and fathers may be male, we also found that women were the main figures in administering these efforts to regulate wayward and promiscuous girls
we suggested that the sexual revolution occurred in part because women had gained sufficient economic, educational, occupational, and political opportunities that they no longer believed it necessary to extract the highest possible price in exchange for sex.
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Smith (1994) noted that Time magazine proclaimed the sexual revolution with a cover story in 1964, and a second cover story in 1984 declared that “the revolution is over.”
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A variety of empirical studies documented that women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors changed more than men’s during the 1960s to 1980s
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Many observers, beginning perhaps with Marx and Engels (e.g., Engels, 1884/1902), have regarded prostitution as a simply more explicit
form of the exchange that characterizes gender relations in general. Their description of marriage as “legalized prostitution” implies that
wives exchange sex for their husbands’ money in a more roundabout but ultimately similar fashion.
REFERENCES
Sherfey, M. J. (1966). The evolution and nature of female sexuality in relation to psychoanalytic theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 14, 28–128.
Reiss, I. L. (1986a). Journey into sexuality: An exploratory voyage. New York: Prentice Hall.
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