Where Do These Grants Come From?

Filed under:Church of Liberalism,Priorities,WTF? — posted by Anwyn on October 2, 2011 @ 1:51 pm

And do the grant-granters know how their money is being spent? “Women Who Make More Decisions Have Less Sex:”

“[T]he findings showed more dominant and assertive women had approximately 100 times less sex.”

These results are clearly specific to the area in which the women were surveyed. A Florida State University study also found that in countries with higher gender equality, there is more sex, so it’s no surprise that in poorer African countries, women are withholding it.

The idea that dominant women are having less sex is likely evidence, as reported by the Daily Mail, that women around the world are taking control of their sexual preferences.

What???

There are two parts of the study reported here:
1) The numbers, which say women who make more household decisions have less sex, and
2) The conclusions, which are:
a) These women withhold sex.
b) These women are “taking control of their sexual preferences.”

I stipulate up front that I haven’t come up with any possible conclusions to this study that don’t make women look bad. All the possible conclusions to numbers like this are unpalatable. But one obvious conclusion also makes men look a bit bad as well as fitting traditional intuition: Men don’t want women who make decisions very much. But that conclusion, while making men look bad, tends to work against the goals of feminism. Feminists would not want to let on that men maybe have less desire for a woman who, as the saying used to be, wears the pants, because maybe that would make women think twice about wearing the pants too often. Maybe that’s why it’s discarded in favor of the two that leave women in control–that they’re withholding sex and that they prefer 100 times less sex than their less decision-making counterparts. They prefer it that way. I find it hard to believe that’s possible even by biological norms.

But what gets me the most is how the researchers apparently not only accept this conclusion as biologically possible but also endorse it as a good rather than realizing it makes the women they’re talking about look like punishing, anti-sex shrews. This is the preferred conclusion over “men don’t prefer women who make more decisions.”

Another killer is the closing:

“Understanding how women’s position in the household influences their sexual activity may be an essential piece in protecting the sexual rights of women and helping them to achieve a sexual life that is both safe and pleasurable,” co-author Carie Muntifering told Health24.com.

We’ve gone from basic, obvious rights–i.e. the right to say “no” to any sexual advance–to “reproductive rights” to “sexual rights” and now apparently it is the job of some section of “academia” to “help women achieve” a good sex life. Please, women of academia, no thank you. Please, grant distributors, stop funding these kinds of idiotic, meddlesome studies.

Got the link from Instapundit.

Update: And thanks to Professor Instapundit for the link!



image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace