Sigmund Freud & female eros

collage by marguerita
Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic.
She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.
And what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that fall far outside the norm making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
The interest has brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles.About female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective.That female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.

The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness.

She joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study.Magazine Preview - What Do Women Want? - NYTimes.com