It was such a simple inquiry, undertaken with neither the mechanical sexology of Shere Hite, whose Hite Report came out three years later, nor an attachment to methodological rigour, without which, people mansplained to Friday for the next four and a half decades, it was anthropologically meritless.
The critique was that her approach was journalistic, rather than academic; she wanted to know what women fantasised about, so she asked them.
The problem was not that a generation of teens might get their mitts on explicit content about everything from vacuum cleaners to barn orgies β although there was that, too. Rather, the entire architecture of sex, marriage and the family, thence to work and economic agency, rested on a fundamental precept: that men were driven by, and often at the mercy of, their sexual desire, while women were not. The logic of social conditioning was biologically determinist, with men and women programmed through millennia to experience desire in such a way as would maximise their genetic imprint.
Men should and did want to spread their seed as widely as possible, and this was reflected in and enabled by their round-the-clock horn-dog urges. Women should and did want to nurture and protect the comparatively few children they could produce, and consequently lusted after only one man, for ever, and even lusted after him in a restrained and respectable way, contingent upon his success in hunting and gathering.
If women were, in fact, as lascivious as men, who was left to gatekeep sex and thereby preserve the institution of marriage? With that equation bust, was the single-breadwinner model also under threat? What did it mean for raising children if women had drives other than maternal? In short, what if the whole damn thing was built on a lie? They are focused on transgression, humiliation, exposure, the sexuality of terror, pain and masochism, domination β and there are a large number of animals where you are not expecting them.
