Post-script: Sontag Gets the Last Word

A final (for now) addendum to last week's posts about gender, sexuality, science and the various waves of feminism. The late Susan Sontag, whose journals I have not read, was tackling these questions in her private thoughts way back in 1962. 

Some of those thoughts are excerpted here.

The gist, as it pertains to last week's posts? Sontag felt that while women may indeed get off on being the object of male desire, this was the product of conditioning, not an innate difference between genders. 

So is nothing innate when it comes to gender-specific differences in behaviour? That seems unlikely. And that's what makes this stuff so maddeningly interesting - trying to determine what's nature and what's nurture when we know elements of both are in play.