Female Supremacy Articles - Page 10

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"Contrary to normative assumptions that women prefer to use indirect strategies to get what they want in interpersonal relationships, we found that the women in our study reported significantly more use of overt sexual pressure than covert pressure strategies," says Mr. Desmarais, along with co-author and former Guelph student Rebecca Parr-LeFeuvre, in an article to be published in the Journal of Sex Research.

Covert pressure tactics such as sulking, trying to make a lover jealous or feigning a lack of interest, are largely non-starters for these young women -- most of whom are used to initiating sex. Indeed, the students reported being more pushy in the use of tactics such as taking off a man's pants than did women, whose average age was 38, surveyed in a similar study by Mr. Desmarais and colleagues in 1998.

"I think we walk around with a rather old-fashioned belief around women and sexuality, (in which) his job is to try and get a home run and her job is to say 'no.' The world just isn't that simple. Guys don't always try and get it all the time," says Mr. Desmarais, a 10-year veteran of gender and sexuality research and the Canada Research Chair in social psychology at Guelph.

He's adamant that the results not be seen as legitimizing sexual aggression by men. "I don't mean the work to suggest that somehow women walk around victimizing men endlessly. Because I think the ramifications of the pressure by women is very different given size and strength differences."