ABSTRACT
Part of the rhetorical power comes from generalizing what's natural and therefore presocial into what's natural and therefore universal. Symons compiled field and laboratory studies and made generous generalizations from these studies to support his conclusion that there are "natural" differences in how men and women experience desire, jealousy, sexual pleasure, orgasm, and wishes for partner variety. In the 1980s a new strategy of feminist scholarship emerged, not to correct false ideas of female nature, not to show the social distortion of natural female capacity by institutionalized oppression, but to challenge the whole notion of naturalism through the idea of social construction. The postmodern boom in scholarship, especially in the interpretive disciplines of anthropology and history, offers a powerful opportunity to challenge the "naturalistic" categories, concepts, and metaphors about sexuality. Biological sex research, the language of sex as a "natural act," is popular in large part because it accesses and maintains prevailing scientific authority.
