Culture! And sex!

I am surrounded on both sides by the social-psychological and biomedical paradigms. So I should be used to seeing everything, everywhere, the glamorization and investigation into psychological and/or biological and/or (yes this is a real word) psychoneuroimmunological explanations for observed human phenomena.

The recent article What Do Women Want in the NYT explores women and sexual desire. And ignores culture.

Assuming sexual response arises from some psycho-biological pathway and that observed differences between the genders points to some evolutionary basis without investigating learned responses, reinforced norms (via culture), etc. etc. is SO ANNOYING! While there may be no to little sex research in other cultures, it bears mentioning that sexual response has (an apparently as yet unmeasured) cultural component. Maybe (in the most simplistic way), western women of the type that volunteer for academic sex research get turned on by watching other women because we are trained from an early age to view women as sexual beings.

Whatever happened to culture, anyway?