Kadınlar İçin Cinsellik ve Duygular

The book opens with a picture of American campuses: some magazines advise men to sign a written agreement after a one-night stand to protect themselves from accusations of rape, professors keep their doors open when students visit, men avoid looking a woman in the face for too long. Drawing on the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter's «Fausse route», the authors push back against American radical feminism and ask whether France, which «always follows the United States ten years behind», is heading the same way. This opening makes the book's stance clear: it favours closeness between men and women but views some forms of feminism with suspicion.

The most valuable part is the «Sexuality in France» survey published in 2008. The team of sociologists Nathalie Bajos and Michel Bozon shows that the share of women reporting only one partner in their lifetime fell from 68% in 1970 to 43% in 1992 and 34% in 2006, while the figure for men stayed roughly the same. The age of first sexual experience has almost equalised for men and women, and older people now say «why should I stop, I have a right too». The authors honestly add that such surveys should be treated with some scepticism.

At the heart of chapter one is a list of «explanations about men for women»: men need reassurance, bottle up their feelings, dread saying «you're right», prefer substance to form, fear saying «I love you», and want sex to relieve stress. The story of Juliette and Romeo — the man taking her remark «that woman parked so well» as a personal insult, followed by a fifteen-day sulk — is a fine example of an everyday misunderstanding. The authors call this a «caricature», but the generalisations often remain just that.

Some «scientific» claims are oversimplified: «testosterone prevents the secretion of tears», «one third of a conversation is verbal and two thirds is gesture, with over a million bodily signals». More interesting is an experiment by the psycholinguist Christiane Tramitz at the Max Planck Institute in Munich: men saw «inviting» signals in a video of a woman, while women viewers read the same footage as signals of withdrawal. The authors' conclusion — men «see what they want to see» — is an important warning about consent.

Chapter two discusses the fragility of the couple: as religious and family communities dissolve, the couple has become a «consumer good» that carries every expectation yet can fall apart at the slightest disappointment. The authors analyse the Prince Charming myth and, following Freud, argue that «finding the love object is in fact refinding it» — a woman unknowingly seeks her father in a partner. These psychoanalytic readings are sometimes interesting, sometimes far too categorical. Explaining how a Muslim woman named Safiya lost her desire after marrying a Christian as submission to «the father's law» sounds especially one-sided.

The Turkish translation is readable but heavy. The later chapters — contraception, pregnancy, menopause, sexually transmitted infections — are more practical but rest on medical knowledge from 2009. On the whole this is a book that dares to speak openly yet cannot fully escape the stereotypes of its time.

• Calm, frank language that never shames
• A question-and-answer structure based on real patients' questions
• Support from a large sociological survey