Anita Clayton may not be the lost member of Salt-N-Pepa, but she sure likes to talk about sex. Clayton, a professor of psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology at UVA, has a new book out that explores the crossroads of her three areas of expertise. In Satisfaction: Women, Sex, and the Quest for Intimacy, Clayton examines women’s relationship to their sexuality and how that relationship is informed and complicated by the media. C-VILLE chatted with Clayton recently about the book. Here’s some of what she had to say.
 Anita Clayton doesn’t want women to settle for so-so sex, and she’s written a recently published book, Satisfaction: Women, Sex, and the Quest for Intimacy, to help the cause. |
C-VILLE: Do you think that there is a way to change the philosophy of sex education—both at home and in school—to help women meet high, yet realistic, expectations for their sex lives?
Anita Clayton: I think that one of the things that’s really important about that is self-esteem. Rather than telling them just to say, “No,” we have to help instill confidence in them to make decisions and then express them. I think early sex is usually not very productive. It very often affects self-esteem negatively because the relationships you have when you are young are not relationships that go on for very long, and thus may instill the feeling that [the girls] are not attractive, damaged goods, rejected, that kind of thing.
C-VILLE: “Satisfaction”—the title seems like a reference to the Rolling Stones. What do the Stones represent sexually in our cultural dialogue?
Anita Clayton: The first concert I ever went to was a Rolling Stones concert when I was 16, and they did have then fairly blatant sexual behaviors on stage. Kissing each other—open-mouthed kissing—on stage, and at the time, that was a little risqué. It may be that things like that help us look at what other people do without us having to be particularly voyeuristic.
C-VILLE: How can a woman “work” to make her sex life better? Can a woman herself change deep-seated issues with sex?
Anita Clayton: I think that that is certainly possible. Many of the things women are overcoming sexually are family, cultural and religious—things that we have accepted, sometimes without question. We need to look at where our own passions interact with those limitations, and then I think we can change those things because it’s not biological.
C-VILLE: You talk a lot about unrealistic portrayals of women’s sexuality in the media. However, could you name any portrayals of relationships in the media that you deem “realistic”?
Anita Clayton: Hmmm…Well, maybe Something’s Got to Give, where [the Jack Nicholson character] doesn’t have any concerns about how attractive he is and he is with this young woman, but [the Diane Keaton character] is concerned that she’s not very attractive because she’s getting older, etc. But when they get together she feels more attractive and is able to take a stand against him dating young women. Then she dates that younger guy and I’m not sure how realistic that is—but the part where she discovers her sexuality, that’s realistic.