What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (12 page)

Diamond was a tireless researcher; the study at the center of her book had been running for more than a decade. Through long interviews and questionnaires, she’d been monitoring the erotic attractions of a hundred women who, at the outset, declared themselves lesbians or bisexuals or declined any label. From her analysis of the many leaps they made between sexual identities and from their detailed descriptions of their sexual lives, Diamond concluded that the direction of female desire was, above all, fluid. And after the book was published, she began collecting data among heterosexual women that helped to solidify her argument, that left her evidence less blurred by subjects whose sexuality seemed inevitably more likely to bend and transform.

Diamond, whose longtime partner was a woman, didn’t claim that women were without innate orientations. But, she contended, female desire was generated—even more than traditionally assumed—by emotional entwining. Attachment was so sexually powerful that orientation could be easily overridden. Despite Diamond’s provocative book title, in a way her thesis couldn’t have been more conventional: closeness was almost all.

Yet something lurked, unaddressed, within her data on fluidity; her subjects weren’t staying close to the same person. Relationships were being traded in periodically, and in the realm of sexual fantasy, they were being betrayed all the time. And suddenly, two years after our first meeting, when I mentioned the predicament of a woman whose story I will recount here in a moment, Diamond said, “In the lesbian community, the monogamy problem is being aired more and more. For years, gay men have been making open arrangements for sex outside the couple. Now, increasingly, gay women are doing it. It’s interesting that lesbians like to call it polyamory, as though to stress love or friendship, instead of just letting it be motivated primarily by sex.” She sounded almost like Meana; there was impatience with the veneer. As she continued, she turned to lesbian tastes in the X-rated, to “the difference between what’s feminist-approved and what gets you off,” to the doubtful presumptions that women need more narrative and more emotional meaning in their pornography, while men are more visual, more objectifying. “The stereotypes of male versus female, that male desire is far more promiscuous, seem more and more open to question.”

M
assage oil, a blindfold: the items Isabel had bought—hoping to alter the feeling of Eric’s touch—when she ventured into the sex-toy boutique. On their visits, Calla and Jill weren’t so reserved. Several months before, they had purchased a double-headed dildo—long shaft, two heads. Bodies arranged in the right way, they could penetrate each other.

These are four unions, four stories of loyalty and its limitations:

1

“Jill is more black-and-white than I am,” Calla said about her girlfriend. “By personality, she’s a jock. She’s feisty. Things for her are either/or. I think maybe commitment comes more naturally for her. Once, maybe in our second year, when we were walking down the street, down the stairs actually, on Queen Anne Hill—there was this thick bed of ivy there—I started crying. I told her I’d never felt such unconditional love.”

This was how she saw the woman she’d met four years ago in a lesbian bar, the woman she’d been living with now for a year. And this, that phrase, “such unconditional love,” would reverberate later when I listened again to Meana, when she told me about an approach she took with only a few of her couples.

The bar had two levels. When their eyes had caught at a distance—Jill standing upstairs and Calla below—Jill’s had refused to let go. “Ballsy,” Calla remembered, and recalled other impressions: Jill’s sharp features, her combination of dark blond ringlets and green irises, the spareness of her athletic body, and the way that, when Calla had wandered off from their first conversation to flirt with someone else, Jill reappeared and announced, with whimsical flair, that she intended to compete. Calla took her home. For most of the year leading up to their meeting, Calla, who was in her early forties, had kept herself celibate in an effort to purge all the forces that had led to her last relationship, her last quick, eager pledge of fidelity, her last attempt at living together, her last disappointment, her last flight, her last repetition of this process, and that night with Jill, short, sinewy, brazen Jill, the sex went on ceaselessly, as though somehow a year might be pressed into hours.

For Calla, there had been a moment. One afternoon back in high school, in PE class, on a volleyball court two courts away from her own, with blue and white balls and black and white nets and cut-offs and gym shorts between them, she had noticed a classmate, a girl she’d seen and briefly spoken to before. But she’d never noticed her in this way, never had this reaction, this sense of invading chaos. Filled with dread, within days she gave herself a test. “I proceeded to go through in my mind the act of going down on her,” she said. “And when I was done, I thought, No, I don’t want to do that.” To her great relief, this meant that she wasn’t a lesbian.

Soon she was writing the girl poetry. Soon they were applying each other’s makeup, telling each other how pretty they looked. She spent nearly all her nights at the girl’s house, in her bed, the two of them in their underwear, tickling or running fingers along lengths of limbs. Things went no further. It wasn’t until her freshman year in college that Calla stole away from a party, went to a dance at the university’s LGBT center, wound up thoroughly immersed in a woman’s body for the first time, and, in the wake of that night in that graduate student’s bed, “realized how crazy girls made me.”

Two decades had gone by since then. Cautiously she had put off living with Jill until the initial thrall subsided; meticulously she had tallied the pros and cons of how they were together; insistently she had promised herself that she wouldn’t repeat the betrayals and disappearances of the past. The small apartment they shared was on Queen Anne, where she had wept gratefully on the ivy-ensconced stairs. Nowadays, after an evening out together, they might stand at the plate glass window that overlooked Puget Sound and share a rare cigarette and gaze out at the dark water, at the island’s faint outline.

Sex sometimes began here, usually after six or seven or eight chaste nights. “Should we?” Jill would ask, inflecting her question with humor, with a sly reference to the count of nights that had gone by.

Calla would answer that they should.

“You don’t sound too excited.”

“Get into bed. Get out the toy and get naked.”

“I’ve been forcing myself to push through my own resistance,” she told me. “When Jill asks, it’s like, I don’t really want to, I should want to, I feel guilty about not wanting to. I tell myself I need to let go, that it’s been too long. And then when we do start, it’s playful, and I can feel her getting turned on, and that makes my body more focused. And meanwhile I’m fantasizing—it might be about other women, sometimes it might be about a man. Is there something wrong with me that I have to fantasize to be with her? I think maybe there is. I didn’t have to at the beginning. Anyway, I orgasm pretty easily and so does Jill, and most of the time we orgasm again, and it is a release. And afterward my head is emptied out, and even with everything my mind was imagining I feel closer to her. So sometimes I ask her, ‘Why don’t we do that every night?’ I say, ‘We should do that every night.’

“Then a night goes by. Then another. I let them go, I make sure they go. I don’t know why. And then the nights after that.”

2

Susan wanted a low headboard. The master bedroom had banks of windows; she wanted the headboard to look right, not to block the panes. “And I wanted it to be good to hang on to during sex, which might have meant old-fashioned brass with bars, but that would have been too high. So I found a wooden one that went with a platform bed. It had these circle things, these circular openings, cut out of it.”

The windows looked onto the suburban town where she lived with her husband. Below were their birch trees and the bird feeder he’d built for their son. At night, though, she recalled, “the windows kind of freaked me out. There were too many of them, and they turned into black holes of nothing. I think I must have been feeling something about my father. When he was dying, the hospice people moved him from his bed, which had a beautiful headboard by the way, with this blue silk upholstery, to a cot in front of a window that faced an air shaft.” He was in his early fifties and single; he and her mother had divorced years before. “I was in college, and when I would come back to New York to visit him, I felt like someone was going to come in and snatch him there. I knew he was going to die anyway, but I felt like he was going to die sooner. He seemed so exposed next to that back window. I felt like it was stealing away his virility. It’s funny, because there was another window in his apartment, a set of windows. And I remember nude sunbathers out there. They were on towels on a roof. That must have been east. The light that way was lovely.”

With no transition, she said, “It was heartbreaking to lose my attraction for my husband. I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t want to hurt him. And in a superstitious way, I felt like if I admitted out loud that it wasn’t there anymore, it would never come back. I just prayed that it would. I get the feeling that for women it goes away more quickly than it does for men. I get the feeling that women are more dissatisfied than men are. It’s the norm, but it’s not talked about, and a lot of women struggle with the reality that they’re not attracted to the spouses they’re supposed to be with for the rest of their lives.

“We were very passionate in the beginning. But I think there’s this whole misconception about women needing to be emotionally invested. I think it might almost be the opposite, that in the first part of a relationship the attachment is the product of the attraction. Sometimes, in long-term happy relationships, maybe, sex ends up serving the relationship, but at first it’s the relationship that’s serving the attraction.

“I don’t know, though. Is that right? We were friends before anything else. It wasn’t like I looked at him and thought, Oh, he’s incredibly hot. It was the way he sounded. It was the way he smelled. It was the whole person. But I definitely found him really attractive.

“I remember one night our younger daughter came into our room. We’d just been starting to make love. I snuggled with her. I had no desire to be physically close with my husband. It had been like that for quite a while—that headboard never did get much use. She’s a really good snuggler, and those windows were threatening. I could feel their presence. I’d had curtains made. In the winter they were heavy velvet. We did have sex maybe once a week, but it didn’t reach me. My body would respond, but the pleasure was like the pleasure of returning library books.

“I had a friend who used to say, ‘The longer you’re married, the larger the bed you need.’ And the thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt like my body was a room that I didn’t want to mess up. Unlike that openness in the beginning when my body was a room and I didn’t mind if he came in with his shoes on—when I wanted him to come in that way.

“He’d gained some weight, not a lot—I don’t think I really noticed. And then I must have, on some level. It sounds crass. Maybe it was thirty pounds. You’re taught that it shouldn’t matter. He also started losing his hair. He’s Jewish—black hair and dark skin and brown eyes. And I was very attracted to that. I’m freckles and fair. So he had all this nice black hair, and he started losing more and more of it, and it bothered me that he wouldn’t do anything about it—he knew that I liked his hair, and he wouldn’t use anything, and I felt like, I do all this stuff to try to look good, why can’t you do that, too? He said that it shouldn’t matter. And I said, ‘Really? If I gained a hundred pounds you wouldn’t mind?’ And he said, ‘I’d be worried about your health.’

“Somehow I lost my generosity toward him. I don’t know how. It certainly wasn’t just his looks. For women, it’s not necessarily a beauty contest. Feeling generous isn’t the same as feeling passion, but it can create a happier situation in your sexual life.

“I have a friend who told me about an article she read about how to heat up your marriage. One of the things on the list was having your husband jump you in the laundry room. She just laughed. ‘My husband feels like my brother.’

“We never went to a psychologist until the end, when we were ready to divorce. I felt like seeing a therapist was only going to result in more tips like the ones I read in books—books written by therapists. We could try a hundred different emotional exercises. We could try new positions.

“So I just lay on that bed, holding my daughter. She truly is a gifted snuggler. It was like taking a muscle relaxant. I clung on to her and thought my morbid thoughts, She is the last physical intimacy I’m going to have before I die, she is the last physical intimacy I’m going to have before I die. And I felt those windows, even though I kept the velvet curtains closed.”

3

Sophie and Paul’s romance had begun when they were in nursing school. One night, ten years ago, a group of students had gone out to a bar and decided to play telephone. Paul sat directly to Sophie’s right. “Sophie,” she whispered to the woman on her left, “will you go out with me?” The question made it all the way around the circle, word for word.

They had been married now for eight years. They had three small children, the youngest under a year old; they both worked; and whatever time was left for them as a couple was swallowed by his studying and training for an advanced degree. Yet their bedroom seemed nothing less than anointed.

When she had first told her friends that she wished—wished badly—that Paul would ask her out, they looked puzzled. “Really?” they said. They thought of him as a dependable friend, not as the subject of dreams. But the man Sophie had just broken up with was a painter with a nipple ring glinting amid the muscles of his chest. He had done her portrait with dark flamboyance, depicting her as a corpse. It all seemed laughably melodramatic now, but for a long while she had been intoxicated not only by the Goth-style art, the gleam of jewelry, and the torso, but by the air of indifference—he rarely even bothered to brush his teeth—that seemed to keep women clustered around him always. He was unfaithful to her on a regular basis.