What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2 page)

Rebecca—who was among the women I spent my time talking with, questioning relentlessly—had a talent for self-disparagement. This encompassed everything from her body to her career. How had she wound up teaching flute and clarinet to fourth-graders and never performing herself except during the intermissions at her students’ recitals? And how, she wondered further, had she managed to corner herself into this marmish existence in, of all places, Portland, Oregon, America’s city of hipsters?

Yet her skill at self-denigration was matched by a fiery resilience. Increasingly, on her screen the image of the twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend was replaced by the home site of an Internet dating service.

Gradually she had some dates. And gradually there was a man she saw as attractive and felt was kind, and—even before they slept together—she confided, over dinner in a Thai restaurant, something that had taken her fourteen years to tell her husband. She wanted to have a threesome with a woman. The discord and dissembling that ran through Chivers’s and Fisher’s findings weren’t her issues. Why she’d waited so long to raise her desire with her husband she wasn’t certain. Yes, some shyness was involved, but she guessed it had more to do with a hunch that turned out to be prescient: he didn’t show any interest. Probably, she thought, this was because having another woman in their bed would have made a glaring reality out of his lack of interest in Rebecca herself. In any case, her date agreed that a threesome would be good. They abandoned the topic there, began sleeping together, and returned to the subject a few months later. She said that she would leave the arrangements to him.

He asked whether she had any criteria. She’d never been with a woman in a threesome or in any other way. Her wishes were specific. Hair color different from her own. Not too tall. In decent shape. White or Latina. And—a factor she’d been fixated on for years—large breasts. C-cups, at a minimum, as long as they were real.

She and her boyfriend joked that she was as male as any caricature of a man. Because he’d never done anything like this before, it took him a while, but eventually he presented her with possibilities. He showed her a photograph from a casual connections site, a woman Rebecca found herself fantasizing about right away. But the emailing with this candidate flickered, and the chance faded. They debated whether to hire an escort. Periodically during this process of false starts, Rebecca was seized by fear: what if the woman saw her as old, repellent? But her boyfriend reassured her, and her desire was louder in her mind than her worry, and as they shifted toward the idea of renting someone, she reminded herself that her own attractiveness simply wasn’t supposed to matter.

At last, with a babysitter taking care of her children, they waited at his apartment for the arrival of an escort he’d chosen from row after row of thumbnail images online. Wanting to be welcoming hosts and to soften the prostitution-like aspects of hiring a prostitute, they had lit tea candles and chilled a nice bottle of wine. When the escort rang the doorbell, though, and when Rebecca and her boyfriend glanced out the living room window, the harsher qualities of the situation became more difficult to ignore.

Despite her high price, the woman was homely and built along the lines of a lumpy block. Rebecca whispered to her boyfriend that maybe the homeliness was due to the glare of his porch light, that all would be okay once they opened the door and began. She felt relieved, meanwhile, that she wouldn’t have to be concerned about her own looks. But when they opened the door and the escort stepped quietly, even timidly, into the vestibule, with the manner more of a housemaid than a call girl, the trouble did not improve. The woman appeared to be around ten years older than Rebecca. And now Rebecca was calculating at rapid speed whether she should and could go through with this to spare the prostitute’s feelings, so that the problem was no longer how to soften the exploitation of a body but how to avoid letting this woman know that her body was unexploitable.

Rebecca all but prayed that her boyfriend would somehow solve everything. He told the escort that Rebecca had suddenly come down with something, that she wasn’t up to it, an excuse that sounded about as convincing as her fourth-graders’ explanations for not practicing their instruments, though the woman, who smiled graciously, seemed to accept the reason or, either way, to be grateful not to have to perform. He gave her some minor cash for her time, and Rebecca said good-bye in sweet tones, and she and her boyfriend went upstairs to click on his computer and stare for a few moments in befuddlement at the immense disparity between the picture and the person and to discuss the mystery of how other customers had handled this difference and whether it was a common dilemma in securing an escort and how you were supposed to prevent this from happening. “I think you just have to spend more,” Rebecca said.

So they did. The second woman was pretty and young. She, too, was at odds with her picture, but not drastically, and Rebecca immersed herself in the escort’s breasts, in her thighs, in her lips, in all the parts that had been paid for, lost herself in the textures and sights and smells, and was nearly euphoric afterward, both because, after years and years of yearning, she’d broken through the range of barriers that stood between her and another woman’s body and lost her virginity in this sense and because, leaving the breakthrough aside, there’d been such pleasure in having, among other things, the prostitute’s nipples in her mouth.

When Rebecca and I talked, she said that while she hoped for another threesome with a woman soon and might like to have a woman alone, she didn’t much think of herself as a lesbian nor really as bisexual. She had no doubt that she preferred the romantic company of men. She fantasized mostly about men, was still happily with the same boyfriend, and definitely wouldn’t want to replace him with a woman. I described Chivers’s plethysmographic readings and asked for her thoughts.

The results didn’t mean that women secretly want to have sex with bonobos, she began, laughing. And it might not be right to label most women as bi, even if lots of women, like her, did wish to have sex with women or would if they permitted themselves to know it. “It’s hard to find the right words,” she said. “The phrase that keeps coming into my head is that it’s like a pregnancy of wanting. Pregnancy’s not a good word—because it means pregnancy. It’s that it’s always there. Or always ready. And so much can set it off. Things you actually want and things you don’t. Pregnant. Full. The pregnancy of women’s desire. That’s the best I can do.”

S
tranger. Close friend. Lover of long-standing.

This was the focus of a new experiment Chivers was finishing during one of my visits. The results made her pulse quicken.

It didn’t race all that often. The daily labors of her research were painstaking; her office in Kingston was about as spare as a monk’s cell. The cinder-block walls were nearly bare. Taped above her desk were a few splotches of purple and green painted by her toddler son. On the opposite wall was a small photographic triptych she’d taken of stone carvings at an Indian temple. A man, in the first image, had sex with a mare while another masturbated; a couple tongued each other’s genitals in the middle picture; in the last photo seven human figures were lost in orgiastic heat. Yet for all its drama, the triptych was miniature enough to overlook. The cinder block dominated; there was minimal distraction; she wanted it like this. She could imagine herself surrounded by what she was venturing into, the forest of female desire.

One morning at her metal desk, with a flat November light making its way through her window, she bent over her laptop, poring through plethysmographic readings she’d collected in her latest study. Her eyes tracked a jagged red line that ran across the screen, a line that traced one subject’s blood flow, second by second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to take the data and arrange them in a meaningful form, she needed to eliminate errant points, moments when a subject had probably shifted in her chair, generating a slight pelvic contraction and jarring the plethysmograph, which could, in turn, cause a jolt in the readings and skew the overall results. Slowly, she scanned the line with all its cramped zigs and zags, searching for spots where the unusual height of a peak relative to the ridges beside it told her that arousal wasn’t at play, that an interval was irrelevant to her study. She highlighted and deleted one tiny aberrant section, then continued squinting. She would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a single subject. “I’m going blind,” she said, as she stared at another suspicious crest.

She was thrilled, though, with what her experiments were uncovering—and thrilled to belong within the “gathering critical mass,” an unprecedented female effort. The discipline of sexology, which was founded in the late nineteenth century, had always been a male domain. Even now, women made up less than a third of the membership in the field’s most eminent organization, the International Academy of Sex Research, and less than a third of the editorial board—on which Chivers served—of the Academy’s journal. So female eros hadn’t been examined with nearly as much energy as it might have been. And one of Chivers’s heroes, one of the older women in the field, Julia Heiman, the director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, told me that, in addition, sexology had for many decades devoted itself more to documenting behavior than to looking into the feelings, like lust, that lie underneath. Alfred Kinsey’s work at midcentury, she said, didn’t reveal all that much about desire. He had started his career as an entomologist, cataloguing species of wasps; he was wary of delving into emotion. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, filming hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions that concentrated on function rather than craving. It wasn’t until the seventies that sexologists began zeroing in on what women want rather than what women do. And then AIDS engulfed the attention of the discipline. Prevention became everything. Only in the late nineties did full-scale exploration of desire start again.

In her new experiment, Chivers played pornographic audiotapes, instead of videos, for straight female subjects. Ever meticulous, always intent on duplicating her results from alternate angles, she wanted to know, partly, whether spoken stories would somehow have a different effect on the blood, on the mind, on the gap between plethysmograph and keypad. “You meet the real estate agent outside the building. He shows you the empty apartment. . . .” “You notice a woman wearing a clinging black dress, watching you. . . . She follows you. She closes the door and locks it. . . .” The scenes her subjects heard varied not only by whether they featured a man or a woman in the seductive role but by whether the scenario involved someone unknown, or known well as a friend, or known long as a lover. There was the female friend dripping in her bathing suit at the side of the pool. There was the male roommate; there was the female stranger in the locker room. All were depicted as physically alluring, and all the salient details were kept equivalent: the pacing of the ninety-second narratives, the abrupt hardness of the cocks, the swelling of the nipples.

Once again, when all was analyzed, the gap was dramatic: the subjects reported being much more turned on by the scenes starring males than by those with females; the plethysmograph contradicted them. Chivers was pleased by the confirmation. But this time, it was something else that excited her.

Genital blood throbbed when the tapes described X-rated episodes with female friends—but the throbbing for female strangers was twice as powerful. The broad-chested male friends were deadening; with them, vaginal pulse almost flatlined. The male strangers stirred eight times more blood.

Chivers’s subjects maintained that the strangers aroused them least of all the men they heard about. The plethysmograph said the opposite. Longtime lovers, male or female, were edged out by the unknown men or women—even though the lovers were dreams, perfect. Sex with strangers delivered a blood storm.

This didn’t fit well with the societal assumption that female sexuality thrives on emotional connection, on established intimacy, on feelings of safety. Instead, the erotic might run best on something raw. This idea wasn’t completely new, but it tended to be offered as the exception rather than the rule: the raw was important to few women; it was the material of only intermittent fantasy for most. Here was systematic evidence to the contrary, the suggestion of a new, unvarnished norm.

Chivers’s work emphasized discord not only between bodies and minds but between realities and expectations, and around her, other researchers, too, were calling conventions into doubt. One was the old notion that women’s sexuality is innately less visual than men’s. Kim Wallen, an Emory University psychology professor whose hordes of rhesus monkeys I visited between my tutorials with Chivers, collaborated with Heather Rupp, his former student and a sexologist at the Kinsey Institute, in showing erotic photographs to male and female subjects. They used viewing time, down to the thousandth of a second, to measure level of interest. The women gazed at the porn no less long than the men. It seemed they were just as riveted.

Terri Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, had been dwelling for years on a series of studies, done over the past four decades, affirming repeatedly that men welcome casual sex while women, for the most part, don’t. In two of these experiments, males and females—“of average attractiveness,” as the researchers described them, and around twenty-two years old—were sent out onto a college campus to proposition two hundred members of the opposite sex. Either they asked for a date, or they asked, “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About the same percentage of men and women—50 percent or so—answered yes to the date. But close to three-quarters of the male responders and none of the females said yes to bed. The data had been used often to argue not only a vast but an intrinsic difference in the desires of men and women. Conley created a questionnaire to look at the topic in another way.