What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (4 page)

Evidence like this piles up in Buss’s pages. And
then he adds another worldwide mating reality—that from Zambia to America,
financial prospects are prized in men—and this takes him to one of evolutionary
psychology’s pivotal conceits. Within the field, it is known as “parental
investment theory.” To the public, it may not be known by any name at all. And
by most, the theory’s components may be only hazily comprehended. Yet the
conceit has traveled from academia through the media and into general
consciousness. It has been fully embraced, deeply absorbed, become part of
common wisdom. Parental investment theory goes like this: because men have
limitless sperm while women have limited eggs, because men don’t have to invest
much of worth in reproduction while women invest not only their ova but their
bodies, as they take on the tolls and risks of pregnancy and childbirth, because
women then invest further in breast-feeding (the investment being in time, in
extra calories required, and in the postponed ability to conceive another
child)—because of this economy of input, far more pressingly relevant to our
prehistoric ancestors, to our ever-endangered forebears, than to the humans of
today, males have been programmed, since way back when, to ensure and expand
their genetic legacy by spreading their cheap seed, while females have been
scripted to maximize their investment by being choosy, by securing a male likely
to have good genes and be a good long-term provider to her and her
offspring.

This all fits neatly with the evidence from Zambia,
Yugoslavia, Palestinian towns, Australia, America, Japan. And the theory’s stark
economic terms have a solid, incontrovertible sound. Our erotic beings, the
differences in desire we observe between the genders, are the inevitable
manifestations of evolutionary forces from eons ago. Parental investment theory
gratifies one of our urgent longings: for simple answers about how we’ve come to
be the way we are.

But the theory’s foundation is precarious at best.
Does the fact that women are expected to be the more demure gender in Lusaka and
New York, in Kabul and Kandahar and Karachi and Kansas City, prove anything
about our erotic hardwiring? Might the shared value placed on female modesty
speak less to absolutes of biology than to the world’s span of male-dominated
cultures and historic suspicion and fear of female sexuality?

And then, what of Chivers’s plethysmograph, which
made a myth out of appearances? What of the drives that lie concealed beneath
the surface, that crouch within the strictures? The sexual insights of
evolutionary psychology can sometimes seem nothing but a conservative fable,
conservative perhaps inadvertently but nevertheless preservationist in spirit,
protective of a sexual status quo. Women, the fable teaches, are
naturally
the more restrained sex; this is the inborn
norm; this is normal. And the normal always wields a self-confirming and
self-perpetuating power. Because few people like to defy it, to stray from
it.

One recent pop psychology mega-seller,
The Female Brain
, opens with lessons grounded in
parental investment theory and serves as an emblem of the ways evolutionary
psychology has spread its sexual vision throughout the culture. “The girl brain”
is a “machine built for connection,” for attachment. “That’s what it drives a
female to do from birth. This is the result of millennia of genetic and
evolutionary hardwiring.” The boy brain-machine is very different; it is built
for “frenzies” of lust.

The book, like loads of others in the pop
psychology genre, pretends to back its evolutionary theory with something
concrete, with the technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging,
fMRI—with pictures of the brain at work. But the technology is nowhere near
being up to the task. To spend time in fMRI laboratories, to stare alongside
neuroscientists while fMRI data is sent from subjects’ brains to lab computers,
to listen as those neuroscientists strain to read and parse the pictures of
brain regions forming on their monitors, as I have, and to ask bluntly about the
state of our seemingly miraculous equipment, its capabilities much hyped by the
media, is to understand that our technology is not at all precise enough to
subdivide and apprehend the miniscule subregions and interlaced brain systems
that enact our complex emotions, among them the wish to have sex. When, on the
news or in a magazine, we hear or read something like, “The hippocampus lit up
as subjects looked at photographs of . . .” we are learning something
about as specific as a TV traffic reporter scanning from a helicopter and being
able to say only, “The heavy traffic is somewhere in northern New Jersey.” As
scientists told me again and again, brain imaging just isn’t a way to determine
much of anything definitive about female versus male emotional neurology, not
yet. And such technology may never be the right way to study
inborn
differences between the genders, because
experience—use and disuse, positive and negative reinforcement—is forever
altering neurological systems, strengthening some and weakening others.

Proclamations like the ones in
The Female Brain
—about connection versus frenzies, or about how a
woman, to have satisfying sex, must be “comfortable, warm, and cozy” and, “most
important,” has “to trust who she is with”—are in striking parallel with the
teachings of fundamentalist Christianity. The secular version is less extreme,
but the messages are similar. As a pair of health education programs, designed
by evangelicals and used in thousands of public schools within the past decade,
instructed in their charts, the “five major needs of women” in marriage are
topped by “affection” and “conversation.” Sex is nowhere in the five. Across the
page, the male list is led by “sexual fulfillment.” In another graphic titled
“Guys and Girls are Different,” girls have an equals sign between “sex” and
“personal relationship.” Guys have the sign crossed out.

So, with scientific or God-given confidence, girls
and women are told how they should feel.

Chapter Four

Monkeys and Rats

H
er unruly red-blond hair tufting atop her head, Deidrah sat beside Oppenheimer. She lipped his ear. She mouthed his chest. She kissed his belly over and over, lips lingering with each kiss. After a while, he pulled himself up and strolled away from her attentions, glancing back over his shoulder to see if she was following. She was.

Deidrah, who was probably the most reserved female monkey in the compound, started in again on his white-haired torso as they sat together on a concrete curb. The habitat, a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot square, was filled with ladders and ropes and assorted apparatus donated by a local fire department and by McDonald’s; an environment of trees and vines would have been too expensive to create and maintain. A trio of monkey children sprinted toward a tube, disappeared inside it, burst from the other end, and raced around for another run-through, berserk with joy.

From a platform on a steel tower, I watched with Kim Wallen, his beard silver, his eyes alight. A psychologist and neuroendocrinologist, he spent much of his time here at Yerkes, an Emory University research center outside Atlanta that was home to two thousand primates. We gazed down at the habitat’s seventy-five rhesus, a monkey species that had been sent into orbit in spaceships, in the fifties and sixties, as stand-ins for humans to see if we could survive trips to the moon. Wallen had lived on a farm as a child when his father, a psychologist, decided to try out a utopian dream of cooperative goat-rearing. Wallen’s observation of animal sexuality had begun then. He’d been watching monkeys now for decades.

“Females were passive. That was the theory in the middle seventies. That was the wisdom,” he remembered the start of his career. Deidrah’s face, always a bit redder than most, was luminous this morning, lit scarlet with lust as she lifted it from Oppenheimer’s chest. “The prevailing model was that female hormones affected female pheromones—affected the female’s smell, her attractivity to the male. The male initiated all sexual behavior.” What science had managed to miss in the monkeys—what it had effectively erased—was female desire.

And it had missed more than that. In this breed used as our astronaut doubles, females are the bullies and murderers, the generals in brutal warfare, the governors. This had been noted in journal articles back in the thirties and forties, but thereafter it had gone mainly unrecognized, the articles buried and the behavior oddly unperceived. “It so flew in the face of prevailing ideas about the dominant role of males,” Wallen said, “that it was just ignored.”

What mostly male scientists had expected and likely wanted to see appeared to have blinded them. Wallen’s career had been about pulling away the blinders. At the moment, below us, one female clawed fiercely at another, bit into a leg, whipped the weaker one back and forth like a weightless doll. Harrowing shrieks rose up. Four or five more monkeys joined in, attacking the one, who escaped somehow, sped away, was caught again. The shrieks grew more plaintive, more piercing, the attackers piling on, apparently for the kill, then desisting inexplicably. Assaults like this flared often; Wallen and his team usually couldn’t glean the reasons. Full battle—one female-led family’s attempt to overthrow another—was rare. That tended toward death: death from wounds and, some veterinarians thought, from sheer fright and shock. Occasionally the compound was littered with corpses.

When he thought about the way science had somehow kept itself oblivious to female monkey lust for so long, Wallen blamed not only preconceptions but the sex act itself. “When you look at the sexual interaction, it’s easy to see what the male is doing; he’s thrusting. It takes really focusing on the entire interaction to see all that the female is doing—and once you truly see it, you can never overlook it again.”

Deidrah fingered Oppenheimer’s belly, caressing, desperate to win his favors. He flopped down on his front, inert in a strip of sun. She kissed where she could get access, his ear again. The red of her face bordered on neon. She was near or in the midst of ovulation, her libidinous hormones high. When it comes to their cycles and sex, female monkeys are somewhere between lower mammals and humans; rhesus mating isn’t limited to the time of ovulation, but in most situations, that’s when it’s a lot more likely to occur.

What was happening between Deidrah’s ovaries and her brain as she stalked and stroked Oppenheimer is only partially understood, and the ways that biochemistry affects desire in women is even more complicated. Basically, though, sex hormones produced by the ovaries and adrenal glands—testosterone, estrogen—prime the primitive regions of the brain, territory lying not far from the brain stem and shared by species from
Homo sapiens
to lizards. This hormonal bathing then affects the intricate systems of neurotransmitters, like dopamine, that send signals within the brain, and this, in turn, alters perception and leads—in people and monkeys, in dogs and rats—to lust. The belief that animals, especially species less advanced than primates, don’t experience lust, that their mating is scripted to the point of making them sexual automatons, is wrong, as Jim Pfaus, a neuroscientist at Concordia University in Montreal, would soon explain to me. Now, on the far side of the ladders and ropes, Deidrah was mouthing Oppenheimer’s ear more and more ardently.

Bulky and torpid, Oppenheimer and the habitat’s other adult male didn’t fully take part in the life of the compound. They didn’t belong to any particular family. They were merely breeders—and their peripheral status mimicked the male role in the wild. There, in Asian mountains or lowland forests, adult males lurked at the edges of female-run domains. The females invited them in to serve sexually. The males remained—desirable, dispensable—until the females lost interest in them. Then they were dismissed, replaced. In his compounds, Wallen removed the breeders and introduced new males about every three years, the time it took for them to become irrelevant, for their charms to wane, for the frequency of their copulations—almost always female-initiated—to fade. In the wild they seemed to stay attractive only slightly longer.

“Rhesus females are very xenophobic when it comes to other females,” Wallen said. “Introduce a new female into the compound and she’ll be hounded until she dies. But when it comes to males, females have a bias toward novelty.”

With his pale muzzle and russet back, Oppenheimer loped off once more and Deidrah trailed him. A child of hers, less than a year old, hurried behind her. Wallen’s assistants adored Deidrah. They loved her sprigs of out-of-control hair; they loved her personality, the quiet dignity she emanated most of the time, if not at the moment; and they loved the devotion of her mothering. Last year, upheaval in the compound had left her and her children vulnerable. Horribly frightened, they latched on to her and wouldn’t let go. “Literally, she could barely get up and walk without being dragged down by her kids,” Amy Henry, an assistant, said. “One held on to her tail. They wouldn’t let her go. She accepted it all with grace. She knew it was her responsibility to reassure them that it was okay. She’s always been a low-key monkey. But she gets very excited when she gives birth. And she gets very attached. I watched her carry her daughter on her back for a long time, right up to when she had a new baby. Not all moms will do that.”

With hustling after Oppenheimer on her mind, though, maternal instinct was gone. She didn’t seem to see let alone know her baby; she kept leaving it alone, and it kept having to scoot after her. She positioned herself in front of Oppenheimer, crouched, and tapped a hand on the ground in a staccato rhythm. She tapped like this persistently, the rhesus equivalent of unbuckling a man’s belt. Yet her gesture contained a touch of hesitance. “She’s being careful, because all the females around her are higher ranked,” Wallen said. If they decided, for any reason, that they didn’t want her having sex with him, they and their families might tear and bite her to death.

Wallen’s realization, in the seventies, that rhesus females are the aggressors in sex had begun with a pattern he noticed in graduate school. At his university, pairs of adult monkeys—one female, one male—were observed in ten-by-eight-foot cages. At a lab in Britain whose work he read about, the cages were markedly smaller. On both sides of the ocean, the females had their ovaries removed; the scientists were tallying the copulations of the rhesus in the absence of ovarian hormones. And Wallen, who found himself contemplating the two sets of results against each other, was captivated by the fact that the couples in the tighter cages had a lot more sex. “So I pulled the literature on a range of similar tests that were done in different-sized cages, and the relationship was quite clear. In the smallest cages there was the most sex, in the largest ones there was the least, and the in-between ones had an in-between amount.”

Soon Wallen arrived at Yerkes, and, watching the rhesus in the center’s broad compounds—habitats whose size came closer to natural conditions—he developed his thinking about the way the tight confines in many experiments had helped to mold the accepted vision of monkey sexuality: lessening the female role and distorting the truth.

Put a male and female in a small cage, and no matter what the female’s hormonal state—no matter whether she had ovaries at all—the pair would have plenty of sex, in part, Wallen came to understand, because their proximity to each other mirrored the kind of stalking Deidrah was doing now. This sexual signaling, created by the cramped dimensions, stirred the males to mount. The males
appeared
to be the initiators of the species. But put rhesus in a less artificial situation, and sex depended almost completely on the female’s tracking, her ceaseless approaching, her lipping and stroking and belly-kissing and tap-tapping, her craving. Without her flood of ovulatory hormones, without the priming of her brain, copulation wasn’t going to occur.

Are females the main sex-hunters in most other monkey species? The answer isn’t yet known, Wallen said; not enough meticulous science has been done. Capuchins, tonkeans, pigtails—he named three types whose females are the stalkers. With their sweeping tails and ebony faces, female langurs initiate fervently. And among the massive orangutans, scenes like this were documented, for the first time, in the late eighties: males lying on their backs, showing off their erections to females, and waiting passively; and females closing in, mounting, pumping. As for bonobos, with their strangely parted hair and reputation for abandon, females avidly get sex going with males and with each other.

At last, with Deidrah tapping her crazed Morse code on the dirt, Oppenheimer reached out. Standing behind her, he set his hands on her hips. And suddenly she had what she sought, his swift thrusts. He pumped back and forth in a flurry. Then he paused, pulled out briefly, touched her flanks, and slid inside her again for another bout of thrusting. He humped and pulled out repeatedly. When he came, thighs quivering and eyes going fuzzy, she twisted, turned her face to his, smacked her lips at high speed, reached back to seize him, and yanked him violently forward.

Her fulfillment was short-lived. Within minutes, she was hounding him again. At other moments, she might have moved on to the other male. “She has sex,” Wallen said, about rhesus females on the whole, “and when he goes into his post-ejaculatory snooze, what does she do? She immediately gets up and goes off and finds another.” Tracking the action of the compound, he asked himself, as he had so many times, whether the libido in women has similar drive, and whether “because of social conventions and imperatives, women frequently don’t act on or even recognize the intensity of motivation that monkeys obey.” He answered, “I feel confident that this is true.”

W
allen didn’t mean to imply perfect correspondence between Deidrah and the average human female. The distinctions included the impact of ovulation, so much more subtle in women. He and his former doctoral student Heather Rupp had been trying to grasp the ways that women’s monthly hormones spur the neurotransmitters of desire. In one study, they had taken three groups of straight females and showed them hundreds of similar pornographic pictures—all featuring women with men—in three rounds, at different points in the women’s cycles. Again, Wallen and Rupp used viewing time as a measure of the subjects’ interest in the porn. One result was predictable: in the first round, the women who were near ovulation stared longer than the other subjects. But something else caught them by surprise. These same women, whose first round of porn came at mid-cycle, when testosterone and estrogen peaked, stayed riveted when they returned to the lab for their second and third rounds, as the month wore on and these hormones faded. The women whose initial viewing came during lower hormonal stretches didn’t become transfixed when they ovulated. They continued to be less moved. Maybe, Wallen thought, some kind of conditioned arousal or indifference took hold. In later rounds, he guessed, the subjects still unconsciously linked the surroundings of the lab, the equipment, the porn to their reaction to their first viewing.

“One lesson,” he said, “is that you don’t want a woman to form her first impression of you when she’s in the wrong menstrual phase. You’ll never recover.” He laughed.

O
ur conversation, on the platform above the compound, veered back to primatology, to the insights offered by our animal ancestors. He spoke about Deidrah’s abundance of lust and about its constraint in women—about a communal sense of danger, a half-conscious fear of societal disintegration, that lay behind the constraining. And as I listened, and afterward as I dwelled on things, I thought of the historic terrors, the carnal archetypes: of witches, whose evil “comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable,” according to the Christian doctrine of the Inquisition, “the mouth of the womb . . . never satisfied . . . wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils”; and of Eve, upon whose sinfulness all of Christianity is constructed, Eve, for whose evil the Son of God has to die, to sacrifice himself so that humanity can have a chance at redemption. This was the foundation, what lay beneath our culture’s primary religion; it was imbedded in our societal psyche. And I thought, too, of monogamy: our inchoate idea that monogamy girds against social chaos and collapse, and our notion—the desperate inversion of our terror—that the female libido is limited and that women are monogamy’s natural guardians. So we managed our fear.