What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (9 page)

Many of Fedoroff’s patients were convicted criminals, but he told me about a case that wasn’t criminal at all. A heterosexual couple had sought him out; the woman could no longer climax, not with her partner. She’d taken to having sex with a series of men in the same night, to watching videos of women having sex with animals, to making videos of herself masturbating—these sent her toward orgasm. Climactic sex with her partner seemed a hopeless cause “until,” Fedoroff wrote in a journal article, “it was discovered that she consumed large amounts of L-tryptophan, available in health food stores, to help her sleep. This substance is metabolized into serotonin, which is known to cause difficulty reaching orgasm. She was advised to discontinue taking L-tryptophan. Soon afterward, her ability to reach orgasm through intercourse with her partner returned, and with it, her paraphilic interest in group sex, exhibitionism, and zoophilia disappeared.”

According to Fedoroff’s theory, fantasies of sexual assault might well serve, for some non-paraphilic women, as a way to unstick the switch; they might supply an emotional emergency and enable orgasm.

But for Meana, rape fantasies were rooted in the narcissism that was imbedded in the female sex drive. As we talked, she narrowed her ideas into an emblematic scene: a woman pinned and ravished against an alley wall. Here, in her vision, was an ultimate symbol of female lust. The ravager, overcome by craving for this particular woman, cannot restrain himself; he tears through all codes, through all laws and conventions, to seize her, and she—feeling herself to be the unique object of his unendurable need—is overcome herself.

Right away, she regretted what she’d described, the alley image she’d called symbolic. She hadn’t used the word “rape,” but the scene evoked it.

“I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she said quickly. The phrase was paradoxical, she stressed; it had no meaning. “In fantasy we control the stimuli. In rape we have no control.” The two ideas couldn’t coexist.

“They’re really fantasies of submission,” she continued. She elaborated on the pleasure of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ ” she sifted through the terms that came to her as she tried to express the wish. “I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word.” It didn’t reflect what women were imagining as Meana’s scene culminated: their willing acquiescence.

Yet she looked vaguely stricken; she knew her parsing of language couldn’t tame the subject. The fantasy of the alley, no matter how much she focused on vocabulary, retained its aura of violence. And as Bivona and Critelli had pointed out, the paradox in logic, in conjuring one’s own lack of control, didn’t exactly mean that the fantasizing woman wasn’t immersing herself in an experience of sexual assault. The assault wasn’t real, of course; the immersion was only partial; but the violence, the overpowering were being lived, if only in the mind. The fantasies occupied a realm that was both infinitely far from the actual and yet psychologically close to it. Were they different from any of our other intensely felt and yet idle wishes? To commit crimes and become rich? To inflict awful harm on our enemies? We don’t act on these imaginings, and in one sense we don’t want to transpose them from the world of the mind to the world of the real. We don’t want that at all; we would then have entered a nightmare. Yet our fantasies do speak of our desires.

When Meana first talked with me about the alley, I was interviewing her for a magazine article. Just before the story went to print, we spoke on the phone. She suggested a change in the way I presented things: I should specify that it wasn’t a stranger who pressed the woman against the wall; it was someone she knew.

I didn’t remember this detail from our discussions. I asked if she was sure the change would represent the truth of her thinking. She hesitated. She worried that without the addition, the scene would seem very much a rape and that she would appear to be endorsing this kind of attack. I assured her that I had made the difference plain: between the gratifications of the invented and the horrors of the real. But she was in agony. She believed that all of her work would be reduced to the alley, that it was all people would remember. That dark place seemed to loom in her mind, almost as if it really was the only thing she had spoken about. We went back and forth about noting that the man was not a stranger. I asked her, Who exactly was he?

And we discussed possibilities: his being a date; his being someone the woman had just met. But there was no nailing it down. It seemed more faithful, not only to her thinking but to the variations within women’s fantasies, to leave the man undescribed except for the force of his desire.

We agreed not to make the alteration, she in deep discomfort, still wishing somehow to soften the scene. When the article came out, she was barraged. Her in-box filled with hundreds of emails. Oprah asked her to be on her show. “I’ve become the overpowerment lady,” Meana said to me later, when I met with her again in Las Vegas. The alley wall had been central in the reaction to her words. And some of the reaction was vehement. “There was hatred. People said I was part of the machinery that puts women down, that I was inciting men to rape.”

Yet there were plenty of other responses. Oprah, as she introduced Meana, voiced her own troubled feelings about the alley but played, at the start of the segment, a taped interview with a perky, middle-of-the-road woman who echoed the allure of Meana’s scenario. And the emails were also full of gratitude. “There were lots of messages from high-powered women thanking me for allowing a discussion of elements of sexuality that don’t fall neatly into an ideological box,” Meana said, relieved. “One woman, in the art world in New York, told me, ‘I could not say what you said without feeling shamed, as though my eroticism made me a willing participant in a patriarchal system.’ ”

Still, Meana remained unsettled. All the attention had churned up something submerged, a latent distaste about studying sex at all, a shame about it, a fear of it. “Even we who do this research have internalized the culture’s sexophobia. It was fine when it was just me in my lab, me with my students. But with the spotlight on—no. Suddenly I was asking myself, Why was I studying something so inconsequential? Why couldn’t I be studying depression? Why couldn’t I be studying suicide? I had to stop myself. I had to remind myself, In what way is sex inconsequential?”

She paused. “I have no insecurity about my feminism,” she said. “I feel on solid ground. What I said in the article stepped outside what have become the conventional, comfortable ways of talking about female sexuality, the soft ways, the ways that leave everyone feeling good, not anxious. I don’t think what I said was misogynistic. I don’t think it was harmful. Now, do I know whether certain turn-ons excite only because of a social structure that disempowers women? Whether certain fantasies are an eroticization of disempowerment? No, I don’t know. But I do see the world from a feminist perspective. And part of that is wanting women to be able to be who they are sexually.”

She sounded almost at ease. She seemed almost to have located solid ground. Yet the footing seemed unsure, as if at any instant it could turn treacherous. The alley was no place to stand.

D
id the fantasies, as Meana asked, “excite only because of social structure”? What about the narcissistic longing that lay beneath, that led to the grammar school principal, to the landowner’s son, to fantasizing about the rape against the pinball machine in
The Accused
—was this “an eroticization of disempowerment”? She raised the quandary that was always near: culture or genes?

To think back to Deidrah was to see an immense societal impact. How else but culture to explain the vast difference between Deidrah’s aggressive sexuality, her stalking of mates, and women’s desire to be desired, which dictated the pleasure of being chased? Men made objects of girls and women; girls and women, living in a male-run world, absorbed the male outlook as their own and made objects of themselves. Hadn’t culture taken Deidrah’s drive and, in women, both partially quelled and completely recast it?

Yet when Meana contemplated the psyche, she called herself an essentialist, mostly. About the interplay between nature and nurture, she placed more weight on the inborn. She placed the weight gingerly. Her essentialism was a hunch, a sensibility; there was no way, she knew, to measure the inherent against the acquired, not for the time being; there was no way to assign a percentage to its role in narcissism, in rape fantasies. (A wealth of pop psychology writing declares confidently that there is an all-determining link between inborn levels of testosterone and myriad forms of aggression or passivity—sexual forms high among them—in men and women. Genetic factors give boys and men a lot more of the hormone, as counted in the bloodstream, and this makes boys and men a lot more aggressive. But among the list of problems with this seductively simple logic is evidence that comes, again, from Deidrah. Compared with male rhesus, females have as little testosterone as women do in contrast with men. Yet female rhesus run the sexual show, incite warfare, and rule the world of rhesus politics.)

Meana’s intuitive leaning toward the innate added to her uneasiness about the appeal of the alley scene. Emphasizing the genetic meant that there was no escape; it meant that the allure was fundamental.

Chivers was haunted in a similar way. She saw the culture’s relentless sculpting of women’s sexuality, but her mission was always to look past that, to seek and examine what lay beyond society’s reach, and this put her into a wrenching confrontation with rape. She knew about emerging results from a close colleague’s experiment: genital blood flow spiked when women listened to rape scenes in a lab. (An experiment of her own demonstrated, as well, that situations of fear or euphoric excitement triggered no vaginal pulsing if sex wasn’t involved. In one comparison, she played videos of a woman being chased up a flight of stairs by a rapist or by a rabid dog. Only the sexual scene flooded the genitals.) She dwelled on studies of victims that documented not only lubrication but sometimes orgasm during sexual assault. And she remembered—from her postdoctoral program in Toronto, when she had done work as a therapist—rape survivors who’d confided their own arousal, their own climaxes, to her.

How to understand this? How to comprehend this harrowing evidence? Was something deeply scripted, something intrinsic, at work?

Chivers felt that it was. And she helped to develop a reassuring theory: that prehistoric women had been constantly subject to sexual attack, and that the ability to lubricate automatically in reaction to all sorts of sexual cues evolved genetically as a protection against vaginal tearing, against infection, against the infertility or death that might follow. Genital arousal might not represent desire, she argued, but might, rather, be part of a purely reflexive, erotically neutral system, a system that was somehow intertwined with but separate from the wiring of women’s libidos. And the instances of orgasm might reflect nothing more than friction.

Yet the theory of separate systems was elaborate, precarious. It defied more straightforward thinking: that being wet meant being turned on, that there wasn’t much that was neutral about it, just as was true for men and being hard. Gradually Chivers settled on what had perhaps, she told me, been obvious all along, that it was possible to be stirred by all sorts of things one didn’t, in fact, want. By sex featuring bonobos, by sex featuring assault.

“I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly” about rape, she said. “I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her own body. Arousal is not consent.”

T
his was one of Ndulu’s fantasies: “A faceless white man slams me against a wall and holds me in place with his elbow as he strokes his rock-hard dick. He whispers into my ear all the vile things he wants to do to my body. He tells me he’s going to shove his cock so far into my pussy I’ll feel it in my belly; he says if I don’t behave, he’ll call in his friend, who’s right outside, ear pressed to the door, violently masturbating, to come fuck me as well. Would I like that? he asks. Would I like two hot cocks in me? He takes me rough and hard from behind, standing up. Just when he begins to call out loudly as he comes inside me, his friend bursts in and comes on my ass. Both men are calling out in such pleasure that it almost sounds like they’re crying.”

This was the way Ndulu’s imaginings usually went, and the violence of the men, the unrestrainable lust of the men, the ecstasy of the men that poured out in their “almost crying” were made more heated for her—and terribly painful for her—by race. Ndulu had grown up on American oil company compounds in West Africa and Europe, gone to college in the American Midwest, and now lived in New York, where she worked as a graphic designer. Over the course of her childhood, her adolescence, and her young adulthood, she had learned to believe that her skin and hair and features added up to an overall appearance that fell somewhere between tolerable and not. This was true, above all, about the shade of her complexion. “In winter,” she said, “it’s medium. In summer, though, no matter what I do, it gets dark. In summer, I can’t even look at myself.”

She spoke of how her mother had always made it clear that lighter skin was more attractive than darker. During her own childhood, Ndulu’s mother had watched
her
mother’s adoring eyes on the paler face of Ndulu’s aunt. “In black families, there’s always this issue,” Ndulu said. “It’s no different in Africa. My aunt was the belle of her village, because she was so light. My grandmother spent all her time on her.”

As a teenager, Ndulu had done what all the girls of her West African city did, what she had begun to learn from her mother before she could talk. Into her hair, to make it less kinky, she slathered a grease that was the pale yellow of custard. “It wasn’t as thick as butter, but it was thick, and it was oilier than butter, and you had to put a lot on. It would drip down the sides of your face in the sun.”