What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (10 page)

These days, in New York, she was trying to wean herself from oil by wearing her hair fairly short. But she hadn’t yet quit; she didn’t expect to. “It’s so common. I don’t think I know a single black woman who doesn’t use it. It’s just something we have to do. To make our hair look more white. I hate it. It reminds me of what I am and what I’m not.”

She added, “I’ve read
The Bluest Eye
,” and she talked about the lessons of Toni Morrison’s novel. “I know how I should be, I know the way it’s supposed to go—the whole empowerment thing. In college I wrote essays out the wazoo about everyone being equal and equally beautiful. I don’t feel any of that.”

Her college was close to 100 percent white; her friends were an insular group of black women. They talked often of the black pop stars and students they fantasized about, of the superiority of black men—the size of their penises, the hairlessness of their skin. Her gay friends now—white, Asian—did the same. And all the while what she felt was that to be the focus of a white man’s violent need—“all of my fantasies are of a white man; and except when he is faceless, he is beautiful, beautiful beyond words; he is tall, with azure eyes and thick, dark hair”—would be to know, in the most absolute way, that she was desirable.

The waiter was tall enough, broad-shouldered, with blue eyes and dark hair. “He was gorgeous,” she said later. She stepped into the bathroom; he followed, turning on the faucet, opening the tap fully, the water loud. How much noise is kissing going to make? she asked silently, as they began. He leaned back against the wall, pulling her toward him. She braced her palms against the tile on either side of his shoulders; his fingers spanned her ass. At some point, he slid his cock out of his pants; she felt it rigid near her waist. She wished she was the one with her back to the wall, but it didn’t matter—the thought was crushed by the strength of his hands.

The faucet went on providing its white noise. “Suck it,” he told her.

Even more than his features, his voice now seemed to spring directly from her imagination, her moments of private lust: the way the two words he repeated held not even the undertone of a question.

She lifted her hands away from the wall, straightened, took a step back. Again, he told her what he wanted.

“I have to go,” she said.

“No, you don’t.”

“I have to go.”

“Stay.”

When she tried, when she turned, she couldn’t get the lock unbolted.

“I’ve been drinking,” she protested. “I have a boyfriend.”

“Do you really?” He held her forcefully.

“I have a boyfriend,” she lied. “I need to go.”

Something shifted in his face, and when he spoke again the presumption was thoroughly washed from his voice, as though by the impact of a wave. He looked disoriented, lost. “Okay,” he said. This time, she managed the lock.

Her friends were in a clamor when she emerged. They assumed she’d gone further than kissing. David insisted on a description of his cock. He often regaled her with the dimensions of his conquests. “I’m not going to talk about that,” she said. Seconds later, she confessed that she hadn’t carried it through. When they groaned, she apologized, and when they asked why, she answered that she didn’t know. “I just couldn’t,” she told them. Then she went home and lay down and let the scene unfold—differently, from the moment of his demand, from her inability to unbolt the door—as she touched herself, let it unfold until she came, let it splinter her mind, obliterate her, obliterate her again the next morning, again the next night, again on more mornings and nights than she could count.

Chapter Seven

Monogamy

A
lison’s husband, Thomas, was a youth league basketball coach. He taught the pick-and-roll, the defensive stance, the proper way to catch a pass, the correct preparation for a free throw. He believed in fundamentals. He believed that if his eleven-year-old players learned nothing else, and if they never touched a basketball again after their season with him, their practices and games under his tutelage would be worthwhile if they gained a set of twelve basic basketball skills, or at least recognized their importance. Life, in his opinion, was a matter of fundamentals as well, and his hope was to have some part in getting kids ready not to win at a sport but to thrive in the years ahead. He was also a corporate lawyer. But he looked forward to the Blazers’ Wednesday evening practices and Saturday morning games a good deal more than to anything he did at his high-paying job.

Alison knew the twelve skills by heart, or anyway nine of them, or at any rate she had been able to list nine four years ago when their son, Derek, had begun his basketball career. But two years ago, Derek had retired. He had become the official G.M., scorekeeper, trainer, and unofficial towel boy for his father’s team, and since then Alison’s recall for the fundamentals had dwindled.

Derek’s retirement had been brought on by his realization, as a fourth grader, that he just wasn’t much of a player, that he was not only shorter and chubbier but slower and less coordinated than his teammates. He raised this in a matter-of-fact way with his parents. When he said that he would prefer a spot in “the front office,” they laughed, talked the decision through with him, hugged him, and agreed. Yet in his first season in his new position, Alison had gradually stopped coming to practices and soon also to games, because of her own work as an attorney, she told her husband and son, and because Derek’s younger sister was getting old enough to have her own schedule. What Alison suspected, though, what she suspected with something awfully like certainty, was that she wasn’t merely avoiding the sight of her son draping towels around the shoulders of the boys and girls on the team (the league was coed) or the cooing, complimentary remarks she received about Derek from the other moms, but that she was avoiding a new—no, a partially new—vision of Thomas. She just didn’t want to see him teaching the box-out technique or charting another play on his clipboard in a time-out huddle.

Then, as Derek’s second front-office season was about to start, her son begged her to watch the opener. So, after Thomas had cooked Saturday pancakes, scrubbed the griddle, loaded the dishwasher, and driven off with Derek to the New Jersey community center to make sure all was ready for the Blazers’ arrival, Alison helped Derek’s sister pick out a special outfit and followed in her car.

A
circle and a line defined a debate in sexology, a debate about the natural course and velocity of female desire, a dispute entangled with a question: how well do marriage and monogamy work for women’s libidos?

Rosemary Basson, a physician and professor of psychiatry and gynecology at the University of British Columbia, had started devising and drawing the circle over a decade ago, sketching it for female patients and couples, for women worried about their lack of lust. She was just past sixty now, feathery brown hair cropped above her ears. Her voice was wispy, her skin pale. As we talked across a coffee table in her Vancouver office, she wore a flowing skirt with a pattern of leaves; she seemed almost formless, ethereal. Yet there was something quietly stern, no-nonsense, governess-like in her speech. She’d been pulled toward the field of eros as an internist in England. Assigned to a ward of patients with spinal-cord injuries, a floor with a steady supply of men left paralyzed by motorcycle accidents, she found herself confronting, now and then, a man who had worked up the courage to ask how—or whether—he could ever have sex. She asked a supervisor for advice. “Change the subject,” he told her. “Change the subject.” She still remembered his tone: tight, panicked. She’d been dealing with the subject of sex ever since.

Pen in her white fingers, she drew her circular flow chart for me. Proudly she recalled its first journal publication. Now the psychiatric profession’s bible, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, the
DSM,
was about to enshrine her thinking in its pages. A massive volume filled with criteria for conditions from autism to sexual dysfunction, the
DSM
distinguishes the normal from the abnormal. In her diagram, Basson rendered a picture of women’s desire as intrinsically slow to build. It was the result of a series of decisions; it was hardly a drive at all. “We’re just not talking about an innate hunger,” she said.

The intricate diagram was meant to evoke the step-by-step progress of a successful sexual encounter for women, beginning with a box at the top of the circle. Inside the box—the outset of the encounter—was the phrase “reasons for sex.” Raw desire wasn’t likely to be the reason, though the chart allowed for it as a possibility. Much more probably, Basson said as she sketched, the woman was going to make a deliberate calculation based on the hope of outcomes like “feeling positive emotionally, feeling loved.” About two-thirds of the way around the circle, the words “arousal” and then, finally, “desire” appeared; at this belated stage, physical sensations, pleasure, and wanting took over, to some degree. But this depended, she explained, on the partner showing “respect,” on the woman feeling “safe,” on the couple’s being in “an appropriate context,” on the partner’s touches being considerate, being just right. Listening, it was hard not to imagine flowers given, a bedroom with the lights low or off, a wife with basically cuddly inclinations, a husband’s gentle caresses.

And what waited at the circle’s end? What was the culmination? “Sexual satisfaction +/- orgasms” was on the diagram, but in some versions it wasn’t even part of the chart’s main track; the physical, the carnal, didn’t matter all that much. At the end was “non-sexual rewards . . . intimacy.”

For Basson, such was the natural state of women’s sexuality. She didn’t make this case based on formal research; she’d developed her chart, she said, from her own clinical experience, and grateful patients had begged her to publish it. Yet while it seemed that her diagram might well represent the wan realities of many women’s bedrooms, her assertion that she had drawn a picture of the inborn ignored the immediate genital reactions of Chivers’s women, the overwhelming randiness of Wallen’s monkeys and Pfaus’s rats. She put forward a quaint and demure portrait, and strangely, stunningly, it was being adopted by the psychiatric profession—from the editors of the
DSM
to hordes of sex therapists—as though it were something wise and new.

One reason for this backward reeling was aesthetic and political. Basson’s circle was supplanting a line, a diagram—credited to Masters and Johnson, along with psychotherapist and sexologist Helen Singer Kaplan—that had long been applied to both men and women, its progression going something like this: desire (first rather than laggard and nearly last) followed by physical arousal followed by pleasure. The line, the linear, could seem, from a certain feminist angle, phallic and patriarchal, decidedly unfemale in its symbolism, and at last Basson had provided an alternative, no matter that her lust-free woman was almost a Victorian paragon.

Another reason was bound up with a David-and-Goliath battle that some therapists saw themselves fighting heroically against the drug industry—against its rush to find, win FDA approval for, and market what was loosely known as a female Viagra. Since the late nineties, when pharmaceutical companies had begun making billions by assisting erections with a chemical that affected the capillaries of the penis, the corporations had been seeking an equivalent for women. But this hadn’t been going smoothly, because women’s sexual problems usually aren’t genital; they’re entrenched in psychological complexities. Meanwhile, a set of clinicians had taken up a campaign, waged mostly within the psychiatric profession but also through the media, to make sure that the industry didn’t manage to persuade huge numbers of women that they should feel more drive, that they needed a drug, soon to be discovered, to help them. The circle served as a useful emblem for the campaign, which was led by a New York University psychiatry professor, Leonore Tiefer, the author of a collection of polemics. Its title,
Sex Is Not a Natural Act
, amplified Basson’s words, “We’re just not talking about innate hunger.” As for Basson’s own attitude about the industry’s search, she told me, “There are already enough date rape drugs around.” Men would be sneaking lust pills instead of sleeping tablets into women’s drinks to ease their assaults. Female modesty needed protection.

But maybe most of all, the circle was being consecrated as psychiatric doctrine because it gave sex therapists and couples counselors a solution to one of their most prevalent and stubborn problems—women’s faint or non-existent desire for their husbands or long-term partners. The solution was low expectations. Clinicians had latched on to the diagram. They’d distilled it into a three-word lesson that they taught in treatment: “Desire follows arousal.” They taught that arousal might take some time. Patience was a necessity; slowness and faintness were entirely fine; “lust” should be banished from the vocabulary. By lowering the bar, the circle offered therapists a standard for treatment that they might have a chance to meet.

And all the while, monogamy seemed to hover like an invisible angel above Basson’s diagram. Occasionally Basson acknowledged that the new might be a key to combustion. But commitment, faithfulness, trust, familiarity—for her, these were the allies of female eros. Tenderness and intimacy ushered women along the circle toward the grand prize of yet more tenderness and intimacy.

B
asson’s colleague at the University of British Columbia, Lori Brotto, served on the
DSM
’s sexuality committee. It was a group of thirteen, and, with the manual about to be fully revised for the first time since the early nineties, she was in charge of the work on female desire. She had high cheekbones, a face that was all angles, hair cut fashionably close to her jaw. About women with the condition the current
DSM
called “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” or HSDD, she told me, “Sometimes I wonder whether it isn’t so much about libido as it is about boredom.” For her, monogamy was less hovering angel than grim reaper.

A psychologist whose sexuality research ran from hormones to acupuncture, Brotto treated women for HSDD in solo therapy and group sessions. “And unless you’re talking about lifelong HSDD, which is rare, the impact of relationship duration is something that comes up constantly.” In middle-aged women, she said, directing me to an Australian study that tracked hundreds of subjects from their forties onward, through menopause, hormones probably weren’t as much of a problem as the length of time a woman had been with the same partner. (The Australian psychiatrist Lorraine Dennerstein, who had conducted that research, was more emphatic: “The sexual feelings of a new relationship can easily override hormonal factors.”)

Yet Brotto, who was in her mid-thirties, who had been married for eight years, who was pregnant with a third child when we first met at a psychiatric conference, didn’t mean to cast an all-encompassing pall on the ideal of long and loyal relationships. She was speaking about one aspect, about sex. And since monogamy simply was the prevailing standard—not only within the culture but within her profession—for success as a couple, and since it had a scarcely questioned status within the thinking of her committee, she was writing Basson’s ideas into the
DSM
. They were ideas Brotto used with her patients, most of them long attached to one lover. She taught the circle, taught “desire follows arousal,” taught these concepts as a way to begin to address disinterest in sex.

Seven years? Two? Less? More? Long attachment was impossible to define, turning points impossible to predict. But if Brotto could help her patients to become more responsive to the touches of their partners, if she could help them to feel more physically aroused, then even if they started out, in any given encounter, indifferent to their partners’ overtures, they might reach a state of desire. To this end, she employed a little tub of raisins, passed around at her group meetings: six women sitting at a pair of pushed-together beige tables in a small windowless conference room. She asked each patient to take exactly one. “Notice the topography of your raisin,” she instructed in steady cadences, her Canadian accent abbreviating some of her vowels. “The valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses.”

Her career, her path to the raisin exercise and to her rarified spot on the
DSM
committee, had been mapped out by chance. As a first-year undergraduate, she knew only that she wanted to do research, no matter what the discipline. She hadn’t thought about studying sex at all. “I grew up in a strict, Italian Catholic, don’t-talk-about-sex environment.” Even now, a silver cross hung from the rearview mirror of her car. She had knocked haphazardly on professors’ office doors, hoping for anyone who would have her as an assistant. No one would; she was too young. But at last a professor invited her to help with his study of antidepressants and their effect on male rat libidos, so, for the next few years, she clutched a stopwatch and tallied copulations. Then, as she headed toward a doctorate, she steered away from animal research and toward clinical work, “because,” she said, “the rat room smelled.”

During her advanced training she did a stint with borderline personality patients. The condition mangles self-image to the point of horror: self-perception grows hideous. People are driven to cut or burn themselves; they ache to replace infinite despair with finite pain. Brotto’s supervisor had developed a treatment that borrowed from the Buddhist technique of mindfulness. The idea was that keen awareness of immediate and infinitesimal experience, down to the level of breath or the heart’s beating, might help to hold patients within the present and reduce their feelings of limitless torment.