What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (11 page)

While she was working with this supervisor, Brotto was also trying to help gynecological cancer patients with their sexual problems after surgery. The women who talked about lost libido, she thought, described their disconnection and sadness during sex in a way that was similar to the language borderline personality patients used to depict their entire lives. She wondered if mindfulness could help draw these women away from detachment and connect them to sensation.

She did some experimenting on herself. She didn’t see herself as lacking in desire, but she did like to view herself sometimes as “an
n
of one,” a single test subject for her ideas. Along with mindfulness, the treatment her supervisor had devised for borderline personality used cognitive therapy, with its stress on transforming patterns of thought, on reversing habits of damning self-assessment. And one day in yoga class, Brotto tried the combination.

As she arranged her body in her usual yoga poses, she attempted “a cognitive reframe. I said to myself over and over, like a mantra, that I was a highly sexual woman, a highly responsive woman. Not that I wasn’t a sexual person, but now I was very consciously telling myself these things, taking on this persona. And there was the mindfulness. That’s a part of yoga anyway; you’re deeply aware of what your body is doing. You’re aware of your breathing, your heartbeat. But that day there was a deliberate intent not only to listen to my body even more than I would normally in yoga but also to interpret the signs from my body as signs of my sexual identity. So my breathing was not just breathing through the pose; it was breathing
because
I was highly sexual.”

Sensation and self-image became linked. She was in a tricky position, bent over and balanced on one foot and one inverted hand, when she had a profound moment. It wasn’t that anything she was trying mentally was in itself so stunningly new. The power of positive thought was a cliché. And the acute concentration on the sensory harkened back to a style of sex therapy practiced by Masters and Johnson decades earlier. Yet by melding the two, something revelatory happened. Suddenly her straining muscles and racing heart were affirmations “of my sexual vigor, my arousability.” She finished class and walked out onto the street and bicycled home with an exhilarating sense of her own body, her potency.

Brotto took what she learned treating borderline personality—the raisins came from that training—and what she discovered in yoga class, and tested it first with her gynecological cancer patients, then with a range of women who rued their weak desire. These days she sent her groups home to repeat over and over and over, “My body is alive and sexual,” no matter if they believed it. And she guided them in the conference room, “Lift the raisin to your lips. . . . Notice that your mouth has begun to salivate. . . . Place the raisin in your mouth, without chewing it. Close your eyes and just notice how it feels. . . . Notice where the tongue is, notice saliva building up in your mouth. . . . Feel your teeth biting through the surface. Notice the trajectory of the flavor as it bursts forth, the flood of saliva, how the flavor changes from your body’s chemistry. Notice the clenching of your jaw when chewing, the sensation of the raisin passing down the throat as it is swallowed. Notice the aftertaste and even the echo of the aftertaste.”

Her results, published in the leading journals of sex research, showed her patients reporting stronger libidos and stronger relationships, though she was quick to note the caveats: that desire isn’t easy to measure; that people are prone to claim improvement on questionnaires given by those who treat them; that just about any method that gets someone to think of sex can increase her interest in having it. And Brotto wasn’t maintaining that she could grant her patients what they actually wished for. She had quoted to me from their files: “I want to have sex where I feel like I’m craving it.” She sighed. She couldn’t provide that, not without a semimiracle or someone new in the patient’s bed.

I asked her about an irony within her
DSM
work: that while disorders were supposed to be abnormal, HSDD seemed to be a normal abnormality, a condition that was largely not psychiatric but created by our most common domestic arrangement. This was confirmed by all the women she met with who, she said, hadn’t stopped desiring but who had merely stopped wanting, or had trouble wanting, their partners. Yes, she agreed, there was this tangle in psychiatry’s reasoning.

She dwelled for a minute on the way our dreams and promises of forever seemed inevitably at odds with our sexual beings. “There is an element of sadness,” she said, “when I think about the women I see, when I think about the couples I know, when I think about myself personally.” She let out another sigh—or something akin to a sigh, a wordless note of grieving in a lower octave.

L
eaning against the rail of his viewing tower, staring down at his monkeys and remembering the small cages that distorted the sexual interaction between females and males, Wallen thought that monogamy was, for women, a cultural cage—one of many cultural cages—distorting libido. He spoke about the research Brotto had mentioned: hundreds of women followed for fifteen years or longer, their relationships, biochemistry, desire relentlessly recorded. “The idea that monogamy serves the natural sexuality of women may not be accurate,” he said.

Meana was sure that it wasn’t. “I have male friends who tell me about new relationships. They say they’ve never been with a woman who’s so sexual. They’re thrilled. And I’m thinking, Just wait.” Not only did monogamy not enhance female sexuality, but it was likely worse for women than men. There wasn’t enough research on the topic, she said, but she talked about a German survey of committed relationships, showing that women felt desire wane more swiftly.

One reason for this, in her mind, stemmed from narcissistic need. Within the bounds of fidelity, the heat of being desired grew more and more remote, not just because the woman’s partner lost a level of interest, but, more centrally, because the woman felt that her partner was trapped, that a choice—the lust-impelled selection of
her
—was no longer being made.

Like Brotto, Meana wasn’t arguing against loyalty, against marriage. She alluded often to her husband; with adoration, she described his career as a professor of literature, a life she’d once wanted for herself. But when she discussed the work she did with couples, she made clear that she expected only very rare success in the realm of eros, if the measure of success was reviving lust. In around one-third or so of her cases, she could bring back something more mild.

Her method sometimes came down to scheduling sex, whether or not it was wished for, if sex hadn’t been happening. She became a monitor, an enforcer. It was as though she were trying, almost brutally, to spade free something buried. “Fuck night,” one of her female patients named it caustically. One of the married women I interviewed saw this kind of scheduling in a happier way. It was like exercising, she said, if you were one of the majority of people who would rather be reading or watching TV. By the time you left the gym, “with the endorphins going,” you were glad to have been there, though you might not be anxious to turn around the next day and go back.

Therapists who claimed to restore lust on a regular basis, to instill desire in a high percentage of their patients, Meana thought, weren’t judging their outcomes in any rigorous way, were deluding themselves, deceiving everyone. “This is big business—the books, the workshops. You could write a book full of promises every year, and every year you could have a bestseller.”

She recalled giving, at a conference, a candid speech about her track record. One therapist, she said, approached her afterward with a common story. In sessions, a wife had suggested that if only her husband would be sensitive enough to help out around the house, she would want him in bed. So the therapist set him to work. She had him scouring pots. She had him tidying. She had him taking the kids to school and picking them up. But the sex didn’t follow. “We tell men to water this little bonsai of women’s desire,” Meana said to me, “we tell them the bonsai has to be treated just so—and guess what?”

She wasn’t objecting to men doing their half of the chores, any more than her eye-rolls about intimacy meant that she didn’t nurture, in counseling, empathy between couples. It was just that these things weren’t likely to undwarf the tree’s constricted limbs.

While Meana explained the problem with monogamy through her theory of narcissism, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist and anthropology professor at the University of California at Davis, raised evolutionary reasons. Her ideas challenged evolutionary psychologists who insisted that women are the less libidinous sex, the sex more suited to be monogamous. Hrdy had begun her career studying langurs in India. Within these monkeys, their jet-black faces surrounded by cloud-colored fur, the males commit rampant infanticide. They swoop in to kill newborns not their own. The same goes for the males in a number of other primate species. And female promiscuity among these types of monkeys and baboons evolved, Hrdy believed, partially as a shield: it masked paternity. If a male couldn’t be sure which babies were his, he would be less prone to murder them. This insight didn’t apply to all of our close animal ancestors; among the rhesus, the males tend toward caution and infanticide is seldom seen. Piecing together evolution’s logic was an incremental process, full of incomplete patterns, causes that weren’t universal. But Hrdy, with her theory of promiscuity as protective, added a compelling element within our ancestry.

And alongside this theory, she put forward an idea that might be relevant to countless species. It revolved around orgasm. Female climax—in humans and, if it exists, in animals—has been viewed by many evolutionary psychologists as a biologically meaningless by-product, a hapless cousin to male orgasm, with no effect on reproduction. Male nipples fall into this category; men don’t give milk and don’t need to for the sake of perpetuating humankind. The miniature look of the clitoris, compared to the penis, has helped to make the argument that female climax has no Darwinian importance, because the clitoris can have the appearance of a puny afterthought.

Somehow, this perspective has survived the recent mapping of the organ’s underlying bulbs and wings. And the length of stimulation some women need to reach orgasm has reinforced the by-product argument; if the event had evolutionary significance, it wouldn’t be elusive, unguaranteed. Especially during intercourse, it would happen more readily.

But the clitoral expanse—touched through the vagina—rivals the penis in total nerve-suffused territory. And as for the slowness of ecstasy, Hrdy flipped predominant thinking upside down. Her vision was a vivid example of substituting a female lens for a male one. Female orgasm could well be thoroughly relevant among our ancestors. Its delay, its need of protracted sensation, wasn’t a contradiction but a confirmation of this; it was evolution’s method of making sure that females are libertines, that they move efficiently from one round of sex to the next and frequently from one partner to the next, that they transfer the turn-on of one encounter to the stimulation of the next, building toward climax.

And the possibility of multiple orgasms compounded libertine motives. Another opioid rush—or a series of opioid infusions—might be in store with the next mounting. The advantages female animals get from their pleasure-driven behavior, Hrdy asserted, range from the safeguarding against infanticide in some primate species to, in all, gathering more varied sperm and so gaining better odds of genetic compatibility, of becoming pregnant, of bearing and raising healthy offspring.

Hrdy’s stance on female orgasm as something probably much more than an evolutionary footnote was supported in another way. The data Pfaus had spoken about, of orgasm-like contractions in rats leading to greater chances of conception, matched fledgling, controversial evidence in women of climactic spasms guiding sperm up into the uterus. But even if female animals weren’t actually having orgasms, weren’t having the all-consuming subjective experience that we do, Hrdy’s basic position about female pleasure held. Abundant stimulation was its own reward, reproductive benefit was its ultimate payoff, and in our near ancestors, this augered against monogamy.

Hrdy noted, too, proclivities in species more distant, polyandry from prairie dogs to sparrows. Or take the female of an arachnid called the book scorpion. Let her have sex with one male and, afterward, offer her that same partner. Forty-eight hours will have to go by before she’s interested in mating again, though he is full of sperm and fully motivated. She seems wired to accrue an assortment of lovers and an array of sperm. Present her with a new male, and she is primed for sex within an hour and a half.

Meana, Wallen, Chivers, Pfaus, Brotto, Hrdy—all, in their different ways, from their different work in labs and observatories, in sessions of therapy and in the animal wild, pried apart assumptions about women, sex, constancy. Then there was Lisa Diamond, who began our series of conversations by emphasizing emotional bonding as the basis of women’s desire.

Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, was a petite woman whose winning, raspy voice was always accompanied by big gestures. She talked with her hands, her shoulders, her neck, her dark eyebrows. When she and I first met, before a lecture Chivers had invited her to give to her department, she had just made herself semifamous with a book titled
Sexual Fluidity
. It carried the academic blessing of being published by Harvard University Press. “In 1997,” she wrote in her introductory lines, “the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man. The actress Cynthia Nixon of the HBO series
Sex and the City
developed a serious relationship with a woman in 2004 after ending a fifteen-year relationship with a man. Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After twelve years together, the pair separated and Cypher—like Heche—has returned to heterosexual relationships.” The opening went on to catalogue the sexual shifts, in both directions, of several more female figures, then asked, “What’s going on?”