What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (14 page)

“I wanted to throw away my inhibitions. I decided she was going to be my role model,” Passie said about the zebra-hat woman.

“Looking back, I think she had a stronger desire for other partners than I did,” he said. “I think she felt it before that first trip.”

“Subconsciously,” she said.

On the table she set a basket of bread that their farming area claimed as its invention.

“We still have sex with each other.” It seemed important, to him, that I know this.

“Nelson is my husband,” she said. “I love him. He is the father of my children. When I say I love him, I mean it.” She explained that at the events, she made sure he had someone to “play with” before she went off to another man’s room.

“I
t’s a paradox that I’m laying before them.” Meana was speaking about a method she tried with just a few of her couples. Most of her patients weren’t ready, she said; they didn’t really want to take such risks. Her prescription didn’t involve anything like alternative lifestyle gatherings. But it required a kind of divide. It meant the surrendering of safety.

She returned to a phrase, a dream, she had criticized before: “You complete me.” The seeking of a lover to embody these words; the pining for a love that will be unconditional; the search for a union that is absolute; the sense that our partners should give us what we were given—or what we believe we should have been given—by our parents; the craving for reassurance—
tell me I’m special, tell me I’m beautiful, tell me I’m smart, tell me I’m successful, tell me you love me, tell me it’s forever, no matter what, till death do us part
—these were, for Meana, scarcely more than a child’s cries. Yet most of us could not bear to give up on these longings. Most of us could not stand to relinquish the yearning for someone to be our fulfillment, our affirmation, because to turn away from such hope would be to acknowledge that we are, inescapably, navigating our lives alone, supported by love if we are lucky but, finally, on our own. Few of us want to navigate this way.

“There has to be an Other for there to be sexiness,” she said. Yet in trying to save ourselves from our solitude, we strain to make our Others one with us. We flail; we grasp. We pray that selves will give way, that souls will combine. And eros, one of the forces we employ in our struggle, is crushed as we try to wring distance forever from our domestic lives. She wasn’t suggesting that couples shouldn’t turn to each other for comfort, for solace. “Love has to exist in different dimensions.” Still, for most of us, in her eyes, something was out of balance: the longing to depend, to be propped up and protected, was given too much power.

With the couples who seemed willing, she liked to ask, “Why
should
she desire you?” or “Why
should
he desire you?” She demanded, “
Tell
me what’s desirable about you. . . . And sometimes they look at me in a way that says, I can’t believe you’re asking me that. Sometimes they hear that as an insult, a slap. Sometimes my question hangs there for weeks. But slowly they realize what I’m doing. I want them to
focus
on what it is, to
know
what it is. I want them to work on what they see as desirable in themselves, to strengthen what they see as their strengths. And I want them to think about what they themselves wish for in a lover and try to turn themselves into that. I want them to make themselves
better
.”

Her technique incorporated, too, tricks of disentanglement. Going out to dinner should begin with arriving at the restaurant separately. Date night should hold to the forms; it should mean a date. And chances should be seized to view the spouse apart. “If I can, I will have them watch their partner perform some function that has nothing to do with them. When I see my husband give a literary talk, and I’m in the back of the room, it’s amazing how attractive that is to me. There he is in a way that has nothing to do with me, and my gaze gains a little bit of the gaze a stranger has on him.”

None of this, she said, would lead to anything spectacular every time—or half the times—you made love as the years together accumulated. But sometimes, because the grasping had ceased, you might find yourself within a momentary, miraculous paradox, a brief merging after all. “It’s about looking at each other in the midst of sex and feeling like you just dove into this pool of somebody
else
. It’s about being astounded. It’s about feeling breathless with that dive. That union. It’s the fusion of two people with no differences in that instant. It’s a complete I-am-yours-you-are-mine-I-don’t-know-where-my-body-starts-and-yours-ends.”

H
ad it only been Derek’s failure as a player that deterred her from going to the Blazers’ games, Alison knew she would have given herself a quick lecture and been there on the sidelines. Had it only been his chubbiness, his hovering as towel boy, and the irksome praise of the other mothers that had preyed on her, she would have told herself that the compliments were probably sincere, in their way, and reminded herself that her son was in fact a wonderfully spirited and open-hearted child. Though she might have felt that it would be nice to be the mother of the Blazers’ leading scorer instead of the team’s avid helpmeet, still she would have gone to the community center every Saturday—or many Saturdays, anyway—with hard-fought pride.

What plagued her, though, was that her minor issues with Derek and basketball mirrored her less ignorable issues with her husband and her life. She tried not to think about the parallels. And because she was a busy woman with a career as an editor that could easily crowd out other thoughts, she sometimes succeeded in keeping herself unaware. But she was also an analytic woman who reflexively drew connections. Thomas was pudgy and had never been much of an athlete, and Thomas’s obsessive devotion to teaching the box-out to elementary schoolers was about on a par with Derek’s alacrity with the towels—or would have been, except that Derek’s role with the team was just one positive part of who he was, while Thomas’s commitment to instilling basketball fundamentals seemed quintessentially Thomas. It seemed, more and more, to define him.

Until two years ago, while Derek was a player, her husband’s faith in the character-building potential of his twelve basketball basics had struck her as maybe somewhat nuts but also admirable and poignant and slightly life-changing for the kids. But with Derek retired, the sight of her husband with his clipboard was a lot less sentimental. And his lengthy talk, over family dinners, about a new method for inculcating one of his twelve lessons—which might, for his players, carry over from the court and eventually help them to achieve thriving careers or happy marriages—made her feel that she might be serving a life sentence. Occasionally she imagined something devastating: that one day one of the other mothers would come over to her and pay her husband the same kind of cloying praise that she heard about her son.

As all of this was taking place at the community center and in her mind, two other things were happening. Thomas had purchased some stretchy bands, some dumbbells, and a video, and was putting himself through a persistent and hapless routine in the basement. And she and her husband were leaving their Manhattan offices once each week to meet together with a therapist, who liked to assign them exercises. In one, they had sat facing each other, palms resting on the other’s palms, their breathing synchronized. Recently they had moved on to spooning, clothed, Alison behind Thomas, one hand on his heart and the other on his groin, or he behind her with hands positioned the same way, their inhaling and exhaling, the rising and falling of their chests, in gentle and exact alignment. They were supposed to let lust gather at its own pace, to postpone anything more sexual until desire coalesced within each of them, to feel no pressure to progress beyond this exercise, to understand that weeks might go by. They were supposed to simply experience the unity of breathing and allow this unity to permeate their hearts and genitals. But she, whose wanting felt extinguished and who was the target of the program, sensed no change aside from more and more futility.

This was the situation as she walked into the rec center gym clutching the hand of Derek’s pretty younger sister. There, with about fifteen minutes before the jump ball of the season’s first game, was Derek, giving a shoulder rub to the Blazers’ captain. And there, farther along the sideline, was Thomas in a Blazers black jersey. This was something she’d never seen and hadn’t prepared herself for, her husband wearing the top half of the team uniform above his jeans—most of the coaches wore polo shirts or sweatshirts, as Thomas himself always had—and it was jarring enough that she didn’t see it precisely but perceived, instead, a semishapeless, almost blurry display of bloatedness and pallor: his shoulders and arms. She was already starting to remind herself that his misguided choice of shirt made no difference, that actually it was an endearing demonstration of caring about his and Derek’s team, when she watched a mother step down the bleachers, taking long strides from level to level in her high-heeled, ankle-high boots, and stand next to Thomas.

His shoulders and arms, she recognized over the next seconds, and realized more fully over the following minutes, might be ghostly white, but they weren’t puffy in the least. An outline of bulky strength was emerging. The woman in her suede boots, the mother of one of the Blazers’ better players, started to chat with him, shoulder to shoulder, smiling. Whatever subject the woman raised—something about basketball, Alison assumed—it was plain that she spoke with affection. And as the minutes went by, it was clear that she was flirting with her son’s basketball coach, with a sturdily put-together man who had been drilling sound principles into her child, lessons imbued with larger meaning.

Alison waited her turn. When it came, she pressed herself against her husband quickly from behind. She put one hand on his heart, told him where she wished the other one was and what she wanted tonight to be, and rejoined their daughter to watch the game.

Chapter Eight

Four Orgasms

S
hanti, a former model who’d just turned fifty, took off her black boots, her black wrist bands, and her blue, red, and yellow Tantra Warrior choker. She slid off her dress, slid off everything, then arranged her body under a sheet and her blond head in the mouth of an fMRI cylinder. This was in Newark, in a Rutgers University lab with a wide glass pane dividing a pair of rooms. The giant cylinder was on one side of the window, and Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers neuroscientist, and Nan Wise, a sex therapist and a doctoral candidate in his program, were on the other. They watched Shanti get settled.

Over the next hour, she would masturbate in various ways. She would use her finger on the external part of her clitoris. She would use a dildo to stimulate her G-spot and her cervix. Clitoral, G-spot, cervical—with Shanti and their other subjects, the scientists were trying to get clear and distinct pictures of the brain regions that burst into activity during three different types of climaxes. Komisaruk, a cheerful man in his late sixties with a horseshoe of curly gray hair, designed and made the translucent streamlined dildos himself to facilitate internal stimulation while avoiding contact with the clitoral exterior. He bought plastic rods, heated them at home in his oven, and bent them to his specifications.

Tantra Warrior was Shanti’s self-created profession. She’d once been on the cover of
Elle
; now she made her living around Manhattan and the resort towns of Long Island, imparting erotic wisdom at soirees held by the erotically foiled, the erotically seeking. Komisaruk and Wise needed subjects like her who had no problem masturbating in public and amid the fMRI machine’s bleating and clanging.

“When you’re about to have an orgasm,” Wise told Shanti through an intercom, “just raise your hand.”

Shanti started on her clitoris under the sheet. Komisaruk, in khakis and a light blue button-down shirt, and Wise, in a crisp black skirt and silk blouse, were joined now by Wen-Ching Liu, a Chinese physicist and expert at interpreting neural imagery, in a white lab coat. They alternately glanced through the window and stared at a monitor on their own side of the glass, watching a map of Shanti’s brain light up in constellated dots.

Komisaruk’s decades of orgasmic research had begun with his wife’s final stages of fatal breast cancer. They’d met at a summer colony when he was fifteen and she was two years younger. They’d gone steady right away and married five years later. At twenty-nine, she was diagnosed. She had just given birth to their second child. The metastases were swift and filled her with fluid and put her in such excruciating pain that she tore out her IV tubes and crawled across the hospital floor, trying somehow to escape her agony. “And I’m standing there like a dummy,” he remembered, “unable to do anything.”

His work at the time involved studying how sexual stimulation blocked pain in female rats, a tunnel of research that he’d branched onto after following a grand ambition, since college, to seek out the neurological underpinnings of consciousness. Watching his wife on her hands and knees, “I said to myself, I’ve got to do something useful.” He would devote himself more thoroughly, he vowed, to understanding pain and figuring out whether sex might hold a natural analgesic. Could he distill an organic pain blocker to rescue sufferers like her? Along the way, after his wife died, his explorations with rats drew the attention of Beverly Whipple, nurse and sexologist and author of the early-eighties bestseller
The G-spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality
. While he went on hunting for an analgesic on his own, he teamed with Whipple on experiments dealing with nerve tracks and women’s varied climaxes, and that had led him here.

“Now we’re getting it!” he exclaimed, eyes on the screen while Shanti worked. The clusters of dots were growing more dense.

“Wow!” Wise let out. “It’s a Christmas tree!”

“She’s moving fast,” he noted, lifting his eyes fleetingly from screen to subject.

“For a Tantra girl,” Wise said.

Shanti was imagining, she recounted later, “My lover touching me; him showing someone else how to touch me; lots of people watching; a line of guys waiting to stroke me, to lick me; then a cute, butchy girl putting her hand up my skirt.”

“She’s getting close,” Komisaruk said. “That’s the insula!”

Shanti raised her free hand.

“It’s popcorn brain!” Wise said, inspired by the points of light.

B
ut Shanti’s session, it turned out, wasn’t a great success. There had been some miscommunication, it seemed, when she’d been signed up as a subject. Erotic guru though she was, she told me afterward that she didn’t think she’d ever had, in her life, a G-spot orgasm, and she knew she’d never had a cervical one. Her efforts with Komisaruk’s homemade dildo didn’t produce the data he was hoping for.

And then, too, he may have been overly optimistic in aiming to distinguish climaxes through brain imaging. In the months that followed, he didn’t manage it, even once he had a set of subjects more versatile than Shanti. The needed machinery probably didn’t exist yet, something he seemed both to have known and not let himself know as he leaped with scientific exuberance into the study. Brain regions could be glimpsed but not the terrain within and not the way those areas interacted. And the identifiable regions were broad, immeasurably complex. The insula—whose illumination had made Komisaruk’s voice spring upward—was a neurological territory of pain as well as pleasure. When all his subjects had been through the experiment, Komisaruk could point to distinct spots in the brain that jolt into action with a touch of the clitoral exterior, the vaginal walls, or the cervix, but this was a long, long way from being able to separate out the almost infinitely intricate systems of ecstasy—systems encompassing much of the brain, from front to mid to back, from the prefrontal cortex to the hypothalamus to the cerebellum—in a trio of orgasms.

And that was assuming that the three different kinds of climax were a reality, that G-spot and cervical orgasms weren’t a figment of popular suggestion and personal imagination. About the culmination of women’s desire there was a swirl of uncertainty and a tangle of angry scientific and political debate, and it was all a reminder that in the twenty-first century it wasn’t only the psychological questions of female eros that were unresolved but something seemingly much more basic: the mechanical workings of women’s genitalia.

The array of plausible orgasms was a reminder, too, of Tiresias, who lived for seven years as a woman and informed Zeus and Hera that women are given the greater part of ecstasy.

T
he story behind Komisaruk’s experiment traced back to Freud. The father of psychoanalysis, who made eros the essential substance of our psyches, decreed that stimulation of the external clitoris—he had no knowledge of the bulbs and wings—was like “pine shavings” compared to the vaginal “hard wood fire.” A woman who relied on the clitoris for her orgasms was stymied, locked in an immature sexuality, thwarted physically and psychologically. Erotic womanhood was marked by orgasms through vaginal intercourse.

But Freud was hazy about one thing, a physiological problem that still bedevils the research of sexologists. He didn’t deal with the dilemma that intercourse sometimes grazes, pulls, or puts pressure on the clitoris. Did he mean that mature, womanly climaxes were solely internal or was this external tugging and pressing acceptable?

It is impossible to know how many women attempted to train themselves to meet Freud’s orgasmic standard, and which interpretation they took as the goal, but Marie Bonaparte—the same French psychoanalyst to whom Freud posed his question, “What does a woman want?”—was tormented by Freud’s edict. Driven by her inability to climax through intercourse, and, it seems, interpreting the edict the second way, in the nineteen twenties she enlisted physicians to measure the distance between the tip of the clitoris—the glans—and the upper edge of the vaginal opening in their patients. She and the doctors collected, too, reports of the women’s ecstasies. Then Bonaparte scrutinized the evidence. She concluded that her personal failure was due to the three centimeters that divided her key parts. Two and a half centimeters, she determined from her data, was the threshold; less than that and a woman stood a good chance of reaching bliss from a man’s thrusting.

Next, Bonaparte consulted a Viennese surgeon. She had her clitoral ligaments snipped, her clitoral glans moved. Though the organ’s nerves survived, the operation didn’t achieve her orgasmic longings. Nor did a second try. She saw herself as doomed to what she termed “frigidity.” But she kept on with her research, zeroing in on African women whose clitorises had been ritually cut, excised. Because of the loss of clitoral sensation, she asked, “Are African women more frequently, and better, vaginalized than their European sisters?” As a start toward interviewing subjects and finding out, she befriended Jomo Kenyatta, who was soon to lead Kenyans in rebellion against British rule, a war of liberation waged partly to preserve the Kenyan custom of clitoridectomy.

Bonaparte seems to have abandoned her African project without gathering much evidence either way, and by midcentury, scientific doctrine started to shift. Kinsey, from his interviews with thousands of women, and Masters and Johnson, from watching women having sex and masturbating in their lab, doubted the existence of the internal orgasm. Then, in 1970, feminist writer Susan Lydon published a clitoral manifesto. Men had forever “defined feminine sexuality in a way as favorable to themselves as possible. If a woman’s pleasure was obtained through the vagina, then she was totally dependent on the man’s erect penis . . . she would achieve her satisfaction only as a concomitant of man’s seeking his.” She proclaimed, “The definition of normal sexuality as vaginal, in other words, was a part of keeping women down, of making them sexually, as well as economically, socially, and politically subservient.” But with the proper exaltation of the clitoris, “woman at long last will be able to take the first step toward her emancipation, to define and enjoy the forms of her own sexuality.”

And soon the manifesto seeped into sexology. A kind of clitoral absolutism took hold. With her bestseller of the seventies,
The Hite Report on Female Sexuality
, researcher Shere Hite commanded an audience of tens of millions. She announced that the clitoris was the only locus of women’s ecstasy. Whether from tongue or finger or the tuggings of intercourse, the external organ was where climax happened.

The absolute became accepted truth, imbued in popular consciousness. But in 1982, Beverly Whipple, Komisaruk’s eventual collaborator, published her book on the G-spot. There was, she and her co-authors maintained, an area along the interior of the vagina’s front wall that could bring on astonishing orgasms. She first hit on this phenomenon while working as a nurse with patients having bladder trouble. The zone could be elusive, she cautioned, and could be trickier to locate in some women than others. Sometimes G-spot climaxes produced ejaculations—not urine, she clarified, but a fluid that “resembles fat-free milk and has a sweet taste.” She named the magical bit of anatomy after a German gynecologist, Ernst Grafenberg, whose forgotten writing from decades earlier, she discovered, had noted the same territory.

Grafenberg wasn’t the first to have found it. A seventeenth-century Dutch scientist had documented the same region. But it was Whipple who brought it to prominence. Her book was translated into nineteen languages and set off an international firestorm. Critics railed that her research was anecdotal, flimsy, that she was sending women on an impossible hunt within the vaginal canal, a quixotic journey in search of superior, grail-like pleasure, that she was reviving oppressive Freudian ideals, that she was elevating patriarchal sex. The G-spot, her opposition insisted, was a fraud.

And nowadays, despite all the powers of contemporary science, the seemingly straightforward anatomical question, is there a G-spot? remains unanswered. The doubters view the phenomenon as a kind of psychosomatic bliss. They raise evidence like a study done recently by British researchers who sent out a questionnaire to thousands of pairs of female twins, identical and fraternal. If the G-spot exists, the scientists proposed, if it is a zone of actual flesh rather than an article of trumped-up faith, then identical twins, whose anatomies are nearly perfect copies of each other, will be far more likely than fraternal pairs to agree that they have one. The twin experiment had a classic structure, one that’s been used repeatedly to separate the genetic from the learned, the objective from the subjective, in domains other than sex. And when the responses came back, the rate of positive answers was the same among the two groups. “What an Anti-Climax: G-spot Is a Myth,” the
Sunday Times
of London declaimed. Women were now saved, one of the researchers said, from reaching for an orgasmic fiction and gaining only feelings of inadequacy.

But Whipple and Komisaruk, meanwhile, together and on their own, have accumulated data that leads to a different conclusion, with some of their evidence arriving through the orgasms of paraplegic women. In female rats and female humans, they’ve established that four nerve paths carry signals from the genitals to the brain. Two of these channels course straight up the spinal cord. But a third, the hypogastric tract, does an end-around; it doesn’t join the spine till well above the pelvis, at about the level of a person’s belly button. And a fourth, the vagus, whose name in Latin means “wandering,” makes its wending way to the brain without relying on the spine at all.

Komisaruk and Whipple have shown the orgasmic importance of this multipronged map by working with women with severe spinal cord injuries, who, theoretically, shouldn’t be able to feel what’s going on below their waists. Their genitals should be insensate. And under examination in the lab, the paraplegics’ clitoral glans have indeed proven dead. But the interior front wall of their vaginas and their cervixes have been plenty sensitive. As they masturbated by stimulating the wall or the cervix, the subjects reported having orgasms. The scientists validated their claims by gauging their sense of pain, taking their pulse, and measuring the dilation of their pupils. Sexology had already verified such readings as markers of climax: pain vanishes, pulse races, pupils widen. Whipple, sitting beside the masturbating women, collected the data, using a calibrated finger pricker and a pupillometer. And she and Komisaruk published papers arguing that the vagus and, in some cases, the hypogastric tracts were escorting the vagina’s ecstatic messages around the point of spinal damage, while the signals of the clitoral exterior, by contrast, depended on the lower spine and were cut off. This, they reasoned, demonstrated that vaginal orgasms were real and distinct, that they weren’t merely due to oblique pulling and pressing on the external clitoris. And, they explained, the two circuitous tracts, the hypogastric and the vagus, were why healthy women described vaginal climaxes as feeling different from the external, the clitoral, as feeling “deeper,” more “throbbing,” “stronger.” Somehow the less linear, more sinuous and imbedded nerve paths created these sensations.