What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (3 page)

Her two hundred college-aged subjects, all of them heterosexual, were asked to imagine scenarios like this: “You are fortunate enough to be able to spend your winter vacation in Los Angeles. One day, about a week into your stay, you decide to visit a trendy café in Malibu that overlooks the ocean. As you are sipping your drink, you look over and notice that the actor Johnny Depp is just a few tables away. You can hardly believe your eyes! Still more amazing, he catches your eye and then approaches you. . . .”

“Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Depp asked the female subjects. So did Brad Pitt and Donald Trump. The males were approached by Angelina Jolie, Christie Brinkley (chosen by Conley because she wondered whether at fifty-something a woman’s age would undercut her appeal despite her extreme beauty—it didn’t seem to), and Roseanne Barr. The experiment stripped away the social expectations, as well as the physical risks, that auger against a woman consenting to have sex with a stranger. Conley’s setup left only fantasy, frequently a clearer window into desire. The subjects scored how they felt about the propositions. The women were just as avid about saying yes to Depp and Pitt as the men were with Jolie and Brinkley; the women were just as hungry, impulsive, impelled. Trump was dismissed with as much distaste as Barr.

Chivers, when she moved on to her next study, found something that complicated what she’d been seeing. But it also crystalized the raw portrait of female lust that was emerging in her work and the research of her colleagues.

A set of straight women looked at pictures of male and female genitalia. There were four kinds of photos: one with a dangling penis; another with a taut erection; a third with a demure vulva half-concealed by coy thighs. The fourth was a “full-on crotch shot,” Chivers said, with typical wry humor, of a woman with spread legs. In all four, the genitalia were tightly framed, mostly disembodied; there was little else to be seen. This time, the subjects’ blood wasn’t indiscriminate. It rushed much, much more when an erection occupied the screen than when any of the other images were on the monitor. Paradoxically, here was objective evidence that women were categorical after all. And this jibed with what Rebecca had said, that she didn’t quite think of herself as bisexual, that she felt an inescapable preference for men even as she harbored plenty of lust for women. It resonated, too, with the faint reactions of Chivers’s earlier subjects when the Adonis with the slack penis walked along the shore. It seemed that the visible slackness had nullified the rest of his impressive body. More than anything, though, as an isolated, rigid phallus filled vaginal blood vessels and sent the red line of the plethysmograph high, niceties vanished, conventions cracked; female desire was, at base, nothing if not animal.

Chapter
Three

The Sexual Fable of
Evolutionary Science

T
he history
of sexuality, and perhaps above all the history of women’s sexuality, is a
discipline of shards. And it is men, with rare exceptions, whose recorded words
form the fragments we have of ancient and medieval and early modern ideas about
female eros. Such glimpses are worth only so much. But what can be said about
these fragments is that they add up to a particular sort of balance—or
imbalance—between an acceptance and even a celebration of desire and drive on
the one hand and, on the other, an overriding fear.

A woman in the Bible’s Song of Songs:

I sleep, but my heart
is awake

I hear my love
knocking.

“Open to me, my sister,
my beloved,

My dove, my perfect
one,

For my head is wet with
dew,

My hair with the drops
of the night.”

. . . My love
thrust his hand

Through the hole in the
door.

I trembled to the core
of my being.

. . . Passion
as relentless as Sheol.

The flash of it a flash
of fire,

A flame of the Lord
himself.

There is no sign of terror here, only a sacred
glory of thrusting and trembling. And there is this recognition of women’s
erotic need from Exodus: “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment,
and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.” The archaic King James
phrasing can thwart contemporary understanding; the same line in more recent
biblical language reads, “He must not neglect the rights of the first wife to
food, clothing, and sexual intimacy.”

From Paul in First Corinthians, in King James: “Let
the husband render unto the wife due benevolence.” Or, in a modern edition’s
version of “due benevolence”: “The husband should fulfill his wife
sexually.”

A steady heat and urgency rises from the quills of
the Bible’s compilers in classical times and rises, too, from classical poetry
and myth and medical texts. “Eros, again now, loosener of limbs, troubles me,
uncontrollable creature,” Sappho wrote. And Ovid’s Tiresias, who lived as both
male and female, declaimed that women take nine times more pleasure in sex. And
Galen of Pergamum, physician to the Roman emperor and great anatomist of
antiquity, pronounced that female orgasm was necessary for conception: a woman’s
climactic emission had to meet up with a man’s. The contents of this female
substance seem never to have been specified, but the requirement of ecstasy—a
moment that appears to match our current definitions—was, for Galen,
absolute.

For the next millennium and a half, until a few
hundred years ago, Galen’s understanding dominated science. A woman’s “certain
tremor” was a key to procreation for the fifth-century Byzantine physician
Aetius of Amida. The Persian scholar Avicenna, whose eleventh-century
Canon of Medicine
was studied throughout the world,
worried that a small penis might be an impediment to reproduction. The woman
might not be “pleased by it,” might not feel enough sensation to send her into
blissful spasms, “whereupon she does not emit sperm, and when she does not emit
sperm a child is not made.” Gabriele Falloppio, discoverer of the Fallopian
tubes in sixteenth-century Italy, stressed that a man’s malformed foreskin might
impede a woman’s orgasm and impregnation.

How did Galen’s thinking cling on so tenaciously?
The longevity of his teaching is all the more baffling, given that only about
one-third of women, nowadays, say they can climax through penetration alone.
Were men and women of Galen’s time, and long after, deftly attentive to the
clitoris during intercourse? Better coached in the methods of vaginal orgasms?
The shards offer up no answers. But, assuming that sexual skill was no better
then than now, didn’t women ever volunteer that they’d conceived without the
tremor? Hints and theories of procreation without pleasure did emerge over the
centuries, yet somehow Galen’s wisdom wasn’t supplanted. In the late sixteen
hundreds, the widely used English midwifery manual titled
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
, which asserted its scientific agreement
with Tiresias about women’s superior ecstasy, described the female role in
conception this way: “By nature much delight accompanies the ejection of the
seed, by the breaking forth of swelling spirit and the stiffness of nerves.”

Still, this embrace of women’s sexuality, from
Exodus onward, shouldn’t be taken as the prevailing ethos of any period. The
ancient wariness and repression of female eros is a story that barely needs
telling. There is Eve’s position as first sinner: seductress and source of
mankind’s banishment from paradise. There is, from Tertullian, founding
theologian of Christianity, the assignment of Eve’s sinfulness to all women. All
women were destined to be “the Devil’s gateway.” There are Moses’s
transcriptions of God’s warnings in Leviticus. As the Jews encamp at Mount Sinai
on their journey toward the land of milk and honey, God descends in a cloud and
makes clear, again and again, that the center of a woman’s sexual anatomy
overflows with horror, with a monthly blood “fountain” so monstrous that she
must be quarantined, “put apart for seven days, and whosoever toucheth her shall
be unclean . . . and everything that she lieth upon shall be
unclean, everything also that she sitteth upon.” The litany of taint continues,
relentlessly, until the decree that those who “uncover” the fountain and have
sex will be expelled from the tribe, cast away from God’s people.

For the Greeks, the original woman was Pandora.
Molded by the gods out of clay, her erotic thrall and threat—her “beautiful evil
. . . bedecked with all manner of finery” in the poet Hesiod’s
rendition, her “shameless mind and deceitful nature”—made her as dangerous as
Eve. Lust-drunk witches of the Middle Ages left men “smooth,” devoid of their
genitals; and to the long line of living nightmares caused by female carnality,
French and Dutch anatomists of the seventeenth century contributed the clitoris
that grew with too much touching into a full-blown phallus, turning women into
men who ravished their former sex.

But if the pre-Enlightenment West had always been
frightened by female heat, sometimes extoling it, yet corralling it carefully
within the bounds of marriage—where, for the sake of women’s as well as men’s
sexual release, England’s early Protestant clergy prescribed conjugal relations
exactly three times per month, with a week off for menstruation—what followed
eventually, with Victorianism, was a focused effort at extinguishing it. Lately
historians have made the case that the Victorian era in Europe and America
wasn’t as prudish as we’ve tended to think; still, on the subject of female
desire, it was a period of ardent denial. As with all the tectonic shifts of
history, this one had uncountable reasons. One explanation has beginnings in the
sixteen hundreds, with scientists’ incipient realizations about the ovum, about
the egg’s part in reproduction. Slowly, incrementally, this ended Galen’s
legacy; gradually it separated women’s ability to ignite from their ability to
get pregnant. The ever-haunting female libido became less and less of a
necessity. It could be purged without price.

Then, too, at the outset of the nineteenth century,
nascent feminist campaigns and evangelical Christian rallying cries converged
around the theme of irreproachable female morality. The two voices were
intertwined; they amplified each other. Nineteenth-century feminists made
humankind’s salvation, here on earth and forever, their own womanly mission;
Christianity made womanhood its exemplar. American prison reformer Eliza Farnham
preached that “the purity of woman is the everlasting barrier against which the
tides of man’s sensual nature surge.” Without this feminine barricade, “dire
disorder will follow.” And educational crusader Emma Willard proclaimed that it
was for women to “orbit . . . around the Holy Centre of
perfection” in order to keep men “in their proper course.” One well-read
American manual for young brides captured the inextricable feminist and
evangelical spirits: women were “above human nature, raised to that of
angels.”

This was all a long way from “by nature much
delight accompanies the ejection of seed.” The innately pious had replaced the
fundamentally carnal. The new rhetoric both instilled and reflected a
transformation. In the mid–eighteen hundreds, in a letter about the sexual
lapses of ministers throughout the Eastern states, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
to her husband, “What terrible temptations lie in the way of your sex—till now I
never realized it—for tho I did love you with an almost insane love before I
married you I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could
be tempted in that way—there never was a moment when I felt anything by which
you could have drawn me astray—for I loved you as I now love God.” And
meanwhile, the renowned British gynecologist and medical writer William Acton
was making plain that “the majority of women, happily for society, are not very
much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.”

Yet beyond reproductive science, feminism, and
religion, the Industrial Revolution had a tremendous impact on the West’s
thinking about what it meant to be female. Class barriers were breaking down;
men could climb. This placed a value on work and professional ambition to a
degree that may never have existed before, now that the rewards were potentially
unlimited. And work—to borrow from Freud, who both was and wasn’t a
Victorian—required sublimation. Eros needed to be tamped down, libido redirected
toward accomplishment. Victorianism assigned the tamping, the task of overall
sexual restriction, primarily to women.

How far have we traveled in the last hundred or so
years? In one way of seeing, Victorianism is a curio, encased in the past, its
pinched rectitude easy to laugh at. This argument relies on a line of evidence
leading rapidly away from the minimizing or denial of female sexuality, a line
running through Freud’s candid investigations of the erotic in women, through
the brashness of the Jazz Age, the brazenness of flapper girls. It runs through
the invention of the birth control pill, through the social upending brought by
the sixties and the sexual revolution, and on through Madonna’s aggressive
cone-shaped breastplates and the pornographic self-displays of any number of
lesser female celebrities. The opposing argument begins, too, with Freud, with
the sections of his writing that render women as having, by nature, “a weaker
sexual instinct,” an inferior erotic capacity, and passes through post–World War
I advice books like one informing that, unlike just about all males, “the number
of women who are not satisfied with one mate is exceedingly small.” From the
forties and fifties, there is the story of Alfred Kinsey, whose research funds
were revoked when, unforgivably, he turned from cataloguing the sex lives of men
to publishing
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
.
Then, from the late sixties, there is the bestselling
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
delivering emotional
law: “Before a woman can have sexual intercourse with a man she must have social
intercourse with him.” And finally there is the confluence between strains of
contemporary thought: between the virginal edicts aimed mainly at girls and
young women by evangelical Christianity, the waves of panic and sexual
protectionism that overtake secular culture when it comes to girls but not boys,
and the widely believed—and flimsily supported—thesis of evolutionary psychology
that, relative to men, who are hardwired to hunt for the gratification of sex,
women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.

This confluence is telling. In subtle yet essential
ways, Victorian thinking about women and sex isn’t so alien to our era. And
science—evolutionary psychology—is an unlikely conservative influence.
Mainstream evolutionary theory nimbly explains our physiological traits, from
our opposable thumbs to our upright posture to the makeup of our immune systems.
By contrast, evolutionary psychology, a field that has bloomed over the last few
decades, sets out to use the same Darwinian principles to illuminate the
characteristics of the human psyche, from our willingness to cooperate to our
inclinations in one of the discipline’s main areas of investigation, sex. The
ambitions of the field are enticing and elusive, enticing because they hold out
the promise that Darwin’s grand logic can provide us with an all-encompassing
understanding of ourselves, and elusive because the characteristics are so
intricate and may have been created mostly by culture rather than inherited on
our chromosomes. Evolutionary psychologists put absolute faith in the idea that
our patterns of behavior and motivation and emotion are primarily the
expressions of our genes. What
is
, evolutionary
psychologists say, is meant to be, genetically speaking. This is equally true
for the fact that we all have thumbs that help grasp and for the fact
that—judging by appearances—men are the more lustful gender.

The role of social learning, of conditioning, isn’t
given much weight by the field’s leaders. If promiscuity were considered normal
in teenage girls and not in teenage boys, if it were lauded in girls and
condemned as slutty and distasteful in boys, if young women instead of young men
were encouraged to collect notches on their belts, how might the lives of
females and males—how might the appearances that evolutionary psychology treats
as immutable—be different? This kind of question doesn’t much interest
evolutionary psychologists like David Buss, a professor at the University of
Texas at Austin and one of the field’s premier sexual theorists. He dispenses
with such challenges by amassing evidence that, all over the globe, male
randiness and female modesty are celebrated. The widespread, in his view, proves
the predetermined, the genetically encoded. Look, he has written in one of the
discipline’s academic manifestos, at the ideal number of sexual partners named
by college students as they think forward over a lifetime; research has shown
far higher figures for men than women. Look, around the world, at preferences in
mates. From Zambia to towns of Arab Palestinians to America, societies set great
value on chastity or some measure of propriety or reserve in women.