What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (7 page)

M
eana wanted to test this further. She had to be certain that the females weren’t checking out the women’s bodies merely for the sake of comparison with their own. She had to dispense with this reason that she saw as intertwined but secondary; she had to confirm that her subjects were staring at what turned them on.

One method might have been to run the same experiment while her subjects masturbated. That way, their eyes would more surely seek out what carried an erotic jolt. But there was little chance that she could get this kind of study approved by the university’s review board and, even if she could, too high a chance that research with masturbating women would bring Meana the outraged scorn of Las Vegas’s conservative press—condemnation that could, in turn, endanger all of her explorations. Las Vegas was a paradoxical place, with nearly all its advertising based on titillation and with prostitutes waiting at licensed ranches down the highway and yet with a prudish strain in the atmosphere, a resistance to the animal impulses that made people flock to the city. This divided psyche seemed an extreme version of a split that ran throughout the country. It left the erotic as hard to study as it was omnipresent. This was partially why Chivers, who had earned her PhD and done the first of her plethysmographic experiments in the States, had returned home to Canada after graduate school to continue. During her years in the United States, her research had been the target of ridicule. The
Washington Times
had protested the American government dollars that helped to pay for her work. “Federally Funded Study Measures Porn Arousal,” the headline had read. A congressman had demanded an investigation. The outcry over her small project soon faded, but she worried about an acute American aversion to looking too closely, too carefully, at the sexual.

Meana was going slowly with the review board. She was designing a study that would use eye-tracking and X-rated videos. The films would turn on her subjects more than the soft-porn photos could. In this more heightened state—a state less conducive to cognition and comparison—would the women’s eyes become less drawn to female body parts and more compelled by everything male? She didn’t think so. She expected that the pattern from her earlier experiment would hold, that when it came to bodies, the female figure would prove full of electricity.

As she developed the new study and hoped for the review board’s approval, she didn’t yet know about Chivers’s research with the pictures of isolated genitals. Those results might have led her to wonder if, in her video experiment, women would seek—as well as female bodies—Deen-like erections, pure declarations of male desire.

Meana’s ideas grew not only from her lab but also from her work as a clinician, some of it trying to help women besieged with dyspareunia, genital pain during intercourse. The condition is not, in itself, caused by an absence of lust, yet her patients reported less pain if their desire increased. So part of her challenge was how to enhance desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she said, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners.

She rolled her eyes at such notions. She described a patient whose tender lover asked often during sex, “ ‘Is this okay?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but”— Meana winced at the misconception behind his delicate efforts—“there was no oomph,” nothing fierce, no sign from the man that his hunger for her was beyond control.

T
alking with Meana made me think of Freud and one of his followers, Melanie Klein. Sexologists don’t have much time for psychoanalytic theory; they tend to ignore or deride Freudian ideas as ungrounded in the empirical research that defines their discipline. Meana never mentioned Freud, yet his thinking, and Klein’s, seemed to float within hers. It seemed to hover, as well, behind Chivers’s readings of blood.

For Freud, sexuality was etched into our psyches with our earliest rapture—and the mother’s breast was the dazzling source. “It was the child’s first and most vital activity,” he wrote a century ago, “his sucking at his mother’s breast. No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” The primal need for sustenance dictated the child’s first lessons in eros; survival and sensuality converged. “The child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation.” The infant’s consciousness was flooded, immersed in moments of nearly orgasmic power.

“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Freud delineated the way our adolescent and adult desires took shape. We searched for the past, for the pleasures we once received, which were given by the mother not only in feeding but—all the more so by her, as opposed to the father, during Freud’s lifetime—in countless other ways of tending to the baby, from cleaning its genitals to nuzzling its neck to clutching it tight. “A mother would probably be horrified,” Freud continued, “if she were made aware” that she was “rousing sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity. She regards what she does as asexual, pure . . . after all, she carefully avoids applying more excitations to the child’s genitals than are unavoidable in nursery care.” She should, Freud assured, “spare herself any self-reproaches even after her enlightenment. She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love.”

The erotic energy of girls, in Freudian theory, was soon led along intricate emotional routes and rechanneled from mothers to fathers. But the original lessons lingered; the mother’s sexual pull was never erased.

Then Klein amplified Freud’s thought. For Freud, nursing and the breast were far less important, finally, than the phallus or lack of it, in writing the psychic scripts of boys and girls. Klein toppled this hierarchy. The breast, for her, was nothing less than mountainous. Maybe it was inevitable that Freud, as a man, would magnify the phallus above all and that it would take a female psychoanalyst to overturn this. Maybe Klein’s thinking arose not only from her being a woman but from working, as a clinician, with young children, from observing the psyche close to its beginnings, rather than reconstructing childhood through the lives of grown patients, as Freud did. No matter what the reasons, Klein evoked a breast that seemed to occupy the infant’s entire vision. All else disappeared. The breast soothed and withheld, seduced and denied, gave itself and guarded itself, taught love and rage. It was “devouring . . . bountiful . . . inexhaustible . . . persecuting”—it consumed our earliest consciousness and never really relinquished its overwhelming role.

Freud believed that homosexual attractions churned within women because of their experiences as infants; his and Klein’s writing offered an explanation for the pulsings of blood when Chivers’s women watched women together, women alone. The breast was the first locus of desire; a woman’s body was its owner; we are all on a quest of “refinding.”

And the mother in Freud and yet more in Klein added depth to Meana’s thinking about women’s sexual narcissism. Through the female bodies in her lab or on the casino stage, through a mostly nude model washing dishes at a kitchen sink or topless swimmers diving into a giant champagne glass, women made themselves, unconsciously, vicariously, recipients of the unmanageable desire they themselves had once felt for the bodies of their mothers. They acquired their mothers’ erotic omnipotence.

O
n one of the laboratory walls, outside the curtained room where women’s pupils were tracked, there was a poster from an Annie Lennox concert Meana had been to. Lennox’s piercing, incantatory voice, her unflinching lyrics, her band’s icy, electronic sound, seemed almost audible sometimes as Meana spoke. “Sweet dreams are made of this; who am I to disagree,” Lennox sang. She then laid out, without judgment, without lament, some of the inescapable realities of lust. Meana’s face was round while Lennox’s was lean; Meana’s bangs were pixieish while Lennox’s hair was shorn half an inch from her skull; Meana’s voice didn’t hold the singer’s unremitting insistence. But there was a shared impatience with the tales people tell themselves about desire. Meana’s features were nimble, expressive; her mouth twisted occasionally, faintly, into something akin to a grimace. This happened when she talked about the legion of couples counselors who held to the idea that, especially for women, incubating intimacy would lead to better sex.

Empathy, closeness—these were supposed to be the paths. For Meana, these paths might lead to lovely places. Lust, though, wasn’t likely to be one of them.

“Female desire,” she echoed Chivers’s experiment with the strangers, the close friends, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality in contrast to men’s.” She was about to publish a study built on long interviews with women whose marriages were sexually bereft. It might be right, she said to me, that bad relationships can kill desire, but good ones don’t at all guarantee it. “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, I don’t know what it is,” she quoted from one subject. “We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area”—the area of their bed.

It was important to distinguish, Meana went on, between what was prized in life and what was most potent as a source of lust. Women might set a high value on ideals of togetherness and understanding, constancy and permanence, but “it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose, they’re the primary source of women’s desire.” Again, she spoke of narcissism and the wish to be the object of primal need.

The attainment of this wish, she argued, required not closeness but a measure of distance. An object of lust was, by necessity, apart. She warned against the expectation or even the hope of reaching popular romantic dreams: of “merging” with a partner, of being able to say “you complete me.” This was the wrong standard for love. This kind of bond, or just the striving for it, could suffocate eros. Melding left no separation to span, no distance for a lover’s drive to cross, no end point where the full force of that drive could be felt.

“S
ometimes we wake up looking at each other,” Isabel said. There was a radiating warmth in this perfectly timed stirring, this simultaneous opening of eyes with pupils and irises so close they were about to blur, she and Eric on the verge of vanishing in proximity. Second best and still wonderful was the lifting of coverings from his face so his eyelids opened and she was seen, recognized, taken in, ensconced, absorbed.

Why, she asked herself, indicted herself, interrogated herself, did she feel indifference—why, if she was honest with herself, had she begun to recoil when he reached out in a way that asked for more? It made no sense to her. At the party where they had first met, she had been the one to spot him first; on their first date, she had been the one to kiss him first; during their first months together, she had, she said, felt such lust she had “climbed him like a tree.” Now, at a year and a half, she “clung to him like Velcro,” had the daily thrill of his just-woken eyes, and felt as though her desire had been stolen, spirited away by some mischievous minor god.

She took action. She ventured into an upscale sex-toy shop and bought massage oil, a blindfold. This was with the intention not of blocking out his handsome features but of transforming the effect of his touch. Attempts like these were successful, slightly, temporarily. What was wrong with her? Sometimes, she said, she wished he would “take more of the marauder approach”—her shoulders pinned to bed or wall, her nipples bitten hard, her thong pulled harshly aside, torn. But she told herself not to ask for this. “Because he would feel badly and because his gestures would be empty, a parody of what I want. The whole thing is that it should be instinctual. The idea that I would have to request it . . .” Her voice trailed off. Was it possible, she asked herself, to have both what she’d had with Michael, for whom the marauder approach had been one part of a hypnotizing repertoire, and what she had from Eric, the profound sincerity, the absolute presence? What was she setting herself up for if she stayed with him? Did she need to extricate herself, no matter how excruciating that would be?

Early in her second winter with him, a great snowstorm hit New York. It piled high plumes on the railings and layered plush cloaks on the sills. It pushed drivers off the streets and consumed their cars once they were parked. The blizzard caused a communal thrill, all the more so since only a few days remained till Christmas. Several days before this, she and Eric had put up her tree, adjusting and clamping it in the stand and adorning it. As she had hooked a gleaming red ball to a high branch, her eyes teared abruptly with gratitude that she was doing the decorating with him.

And now, in the middle of the Saturday afternoon blizzard, she came home from shopping for gifts and, in her kitchen, talked with him about what she’d bought. She noticed that he wasn’t saying much, then that he wasn’t taking part at all. He walked out of the room, into the vestibule.

He stopped, turned. She realized his hands were behind his back. Maybe, she thought, he’d got her an early present. He stepped again into the kitchen and knelt on one knee.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m asking you to marry me.”

“You’re doing that? Right now?”

Plainly, he was, because below her, in his outstretched fingers, he held a ring. Still, she seized on the thought that he might be joking, because the knee was so sudden and the kitchen, as a setting, was so strange.

“Are you going to speak?” he asked.

She didn’t.

“Are you saying yes?”

So much hope lay in that question, and it was met by her own, hers full of desperation to preserve everything she had with him.

“Yes,” she said, “I am saying yes.”

She joined him on the kitchen floor. She slid on the ring, a diamond in a deco setting, a hexagon. He’d chosen it without any hint from her. As ever, they had the same taste. He told her that, hours earlier, he’d called each of her parents and asked for their blessings. She loved that, too.