What Do Women Want?. Daniel Bergner
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opposite sex. Either they asked for a date, or they asked, “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About the same percentage of men and women—50 percent or so—answered yes to the date. But close to three-quarters of the male responders and none of the females said yes to bed. The data had been used often to argue not only a vast but an intrinsic difference in the desires of men and women. Conley created a questionnaire to look at the topic in another way.
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
The 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