What Do Women Want?. Daniel Bergner
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lush-bodied woman lay back beneath her lover on a green army blanket in the woods. His hair was cropped, his shoulders hulking. He propped his torso on rigid arms and slid inside her. She lifted her thighs and enwrapped him with her calves. The pace of his thrusting quickened, the muscles of his buttocks rippled, her fingers spread and seized his triceps.
After each ninety-second clip of porn, the subjects watched a video that sent the plethysmograph’s readings back to a baseline state. The camera scanned jagged mountains and rested on a parched plateau.
Then a man walked naked on a beach. His back formed a V, and ridges of muscle angled toward his groin above his taut thighs. He flung a stone into the surf. His chest was massive. So were his buttocks, without a hint of fat. He strode along a rock precipice. His penis, relaxed, slung from side to side. He tossed another stone and stretched his spectacular back.
A slender woman with a soft, oval face and dark, curly hair sat on the lip of a large tub. Her skin was tan, her areolas dark. Another woman rose from the water, her soaked blond hair raked behind her ears. She pressed her face between the brunette’s thighs and whisked with her tongue.
On his knees an unshaven man mouthed a sizeable penis that rose below a sheer, muscled stomach.
A woman with long black hair leaned forward on the arm of a lounge chair, her smooth buttocks elevated. Then she settled her light brown body onto the white upholstery. Her legs were long, her breasts full, high. She licked her fingertips and stroked her clitoris. She pulled her spread knees up. She handled one breast. Her hips began to grind and lift.
A man drove himself into the ass of another man, who let out a grateful moan; a woman scissored her legs in a solitary session of nude calisthenics; a bespectacled, sculpted man lay on his back and masturbated; a man slipped a woman’s black thong over her thighs and began with his tongue; a woman straddled another woman who wore a strap-on.
Then a pair of bonobos—a species of ape—strolled through a grassy field, the male’s reedy, pig-colored erection on view. Abruptly, the female splayed herself, her back on the ground and legs in the air. While her mate thrust into her, his rhythm furious, she threw her hands above her head, as if in total erotic surrender.
Sitting on the leatherette chair, Chivers’s subjects, straight and lesbian, were turned on right away by all of it, including the copulating apes. To stare at the data amassed by the plethysmograph was to confront a vision of anarchic arousal.
This was my initial glimpse of sexology’s strivings after female desire. Chivers’s husband, a psychologist whose thinking I’d sought out for another book about sex, introduced us. And soon I was learning not only from Chivers but from many of the researchers she called a “gathering critical mass” of female scientists who were set on puzzling out the ways of eros in women. There was Marta Meana with her high-tech eye-tracker and Lisa Diamond with her low-tech, long-term studies of women’s erotic existences and Terri Fisher with her fake polygraph machine. Men, too, were part of the project. There was Kim Wallen with his monkeys and Jim Pfaus with his rats. There was Adriaan Tuiten with his genetic screening and his specially designed aphrodisiacs, Lybrido and Lybridos, that were headed to the Food and Drug Administration for approval.
And while they tutored me in their labs and animal observatories, I was listening as well to numberless everyday women who shared their yearnings and their bewilderment, who explained what they could—and couldn’t—understand about their sexuality. Some of their stories are laced throughout these pages. There was Isabel, who, in her early thirties, was tormented by a basic question: whether she should marry the handsome and adoring boyfriend she had once—but no longer—desired. Every so often, when they stood at a bar, she told him, “Kiss me like we’ve never met before.” She felt a reverberation, terribly faint, instantly fading. It mocked her, teaching her repeatedly: better not to make requests like that. “I’m not even thirty-five,” she said to me. “That tingling—I don’t get to feel that anymore?” And there was Wendy, who, ten years older than Isabel, had signed up for the Lybrido and Lybridos trials, to see if an experimental pill could restore some of the wanting that had once overtaken her with her husband, the father of her two children.
Others I interviewed—like Cheryl, who was slowly, deliberately reclaiming her capacity for lust after disfiguring cancer surgery, or Emma, who wanted our conversation to start at the strip club where she’d made her living a decade ago—don’t appear in these chapters but invisibly inform them. I interviewed and interviewed and interviewed, hoping for yet more sight lines, and in the end, recent science and women’s voices left me with pointed lessons:
That women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction.
That despite the notions our culture continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety, as Marta Meana would stress both in front of her eye-tracker and beside a casino stage.
And that one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.
Monogamy is among our culture’s most treasured and entrenched ideals. We may doubt the standard, wondering if it is misguided, and we may fail to uphold it, but still we look to it as to something reassuring and simply right. It defines who we aim to be romantically; it dictates the shape of our families, or at least it dictates our domestic dreams; it molds our beliefs about what it means to be a good parent. Monogamy is—or we feel that it is—part of the crucial stitching that keeps our society together, that prevents all from unraveling.
Women are supposed to be the standard’s more natural allies, caretakers, defenders, their sexual beings more suited, biologically, to faithfulness. We hold tight to the fairy tale. We hold on with the help of evolutionary psychology, a discipline whose central sexual theory comparing women and men—a theory that is thinly supported—permeates our consciousness and calms our fears. And meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies search for a drug, a drug for women, that will serve as monogamy’s cure.
CHAPTER TWO
Bodies and Minds
Chivers traced her love of collecting data back to her father, a Canadian Air Force colonel. With a master’s in the field of human factors engineering, he created efficient cockpits for fighter jets; he studied reaction times to signals and how best to arrange a plane’s controls. He taught her a reverence for the empirical. He plucked up a rock and told her about geological formations; he uncovered earthworms and talked about the aeration of soil. When the weekly TV section arrived with the newspaper, she underlined all the science shows. For her pet hamsters, she built mazes out of cardboard boxes. She settled on an optimal reward—the smell of peanut butter, she discovered, was too pervasive and confusing, so she used vegetables—and ran experiments to learn whether the nocturnal rodents functioned more effectively and found a route to the food faster at night.
Down in her father’s basement workshop, she learned to build under his watch and made a fridge with tiny wire hinges and a horse stable to go with the dollhouse he fabricated. She was entranced by the way things—inanimate and animate—fit together and operated; by college she was studying neuroscience, devoting herself to biophysics and biochemistry, when a friend suggested she enroll in something easy, a sexuality class. Six hundred students filled the lectures. One day the professor was showing slides. A vulva appeared. The ridges and folds of female genitalia, in tight close-up, took over the screen. Disgust consumed the hall, a massive expulsion of “Eeew!” that Chivers heard mostly from the women. A close-up of a penis caused no horror, no gasp, from anyone.
Back in high school, for a group of male classmates, Chivers had sketched the vulva’s anatomy, a map to help the boys in finding the clitoris. Now, surrounded by the women’s voluble wincing, she thought, This is the way you feel about your own bodies?
After the lecture course, she enrolled in a sexuality seminar. She gave a presentation on women’s problems with orgasm; she played a video of