What Do Women Want?. Daniel Bergner
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and left the room elated, but she couldn’t conceive of any career dealing directly with sex, besides being a sex therapist, which she didn’t want. Sticking with neuropsychology, she wound up doing a thesis experiment that added to fledgling evidence: that homosexual men perform less well than heterosexuals on a type of test involving three-dimensional shapes, just as females, on average, perform less well than males.
This bit of undergraduate research wasn’t very politic. It fell within an area of science that is fiercely debated, mostly because of its signs that there are certain differences in intelligence between women and men due not to culture but to genes. Yet Chivers didn’t much care about the politics; she was gazing at an intriguing nexus: between gender (the skill discrepancies between women and men at rotating three-dimensional shapes in their minds), desire (the similar discrepancies between gays and straights), and aspects of neurology that might well be innate. After graduation, she begged her way into an assistant’s job at the Toronto lab that would later, after she got her doctorate, contain her cramped chamber with its La-Z-Boy and plethysmograph; it is part of one of Canada’s most prestigious psychiatric teaching hospitals. When she arrived at the age of twenty-two, she was the only woman on the floor. Male sexuality was the sole focus of the science being done, and one day she asked the oldest researcher, Kurt Freund, an eighty-one-year-old icon in sexology, why he never turned his attention to women.
Bald, with a bladelike nose and oversized ears that seemed to be sly instruments of detection, Freund, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, had been hired by the Czech military half a century earlier to catch conscripts who were trying to escape service by pretending to be homosexual. He’d developed a male version of the plethysmograph. This was long before a female equivalent existed. A glass tube was placed over the penis with an airtight seal around the base of the shaft. Images were shown. A gauge determined air pressure and marked the swelling. If, with a Czech draftee, the pressure didn’t rise when Freund showed provocative pictures of young men, the conscript was headed into the army.
Freund didn’t make a career out of hunting homosexuals. Early on, he tried to cure gays through psychoanalysis; eventually he called in his patients and gave their money back. Arguing that homosexuality arose from prenatal biology rather than upbringing, and insisting that it could not be treated, he fought Czech laws that criminalized gay sex. After he fled communist rule and settled in Toronto, his vision of male sexual orientation as permanent—and being gay as nothing like a sickness—helped to convince the American Psychiatric Association, in 1973, to strike homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
Like all the researchers at the Toronto lab, Freund highlighted the inborn scripting of desire. Nurture was in constant interplay with nature, but it wasn’t a fifty-fifty partnership. Answering Chivers, he asked a question of his own: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women when I am a man?” His words put her on the far side of a divide—a chasm, in his view. For her, they laid down a challenge. There were experiments to be constructed, data to be compiled, deductions to be distilled, results to be replicated. She imagined one day drawing a map that would capture female eros. “I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” she said, when we first spoke. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.”
In her sense of quest, there were echoes of Sigmund Freud, of his words to Marie Bonaparte almost a century ago. A great-grandniece of Napoleon, she was one of Freud’s psychoanalytic disciples. “The great question that has never been answered,” he told her, “and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”
* * *
While they watched the clips of erotica, Chivers’s subjects didn’t just wear a plethysmograph; they also held a keypad. On this, they rated their own feelings of arousal. So Chivers had physiological and self-reported—objective and subjective—scores. They hardly matched at all. All was discord. And this dissonance resonated loudly with findings from other researchers.
Women with women, men with men, men with women, lone men or women masturbating—Chivers’s objective numbers, tracking what’s technically called vaginal pulse amplitude, soared no matter who was on the screen and regardless of what they were doing, to each other, to themselves. Lust was catalyzed; blood flow spiked; capillaries throbbed indiscriminately. The strength of the pulsings did hold a few distinctions, variations in degree, one of them curious: the humping bonobos didn’t spur as much blood as the human porn, but with an odd exception. Among all women, straight as well as gay, the chiseled man ambling alone on the beach—an Adonis, nothing less—lost out to the fornicating apes. What to make of such strangeness?
There was some further discrimination on the part of the lesbians. Over the series of studies Chivers did—to be sure her data were no fluke—they were a little selective; amplitude leapt more during videos starring women. Yet the lesbians’ blood rushed hard during scenes of gay male porn. When Chivers analyzed the evidence, transmitted from vaginal membranes to sensor to software, when she set it out in graphs of vertical bars, the female libido looked omnivorous.
The keypad contradicted the plethysmograph, contradicted it entirely. Minds denied bodies. The self-reports announced indifference to the bonobos. But that was only for starters. When the films were of women touching themselves or enmeshed with each other, the straight subjects said they were a lot less excited than their genitals declared. During the segments of gay male sex, the ratings of the heterosexual women were even more muted—even less linked to what was going on between their legs. Chivers was staring at an objective and subjective divide, too, in the data from the lesbians: low keypad scores whenever men were having sex or masturbating in the films.
She put heterosexual and homosexual males through the same procedure. Strapped to their type of plethysmograph, their genitals spoke in ways not at all like the women’s—they responded in predictable patterns she labeled “category specific.” The straight men did swell slightly as they watched men masturbating and slightly more as they stared at men together, but this was dwarfed by their physiological arousal when the films featured women alone, women with men, and, above all, women with women. Category specific applied still more to the gay males. Their readings jumped when men masturbated, rocketed when men had sex with men, and climbed, though less steeply, when the clips showed men with women. For them, the plethysmograph rested close to dead when women owned the screen.
As for the bonobos, any thought that something acutely primitive in male sexuality would be roused by the mounting animals proved wrong. The genitals of both gay and straight men reacted to these primates the same way they did to the landscapes, to the pannings of mountains and plateaus. And with the men, the objective and subjective were in sync. Bodies and minds told the same story.
How to explain the conflict between what the women claimed and what their genitals said? Plausible reasons swirled. Anatomy, Chivers thought, might be one factor. Penises extend, press against clothes. Visibly they shrink and shrivel. Boys grow up with a perpetual awareness; male minds are used to being fed information from their groins. A sexual loop between body and cognition, each affecting the other, develops; it runs fast and smooth. For women, more covert architecture might make the messages less clear, easier to miss.
But were the women either consciously diminishing or unconsciously blocking out the fact that a vast scope of things stoked them—stoked them instantly—toward lust?
The discord within Chivers’s readings converged with the results of a study done by Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.
The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another