What Do Women Want?. Daniel Bergner
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who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.
Because of the way the questions were phrased—somewhat delicately, without requiring precise numbers, Fisher told me, in deference to the conservative undertone she sensed on her satellite campus—the study couldn’t pinpoint rates of masturbation or porn use; yet, she went on, it left no doubt as to the constraints most women feel about acknowledging the intensity of their libidos. When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also—unlike their female counterparts—gave numbers a good deal higher than the men.
This kind of conscious suppression could well have distorted the self-reports of Chivers’s straight women, but had it insinuated itself with the lesbians? Many of them might have adopted a stance of defiance about their sexuality—wouldn’t this have lessened any impulse toward lying? Maybe, though with these women another sort of restraint could have been at work: the need for fidelity to their orientation, their minority identity.
Fisher’s research pointed to willful denial. Yet, Chivers believed, something more subtle had to be at play. In journals she found glimmers of evidence—unconfirmed, insubstantial, like so much that she wished she could rely on, build on, as she attempted to assemble sexual truth—that women are less connected to, less cognizant of, the sensations of their bodies than men, not just erotically but in other ways. Was there some type of neural filter between women’s bodies and the realms of consciousness in the brain? Something tenuous about the pathways? Was this especially the case with sexual signals? Was this a product of genetic or societal codes? Were girls and women somehow taught to keep a psychic distance from their physical selves? Deep into our seven-year conversation, Chivers spoke bluntly about the congenital and the cultural, about nature and nurture and women’s libidos. For a long while, though, she made no pronouncements. Her scientific intentions were aggressive, the stripping away of the societal, the isolation of the inherent. But she had a researcher’s caution, an empiricist’s reserve, a reluctance to declaim more than the data could support.
Fisher, meanwhile, was emphatic about the contortions imposed, the compressions enforced. “Being a human who is sexual,” she said, “who is allowed to be sexual, is a freedom accorded by society much more readily to males than to females.” Her lie detector was unequivocal.
Rebecca was a forty-two-year-old elementary school music teacher with three children. One afternoon, on the computer she shared with her husband, she discovered a picture of a woman who was plainly his lover. In all sorts of ways, this was devastating. There was the difference in age between the two women, clear to Rebecca immediately. More particularly and insidiously, there were the woman’s breasts, exposed in the photograph and, in Rebecca’s eyes, significantly superior to her own, which had shrunk, she was sure, more than most do from nursing. And then there was her sense—instantaneous—that her husband wanted the photo to be found and the affair to be found out, because he hadn’t had the courage to end the marriage and move in with the woman—who was blowing a whimsical kiss from the screen—without some mayhem to camouflage the long premeditation of his escape. Obeying a therapist’s advice, Rebecca tried not to beg her husband to stay. She lobbied through friends. She gave her husband a book about seeking spiritual fulfillment instead of chasing new love. But within weeks, she was a single mother who spent a good amount of time in front of the computer, comparing herself to the seminude picture, which she’d forwarded to her own email address.
Rebecca—who was among the women I spent my time talking with, questioning relentlessly—had a talent for self-disparagement. This encompassed everything from her body to her career. How had she wound up teaching flute and clarinet to fourth-graders and never performing herself except during the intermissions at her students’ recitals? And how, she wondered further, had she managed to corner herself into this marmish existence in, of all places, Portland, Oregon, America’s city of hipsters?
Yet her skill at self-denigration was matched by a fiery resilience. Increasingly, on her screen the image of the twenty-nine-year-old girlfriend was replaced by the home site of an Internet dating service.
Gradually she had some dates. And gradually there was a man she saw as attractive and felt was kind, and—even before they slept together—she confided, over dinner in a Thai restaurant, something that had taken her fourteen years to tell her husband. She wanted to have a threesome with a woman. The discord and dissembling that ran through Chivers’s and Fisher’s findings weren’t her issues. Why she’d waited so long to raise her desire with her husband she wasn’t certain. Yes, some shyness was involved, but she guessed it had more to do with a hunch that turned out to be prescient: he didn’t show any interest. Probably, she thought, this was because having another woman in their bed would have made a glaring reality out of his lack of interest in Rebecca herself. In any case, her date agreed that a threesome would be good. They abandoned the topic there, began sleeping together, and returned to the subject a few months later. She said that she would leave the arrangements to him.
He asked whether she had any criteria. She’d never been with a woman in a threesome or in any other way. Her wishes were specific. Hair color different from her own. Not too tall. In decent shape. White or Latina. And—a factor she’d been fixated on for years—large breasts. C-cups, at a minimum, as long as they were real.
She and her boyfriend joked that she was as male as any caricature of a man. Because he’d never done anything like this before, it took him a while, but eventually he presented her with possibilities. He showed her a photograph from a casual connections site, a woman Rebecca found herself fantasizing about right away. But the emailing with this candidate flickered, and the chance faded. They debated whether to hire an escort. Periodically during this process of false starts, Rebecca was seized by fear: what if the woman saw her as old, repellent? But her boyfriend reassured her, and her desire was louder in her mind than her worry, and as they shifted toward the idea of renting someone, she reminded herself that her own attractiveness simply wasn’t supposed to matter.
At last, with a babysitter taking care of her children, they waited at his apartment for the arrival of an escort he’d chosen from row after row of thumbnail images online. Wanting to be welcoming hosts and to soften the prostitution-like aspects of hiring a prostitute, they had lit tea candles and chilled a nice bottle of wine. When the escort rang the doorbell, though, and when Rebecca and her boyfriend glanced out the living room window, the harsher qualities of the situation became more difficult to ignore.
Despite her high price, the woman was homely and built along the lines of a lumpy block. Rebecca whispered to her boyfriend that maybe the homeliness was due to the glare of his porch light, that all would be okay once they opened the door and began. She felt relieved, meanwhile, that she wouldn’t have to be concerned about her own looks. But when they opened the door and the escort stepped quietly, even timidly, into the vestibule, with the manner more of a housemaid than a call girl, the trouble did not improve. The woman appeared to be around ten years older than Rebecca. And now Rebecca was calculating at rapid speed whether she should and could go through with this to spare the prostitute’s feelings, so that the problem was no longer how to soften the exploitation of a body but how to avoid letting this woman know that her body was unexploitable.
Rebecca all but prayed that her boyfriend would somehow solve everything. He told the escort that Rebecca had suddenly come down with something, that she wasn’t up to it, an excuse that sounded about as convincing as her fourth-graders’ explanations for not practicing their instruments, though the woman, who smiled graciously, seemed to accept the reason or, either way, to be grateful not to have to perform. He gave her some minor cash for her time, and Rebecca said good-bye in sweet tones, and she and her boyfriend went upstairs to click on his computer and stare for a few moments in befuddlement at the immense disparity between the picture and the person and to discuss the mystery of how other customers had handled this difference and whether it was a common