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USA - Female Sexuality: What Do Women Want ?
posted 27 Jan 2009
Article FYI.
Quote #1:
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed
sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital
arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women
with men.
They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the
strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly - and markedly, though to a
lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the
ambling, strapping man - as they watched the apes.
And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed
scarcely to belong to the same person.
The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord.
During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less
excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a
great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much
more.
Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared
on the screen.
But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement
than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed
almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
Quote #2:
"In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic
relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having
had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships.
The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to
marry a man." So begins Diamond's book, "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding
Women's Love and Desire," published by Harvard University Press last winter.
She continues: "Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician
Melissa Etheridge in 1988.
After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher - like Heche - has
returned to heterosexual relationships." She catalogs the shifting sexual
directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, "What's going
on?" Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis
of animal mating and women's sexuality, is that female desire may be
dictated - even more than popular perception would have it - by intimacy, by
emotional connection.
-----------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html
The New York Times (USA)
22 January 2009
What Do Women Want?
By Daniel Bergner
Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old
psychology professor at Queen's University in the small city of Kingston,
Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of
the world's leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual
Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she
has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos,
a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds
were dull - "bonobos don't seem to make much noise in sex," she told me,
"though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds" -
she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed
the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects,
she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex,
a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a
beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high
boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two
ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown
leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and
Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with
the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and
where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The
genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs - for the men,
an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the
women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing
light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of
blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping
of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so
that they could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms "category
specific" ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while
gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating
and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed
only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any
expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within
the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by
the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the
keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men's minds and
genitals were in agreement.
***
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed
sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital
arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women
with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than
to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly - and markedly,
though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the
footage of the ambling, strapping man - as they watched the apes. And with
the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely
to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the
keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling,
heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated;
watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual
intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two
readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films
featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the
plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost
no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
***
"I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest," Chivers said,
describing her ambition to understand the workings of women's arousal and
desire. "There's a path leading in, but it isn't much." She sees herself,
she explained, as part of an emerging "critical mass" of female sexologists
starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and
clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of
his female disciples almost a century ago: "The great question that has
never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite
my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her
data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled,
unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a
room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the
intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for
three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an
entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been
pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she
ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between
her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she
said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male
classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and
clarified the location of the clitoris.
In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for
Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of
Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers
investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias -
erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she
asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of
penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and
pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he
replied: "How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study
women, when I am a man?"
Freund's words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a
central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to
comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological
studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual
experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison
reformer who once served as New York City's first female commissioner of
corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the
International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that
publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said,
most of the field's leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women
make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he
continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of
William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and
the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid
by women, to illuminating the realm of women's desire.
It's important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute's current
director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft's history, between behavior
and what underlies it. Kinsey's data on sexuality, published in the late
1940s and early '50s in his best-selling books "Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male" and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," didn't reveal much
about the depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by
cataloging species of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious
of examining emotion. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects
having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late '60s
and early '70s that concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female
desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a
focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the '70s, through the writing
of Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods -
though sexologists prefer to etch a line between what they see as their
scientific approach to the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis.
Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology's venerable
investigators, conducted, as a doctoral candidate in the '70s, some of the
earliest research using the vaginal plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS
epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on
prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be
feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers's,
Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s. Though aimed at
men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed
a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women's sexuality,
not only generating an effort - mostly futile so far - to find drugs that
can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives
have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the
search for a full understanding of women's lust. This search may reflect,
as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic
role of biology, on nature's dominance over nurture - and, because of this,
on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain
of sex. "Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,"
Heiman said. "Now it's research on differences that gets funded, that gets
published, that the public is interested in." She wondered aloud whether
the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days
it may be among the factors that infuse sexology's interest in the giant
forest.
"No one right now has a unifying theory," Heiman told me; the interest has
brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study,
for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human
Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic
resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation,
certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by
male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have
come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at
California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands
of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high
sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most
males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the
opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the
attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.
Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a
neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to
orgasm while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner - he aims to
chart the activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four
types of climax: orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating
the anterior wall of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by
stimulating the cervix; and by "thinking off," Komisaruk said, without any
touch at all. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in
considerable doubt, in 1992 Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers
sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of
the G spot in the '80s), carried out one of the most interesting
experiments in female sexuality: by measuring heart rate, perspiration,
pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that some rare women can
think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology
Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy
Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like "Short-
and long-term effects of ginkgo biloba extract on sexual dysfunction in
women" and "The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in exercise-induced
sexual arousal in women" and "Sex differences in memory for sexually
relevant information" and - an Internet survey of 3,000 participants - "Why
humans have sex."
Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through
high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or
through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of
terrain as complex as women's desire. But Chivers, with plenty of
self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a
scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though
she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing
evidence she has collected - with the question, first, of why women are
aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men
simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers
has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female
transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that
showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual
and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in
categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an
inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn't hard to argue that cultural lessons
had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence
as females could have altered the culture's influence. "The horrible
reality of psychological research," Chivers said, "is that you can't pull
apart the cultural from the biological."
Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael
Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were
taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic
pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and
women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition
were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren't
activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't
appear to be an explanation for men's narrowly focused desires. Early
results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same
absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the
distinctions in her data between men and women - including the divergence
in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind
- arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.
Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of
Sexual Behavior, the split between women's bodies and minds in 130 studies
by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same
enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental
attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient
desire.
By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though
plenty of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to
drive up the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It's a
demand, in any event, that hasn't been met. In men who have trouble getting
erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all
that's needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the
mind. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a
feeling of power and control, but they don't, for the most part,
manufacture wanting. And for men, they don't need to. Desire, it seems, is
usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to
be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs
have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication,
but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire.
Chivers isn't especially interested at this point, she said, in
pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of
consulting for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of
testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can't, contractually,
discuss what she describes as her negligible involvement in the development
of the drug, and the company isn't prepared to say much about the workings
of its chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and
Drug Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat
depression - it singles out the brain's receptors for the neurotransmitter
serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the
libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving
depression, it left female - but not male - subjects feeling increased
lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn't understand or
doesn't yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently
trying out in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources
of desire in the female brain.
Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well,
and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches
have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened
risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment's
advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn't yet been
sanctioned by the F.D.A.
Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest
for comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking
will eventually have some benefit for women's sexuality. "I wanted
everybody to have great sex," she told me, recalling one of her reasons for
choosing her career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons
she once gave on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it's the aim of
understanding in itself that compels her. For the discord, in women,
between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of
explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its
reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women
might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture
and culture - and here was culture again, undercutting clarity - with a
dimmer awareness of the erotic messages of their genitals. Chivers said she
has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than
women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress
and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their
emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are
hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the
subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this
disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated
in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.
Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke - always with a scientist's caution, a
scientist's uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture - about female
sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably
overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this
formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological
arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, "I
would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos."
Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her
construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research
reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of
orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a
therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is
familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study
showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of
rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of
unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at
an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive
sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her
upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary "to reduce
discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. ...
Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual
cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted
vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death,
and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their
offspring."
Evolution's legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to
lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings.
Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or
perhaps simply the sight of a male ape's erection, stimulated this reaction
because apes bear a resemblance to humans - she joked about including, for
comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered
if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to
the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the
exposure and tilt of the woman's vulva during her calisthenics was
processed as a sexual signal while the man's unerect penis registered in
the opposite way.
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the
possibility that along with what she called a "rudderless" system of
reflexive physiological arousal, women's system of desire, the cognitive
domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I
think about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly
women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than
men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a
go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process.
If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more
interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very
strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar
force. You need something complementary. And I've often thought that there
is something really powerful for women's sexuality about being desired.
That receptivity element. At some point I'd love to do a study that would
look at that."
The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her
earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than
filmed scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will
offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of
the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a
friend, some with a stranger: "You meet the real estate agent outside the
building. ..." From early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses
she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not
objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers.
Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and
one would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the
mechanisms of desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women
in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that
cause physiological response - but that do not elicit a positive rating on
the keypad - lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual
activity with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women
may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to
infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.
Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers's generation, looks
at women's erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of
psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark
hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done
much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her
attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem
at odds with Chivers's data about sex with strangers.
***
"In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic
relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having
had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with
DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man." So
begins Diamond's book, "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and
Desire," published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues:
"Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa
Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher -
like Heche - has returned to heterosexual relationships." She catalogs the
shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then
asks, "What's going on?" Among her answers, based partly on her own
research and on her analysis of animal mating and women's sexuality, is
that female desire may be dictated - even more than popular perception
would have it - by intimacy, by emotional connection.
***
Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been
going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the
erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work,
identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label.
From her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities
and from their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues
that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole,
desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to
categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply
a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her
group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she
assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to
women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the
explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural
pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.
"Fluidity is not a fluke," Diamond declared, when I called her, after we
first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers's university, to ask
whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her
subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants
began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories - wasn't it to be
expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged
this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years,
both in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told,
was toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its
true expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is
embedded in the nature of female desire.
Diamond doesn't claim that women are without innate sexual orientations.
But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with
the statement "I'm the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to
the person rather than their gender." For her participants, for the
well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on
average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from
emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may
not always affect women's behavior - the overriding may not frequently
impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships - but it can redirect
erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be
found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The
chemical's release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of
trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of
rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments.
Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter's importance in
human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on
estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of
this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire
is especially potent.
Intimacy isn't much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a
professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana,
who serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior,
entered the field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working
clinically and carrying out research on dyspareunia - women's genital pain
during intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female
desire that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research.
Before discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a
Cirque du Soleil show called "Zumanity," a performance of very soft-core
pornography that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.
On the stage of the casino's theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted
women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam
underwater, arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe
blonde took over the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short
schoolgirl's skirt. She spun numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist
and was hoisted by a cable high above the audience, where she spread her
legs wider than seemed humanly possible. The crowd consisted of men and
women about equally, yet women far outnumbered men onstage, and when at
last the show's platinum-wigged M.C. cried out, "Where's the beef?" the
six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up through a trapdoor and started
to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already almost-bare women.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender
imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers's thinking. "The
female body," she said, "looks the same whether aroused or not. The male,
without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body
always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex" - a suggestion that sends
a charge through both men and women. And there was another way, Meana
argued, by which the Cirque du Soleil's offering of more female than male
acrobats helped to rivet both genders in the crowd. She, even more than
Chivers, emphasized the role of being desired - and of narcissism - in
women's desiring.
The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an
emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four
decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the
birth-control pill and the women's liberation movement, she said, the
predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was
fueled from within, that it didn't depend on another's initiation. One
reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight
gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in
sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or
on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to
counter the field's infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory
measurements.
Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the
U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it
comes to desire, "the variability within genders may be greater than the
differences between genders," that lust is infinitely complex and
idiosyncratic.
She pronounced, as well, "I consider myself a feminist." Then she added,
"But political correctness isn't sexy at all." For women, "being desired is
the orgasm," Meana said somewhat metaphorically - it is, in her vision, at
once the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at
"Zumanity" between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in
the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies
were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana's ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research.
With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual
Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and
women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at
pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females,
their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the
two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of
the women - to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of
wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients
with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make
intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she
said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire
increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing
wisdom, the answer, she told me, had "little to do with building better
relationships," with fostering communication between patients and their
partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient
whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during
lovemaking, " 'Is this O.K.?' Which was very unarousing to her. It was
loving, but there was no oomph" - no urgency emanating from the man, no
sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
"Female desire," Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her
dyspareunic patients, "is not governed by the relational factors that, we
like to think, rule women's sexuality as opposed to men's." She finished a
small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20
women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships
often kill desire, she argued, good ones don't guarantee it. She quoted
from one participant's representative response: "We kiss. We hug. I tell
him, 'I don't know what it is.' We have a great relationship. It's just
that one area" - the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of
lust.
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating
intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. "Really,"
she said, "women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic" - it is
dominated by the yearnings of "self-love," by the wish to be the object of
erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she
talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's
erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it.
"When it comes to desire," she added, "women may be far less relational
than men."
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems.
But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague.
On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer
lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural
reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and
longevity of relationships: "But it's wrong to think that because
relationships are what women choose they're the primary source of women's
desire."
Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a
great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy,
masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men,
and second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women
are more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it
takes a greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman's
libido than a man's. "If I don't love cake as much as you," she told me,
"my cake better be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it." And within a
committed relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases
considerably, not only because the woman's partner loses a degree of
interest but also, more important, because the woman feels that her partner
is trapped, that a choice - the choosing of her - is no longer being
carried out.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana's talk of female lust: a woman pinned
against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana's vision, was an
emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on
this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses
societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the
unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and
surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the
scene.
Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she
didn't dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for
and protected. "What women want is a real dilemma," she said. Earlier, she
showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing
the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a
simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. "Women want to be
thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and
caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the
contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of
power and that he is a good man."
After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic - as
opposed to aversive fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of
relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an
analysis that defines rape as involving "the use of physical force, threat
of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to
coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will," between one-third
and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often
during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual
assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having
no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed
the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors
of the real. "I hate the term 'rape fantasies,' " she went on. "They're
really fantasies of submission." She spoke about the thrill of being wanted
so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. "But
'aggression,' 'dominance,' I have to find better words. 'Submission' isn't
even a good word" - it didn't reflect the woman's imagining of an
ultimately willing surrender.
Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose
because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily
happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas
from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen
excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing
of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to
confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being
turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product
of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the
unsettling evidence of women's arousal during rape and during depictions of
sexual assault in the lab.
As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote
"semantics" in the margin of my notes before she said, "The word 'rape'
comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage." She continued: "I walk a fine
line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I
would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the
right to take away a woman's autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my
students, 'Arousal is not consent.' "
We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of
repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for
unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure
glimpse into desire, without meaning - especially in the case of sexual
assault - that the actual experiences are wanted.
"It's the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought," Chivers said about rape
fantasies. "To be all in the midbrain."
One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely
decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital
and subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged
red line that ran across the computer's screen, a line that traced one
subject's vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a
computer program to analyze her data, she needed to "clean" it, as the
process is called - she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a
subject's shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contraction that
might have jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the
readings and distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the
line, with all its tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the
inordinate height of a peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her
that arousal wasn't at work, that this particular instant was irrelevant to
her experiment. She highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then
continued peering. She would search in this way for about two hours in
preparing the data of a single subject. "I'm going blind," she said, as she
stared at another suspicious crest.
It was painstaking work - and difficult to watch, not only because it might
be destroying Chivers's eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by
the vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers
was constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with
numberless aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she
possibly complete in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the
sexologists in the world who focus on female desire, whether they were
wiring women with plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains
in fM.R.I. scanners or fitting them with goggles or giving them
questionnaires or following their erotic lives for years? What more could
sexologists ever provide than intriguing hints and fragmented insights and
contradictory conclusions? Could any conclusion encompass the erotic drives
of even one woman? Didn't the sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by
Diamond, commingle with Meana's forces of narcissism? Didn't a longing for
erotic tenderness coexist with a yearning for alley ravishing? Weren't
these but two examples of the myriad conflicting elements that create
women's lust? Had Freud's question gone unanswered for nearly a century not
because science had taken so long to address it but because it is
unanswerable?
Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her
thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her
own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help
women, she said that it could "shift the way women perceive their capacity
to get turned on," that as her lab results make their way into public
consciousness, the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects
might get women to realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of
stimuli, that the state of desire is much more easily reached than some
women might think. She spoke about helping women bring their subjective
sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to
aiding those who complain that desire eludes them. But didn't such
thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of the physiological and the
subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it might. The giant forest
seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.
And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn't visible at all,
as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than
of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that
have left women's lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding.
"So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality," she
said. "If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to
control it? Why is it so frightening?" There was the implication, in her
words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not
even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be
deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her
interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the
intimation that, at its core, women's sexuality might not be passive at
all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried
the nature of women's lust too deeply to unearth, to view.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at
red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation
of data - a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female
desire - would see just as well.
---
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book,
"The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and
Longing," will be published this month.
Quote #1:
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed
sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital
arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women
with men.
They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the
strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly - and markedly, though to a
lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the
ambling, strapping man - as they watched the apes.
And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed
scarcely to belong to the same person.
The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much accord.
During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less
excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a
great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much
more.
Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared
on the screen.
But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement
than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed
almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
Quote #2:
"In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic
relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having
had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships.
The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to
marry a man." So begins Diamond's book, "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding
Women's Love and Desire," published by Harvard University Press last winter.
She continues: "Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician
Melissa Etheridge in 1988.
After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher - like Heche - has
returned to heterosexual relationships." She catalogs the shifting sexual
directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, "What's going
on?" Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis
of animal mating and women's sexuality, is that female desire may be
dictated - even more than popular perception would have it - by intimacy, by
emotional connection.
-----------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html
The New York Times (USA)
22 January 2009
What Do Women Want?
By Daniel Bergner
Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old
psychology professor at Queen's University in the small city of Kingston,
Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of
the world's leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual
Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she
has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos,
a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds
were dull - "bonobos don't seem to make much noise in sex," she told me,
"though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds" -
she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed
the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects,
she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex,
a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a
beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high
boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two
ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown
leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and
Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with
the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and
where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The
genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs - for the men,
an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the
women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing
light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of
blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping
of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so
that they could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms "category
specific" ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while
gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating
and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed
only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any
expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within
the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by
the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the
keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men's minds and
genitals were in agreement.
***
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed
sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital
arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women
with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than
to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly - and markedly,
though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the
footage of the ambling, strapping man - as they watched the apes. And with
the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely
to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the
keypad weren't in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling,
heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated;
watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual
intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two
readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films
featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the
plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost
no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
***
"I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest," Chivers said,
describing her ambition to understand the workings of women's arousal and
desire. "There's a path leading in, but it isn't much." She sees herself,
she explained, as part of an emerging "critical mass" of female sexologists
starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and
clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of
his female disciples almost a century ago: "The great question that has
never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite
my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her
data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled,
unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a
room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the
intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for
three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an
entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been
pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she
ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between
her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she
said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male
classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and
clarified the location of the clitoris.
In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for
Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of
Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers
investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias -
erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she
asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of
penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and
pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he
replied: "How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study
women, when I am a man?"
Freund's words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a
central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to
comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological
studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual
experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison
reformer who once served as New York City's first female commissioner of
corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the
International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that
publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said,
most of the field's leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women
make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he
continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of
William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and
the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid
by women, to illuminating the realm of women's desire.
It's important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute's current
director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft's history, between behavior
and what underlies it. Kinsey's data on sexuality, published in the late
1940s and early '50s in his best-selling books "Sexual Behavior in the
Human Male" and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," didn't reveal much
about the depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by
cataloging species of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious
of examining emotion. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects
having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late '60s
and early '70s that concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female
desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a
focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the '70s, through the writing
of Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods -
though sexologists prefer to etch a line between what they see as their
scientific approach to the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis.
Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology's venerable
investigators, conducted, as a doctoral candidate in the '70s, some of the
earliest research using the vaginal plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS
epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on
prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be
feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers's,
Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s. Though aimed at
men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed
a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women's sexuality,
not only generating an effort - mostly futile so far - to find drugs that
can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives
have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the
search for a full understanding of women's lust. This search may reflect,
as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic
role of biology, on nature's dominance over nurture - and, because of this,
on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain
of sex. "Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,"
Heiman said. "Now it's research on differences that gets funded, that gets
published, that the public is interested in." She wondered aloud whether
the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days
it may be among the factors that infuse sexology's interest in the giant
forest.
"No one right now has a unifying theory," Heiman told me; the interest has
brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study,
for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human
Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic
resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation,
certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by
male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have
come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at
California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands
of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high
sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most
males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the
opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the
attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.
Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a
neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to
orgasm while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner - he aims to
chart the activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four
types of climax: orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating
the anterior wall of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by
stimulating the cervix; and by "thinking off," Komisaruk said, without any
touch at all. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in
considerable doubt, in 1992 Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers
sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of
the G spot in the '80s), carried out one of the most interesting
experiments in female sexuality: by measuring heart rate, perspiration,
pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that some rare women can
think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology
Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy
Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like "Short-
and long-term effects of ginkgo biloba extract on sexual dysfunction in
women" and "The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in exercise-induced
sexual arousal in women" and "Sex differences in memory for sexually
relevant information" and - an Internet survey of 3,000 participants - "Why
humans have sex."
Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through
high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or
through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of
terrain as complex as women's desire. But Chivers, with plenty of
self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a
scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though
she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing
evidence she has collected - with the question, first, of why women are
aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men
simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers
has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female
transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that
showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual
and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in
categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an
inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn't hard to argue that cultural lessons
had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence
as females could have altered the culture's influence. "The horrible
reality of psychological research," Chivers said, "is that you can't pull
apart the cultural from the biological."
Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael
Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were
taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic
pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and
women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition
were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren't
activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't
appear to be an explanation for men's narrowly focused desires. Early
results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same
absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the
distinctions in her data between men and women - including the divergence
in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind
- arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.
Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of
Sexual Behavior, the split between women's bodies and minds in 130 studies
by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same
enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental
attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient
desire.
By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though
plenty of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to
drive up the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It's a
demand, in any event, that hasn't been met. In men who have trouble getting
erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all
that's needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the
mind. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a
feeling of power and control, but they don't, for the most part,
manufacture wanting. And for men, they don't need to. Desire, it seems, is
usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to
be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs
have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication,
but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire.
Chivers isn't especially interested at this point, she said, in
pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of
consulting for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of
testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can't, contractually,
discuss what she describes as her negligible involvement in the development
of the drug, and the company isn't prepared to say much about the workings
of its chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and
Drug Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat
depression - it singles out the brain's receptors for the neurotransmitter
serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the
libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving
depression, it left female - but not male - subjects feeling increased
lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn't understand or
doesn't yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently
trying out in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources
of desire in the female brain.
Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well,
and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches
have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened
risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment's
advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn't yet been
sanctioned by the F.D.A.
Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest
for comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking
will eventually have some benefit for women's sexuality. "I wanted
everybody to have great sex," she told me, recalling one of her reasons for
choosing her career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons
she once gave on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it's the aim of
understanding in itself that compels her. For the discord, in women,
between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of
explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its
reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women
might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture
and culture - and here was culture again, undercutting clarity - with a
dimmer awareness of the erotic messages of their genitals. Chivers said she
has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than
women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress
and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their
emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are
hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the
subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this
disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated
in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.
Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke - always with a scientist's caution, a
scientist's uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture - about female
sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably
overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this
formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological
arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, "I
would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos."
Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her
construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research
reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of
orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a
therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is
familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study
showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of
rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of
unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at
an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive
sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her
upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary "to reduce
discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. ...
Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual
cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted
vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death,
and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their
offspring."
Evolution's legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to
lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings.
Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or
perhaps simply the sight of a male ape's erection, stimulated this reaction
because apes bear a resemblance to humans - she joked about including, for
comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered
if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to
the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the
exposure and tilt of the woman's vulva during her calisthenics was
processed as a sexual signal while the man's unerect penis registered in
the opposite way.
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the
possibility that along with what she called a "rudderless" system of
reflexive physiological arousal, women's system of desire, the cognitive
domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I
think about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly
women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than
men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a
go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it's more of a reactive process.
If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more
interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you've got a very
strong motivational force. It wouldn't make sense to have another similar
force. You need something complementary. And I've often thought that there
is something really powerful for women's sexuality about being desired.
That receptivity element. At some point I'd love to do a study that would
look at that."
The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her
earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than
filmed scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will
offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of
the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a
friend, some with a stranger: "You meet the real estate agent outside the
building. ..." From early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses
she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not
objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers.
Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and
one would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the
mechanisms of desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women
in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that
cause physiological response - but that do not elicit a positive rating on
the keypad - lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual
activity with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women
may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to
infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.
Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers's generation, looks
at women's erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of
psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark
hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done
much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her
attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem
at odds with Chivers's data about sex with strangers.
***
"In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic
relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having
had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with
DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man." So
begins Diamond's book, "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and
Desire," published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues:
"Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa
Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher -
like Heche - has returned to heterosexual relationships." She catalogs the
shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then
asks, "What's going on?" Among her answers, based partly on her own
research and on her analysis of animal mating and women's sexuality, is
that female desire may be dictated - even more than popular perception
would have it - by intimacy, by emotional connection.
***
Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been
going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the
erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work,
identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label.
From her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities
and from their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues
that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole,
desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to
categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply
a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her
group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she
assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to
women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the
explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural
pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.
"Fluidity is not a fluke," Diamond declared, when I called her, after we
first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers's university, to ask
whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her
subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants
began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories - wasn't it to be
expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged
this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years,
both in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told,
was toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its
true expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is
embedded in the nature of female desire.
Diamond doesn't claim that women are without innate sexual orientations.
But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with
the statement "I'm the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to
the person rather than their gender." For her participants, for the
well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on
average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from
emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may
not always affect women's behavior - the overriding may not frequently
impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships - but it can redirect
erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be
found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The
chemical's release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of
trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of
rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments.
Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter's importance in
human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on
estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of
this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire
is especially potent.
Intimacy isn't much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a
professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana,
who serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior,
entered the field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working
clinically and carrying out research on dyspareunia - women's genital pain
during intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female
desire that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research.
Before discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a
Cirque du Soleil show called "Zumanity," a performance of very soft-core
pornography that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.
On the stage of the casino's theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted
women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam
underwater, arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe
blonde took over the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short
schoolgirl's skirt. She spun numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist
and was hoisted by a cable high above the audience, where she spread her
legs wider than seemed humanly possible. The crowd consisted of men and
women about equally, yet women far outnumbered men onstage, and when at
last the show's platinum-wigged M.C. cried out, "Where's the beef?" the
six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up through a trapdoor and started
to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already almost-bare women.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender
imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers's thinking. "The
female body," she said, "looks the same whether aroused or not. The male,
without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body
always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex" - a suggestion that sends
a charge through both men and women. And there was another way, Meana
argued, by which the Cirque du Soleil's offering of more female than male
acrobats helped to rivet both genders in the crowd. She, even more than
Chivers, emphasized the role of being desired - and of narcissism - in
women's desiring.
The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an
emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four
decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the
birth-control pill and the women's liberation movement, she said, the
predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was
fueled from within, that it didn't depend on another's initiation. One
reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight
gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in
sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or
on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to
counter the field's infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory
measurements.
Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the
U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it
comes to desire, "the variability within genders may be greater than the
differences between genders," that lust is infinitely complex and
idiosyncratic.
She pronounced, as well, "I consider myself a feminist." Then she added,
"But political correctness isn't sexy at all." For women, "being desired is
the orgasm," Meana said somewhat metaphorically - it is, in her vision, at
once the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at
"Zumanity" between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in
the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies
were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana's ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research.
With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual
Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and
women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at
pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females,
their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the
two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of
the women - to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of
wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients
with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make
intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she
said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire
increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing
wisdom, the answer, she told me, had "little to do with building better
relationships," with fostering communication between patients and their
partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient
whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during
lovemaking, " 'Is this O.K.?' Which was very unarousing to her. It was
loving, but there was no oomph" - no urgency emanating from the man, no
sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
"Female desire," Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her
dyspareunic patients, "is not governed by the relational factors that, we
like to think, rule women's sexuality as opposed to men's." She finished a
small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20
women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships
often kill desire, she argued, good ones don't guarantee it. She quoted
from one participant's representative response: "We kiss. We hug. I tell
him, 'I don't know what it is.' We have a great relationship. It's just
that one area" - the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of
lust.
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating
intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. "Really,"
she said, "women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic" - it is
dominated by the yearnings of "self-love," by the wish to be the object of
erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she
talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's
erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it.
"When it comes to desire," she added, "women may be far less relational
than men."
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems.
But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague.
On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer
lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural
reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and
longevity of relationships: "But it's wrong to think that because
relationships are what women choose they're the primary source of women's
desire."
Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a
great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy,
masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men,
and second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women
are more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it
takes a greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman's
libido than a man's. "If I don't love cake as much as you," she told me,
"my cake better be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it." And within a
committed relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases
considerably, not only because the woman's partner loses a degree of
interest but also, more important, because the woman feels that her partner
is trapped, that a choice - the choosing of her - is no longer being
carried out.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana's talk of female lust: a woman pinned
against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana's vision, was an
emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on
this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses
societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the
unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and
surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the
scene.
Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she
didn't dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for
and protected. "What women want is a real dilemma," she said. Earlier, she
showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing
the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a
simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. "Women want to be
thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and
caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the
contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of
power and that he is a good man."
After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic - as
opposed to aversive fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of
relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an
analysis that defines rape as involving "the use of physical force, threat
of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to
coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will," between one-third
and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often
during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual
assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having
no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed
the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors
of the real. "I hate the term 'rape fantasies,' " she went on. "They're
really fantasies of submission." She spoke about the thrill of being wanted
so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. "But
'aggression,' 'dominance,' I have to find better words. 'Submission' isn't
even a good word" - it didn't reflect the woman's imagining of an
ultimately willing surrender.
Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose
because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily
happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas
from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen
excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing
of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to
confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being
turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product
of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the
unsettling evidence of women's arousal during rape and during depictions of
sexual assault in the lab.
As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote
"semantics" in the margin of my notes before she said, "The word 'rape'
comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage." She continued: "I walk a fine
line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I
would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the
right to take away a woman's autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my
students, 'Arousal is not consent.' "
We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of
repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for
unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure
glimpse into desire, without meaning - especially in the case of sexual
assault - that the actual experiences are wanted.
"It's the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought," Chivers said about rape
fantasies. "To be all in the midbrain."
One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely
decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital
and subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged
red line that ran across the computer's screen, a line that traced one
subject's vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a
computer program to analyze her data, she needed to "clean" it, as the
process is called - she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a
subject's shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contraction that
might have jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the
readings and distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the
line, with all its tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the
inordinate height of a peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her
that arousal wasn't at work, that this particular instant was irrelevant to
her experiment. She highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then
continued peering. She would search in this way for about two hours in
preparing the data of a single subject. "I'm going blind," she said, as she
stared at another suspicious crest.
It was painstaking work - and difficult to watch, not only because it might
be destroying Chivers's eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by
the vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers
was constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with
numberless aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she
possibly complete in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the
sexologists in the world who focus on female desire, whether they were
wiring women with plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains
in fM.R.I. scanners or fitting them with goggles or giving them
questionnaires or following their erotic lives for years? What more could
sexologists ever provide than intriguing hints and fragmented insights and
contradictory conclusions? Could any conclusion encompass the erotic drives
of even one woman? Didn't the sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by
Diamond, commingle with Meana's forces of narcissism? Didn't a longing for
erotic tenderness coexist with a yearning for alley ravishing? Weren't
these but two examples of the myriad conflicting elements that create
women's lust? Had Freud's question gone unanswered for nearly a century not
because science had taken so long to address it but because it is
unanswerable?
Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her
thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her
own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help
women, she said that it could "shift the way women perceive their capacity
to get turned on," that as her lab results make their way into public
consciousness, the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects
might get women to realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of
stimuli, that the state of desire is much more easily reached than some
women might think. She spoke about helping women bring their subjective
sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to
aiding those who complain that desire eludes them. But didn't such
thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of the physiological and the
subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it might. The giant forest
seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.
And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn't visible at all,
as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than
of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that
have left women's lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding.
"So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality," she
said. "If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to
control it? Why is it so frightening?" There was the implication, in her
words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not
even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be
deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her
interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the
intimation that, at its core, women's sexuality might not be passive at
all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried
the nature of women's lust too deeply to unearth, to view.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at
red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation
of data - a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female
desire - would see just as well.
---
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book,
"The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and
Longing," will be published this month.
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