Vagina (10 page)

The female rats were then placed into cages designed by a female scientist: the cages had four little openings in a Plexiglas divider. These allowed the female rats to scamper in and out of the area where the male rats were waiting for them (since the males are bigger, the males could not follow the females through the little doors). The doors gave the females control over the contact.

The female rats injected with the saline—that is, those who could feel pleasure—were—there is no other way to say it—wildly flirtatious; they scampered in and out of the males’ space; they “solicited” the males repeatedly (I learned that female rats solicit males by making a “headwise orientation”—gazing directly into the males’ eyes—then running away); they hopped around the males, another sign of female rat sexual desire; they presented their genitals to the males to lick and sniff. One feisty female kept trying to mount the male in her cage—finally reaching a point at which she simply resorted to hopping onto his shoulders and mounting his
head.
What was unmistakable about the activity was that it was being reinforced—the “saline” females were getting something they wanted from the males that made them more and more interactive with them, and more and more excited. For the saline group, it was prom night. Excitement, activity, interaction!

For the naloxone females, in contrast—they all soon looked like characters in an Ibsen play. There was some initial sniffing and palpating from the males, but soon the females just gave up responding to, or initiating, contact. You could see the moment at which they did, almost perceptibly. After a few forays, they stopped interacting with their partners; stopped scampering over to the male’s sides of the cages; stopped “headwise soliciting”; stopped trying to climb onto the males. Soon each female was gazing bleakly into the middle distance in her own area in the cage that the male could not get to—though one male, I will never forget, was desperately trying to get himself through the too-small doorway and, in a begging posture, tried to drag his mate through the tiny door by her tail with his teeth. Finally the females were permanently on “their own side of the bed.” They stopped moving much at all—wouldn’t look at the males—and appeared listless. They were not being reinforced by sexual pleasure. What struck me about that scene was not just that
sex
wasn’t being reinforced for these females—but that
nothing
, really, was being reinforced; they weren’t interacting with their own environments.

The experiment in its later stage showed an even more dramatic outcome: at this point, the scientists ran the naloxone experiment with a scent—such as lemon or almond—associated with the male rat: the scent was placed into the male rat’s fur. Later, when the young, naive female rats who had had naloxone were put in a “ménage à trois” situation with two male rats as potential sexual partners—that is, in a situation in which the females could choose—they avoided the male rat that was scented with an aroma, even if it was a new male rat—and even though these females now could experience pleasure. In other words, the females were showing proof of
memories
of a bad sexual experience, and making decisions accordingly. Dr. Pfaus noted that they showed a lot of activity in the prefrontal cortex during that experiment: it proved that even lower female mammals have sexual memories and think about avoiding bad—pleasureless—sexual experiences. In strikingly poetic language for a scientific journal, he writes that his experiment proved “that a critical period exists during an individual’s early sexual experience that creates a ‘love map’ or gestalt of features, movements, feelings, and interpersonal interactions associated with sexual reward.”
²³

I left the lab that day feeling strangely validated and elated by what I had seen (though glad that the naloxone rats would get a chance to have the saline in the future). Nature had spoken. Those females in the first experiment—the saline group, so eager for sexual pleasure that they were mounting the
heads
of the happy males—were, as Dr. Pfaus points out only partly joking, making decisions in an environment in which no one had ever called them sluts, or unladylike. I felt strangely freed by seeing how directly nature or evolution had placed that intense female sexual desire firmly inside every little female mammal on earth.

A THIRD SEXUAL CENTER FOR WOMEN?

Sexuality is under observation in many labs, and experiments are producing much new information about female arousal, desire, and emotions.

I was interested to note that Dr. Pfaus’s other recent experiments show that female rats, given the option, prefer penetration (that is, penetration that they can control)—with clitoral, vaginal, and cervical stimulation—to the “brush” that stimulates the clitoris alone.

The latest MRI experiments from Dr. Barry Komisaruk’s lab at Rutgers University in 2012 confirm a possibly related finding in human females, too. The vagina and the mouth of the cervix seem to be evolutionarily rigged to need an “other.”

Dr. Komisaruk’s MRI study showed that genital stimulation (clitoral, vaginal, and cervical) in women activated different but adjacent parts of the cortex, and that these areas also relate to different functions and emotional centers. This experiment confirmed in a vivid new way—among other amazing hypotheticals—the existence of a third sexual center for women, this one at the mouth of the cervix.
²⁴
(Beverly Whipple’s experiments had provisionally identified it in the 1980s.)

The idea of another sexual center in women made perfect sense to me. I had experienced it myself, even though, according to our until-recent understanding of the anatomy of female orgasm, it was not supposed to exist. It makes evolutionary sense, of course; while it is handy from an evolutionary point of view for women to have clitoral pleasure, it is superefficient, for reproductive reasons, for women to experience additional extreme pleasure from pressure at the very mouth of the cervix, as that kind of pleasure encourages penetration and thus pregnancy. I was also aware that for many women, when there is sexual pressure against the cervix, orgasms can feel far more emotional—women can burst into tears after orgasms that strike the mouth of the cervix. Many women have described to me becoming emotionally “addicted” to this sensation from a lover.

A Komisaruk team experiment asking women to rank orgasms subjectively confirmed heightened emotional subjectivity as well, in relation to some sexual areas more than others.

These experiments should, I believe, help to radically change our notion of what the “self” consists of. Since the eighteenth century, the self has been defined in the West as autonomous. But the vagina and cervix of even the most empowered woman cannot choose autonomy so simply. The vagina and the mouth of the cervix seem to be evolutionarily rigged to need “others” and to place the female brain in an unchosen but demanding connection to others.

The vagina and cervix, with their built-in craving for “the other,” seem to be evolution’s guarantee that heterosexual women will always interdepend with men and be willing to have intercourse with them, even with its many dangers, emotional as well as physical. This arrangement seems to guarantee that women will be driven by strong desires from within to attend to building complex bonds with others, even at the risk of their personal autonomy. And it comes as no surprise, then, to discover that many women find that vibrators alone or masturbation alone do not do exactly what lovemaking does for them emotionally. Dr. Pfaus believes that maybe we are “hardwired to associate that kind of stimulation with another individual that we have to work on in a relationship; and having the stimulation disembodied—though pleasurable—is not the same degree of pleasure that we experience with another individual living entity.”
²⁵

What if there is nothing wrong with this? Dr. Helen Fisher argues that male and female biologies and drives arose, for evolutionary purposes, to be interdependent with one another: to maximize each person’s success if the two genders work as a team. What if sexuality and satisfaction actually require both perspectives—the more autonomous male and the more interdependent female? What if the vagina’s longing is nature’s way of correcting the potential imbalance of a worldview based on male biology alone?

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle,” the Second Wave feminist slogan assured us, but maybe the fact is, well, no. I now think that denial of this need for men for sexual pleasure in straight women’s lives was not actually feminist and did not actually help heterosexual women. Obviously, straight women do not need just any man. It is an insult to these women to dismiss their longing for the one they feel is
the
man, or to deride their mourning if he is gone. Nor does this denial of the paradox of our feminine autonomy, coexisting unsettledly with our feminine need for interdependence, help lesbians or bisexual women understand why, so often, the need for the lover is so intense. This ideology does nothing to help women of any sexuality understand why, often, the vibrator and a pint of Häagen-Dazs are pleasurable but that other longings for connections can remain strong.

To respect the central paradox of the female condition—the sexual/emotional need of the vagina and cervix—might mean that we need to face the fact that women are, in a sense, more easily addicted to love and to good sex with the person who triggers that heady chemical bath, than men are. The work of Dr. Daniel G. Amen, in
The Brain in Love,
along with that of many other neurobiologists whose work has not yet been “translated” into mainstream culture, suggests that some of women’s behaviors currently seen as needy or masochistic are in fact better understood as natural and probably evolutionary responses to the brain changes caused by female orgasm. Good sex is, in other words,
actually
addictive for women biochemically in certain ways that are different from the experience of men—meaning that one experiences discomfort when this stimulus is removed and a craving to secure it again. Bad sex—inattentive sex with a selfish or distracted partner—is
actually
chemically dispiriting and damaging psychologically to women in a way that is different from men’s experience. We will see why.

Neuroscientist Simon LeVay, in
The Sexual Brain,
points out that orgasm triggers, for both genders, the same mechanism as addiction, and he notes that all addictive mechanisms share a basis in dopamine. “Porn, accumulating money, gaining power over others, gambling, compulsive shopping, video games . . . if something really boosts your dopamine, then it’s potentially addictive for you.” Addiction highs can “hijack” our wiring, leaving us with little choice about seeking that high again and again, even if we suffer for the need in other ways. Of thousands of different chemicals, just a few—alcohol, cocaine, and other opiates and narcotics—boost dopamine. Highly stimulating versions of ordinary behaviors also boost dopamine, which is why exercise and pornography can be addictive.
²⁶

But we are living in a postfeminist world that tells women to just “fuck like men”—that doing so is a sign of liberation—and encourages young women to engage in “friends with benefits” relationships as an act of self-confidence, to roll out of bed with the same casual carelessness that men have traditionally demonstrated.

That male-model ideal of not-caring, take-it-or-leave-it sexuality is, I argue, setting up yet another impossible ideal into which women are supposed to shoehorn their actual needs, at some violence to themselves. Because sexually addictive behavior—or I should say, addictedness to a lover who is “right” for the autonomic nervous system—in women is hardwired. This is possibly the not so well-kept secret of women and love: we talk about great personalities or impressive résumés, similar backgrounds or common interests in prospective mates or new lovers. But though this dimension of our courtship experience is critical, certainly at first, the truth is that if he or she didn’t make you feel that great in your body—if he or she didn’t smell that good to you, taste that satisfying, touch you in ways that suited your unique needs to be touched, or make you come satisfyingly—you wouldn’t care
that
much if he or she never called again. If he or she is the one who turns the ANS on high alert, who delivers the dopamine high from anticipation, who leaves you with the world aglow from opioid release—that is the same man or woman who makes you ache with anxiety for the follow-up call. If this is the person with the right touch to activate your unique neural network,
you will go into withdrawal
if he or she is not around to do this again, and fairly soon. Actual, painful, real withdrawal.

So when women have good, satisfying sex—what I call “high” orgasm: caring, attentive sex that activates the entire pelvic neural network and also intensely engages the ANS—they experience a major brain high.

This bath, of what are essentially drugs, primes women’s neural systems to overcome huge obstacles to getting to the loved one; to engage in extreme behavior in pursuit of love and sexual pleasure; and to be physiologically unable to compartmentalize, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or just to “get a grip” or “get over” him or her. If they manage to “snap out of it,” it is with superhuman effort and at a cost. This major brain high can also involve the hormones that elicit obsessive thinking about a loved one, and that elicit nurturing and even self-sacrificing behaviors. This major brain high is a factor for both genders. Both genders, of course, experience passionate attachment and suffer from unrequited love. And yes, the issue of the way intercourse differs emotionally and physically from masturbation for men, the role of male attachment, and the relationship of male sexuality to consciousness, deserves its own book.

But: women are potentially multiorgasmic, which changes, to some extent, one aspect of the “major brain high” equation.