Vagina (41 page)

In
The House of Mirth
(1905), Wharton also seeks to describe the loss of self that realized sexual passion threatens, or proposes, to women as she describes her heroine, Lily Bart’s, sexual temptation: “The mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the siren who loves her prey: such victims are floated back dead from their adventure.”
¹⁵

This activation of the part of the brain involved with a loss of all conscious boundaries poses an incredible challenge to the female writer or female philosopher because it means that women’s experiences of the boundaries of the self—if these women are orgasmic—are regularly
different
from men’s experiences of the boundaries of self. The self has been constructed in masculine, Western philosophy as rational, conscious, guided by will, and master of discrete boundaries and of autonomy; but orgasmic women’s brains regularly have a subjective experience of the self as unbounded, flowing into or overtaken by a greater force, limitless, not subject to conscious control. The uncanniness of that orgasmic loss of control certainly could be why men have portrayed women sexually as irrational, as maenads and witches.

That wild cell group in that crazy, out-of-control female ventral midbrain? It responds ecstatically to a whole range of stimuli: “this cell group plays a crucial role in a wide range of rewarding behaviors [Macbride et al. 1997, Sell et al. 1999], including euphoric states induced by drugs [Breite et al. 1997, Sell et al. 1999], pleasurable music [Blood and Zotorre 2001] and eating chocolate [Small et al. 2001].”
¹⁶
These researchers found the physical mechanism for why orgasm was reinforcing in women—how it led them to seek out those ecstatic feelings, those heroin-like feelings, again and again: “PSA correlated positively with RCBF in ventral midbrain” which explained “the reinforcing nature of orgasm in women.” That is, they found the science that underlies millennia of patriarchal fear of female sexuality: when women have orgasms they are indeed biologically designed to find them reinforcing—to want more and more and more.

The Georgiadis researchers cited other studies that showed—feminists may not like this—that “cervical stimulation was more important than clitoral in activating the female hypothalamus [Komisaruk et al 2004].” Why does this matter at all? The hypothalamus is “well known for its role in female reproductive behavior [Dr. Pfaus 1999]” and “during female orgasm it may release oxytocin [Carmichael 1999].”
¹⁷
If you are a heterosexual couple, a vaginal or blended orgasm is more likely to get you pregnant because of the role of what is unpoetically called “upsuck” in vaginal contractions. This is not to advocate any one approach over any other or to suggest that you should try to like something, sexually, that you may not like. It is just to disclose what scientists are beginning to know about the different kinds of female orgasms that are more or less likely to get you pregnant, and more or less likely to make you fall in love and stay in love.

(One young female scientist I met, who had done research with Dr. Pfaus, explained one of these studies to me while we were at a reception in an imposing academic building. She is a charming and well-bred twentysomething who was wearing, for that occasion, a summery batik maxidress. Holding a glass of white wine with slender fingers, her bearing impeccably ladylike, she remarked, “This finding is why farmers are paying people to fist their cows.”)

Women know that they go into something like a trance state during really powerful sex, and this trance state is an encounter with the self on another, higher level. We misunderstand women if we see their interest in romance as being only about the “other”; if a male or female lover can help a woman get to this trance state, that love is not just compelling to her because of the “other”: it is compelling to her because, through this sexual experience, she is awakening and engaging with profoundly important dimensions of her own self.

HUG HER, CUDDLE HER, TAKE HER SLOW DANCING: THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MALE ARMPIT

I think about going through his bureau drawers, pull one open and bring a folded t-shirt to my nose. I can still smell him in so many places, and wonder what it will be like when that, too, is gone.

—Sally Ryder Brady,
A Box of Darkness
¹⁸

When you really listen to what many heterosexual women feel they are missing sexually, you often hear them speak about sexual longing in metaphors involving scent. One woman with whom I spoke, a vibrant Portuguese literature professor in her thirties, spent years in a relationship with a supportive, “safe” man who was perfect for her on paper; but she returned obsessively to the fact that they did not “match” as physical types. She fixated on the sense that there was something about his smell that was wrong for her. “I once read a novel in which the hero said, ‘She perfumes my days.’ I want that; I want to feel that a man ‘perfumes my days’ and that I do his.”

The smell of men has powerful effects on the mood, hormonal levels, and even fertility of heterosexual women. Ivanka Savic of the Carolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, found that when women and gay men inhaled a hormonal component in men’s sweat, a PET brain scan showed lit-up areas around the hypothalamus, suggesting that the female and gay male brains had a sexual rather than an olfactory response to the stimulus.
¹⁹

Denise Chen, a psychologist at Rice University in Houston, and her colleagues, speculated that if humans do produce and respond to sweat pheromones, then a woman should respond to male “sexual sweat” more than to the control sweat.

Chen and her team asked twenty heterosexual men to stop wearing deodorant and other scented grooming products for several days. The researchers then put pads under the men’s armpits, and wired the men to electrodes, as the men watched pornographic videos. The researchers analyzed the “aroused” male sweat and also analyzed pads collected from under the arms of the same men when they were not sexually aroused.

Then, nineteen heterosexual women smelled the men’s “aroused” and “unaroused” sweat pads, while they themselves underwent brain scans. The women’s brains reacted very differently in response to the “aroused” male sweat.

The “sexual sweat” activated the women’s right orbitofrontal cortex and the right fusiform cortex, but the “unaroused” sweat did nothing for them. These are the brain areas that help us recognize emotions and engage in perception. Both areas are in the right hemisphere, where smell, social response, and emotion are mediated.

Chen concluded that her findings bolster the idea that humans do communicate via subconscious chemical signals.
²⁰
To me this finding also suggests that women’s bodies know categorically and uncompromisingly when a man is or is not sexually interested in them, even if everyone in the couple is saying the “right” things. This may have been what my friend, who has a strong sex drive, and whose partner did not “perfume her days,” may have been experiencing: his sexual interest in her was not strong enough for her. This finding suggests that she could not will that relationship to be a success if she had tried to forever. She couldn’t smell enough of his arousal—a scent that would in turn have aroused her.

Specific scents have been found to boost vaginal blood engorgement: cucumbers and Good & Plenty candies both are at the top of vaginal-engorgement-activating scents, according to one study (and both are phallic in shape).
²¹

It is not just men’s arousal levels that women can subconsciously smell. Another study shows that women are attracted to the underarm sweat of men whose DNA is unlike theirs, and repelled by the smell of men whose DNA is too much like theirs. There is an important exception to this preference—when women are pregnant, they prefer the smell of men whose DNA is like theirs; researchers suggest that this finding may be the result of pregnancy being a time when women wish to be near kin.

A study, by Virpi Lummaa and Alexandra Alvergne, “Does the Contraceptive Pill Alter Mate Choice in Humans?,” should give us pause and lead us to take very seriously the impact of the Pill in terms of men’s smell and its effect on female mate selection. “Female and male mate choice preferences in humans both vary according to the menstrual cycle. Women prefer more masculine, symmetrical and genetically unrelated men during ovulation compared with other phases of their cycle, and recent evidence suggests that men prefer ovulating women to others. Such monthly shifts in mate preference have been suggested to bring evolutionary benefits in terms of reproductive success. New evidence is now emerging that taking the oral contraceptive pill might significantly alter both female and male mate choice by removing the mid-cycle change in preferences,” they write.
²²
This study suggests that when women are on contraceptive pills, they smell men in a different way than they do when they aren’t, because the Pill tricks women’s bodies into believing that they are already pregnant. So while they are “on the Pill”—and hormonally pregnant—but dating, these young women prefer men who smell like their own kin. Then—married—they go off the Pill in order to start their families. Hormonally not pregnant again, they get their normal scent responses back—and the young marriages are suddenly in terrible trouble. The women find themselves to be sexually repelled by their husbands—saying things like, “I can’t stand for him to touch me”—at just the moment when the new couple wishes to conceive. Anecdotally, many therapists say these young wives tell them identical stories: they feel suddenly that they have married the wrong man; specifically, the young wives report that they can’t bear their husbands’ smell.

Not only can women’s bodies tell by scent if men are into them sexually, and if a mate is a good match, but male armpit sweat and its pheromones can also relax women. George Preti, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and his colleagues found that male pheromones affect both a woman’s serenity levels and her fertility levels.
²³
Researchers in the study, reported in the journal
Biology of Reproduction,
placed pads under the armpits of male subjects. The team collected the sweat on pads from under the armpits of a group of male donors. They then extracted the concentrated chemical compounds from it, masked this compound with a fragrance, and whisked it systematically under the noses of women volunteers. After six hours of exposure, all the women reported feeling more relaxed and less tense.

When women who have long been married say that the romance has gone out of their marriages, they often use the phrase “He never takes me dancing anymore.” An ad for British railway sleeper cars shows an affluent, middle-aged man on one side of the page and his wife on the other. Under the man the caption reads: “Room service. Snoozing. Golf.” Under hers, it reads: “Candlelight dinner. Flirting. Dancing under the stars.” If the hypothetical couple’s weekend away turns out to revert to his side of the wish list at the expense of hers, the marriage will suffer, even though no one clearly sees why. She won’t be able to really relax and get deeply aroused, because she won’t have had the chance to really smell her mate, who has been out on the golf links all day—among the other aspects of the Goddess Array she needs to experience.

For if we tease out this female-romance cliché—“dancing under the stars”—a bit further, the kind of dancing this hypothetical woman misses is not, generally, rock and roll or hip-hop dancing, in which the partners dance at a pheromonal remove from each other. Rather, the feminine romantic image is of some version of a touching couple’s dance with a frontal embrace, such as the waltzing scenes that signal romance in pop culture landmarks such as
Gone with the Wind,
or Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast
and
Anastasia.
Indeed, in many classic love stories, the heroine realizes she is in love with the hero after she has danced with him in this frontal-embrace way—that is, gotten a good long inhalation of his intoxicating pheromones, to a rhythmic melody that is activating her ANS, and secured a sense of his familiar or, better, excitingly unfamiliar, DNA.

“We never cuddle anymore” is another refrain from women in sexually and romantically frustrating marriages; and again, when we tease this out, a cuddle on the couch typically nestles the woman’s head against the man’s shoulder or chest; in bed, a cuddle often positions the woman’s head on the chest of her husband or lover. Female cuddling often means scent inhalation.

What is the unifying element for dancing, cuddling, and hugging, and why are they all vital for heterosexual women? They all have to do with activating the secret life of the male armpit, and its relationship to heterosexual female desire.

People have extraordinarily strong emotions about this. I posted an informal questionnaire about male sweat (hugs, embraces, and dancing) online, and within forty-five minutes received eighty-seven extensive answers, from both women and men. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to tell me about the male armpit.

“When I am stressed and I get a hug from my husband, it calms me down right away but it helps if I get a strong whiff of his scent,” wrote one woman.

“I sleep with my boyfriend’s T-shirt when he is away because I can’t sleep otherwise,” wrote another.

“I left a man who was perfect for me in every way because he didn’t smell right, and it was a tragedy but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it,” wrote a third.

Men, too, were amazed at the effect of this unglamorous signaling system in their armpits. “When it is winter and I don’t get as sweaty, I skip using deodorant and I notice I get far more interest from women,” wrote one man.