Vagina (42 page)

George Preti and his team, mentioned above, found that male sweat not only affects women’s levels of calmness and women’s fertility levels.
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That was not all—the women, after sniffing the chemicals in male sweat, would also, though the study did not highlight this, have felt much more readily aroused, for the scientists found surges of luteinizing hormones in their brains—far greater surges than in the nonsniffing control group.

Luteinizing hormone is a key building block of female sexual desire and plays an important role in triggering ovulation. What teachers usually fail to mention to eager teenage girls in eighth-grade sex education is that this hormone is also key to triggering and amplifying the female sex drive. As women approach ovulation, pulses of this hormone increase in size and frequency in the female brain, which is why you are more lustful in mid-cycle. So in the Preti experiment, when women smelled the male sweat extract, they also experienced a surge of the female-sexual-desire hormone.

But if women are away from their men all day and smell their partners mostly when they are not aroused—because both members of the couple are exhausted from work and parenting—she may “hear” him on an intellectual level say “I love you” or even “I want you”; but on a visceral level, she will have a more difficult time feeling it. So many young couples in our culture transition from courtship—when they could spend weekends in bed together, and, fully sated with scent, feel deeply in love—to dual-career work and young parenthood, when they can barely spend twenty minutes in each other’s arms in a forty-eight-hour period. At that point, it is often the women rather than the men who start to feel disenchanted, trapped, and haunted by a sense of the terrible prosaicness of life, a sense that something is missing.

So let us go back to our starting template—the numbers that show such drastically low libido among a third of Western women. The women whose libidos are dropping, whose marriages now seem tedious, and who are feeling that the world is colorless and flat, may believe that this is due to the stresses of adult life and all their responsibilities. But what if the hardworking women in our culture are also neurologically starved of worlds of scent—along with the worlds of touch, gazing, stroking, pleasure, and so on—that their very natures minimally require in order for them to feel connected, excited, hopeful, and “in love”?

Why are vacations so relaxing and so sexualizing for these same overscheduled couples? Why do so many couples who are struggling with infertility become pregnant on vacation? Is it partly because she finally has time to get to know him again—on an olfactory level? Is it because she is getting enough of the arousing and calming scent from him that reminds her that, even if he sometimes repeats his stories, or he sometimes drops his laundry on the floor, or even if his hairline may be receding, on another, entirely animal level, he can make her calm, aroused, and happy?

It is heterosexual women, not men, who are calmed by the opposite sex’s pheromones. So today, if straight men can’t smell women often or closely enough, they may not become as aroused, but this does not stress them. However, if straight women can’t smell men often or closely enough, they are both more sexually apathetic and more stressed. And you recall what stress does in turn to the female libido—further depresses it.

We have an epidemic of infertility in the United States and Western Europe: straight women are not smelling men closely or often enough, perhaps, to boost the levels of luteinizing hormone they require for optimal fertility. Marital counselors tell women and men to talk though their problems; fertility doctors send men into rooms to masturbate and then they inject the semen themselves into the vaginas of women who are suffering from irregular periods or with low fertility levels. Again, if you understand the profound nature of the animality of women, you see that these practices are incomplete. Marital counselors should start by telling men to hug women; to stroke if the women are open to that; to take women, if they are willing, ballroom dancing. Fertility specialists should make sure, before anything else, that women are getting well and regularly cuddled, and brought to orgasm, by their men.

Bob Beale, in
ABC Science Online,
reported on the Preti study and cited speculation by another member of the research team, Dr. Charles Wysocki, that women may have evolved to have men’s smell trigger their ovulation.
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That is, the smell of a male partner may help to trigger ovulation at the ideal time while making women more relaxed, so that they will be receptive to sex at the right time of the month for them to conceive.

I would have to argue that the phrasing of Dr. Wysocki’s conclusion shows how profoundly even scientists at the cutting edge of sexual-response research are missing something crucial about female desire—including a possibly more accurate reading of the cause and effect in the data—by having unconscious male-centered models of what sex
is
. In Dr. Wysocki’s conclusion, an otherwise mostly uninterested woman smells a guy, it triggers her ovulation, and then, now that she is fertile, she is also relaxed and “receptive” to his sexual approach. What if this reading is missing her sexual agency? What if she smells him; she gets a surge of luteinizing hormone; she becomes relaxed and aroused. This relaxation and arousal makes her wish actively (not “receptively”) to seek out more sex and orgasm, further smelling her man—women get lots of male armpit scent in missionary-position heterosexual sex. This additional man-smelling in turn regulates her cycle further, thus supporting her continued fertility. In other words, his smell drives her to ovulate, which drives her to seek sex, which leads her to smell him more, which further boosts her fertility. In this reading, which is more aligned with Dr. Pfaus’s more progressive, female-agency-centric view of mammalian desire, males don’t “make females fertile”; males may make females want to have sex, but it is the female wanting-to-have sex that
keeps
females optimally fertile. The traditional and somewhat sexist male view of evolutionary biology is that sexy-looking females are fertile females (a hard prospect to apply practically to a lab rat, for instance); but we have to add a dimension from the latest neuroscience: it seems that
lustful
females who continually choose sexual agency and sexual engagement are the more fertile, and thus the more evolutionarily successful females. It is not, based on this model, how conventionally pretty you are, but how sexually questing and driven you are, as a woman, that will help you optimize the reproduction of your DNA.

One continued problem with really understanding female sexuality in our culture is that all of our language about the vagina positions women in a state of sexual passivity and casts the man in the drama as the sexual pursuer—instead of understanding that the vagina, too, is on a quest. In this model—in my version of the same story and reading of the same data—the woman’s arousal is the center of the narrative. It is not a side effect of the drama, or a momentary carrot on a stick briefly waved about by Mother Nature to allow the central player, the inseminating male, a moment’s handily timed ingress. In this interpretation of the same data, which is a more natural evolutionary interpretation, it is the woman’s needs that drive the sexual quest. In my reading of this data, the vagina is, in evolutionary terms, as many have called it in other contexts, “the Center of the Universe.”

GAZE INTO HER EYES

When Lousada begins a Tantra session, he spends many minutes—perhaps ten; it felt like an eternity to me—face-to-face with his client, gazing directly and searchingly into her eyes. Many of his clients have trouble at first tolerating this gaze, or start laughing, or must look away. But all his clients whom I interviewed—and I myself—sooner or later found this deep exchange of gazing very profound in creating an atmosphere that supported the feminine.

Why is this? Dr. Daniel Amen, in his book
The Brain in Love,
shows that eye-to-eye gazing reveals clues about sexual arousal and that the gaze is involved in mirror neuron behavior, which gives people signals about how others feel about them.
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Daniel Goleman, in
Social Intelligence: The Revolutionary New Science of Human Relationships,
discusses the neuroscience of the importance of gazing into one another’s eyes in intimate contexts: “Those long gazes may have been a necessary neural prelude to [a couple’s] kiss. . . . The eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly to a key brain structure for empathy and matching emotions, the orbitofrontal (or OFC) area of the prefrontal cortex. Locking eyes loops us. . . . This tight connection [of the OFC with the cortex, amygdala and brain stem] . . . facilitates instantaneous coordination of thought, feeling and action. . . . [T]he OFC performs an instant social calculus, one that tells us how we feel about the person we are with, how she feels about us, and what to do next in accord with how she responds.”
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Is it surprising, given the power of the OFC, that women long for eye-to-eye gazing as a form of connection? It is actually, neurologically, a medium of connection. Women can often crave “the gaze”—the direct eye contact that other women and small children give them continually. They read this as a strengthening connection. In contrast to this, men have a natural aversion to a deep face-to-face gaze. Men prefer interacting side by side—they interpret a direct gaze as threatening. For the first two years of courtship, when studies show that men’s neurochemicals become more like women’s, and vice versa, men will provide women with this kind of face-to-face gazing; this gazing tends to diminish significantly after that initial courtship period.
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(Female rats gaze deeply before they are ready to have sex: they engage, as you recall, in “headwise orientation”—they will gaze intently face-to-face with the male rat, and then run away, to initiate sex.)

In humans, direct eye contact requires trust. In a sexual context, eye gazing paired with pupil dilation means that you can read what your partner feels about you, since pupil dilation means sexual arousal. Romantic restaurants are dimly lit to support pupil dilation, which then reads as arousal.

But the female craving for a deep gaze with a male lover does not subside: most romance scenes in films and in novels involve descriptions of the man “gazing deeply into her eyes.” In the wild, courtship and sex between primates involves deep eye-to-eye gazing. This deep feminine hunger for what I have to call “gaze contact” or perhaps even better, “gaze communication,” may help explain many mysteries about some of the stresses of married life and long-term heterosexual relationships.

Many women read deep eye-to-eye gazing from a man as sexy. Gaze communication is part of the Goddess Array. How many women are “gaze starved” and seek unconsciously to provoke their male partners—just because they wish his full eye-to-eye attention? How many women feel that their partners rarely gaze deeply into their eyes unless they are angry? A familiar and frustrating experience to many women is the feeling that their husband or male partner is going about his business with her, day after day, without ever really
looking
at her. This building frustration in her can lead to those provocative, “bitchy” interactions from her that, to the man, will feel as if they have come out of the blue. She herself may not fully understand why she is suddenly so irritated with him. He hasn’t said anything awful, done anything terrible—he has just gone for three or four days not really, from her perspective,
looking at
her. Poor woman—she is not conscious of being deprived of the deep interactive gaze she craves, because this is not information that is widely understood or available. Poor man—he may feel perfectly companionable, while she begins to seethe, because side-by-side activity with eyes averted from each other is how men happily spend time with male friends and colleagues.

Data show a marked drop in marital satisfaction after the birth of a first child—and babies are evolutionarily programmed to seek the caregiver’s gaze and lock in on it.
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Might it be that some new mothers—starved of deep gazing from their husbands—are more at risk of being drawn into a charmed circle of mutual gazing with their babies, which leaves out the man? How many new mothers are seduced by the baby’s deep interest in gazing into their eyes, into a relationship with the baby that becomes primary, one that leaves the father sidelined as a romantic partner? This unhappy triangulation after the birth of a new baby, and the subsequent complaints of a low-libido or even sexless marriage, are extremely common in our culture. How much of that trigger is the gaze-starved mom?

A man who wants to activate the Goddess Array will be aware of the dangers of overusing the BlackBerry at home. He will make time, from time to time, even if it does not come naturally to him, to gaze deeply into his wife’s or lover’s eyes.

TALK TO HER, LISTEN TO HER

A day-to-day stressor for straight women living with men they love is male silence. I don’t mean hostile silence or antagonistic silence—I mean just plain old garden-variety male-brain quiet.

Many studies have confirmed the difference between male and female brains when it comes to verbal processing: women have far greater levels of activity between the two hemispheres of their brains, thus leading women to have a far higher interest in talking, to use greater vocabulary ranges, and to be far more interested in discussing emotions.
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For straightforward neurobiological reasons, these activities are of far less interest to men. They aren’t trying to be rude or dismissive; their brains simply don’t light up in those activities in the same way. Add to this the factor that many men come home from jobs at which they have had to spend all day verbally processing and reading people’s emotions—those post-industrial-revolution jobs that require men’s brains, in effect, to act more like women’s. Many men walk in the door at the end of the day completely exhausted in terms of brain activity. All they want is to recover—to rest the male brain.