Vagina (45 page)

“I told my husband about the ‘Goddess’ hypothesis,” she continued, “and about the information in your article. He was amused, but seemed interested, I think especially at the prospect of its possibly changing my own response. He started to try to become sexual with me, and I wasn’t really in the mood yet—it felt kind of porny and not really engaging. I could do it, and climax, but felt I would sort of be going through the motions. I was ready for that slight sense of disappointment you feel at those times. But I kind of pushed him back a little, playfully, and said, ‘You should address the Goddess.’

“He laughed and said, really awkwardly, ‘You’re a cute Goddess.’ It sounds crazy, but something in me opened up. I think he saw this, so he added, making the most of the moment, ‘You have a cute yoni.’ I laughed too—he said it in such a goofy way, and it was very funny—but there was something there that was also sincere. When we made love after that it was as if gates that had been rusted shut had opened. When we were done with our lovemaking, I felt different about myself. I felt differently toward him afterwards because of what he had said. It wasn’t about some fake flattery. It is hard to put into words. I felt
seen
somehow.”

I am not suggesting that everyone who reads this will or even should manage to address his lover, even in passing, as “Goddess.” The ridiculousness meter each of us carries inside may not allow it to happen. But it is obvious from putting the recent science of female sexual response side by side with Tantra 101 that when heterosexual men treat women like Goddesses—overtly—in various ways, even very everyday and manageable ways, simply verbalizing their admiration, telling them how uniquely precious they are, how beautiful they are—“the most beautiful,” in their eyes—or making gestures that show that they cherish them, this helps open up even tired, depressed, and hurt women.

DON’T BE SCARY, BUT DON’T BE BORING

There is a continuing duality in the representations of men that heterosexual women desire, which resurfaces in culture from decade to decade and even century to century. Consider (bad, haughty, unkind) Darcy in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
(1813) and (good, kind) Darcy revealed later in the novel. Think about (nice) Edgar Linton versus (dangerous) Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
(1847). Look at the (dangerous) Rochester before the fire in Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(1847), vs. the (safe, nice) St. John, and the (safe, nice) Rochester who is blinded, after the fire. Look at (nice, boring) Ashley Wilkes vs. (bad, enthralling) Rhett Butler in Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
(1936). Look at the (safe, nice) early Beatles versus the (bad, dangerous) Rolling Stones in the 1960s.

This is more than a good parlor game; these dual heroes are, I believe, archetypal for heterosexual women. Romance novels, which are the biggest-selling category of any fiction at all, tend to center on a repeated narrative arc involving an apparently bad man—a lead character who seems emotionally troubled, or arrogant, or dangerous—who turns out to be a good man, and a stable, loving, and committed husband. The enduring appeal of reading romances with this plotline—a plotline that women who read romances consume over and over with minimally changed details—may have to do with how fantasy can resolve, at least temporarily, painfully unresolvable real-life physiological tensions.

Just because women, to be sexually fully alive, need to feel safe doesn’t mean they can sexually tolerate being bored. Dr. Pfaus, as you may recall, emphasized the negative role of “bad stress” and the erotic potential of “good stress.” I would tease this out as excitement and “safe danger.” A profound dilemma—that looks at first like a paradox—in female consciousness may be built into female neurobiology. The data we saw above on hormone fluctuations during the menstrual cycle show that when we are ovulating, we are attracted to high-testosterone, risk-taking, unpredictable males—and when we are not ovulating, we are drawn to nurturing, safer, more reliable mates.
⁴³

This dualism, of course, makes perfect evolutionary sense, from the perspective of Dr. Helen Fisher’s theory
:
women are not, she argues, by nature monogamous, though it is in their interest to pair-bond with a safe, reliable male for at least the first two years of a child’s life. But she also argues that adultery can be evolutionarily valuable to women because they get the sperm competition, as scientists call a situation in which more than one man’s ejaculate is inside a not monogamous woman, and this aids conception. A woman can raise the baby, for at least the vulnerable first two years of its life, with the (reliable) helpmate provider. This unresolvable, even tragic tension—the sexy drive to be impregnated by the unpredictable stranger, and the equally compelling emotional drive to “marry” the predictable, nurturing man—may be built into our evolutionary wiring as women; and it is certainly built into our monthly variability. Rochester or St. John? Brett or Ashley? It may depend on the time of the month, and on our baseline SNS levels.

This tension may also explain an enduring problem within female heterosexuality, which is so tenacious but so shameful that we tend to shy away from discussing it. And this is the problem of the obvious and enduring appeal to many heterosexual women of the “bad boy” and of themes in female sexual response around domination, submission, and power. The slightly S&M novel series
Fifty Shades of Grey,
by E. L. James, sold millions of copies to women in 2012. These themes are great feminist unsayables of female sexuality. But if you look at the dozens of these scenes in, say, Nancy Friday’s collection of women’s erotica,
My Secret Garden,
or similar scenes of being “swept away” by a dominant male in any Harlequin romance or Mills and Boon novel, one must confront the fact that there can be something magnetic about, not force in men, but about a kind of capacity for mastery.

The really beloved bad boys of women’s literature don’t bully or abuse the heroine, but they continually provoke and tease her—they are teasing her to release her own latent wildness. And one thing the romantic heroes of women’s fiction, even the bad boys, who can be brusque or verge on rudeness, never, ever do is actually snap at, that is, negatively startle, the heroine; think of the edgy but grudgingly respectful repartee of Darcy and Elizabeth. Virtually every woman’s genre romance novel follows a script of a man who seems bad—insensitive, corrupt, womanizing—but turns out to be good. It also often features a heroine who begins demure and unripe—“Poor, obscure, plain and little” in Jane Eyre’s speech—but who becomes herself, grows into herself, under the provocation of this bad boy who is secretly good.

This seeming paradox or politically incorrect fantasy is, I would argue, an essential archetype of the female heterosexual journey. A skilled, even at times slightly dangerous, male provocateur can help the female sexual journey to begin. “Badness” is not literal badness—it is otherness, wildness, the dimensions of the unknown. The motorcycle boots, the Harley—they are about
her
adventures,
her
penchant for the open road, erotically and in terms of her own creativity and subversiveness, that society has generally repressed in her and forbidden her to claim as a longing, let alone as part of her “good girl” identity. His male “badness” is simply the projected dark anima of her own unacknowledged wild self.

The difficult secret is that there is something about power—or skill, or mastery of a situation—in men that is erotic to many heterosexual women, and that probably has to do with that hormonal variation that leaves us alert to high-testosterone signals, as well as the “good stress” of SNS activation in a context a woman can ultimately control. Old-fashioned, male-centered theories of evolutionary biology have popularized notions such as the one espoused by Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene,
which support the idea that men who are old, rich, and powerful can attract young, beautiful women seeking security; and that women will always be at a disadvantage in the mating dance, because they desire commitment whereas men want to spread their seed. But Dr. Helen Fisher’s theory tells a very different story about male attractiveness to women: it is not the males who are sexually selecting but the females—which is the case throughout the mammal kingdom. In this scenario, a woman isn’t looking for an old guy with a gold MasterCard. She is looking for a helpmate, and she is looking for high-quality sperm—a dual mission that can lead to pair-bonding with simultaneous female adultery. Could her hormonal fluctuations, and the “good stress” appeal of a man who can be dangerously exciting but not actually injurious, also intensify the duality of this mission and help explain why male fantasy figures in women’s films and books manifest such opposing, even irreconcilable traits?

I have been listening to the language of women who have left their marriages or who have committed adultery. The following is another cultural secret: a substantial theme that surfaces when women say why they left solid, stable marriages, or committed adultery against good, devoted, faithful men, is that they
were bored.
Our cultural script tells us that women never leave or stray unless the men they married have done something awful to them, but I cannot count how many perfectly nice, reasonable, sane, considerate women have confided to me that the reason they left or strayed is that they “couldn’t stand” the sexual boredom caused by the good, safe, nice, predictable man. They are not proud of what they have been driven to do, but they use the language of survival in explaining this: “I thought I would die if I didn’t ever get this again in my life,” said one adulteress, referring to the erotic chemistry of her affair. Others remarked, “I thought I would die if I stayed,” and “I was dying inside.” The men who were being left, or deceived, by the women who told me their stories were all incredibly nice; but they had stopped relating intellectually to the women in their lives from a condition of growth or adventure. They had stopped bringing seduction and drama into the marital bed. They had stopped seeing the women in their lives as if the women themselves needed excitement and drama within the relationship and were themselves not to be taken for granted. This seemed to have a knock-on effect: the women stopped treating the men as if their needs for excitement and novelty mattered, and started to treat them as if they were uninteresting. I believe that women’s monthly need for drama in intimate settings means that when men do not provide it in positive forms, heterosexual women tend to become provocative and bitchy so they will get the stimulation they crave from men even if it arrives in a negative form such as an argument. By becoming so changeless, so predictable, many husbands lock themselves into the staid, less sexy, provider role in women’s psyches, and they abandon the provocateur role—leaving nothing to fire the imagination or the SNS during the times of the months when a woman craves adventure, the “dance,” and excitement. Could these women have married the men who provide for half of the need sets that our hormones prime us for—but that ignore the other half—the high-risk, unpredictable half?

Is there also something about the unpredictability of the “bad boy” that boosts the female SNS? Yes. When “bad stress” takes over the SNS, it focuses the woman’s attention on anxiety rather than sexual arousal. But, as Dr. Pfaus puts it, “Good stress can sometimes be good for your sex life.” Vacation sex is so arousing because of the novelty and unpredictability of the setting, which boost the SNS in a sexual way rather than an anxiety-producing way. “Some women can’t quite reach orgasm without activation of the SNS produced by, say, a spanking or by hair pulling,” explains Dr. Pfaus. He notes that these tastes have often been construed as evidence of these women’s innate masochism, but they can simply result from the fact that these women’s baseline SNS needs a bit more activation than is typical.
⁴⁴

It strikes me that this nonweird explanation for a bit of aggression being exciting to some women may explain many women’s attraction to rape fantasies and other kinds of role playing, all of which heighten the SNS. (Knowing that these tastes may not derive from any psychological masochism does not mean, though, that I believe one should ignore the risk of habituation to violent sexual imagery or practices, and the risk of escalation through habituation, that I discussed in Chapter 12, “The Pornographic Vagina.”)

The SNS-activating excitement and unpredictability that is good for female arousal can come from more gentle surprises, too. I know a very happily married couple; they have every stress other long-married couples have: bills, commutes, jobs, two kids who sometimes whine and who need braces and who will need college tuition eventually. But the wife is sparkling and “in the Goddess” well into her forties, and the man is very pleased with his life. For her birthday, at a time when they had very little money, the husband booked a cheap long-weekend flight to a second-class Caribbean resort.

They could have been like every other bored couple: standing in line at security together; reading magazines together; arriving at the resort tired and hungry and putting away their clothes with all the usual stresses and familiarities of every other long-married marital unit. But that is not what happened to them. Because the husband never told his wife where they were going—he only told her to pack some clothes for warm weather, and a swimsuit. He went ahead of her to the gate to explain the surprise to the bemused airline personnel. Then he went back to where she was waiting, opened a bottle of champagne, took out a dish of strawberries, poured her a glass, handed her some fruit, and then, with her permission, blindfolded her while they got onto the plane. Though her blindfold came off once they were seated, she had no idea where she was going and wouldn’t find out until she landed and disembarked. Her husband said she was grinning the entire flight.