What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (6 page)

The tale is used to hammer home the principle that male lust feeds on multiple partners. Pfaus mocked the faith that this is somehow less so for females. Rodent females, he informed his undergrads, do more hopping and darting to score with new mates. And they dip their spines deeper, so the new male has an easier time thrusting in.

D
uring one of our talks, Pfaus swerved from the evidence he’d accumulated; he careened down a road of speculation. “When this generation of young people is fully studied,” he said, words gathering speed, “we’re going to see more supposedly male-like behavior, more women picking up men, more women getting laid and leaving, having sex without waiting to bond, more girls up in their rooms at their computers clicking on porn and masturbating before they get started on their homework.”

It wasn’t clear which age group he was thinking about, whether he meant girls who were now twelve or women who were now twenty-four, and it wasn’t clear how he explained the unfettering he believed was underway, though it seemed to have partly to do with the Internet. Were there any concrete signs, I wondered, that the trend he imagined was real? Were girls and women staring more and more at the X-rated? Was their porn-surfing nearing that of men? There were only scattered answers, slivers of evidence. The most credible came from Nielsen, the consumer tracking company, in a report that one in three online porn users was female—four years earlier, the figure had been one in four. And porn-addiction counselors were quoted in the press saying that their ratios of female clients were rising. Yet the most vivid clue was probably James Deen’s fan base.

Deen—who’d chosen his name and its spelling himself—was a porn star who’d shot two thousand scenes over the last eight years, scenes in which a delivery man is asked inside for a blow job, in which a principal teaches a lesson to a new high school teacher, in which a chained and gagged blonde submits or a MILF has her way, scenes made, like most of the films produced by the thirteen-billion-dollar-a-year porn industry, with men in mind. But the scenes had caught on among teenage girls. Teens and young women seemed to make up most of his tens of thousands of Twitter followers. They watched him on PornHub and Brazzers and Kink.com; they traded his images, set their computers to pick up any mention of his name, sent him proposals of marriage. A profile on
Nightline
—“the young man your teenage girl may be secretly watching,” the introduction intoned, “a porn star for the Facebook generation”—added to the craze.
GQ
, the
New York Observer
, the
Guardian
in England swarmed next. Some fans said they were attracted by his boy-next-door looks, some by the way he held a woman’s eyes amid doing everything else, but along with his slender build and the possibility that he gave slightly more eye contact than the average porn stud, the basics were the basics: a maximally sized erection, a minimum of dialogue, a dose of violence (“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole life,” he told one interviewer, “so I’m not, like, bad at it”), lots of female moaning, many genital close-ups.

Like Deen’s popularity, Suki Dunham’s nascent success as an entrepreneur pointed to changes taking place. In her case, the changes ranged over age groups. In a New Hampshire town of four thousand, in a farmhouse bordered by a white picket fence, with a tree house out back for her two kids, Dunham designed state-of-the-art vibrators like the Freestyle and the Club Vibe 2.OH.

The predecessors to her devices had been around for over a century—initially as aids to doctors and nurses who believed they needed to massage patients to “paroxysm” as a cure for hysteria—but during the last few decades the percentage of women saying they’ve used a vibrator has gone from one to over fifty, and a few years ago vibrators appeared on the shelves at Walmart, at CVS, at Duane Reade. Trojan spotted an opportunity, entered the market, advertised its Tri-Phoria on TV, and watched sales leap in a period of cataclysmic economic decline. Durex, another condom maker, did the same and had the same results. And Dunham, who grew up in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a man who ran a small excavation outfit, was developing a high-end niche.

Dunham, who has an eager, thin-lipped smile, had worked at Apple for nine years, marketing iMacs. One Christmas in her mid-thirties, she received in her fireplace stocking an iPod and a vibrator from her husband, who traveled a great deal on business. Using the two devices together started her thinking, and now she had a warehouse packed with merchandise. She was shipping to thirty countries and had just begun teaming with a reality TV star who was turning the products and Dunham herself into a regular part of the show. Dunham’s company sold sleekly curved vibrators, aggressively bifurcated vibrators, discreetly streamlined vibrators, and an app that let the user program a vibrator to pulse and tremble to the rhythm of an iPod’s music. The newest item, the bullet-shaped 2.OH, slipped into a bullet-shaped pocket stitched into a thong. The 2.OH massaged, at an array of intensities, to the music of a club or party. It had enough charge to last three hours.

W
ith females hopping and darting in front of us, Pfaus asked, “Why do we have Pandora’s box—why have we boxed in women’s sexuality? Why do we keep women’s desire relatively repressed? We men are afraid that if we open the box, open her control, we’re opening ourselves to being cuckolded. We’re afraid of what’s inside.”

He laughed over a memory of mine: not too long ago, porn on cable TV in New York had, by law, included a blue dot. Always, the dot covered the male member. Women’s bodies were thoroughly exposed, yet the dot floated wherever the penis went.

And I thought, as well, of trips I’d made in other parts of my writing life, trips to places where the blue dot took other, not so comical forms. Once, in a remote village in northern Kenya, I’d asked a group of Samburu men why their culture practiced clitoridectomy. They answered matter-of-factly, “So our wives will be faithful.”

Sometime later I spoke again with Chivers. She’d been designing a new experiment that would use subliminal images as another means to tunnel beneath consciousness and perhaps beyond culture. She outlined the study, then said that she’d been thinking about the scene in her college lecture hall twenty years before, about the sound of “Eeew,” about that fleeting, unforgettable, half-funny syllable as an expression of a history and prehistory of “all kinds of prohibitions and restrictive perspectives on female sexuality.” Suddenly her voice leapt: “Look at all the barriers! Look at all the obstacles! But that isn’t what amazes me.”

She was a fastidious scientist who chose to surround herself with surfaces of barely adorned cinder block, to spend her days in an almost monk-like cell, to avoid pronouncements, to let her data speak for itself. Now, though, she ignored the scientific restraints. “Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament. Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that.”

Chapter Five

Narcissism

O
ne wall of Marta Meana’s cramped university office was covered with postcard-sized reproductions, portraits from past centuries. All were of women. The faces of Vermeer’s
Girl with a Pearl Earring
and
Portrait of a Young Woman
floated on their dark backgrounds, their skin luminous, their eyes turned toward something or someone behind them.

Below them, as a joke, Meana handed me a picture of two control panels. One symbolized the workings of male desire; the other, female. One had only a simple on-off switch; the other had countless knobs. “Trying to figure out what women want,” she said, “is a real dilemma.” It was a dilemma she was trying to address—as a scientist, as a couples counselor, and as the president of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, the most prominent organization in its clinical field—in different ways than Chivers.

And it was a dilemma that Isabel, a lawyer at a nonprofit, was attempting to solve for herself as she debated whether she should stay with her boyfriend of eighteen months, Eric, and marry him if he proposed, which she sensed he would. The issue was that despite his good looks, his intelligence, his kindness, and his skill in bed, she rarely wanted to make love with him.

Isabel, who was not one of Meana’s patients but was one of the women I spent my time learning from, recounted a scene from the evening of last year’s Valentine’s Day. In her small Manhattan apartment, Eric had run her a bath, strewn it with salts, surrounded it with candles, and considerately left her to lie alone in it. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she found her bedroom lit with more candles. And on her bed was a deluge of rose petals arranged in the shape of a heart. Through a fair amount of conscious effort, she managed to be seduced by this gift: while Eric took her place in the bathroom and showered, she lay back on the bed, brushed the petals across her lips, and dropped some onto her shoulders and breasts. When he emerged from the shower, she did feel pleasure as he went down on her, slid his broad shoulders up her body, and slid inside her. But the pleasure was precarious. And on many other nights what she felt was merely patience or something worse than that.

She loved him, she was certain. She said, “I remember the first time I brought Eric home to St. Louis to meet my dad and my stepmother and my grandmother. She’s eighty-eight years old. She helped raise me when my parents were divorced. We call her The Patter. If she sits next to you, she’s going to find some part of you and pat it. She’s going to pat your hand or your knee or your arm. Pat-pat-pat as you sit there. She’s incredibly special to me. She’s incredibly affectionate. She’s deaf, mostly. I think that’s one reason she’s so tactile; her ability to communicate is hampered. There’s something very child-like about her. And one afternoon during that visit, I walked into the living room, and she and Eric were sitting on the couch, holding hands. He looked totally comfortable. There was nothing ironic in his expression. I think they had been talking, but talking is labor-intensive with Granny, and now they were watching TV. Probably she’d been patting him, and they’d wound up holding hands. I think most men would have been highly self-conscious. Holding hands with her like that would have been an ironic exercise. But for Eric it was natural.”

She also said, “The shades in my bedroom let in a small amount of light, and he likes to sleep with something over his face. A T-shirt, a pillow, an arm, all three—I don’t know how he breathes. It’s kind of hilarious. In the mornings, I have to peel away layers to get to where his face is. I want eye contact.” She endured sex once a week but yearned for this every day. “I’ll find his eyes under everything and wait for his eyelids to open, and then I’ll find space for my body right against his.”

She was transfixed by the tenderness of his gaze and tormented by the fact that her lust for him had waned within a few months of their starting to date; she sensed that his proposing might happen any day. She dreaded it. She was in her early thirties. She believed that she couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice, and amid all the truths she tried to weigh rationally, it was impossible for her not to compare her situation with Eric to the two years she had spent with her previous boyfriend. When she had dressed for Michael, she had selected her clothes while subjecting herself to a silent inquisition. “Am I a doll?” she had asked herself as she stood in front of her mirror, or as she lingered in a boutique’s fitting room, deciding whether to buy. “Am I a fantasy?” Michael’s preferences weren’t extreme, but they were pointed. High-heeled boots, a short skirt. Or tight jeans and a T-shirt slung halfway off one shoulder, sizeable hoop earrings, dark eyeliner.

He was ten years older. And he was particular, though his requests were never demands. What she put on was her choice. He let her know, keenly, precisely, what he liked: the black lace bra through which her nipples showed. But the decision about whether to fulfill his wishes belonged entirely to her.

The problem was that she wanted to fulfill them all, though his taste in clothes was not hers. What was she collapsing into? she had berated herself. Yet it didn’t feel like collapse. There was strength in sliding on the lace thong that matched the bra, in pulling on the jeans or skirt, the boots. He would be riveted. She had that power. An alertness spread through her body as she dressed for him. An awareness suffused her skin.

With Eric, she didn’t have to accuse herself of any capitulation. He liked what she liked, and she counted this as a sign. When they went out in summer, she often wore a loose-fitting pastel green dress she’d bought on a trip to Guatemala. It was girlish, she knew, and she laughed at herself because of it. But Eric cherished this quality in her. To be who Michael had wanted required stepping off a precipice, dismissing the voice that warned her against inhabiting his wishes, plummeting over that edge. Women who dressed with urgent, ungoverned need for the desire of men could set off, inside her, a flurry of disdain, like an instinctive aversion to a weakness or wound. Yet whenever she walked into a restaurant where Michael waited for her at the bar, his focus seemed to pluck her from the air, midfall, and pull her forward. His eyes held a thoroughly different kind of constancy than Eric’s later would. Eric adored her. Michael admired her. She was a possession, the heels of the boots she picked for him taking her across crowded rooms toward her owner. The boots were like the frames and pedestals he chose for the photography and sculpture in his gallery. He had specific opinions about how she was best displayed.

Her mind was already reeling by the time they sat down to dinner, yet she kept the appearance of balance. The display that pleased him depended on a degree of agility. In conversation and body she maintained dexterity, but when his breath or hand grazed across her in any way, or even when there was no contact at all, only proximity, she could become so frantic with need she grew almost angry. “If you don’t touch me right now, I’m going to scream,” she would plead silently. “Please, God, touch me right now. Please, God, something’s got to be done here.”

She came quickly, repeatedly, when the dinners were at last over and they were in bed. The certainty of her coming guaranteed it; she didn’t have to doubt, so doubt never got in the way. Her mind never obstructed; it had been unspooling since the evening’s start.

Michael’s effect on her had been all the more enthralling because of the way she viewed her own body. At the age of seven, anointed a flower girl for a summer wedding, she had worn a dress of pink flounce and lace trim with a pink sash and a crown of roses and baby’s breath. She couldn’t have been more pleased; the outfit was the prettiest she had ever put on. But when she glimpsed the girl chosen to walk alongside her, who wore the same flounce and trim and sash, and who seemed half Isabel’s size, the spell cast by the fairy-tale clothes floated away, replaced by bewilderment, then despair, that two seven-year-olds in identical gowns could look so far from identical. Ever since, she’d seen herself as encased by a soft excess, sometimes horrifically thick, sometimes subtle. She assaulted this flesh by dieting, or ignored yet never forgot it. And though as an adult she told herself that it had been years since anyone could rightly have called her even chunky, still there was this padding that dismayed her. Under Michael’s stare, she had felt pared away. The sharpness of his eyes had somehow cut her body to a better outline. Eric didn’t have that ability. He was gentle, while Michael had been gentlemanly; he was empathetic, while Michael was at once solicitous and commanding. Michael’s admiration had convinced her of her allure; Eric’s telling her she was beautiful couldn’t quite make it so.

The relationship with Michael had ended only because she understood he would never commit to her, never marry her or even live with her, but it didn’t end cleanly at all. Months after breaking things off, she met him for dinner, and afterward, outside, he turned up the collar of her overcoat, hailed her a cab, and five minutes later sent her a text: I’m following you. Soon she was buzzing him into her building. There were lapses like that, lapses and lapses. The end point she had announced to her friends took forever, it seemed, to become fact, until she could no longer bear to confess her failures to them.

“I could not part with him,” she said. “I couldn’t get him out of my skull.”

M
eana was a psychology professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and just before I flew out to meet her, she said that we should start by going together to a Cirque du Soleil show at one of the casinos. So, soon after my plane landed, we sat in a darkened U-shaped theater and began our conversation while a pair of topless, dark-haired women in G-strings dove backward into a giant water-filled champagne glass on stage. The women plunged in from opposite sides of the pool, swam toward each other, and entangled with each other, eel-like. They slid up the walls, arching their spines and dragging their breasts along the glass.

Next, a wispy blonde came skipping like a schoolgirl out on stage. Wearing a tiny pleated skirt, she swirled her hips and kept a set of hula hoops spinning around her waist. Suddenly a cable snatched her up above the audience, hoisting her high. It was her act’s climactic moment, a symbolic ravishing. The nymphet opened her legs wide above our eyes, splitting them wider than seemed humanly possible; the splitting was almost violent.

Then a sinewy black woman wearing only beads thrust and pumped her gleaming body to a tribal beat. The soft-porn performances followed each other in fast succession, the stage dominated by arresting women. The audience was divided equally between the sexes. Finally the platinum-wigged MC cried out, “Where’s the beef?” and a long-haired man in a cowboy’s vest and chaps climbed through a trap door. He strutted and swiveled and bared his abdominal ladder of muscle. He shed the chaps, kept only his groin covered, and stood in his cowboy boots, flexing his ass. Yet even as male nudity had its minutes, a dozen female bodies surrounded him.

In her early fifties, Meana, wearing a shirtdress and tights that evening and wearing her bronze-colored hair in bangs, didn’t doubt the usual explanations for the fact that women far outnumbered men among the performers, though she didn’t believe they were terribly illuminating. Those explanations went like this: The men in the audience would have been made too uneasy by more male nudity on stage. For them—for the heterosexuals among them, anyway—the cowboy needed to be obscured by breasts. And for the women in the crowd, the female nakedness fed an addiction—judging their own looks against iconic beauty. So the ticket buyers were gratified, given a live version of what they were used to from a million images on billboards, in magazines, on television: for the men, an opportunity to lust; for the women, a chance to compare.

Meana saw more in the imbalance on stage. She began simply, with something that fit with what Chivers had found through her plethysmograph, as the flaccid Adonis tossed stones on the beach. “The female body looks the same whether aroused or not. The male without an erection,” Meana said, “is
announcing
a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion, of sex.” The suggestion sent a charge through both genders.

And then, the imbalance served women in a further way, an essential way—a way that formed the crux of Meana’s thinking. To be desired was at the heart of women’s desiring. Narcissism, she stressed—and she used the word not in damning judgment but in plain description—was at the core of women’s sexual psyches. The females in the audience gazed, erotically excited, at the women on stage, imagining that their own bodies were as searingly wanted as those in front of them.

F
rom her office wall, in one of the two Vermeers Meana had put up, the young woman glanced back and outward, her thin-lipped mouth smiling timorously, as if she couldn’t be sure anyone was aware of her. In the other, the more full, parted lips were not smiling at all. The girl had no doubt she was being watched.

“Being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically; it was at once the thing craved and the spark of craving. Her confidence about this narcissistic engine arose partly from a curtained area in her lab, from a contraption that seemed to belong in an ophthalmologist’s office. With chin clamped and immobilized on its little cradle, her subjects peered at a screen, at a series of soft-porn images. The contraption took hundreds of readings per second of how the eyes roamed and where they paused.

For a few years, she had been comparing female and male patterns of focus. Long ago, she had earned a master’s in literature and planned on a career teaching great novels. But she found she couldn’t endure standing in front of a classroom and trying to make her students share what she felt. “I didn’t want to tarnish it,” she said. So she had returned to study as an undergraduate, to get the background she needed to start on her doctorate in psychology.

In a study she had just published, her heterosexual subjects had gazed at pictures of men and women in foreplay, among them a couple standing at a kitchen sink, he behind her, tight against her, genitals out of sight, the two of them wearing little more than a few suds of dish soap. Viewing the sequence of pictures, the male subjects stared far more at the women on the screen, at their faces and bodies, than at the men. The females looked equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the women’s bodies—to the expressions, it seemed, of desire in the men and to the flesh desired in the women. For the females, heat seemed to radiate from the men’s urgency and from the women’s power to generate it.