※ [本文轉錄自 feminine_sex 看板]
作者: daidai (稀薄) 看板: feminine_sex
標題: [新聞] 究竟什麼燃起女人慾火？-紐約時報雜誌文章
時間: Tue Feb 3 09:34:39 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?_r=1
很長的英文文章...
What Do Women Want?
By DANIEL BERGNER
Published: January 22, 2009
Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old
psychology professor at Queen's University in the small city of Kingston,
Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of
the world's leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior.
The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried
out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of
ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull —
"bonobos don't seem to make much noise in sex," she told me, "though the
females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds" — she dubbed in
some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie
to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed
clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man
masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach
and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high
boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two
ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown
leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and
Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with
the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where
I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of
the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus
that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little
plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal
walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a
lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture
through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they
could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms "category
specific" ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while
gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and
exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only
men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any
expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the
men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the
bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad
matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men's minds and genitals were
in agreement.
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual
orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when
the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They
responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling
man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser
degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling,
strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the
straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same
person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren't in much
accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less
excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a
great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much
more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women
appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians
reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight
or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the
bonobos.
"I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest," Chivers said,
describing her ambition to understand the workings of women's arousal and
desire. "There's a path leading in, but it isn't much." She sees herself, she
explained, as part of an emerging "critical mass" of female sexologists
starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians
are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female
disciples almost a century ago: "The great question that has never been
answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of
research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?"
Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her
data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled,
unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a
room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the
intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for
three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an
entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been
pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she
ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between
her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she
said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male
classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and
clarified the location of the clitoris.
In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for
Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry,
she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male
sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that
fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a
scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and
who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1950s, why
he never turned his attention to women, he replied: "How am I to know what it
is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?"
Freund's words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a
central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to
comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological
studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual
experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison
reformer who once served as New York City's first female commissioner of
corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the International
Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives
of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field's
leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a
quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long
wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and
Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism,
there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to
illuminating the realm of women's desire.
It's important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute's current
director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft's history, between behavior and
what underlies it. Kinsey's data on sexuality, published in the late 1940s
and early '50s in his best-selling books "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male"
and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," didn't reveal much about the
depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by cataloging species
of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious of examining emotion.
Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab,
drew conclusions in their books of the late '60s and early '70s that
concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female desire, and the reasons
some women feel little in the way of lust, became a focal point for
sexologists, Heiman said, in the '70s, through the writing of Helen Singer
Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods — though sexologists
prefer to etch a line between what they see as their scientific approach to
the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis. Heiman herself, whom Chivers
views as one of sexology's venerable investigators, conducted, as a doctoral
candidate in the '70s, some of the earliest research using the vaginal
plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS epidemic engulfed the attention of the
field, putting a priority on prevention and making desire not an emotion to
explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers's,
Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late '90s. Though aimed at
men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a
kind of collateral electric current into the area of women's sexuality, not
only generating an effort — mostly futile so far — to find drugs that can
foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have
facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search
for a full understanding of women's lust. This search may reflect, as well, a
cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology,
on nature's dominance over nurture — and, because of this, on innate
differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain of sex.
"Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar," Heiman said.
"Now it's research on differences that gets funded, that gets published, that
the public is interested in." She wondered aloud whether the trend will
eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days it may be among
the factors that infuse sexology's interest in the giant forest.
"No one right now has a unifying theory," Heiman told me; the interest has
brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study,
for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human
Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic
resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation,
certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by
male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have come
not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California
State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to
demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives
report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women
for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is
generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both
sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.
Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a
neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to orgasm
while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner — he aims to chart the
activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four types of climax:
orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating the anterior wall
of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by stimulating the cervix;
and by "thinking off," Komisaruk said, without any touch at all. While the
possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in considerable doubt, in 1992
Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple (who
established, more or less, the existence of the G spot in the '80s), carried
out one of the most interesting experiments in female sexuality: by measuring
heart rate, perspiration, pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that
some rare women can think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual
Psychophysiology Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the
psychologist Cindy Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with
names like "Short- and long-term effects of gingko balboa extract on sexual
dysfunction in women" and "The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in
exercise-induced sexual arousal in women" and "Sex differences in memory for
sexually relevant information" and — an Internet survey of 3,000
participants — "Why humans have sex."
Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through
high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or
through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of
terrain as complex as women's desire. But Chivers, with plenty of
self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a
scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she
wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence
she has collected — with the question, first, of why women are aroused
physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men simply
more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried
to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as
subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human
sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were
homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They
responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet
it wasn't hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within
these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the
culture's influence. "The horrible reality of psychological research,"
Chivers said, "is that you can't pull apart the cultural from the biological."
Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael Bailey,
a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were taken of
their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic pictures featuring
men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In
straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by
images of men; in gays, such regions weren't activated by pictures of women.
Inhibition, in Bailey's experiment, didn't appear to be an explanation for
men's narrowly focused desires. Early results from a similar Bailey study
with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers,
this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men
and women — including the divergence in women between objective and
subjective responses, between body and mind — arise from innate factors
rather than forces of culture.
Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of
Sexual Behavior, the split between women's bodies and minds in 130 studies by
other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same enigmatic
discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to
use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire.
By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though plenty
of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to drive up
the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It's a demand, in
any event, that hasn't been met. In men who have trouble getting erect, the
genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that's
needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don't aim at the mind. The
medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a feeling of
power and control, but they don't, for the most part, manufacture wanting.
And for men, they don't need to. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady
supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not
the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant.
The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to
create a conscious sense of desire.
Chivers isn't especially interested at this point, she said, in
pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of consulting
for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of testing a
female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can't, contractually, discuss what
she describes as her negligible involvement in the development of the drug,
and the company isn't prepared to say much about the workings of its
chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and Drug
Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat
depression — it singles out the brain's receptors for the neurotransmitter
serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the
libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving
depression, it left female — but not male — subjects feeling increased
lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn't understand or doesn't
yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently trying out
in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources of desire in
the female brain.
Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well,
and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches have
increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of
cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment's
advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn't yet been
sanctioned by the F.D.A.
Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest for
comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking will
eventually have some benefit for women's sexuality. "I wanted everybody to
have great sex," she told me, recalling one of her reasons for choosing her
career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons she once gave
on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it's the aim of understanding in
itself that compels her. For the discord, in women, between the body and the
mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of explanations, the simplest being
anatomy. The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and
pressing upon consciousness. Women might more likely have grown up, for
reasons of both bodily architecture and culture — and here was culture
again, undercutting clarity — with a dimmer awareness of the erotic messages
of their genitals. Chivers said she has considered, too, research suggesting
that men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate at
moments of heightened stress and that men may rely more on such physiological
signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on
situational cues. So there are hints, she told me, that the disparity between
the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than
sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is
accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.
Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke — always with a scientist's caution, a
scientist's uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture — about female
sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping,
systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this formulation,
resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals
little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, "I would have to
believe that women want to have sex with bonobos."
Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her
construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research
reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of
orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a
therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is
familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing
surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape
scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted
sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an
evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual
readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper
in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary "to reduce discomfort, and the
possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who
did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more
likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that
resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely
to have passed on this trait to their offspring."
Evolution's legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to
lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings.
Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps
simply the sight of a male ape's erection, stimulated this reaction because
apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for
comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered if
the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to the
exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the exposure
and tilt of the woman's vulva during her calisthenics was proc- essed as a
sexual signal while the man's unerect penis registered in the opposite way.
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the
possibility that along with what she called a "rudderless" system of
reflexive physiological arousal, women's system of desire, the cognitive
domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. "One of the things I think
about," she said, "is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are
very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one
possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of
sexuality, it's more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one
part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is
probably more aggressive, you've got a very strong motivational force. It
wouldn't make sense to have another similar force. You need something
complementary. And I've often thought that there is something really powerful
for women's sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some
point I'd love to do a study that would look at that."
The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her
earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than filmed
scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will offer too
a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of the scripts
she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a friend, some with a
stranger: "You meet the real estate agent outside the building. . . ." From
early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses she will find that women
are most turned on, subjectively if not objectively, by scenarios of sex with
strangers.
Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and one
would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the mechanisms of
desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women in the days
after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that cause
physiological response — but that do not elicit a positive rating on the
keypad — lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual activity
with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women may not
want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to infer
that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.
Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers's generation, looks at
women's erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of
psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark
hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done
much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her
attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem
at odds with Chivers's data about sex with strangers.
"In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic
relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having
had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with
DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man." So begins
Diamond's book, "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire,"
published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues: "Julie
Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in
1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher — like Heche —
has returned to heterosexual relationships." She catalogs the shifting
sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, "What's
going on?" Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her
analysis of animal mating and women's sexuality, is that female desire may be
dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy,
by emotional connection.
Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been
going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the
erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work,
identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label. From
her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities and from
their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues that for
her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is
malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their
attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of
more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her group who called
themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her
ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research
unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic
attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine
desire.
"Fluidity is not a fluke," Diamond declared, when I called her, after we
first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers's university, to ask
whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her
subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants
began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories — wasn't it to be
expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged
this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years, both
in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told, was
toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its true
expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is embedded
in the nature of female desire.
Diamond doesn't claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But
she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the
statement "I'm the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the
person rather than their gender." For her participants, for the well-known
women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she
stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness
that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect
women's behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual
women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction.
One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a
neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical's release has been
shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in
female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of
sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in
animals, and by the transmitter's importance in human childbirth and breast
feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more
extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why,
in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.
Intimacy isn't much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a
professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana, who
serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior, entered the
field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working clinically and
carrying out research on dyspareunia — women's genital pain during
intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female desire
that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research. Before
discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a Cirque du
Soleil show called "Zumanity," a performance of very soft-core pornography
that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.
On the stage of the casino's theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted
women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam underwater,
arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe blonde took over
the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short schoolgirl's skirt. She spun
numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist and was hoisted by a cable high
above the audience, where she spread her legs wider than seemed humanly
possible. The crowd consisted of men and women about equally, yet women far
outnumbered men onstage, and when at last the show's platinum-wigged M.C.
cried out, "Where's the beef?" the six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up
through a trapdoor and started to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already
almost-bare women.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender
imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers's thinking. "The female
body," she said, "looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an
erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the
promise, the suggestion of sex" — a suggestion that sends a charge through
both men and women. And there was another way, Meana argued, by which the
Cirque du Soleil's offering of more female than male acrobats helped to rivet
both genders in the crowd. She, even more than Chivers, emphasized the role
of being desired — and of narcissism — in women's desiring.
The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an
emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four
decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the
birth-control pill and the women's liberation movement, she said, the
predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was
fueled from within, that it didn't depend on another's initiation. One reason
for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight gathered,
in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in sexology, an
embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or on clinical
experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to counter the
field's infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory measurements.
Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the
U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it comes
to desire, "the variability within genders may be greater than the
differences between genders," that lust is infinitely complex and
idiosyncratic.
She pronounced, as well, "I consider myself a feminist." Then she added, "But
political correctness isn't sexy at all." For women, "being desired is the
orgasm," Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once
the thing craved and the spark of craving. About the dynamic at "Zumanity"
between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd
gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as
desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana's ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With
her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual
Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and
women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at
pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females,
their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two
genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the
women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and
to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with
dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make
intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said
that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased.
The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the
answer, she told me, had "little to do with building better relationships,"
with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled
her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly
empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, " 'Is this O.K.?' Which
was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph" — no
urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was
beyond control.
"Female desire," Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her
dyspareunic patients, "is not governed by the relational factors that, we
like to think, rule women's sexuality as opposed to men's." She finished a
small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20 women
in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships often
kill desire, she argued, good ones don't guarantee it. She quoted from one
participant's representative response: "We kiss. We hug. I tell him, 'I don't
know what it is.' We have a great relationship. It's just that one area" —
the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of lust.
The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating
intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. "Really,"
she said, "women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic" — it is
dominated by the yearnings of "self-love," by the wish to be the object of
erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she
talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women's erotic
fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. "When it
comes to desire," she added, "women may be far less relational than men."
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems.
But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague.
On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer
lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural
reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and
longevity of relationships: "But it's wrong to think that because
relationships are what women choose they're the primary source of women's
desire."
Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a
great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy,
masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men, and
second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women are
more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it takes a
greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman's libido than
a man's. "If I don't love cake as much as you," she told me, "my cake better
be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it." And within a committed
relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases considerably,
not only because the woman's partner loses a degree of interest but also,
more important, because the woman feels that her partner is trapped, that a
choice — the choosing of her — is no longer being carried out.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana's talk of female lust: a woman pinned
against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana's vision, was an emblem
of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this
particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal
codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object
of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders.
Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the scene.
Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she
didn't dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and
protected. "What women want is a real dilemma," she said. Earlier, she showed
me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the
workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple
on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. "Women want to be thrown up
against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If
I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the
contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of
power and that he is a good man."
After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic — as
opposed to aversive - — fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of
relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an
analysis that defines rape as involving "the use of physical force, threat of
force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to
coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will," between one-third and
more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during
intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at
least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having
no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed
the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of
the real. "I hate the term 'rape fantasies,' " she went on. "They're really
fantasies of submission." She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much
that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. "But 'aggression,'
'dominance,' I have to find better words. 'Submission' isn't even a good
word" — it didn't reflect the woman's imagining of an ultimately willing
surrender.
Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose
because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily happen
when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas from our
many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen excitement
stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing of distinct
systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to confound a simpler
truth, that women associate lubrication with being turned on. The idea of
dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product of an unscientific
impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the unsettling evidence of
women's arousal during rape and during depictions of sexual assault in the
lab.
As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote
"semantics" in the margin of my notes before she said, "The word 'rape' comes
with gargantuan amounts of baggage." She continued: "I walk a fine line,
politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would
never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right
to take away a woman's autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my
students, 'Arousal is not consent.' "
We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of
repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for unencumbered
excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure glimpse into
desire, without meaning — especially in the case of sexual assault — that
the actual experiences are wanted.
"It's the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought," Chivers said about rape
fantasies. "To be all in the midbrain."
One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely
decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital and
subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged red
line that ran across the computer's screen, a line that traced one subject's
vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer
program to analyze her data, she needed to "clean" it, as the process is
called — she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a subject's
shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contraction that might have
jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the readings and
distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the line, with all its
tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the inordinate height of a
peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her that arousal wasn't at work,
that this particular instant was irrelevant to her experiment. She
highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then continued peering. She
would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a
single subject. "I'm going blind," she said, as she stared at another
suspicious crest.
It was painstaking work — and difficult to watch, not only because it might
be destroying Chivers's eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by the
vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers was
constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with numberless
aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she possibly complete
in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the sexologists in the world
who focus on female desire, whether they were wiring women with
plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains in fM.R.I. scanners
or fitting them with goggles or giving them questionnaires or following their
erotic lives for years? What more could sexologists ever provide than
intriguing hints and fragmented insights and contradictory conclusions? Could
any conclusion encompass the erotic drives of even one woman? Didn't the
sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by Diamond, commingle with Meana's
forces of narcissism? Didn't a longing for erotic tenderness coexist with a
yearning for alley ravishing? Weren't these but two examples of the myriad
conflicting elements that create women's lust? Had Freud's question gone
unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to
address it but because it is unanswerable?
Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her
thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her
own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help women,
she said that it could "shift the way women perceive their capacity to get
turned on," that as her lab results make their way into public consciousness,
the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects might get women to
realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of stimuli, that the state
of desire is much more easily reached than some women might think. She spoke
about helping women bring their subjective sense of lust into agreement with
their genital arousal as an approach to aiding those who complain that desire
eludes them. But didn't such thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of
the physiological and the subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it
might. The giant forest seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.
And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn't visible at all,
as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of
societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have
left women's lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. "So
many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality," she said.
"If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control
it? Why is it so frightening?" There was the implication, in her words, that
she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it,
that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might
represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might
be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its
core, women's sexuality might not be passive at all. There was the chance
that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women's lust
too deeply to unearth, to view.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red
lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of
data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female
desire — would see just as well.
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book, "The
Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing,"
will be published this month.
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