Sinopsis
On the
subject of women and sex, Meredith Chivers was out to obliterate the civilized
world. The social conventions, the lists of sins, all the intangible influences
needed to go. “I’ve spent a lot of time,” she said, “attempting to get back in
my head to what life was like for proto-humans.”
When Chivers and I first met seven years
ago, she was in her mid-thirties. She wore high-heeled black boots that laced up
almost to her knees and skinny, stylish rectangular glasses. Her blond hair fell
over a scoop-necked black top. She was a young but distinguished scientist in a
discipline whose name, sexology, sounds something like a joke, a mismatching of
prefix and suffix, of the base and the erudite. Yet the matching is in
earnest—the ambitions of the field have always been grand. And Chivers’s dreams
were no different. She hoped to peer into the workings of the psyche, to see
somehow past the consequences of culture, of nurture, of all that is learned,
and to apprehend a piece of women’s primal and essential selves: a fundamental
set of sexual truths that exist—inherently—at the core.
Men are animals. On matters of eros, we
accept this as a kind of psychological axiom. Men are tamed by society, kept,
for the most part, between boundaries, yet the subduing isn’t so complete as to
hide their natural state, which announces itself in endless ways—through
pornography, through promiscuity, through the infinity of gazes directed at
infinite passing bodies of desire—and which is affirmed by countless lessons of
popular science: that men’s minds are easily commandeered by the lower, less
advanced neural regions of the brain; that men are programmed by evolutionary
forces to be pitched inescapably into lust by the sight of certain physical
qualities or proportions, like the .7 waist-to-hip ratio in women that seems to
inflame heterosexual males all over the globe, from America to Guinea-Bissau;
that men are mandated, again by the dictates of evolution, to increase the odds
that their genes will survive in perpetuity and hence that they are compelled to
spread their seed, to crave as many .7’s as possible.
But why don’t we say that women, too, are
animals? Chivers was trying to discover animal realities.
She carried out her research in a series of
cities, in Evanston, Illinois, which sits right next to Chicago, in Toronto, and
most recently in Kingston, Ontario, which feels utterly on its own, tiny, and
fragile. The Kingston airport is barely more than a hangar. Kingston’s pale
stone architecture has a thick, appealing solidity, yet it doesn’t chase away
the sense that the little downtown area, on the frigid spot where Lake Ontario
spills into the Saint Lawrence River, isn’t much more formidable than when it
was founded as a French fur-trading post in the seventeenth century. Kingston is
the home of Queen’s University, a sprawling and esteemed institution of
learning, where Chivers was a psychology professor, but the city is stark and
scant enough that it is easy to imagine an earlier emptiness, the buildings
gone, the pavement gone, almost nothing there except evergreens and snow.
And this seemed fitting to me when I visited
her there. Because to reach the insight she wanted, she needed to do more than
strip away societal codes; she needed to get rid of all the streets, all the
physical as well as the incorporeal structures that have their effects on the
conscious and the unconscious; she needed to re-create some pure, primordial
situation, so that she could declare, This is what lies at the heart of women’s
sexuality.
Plainly, she wasn’t going to be able to
establish such conditions for her studies. Almost surely, for that matter, such
pure conditions never existed, because proto-humans, our forehead-deficient
Homo heidelbergensis and Homo
rhodesiensis ancestors of some hundreds of thousands of years ago, had
proto-cultures. But what she possessed was a plethysmograph: a miniature bulb
and light sensor that you place inside the vagina.
This is what her female subjects did as they
sat on a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small, dimly lit lab in
Toronto, where she first told me about her experiments. Semireclining on the
La-Z-Boy, each subject watched an array of porn on an old, bulky computer
monitor. The two-inch-long glassine tube of the plethysmograph beams light
against the vaginal walls and reads the illumination that bounces back. In this
way, it measures the blood flow to the vagina. Surges of blood stir a process
called vaginal transudation, the seeping of moisture through the cells of the
canal’s lining. So, indirectly, the plethysmograph gauges vaginal wetness. It
was a way to get past the obfuscations of the mind, the interference of the
brain’s repressive upper regions, and to find out, at a primitive level, what
turns women on.
As they enrolled in the study, Chivers’s
subjects had identified themselves as straight or lesbian. This is what all of
them saw:
A lush-bodied woman lay back beneath her
lover on a green army blanket in the woods. His hair was cropped, his shoulders
hulking. He propped his torso on rigid arms and slid inside her. She lifted her
thighs and enwrapped him with her calves. The pace of his thrusting quickened,
the muscles of his buttocks rippled, her fingers spread and seized his
triceps.
After each ninety-second clip of porn, the
subjects watched a video that sent the plethysmograph’s readings back to a
baseline state. The camera scanned jagged mountains and rested on a parched
plateau.
Then a man walked naked on a beach. His back
formed a V, and ridges of muscle angled toward his groin above his taut thighs.
He flung a stone into the surf. His chest was massive. So were his buttocks,
without a hint of fat. He strode along a rock precipice. His penis, relaxed,
slung from side to side. He tossed another stone and stretched his spectacular
back.
A slender woman with a soft, oval face and
dark, curly hair sat on the lip of a large tub. Her skin was tan, her areolas
dark. Another woman rose from the water, her soaked blond hair raked behind her
ears. She pressed her face between the brunette’s thighs and whisked with her
tongue.
On his knees an unshaven man mouthed a
sizeable penis that rose below a sheer, muscled stomach.
A woman with long black hair leaned forward
on the arm of a lounge chair, her smooth buttocks elevated. Then she settled her
light brown body onto the white upholstery. Her legs were long, her breasts
full, high. She licked her fingertips and stroked her clitoris. She pulled her
spread knees up. She handled one breast. Her hips began to grind and lift.
A man drove himself into the ass of another
man, who let out a grateful moan; a woman scissored her legs in a solitary
session of nude calisthenics; a bespectacled, sculpted man lay on his back and
masturbated; a man slipped a woman’s black thong over her thighs and began with
his tongue; a woman straddled another woman who wore a strap-on.
Then a pair of bonobos—a species of
ape—strolled through a grassy field, the male’s reedy, pig-colored erection on
view. Abruptly, the female splayed herself, her back on the ground and legs in
the air. While her mate thrust into her, his rhythm furious, she threw her hands
above her head, as if in total erotic surrender.
Sitting on the leatherette chair, Chivers’s
subjects, straight and lesbian, were turned on right away by all of it,
including the copulating apes. To stare at the data amassed by the
plethysmograph was to confront a vision of anarchic arousal.
This was my initial glimpse of sexology’s strivings
after female desire. Chivers’s husband, a psychologist whose thinking I’d sought
out for another book about sex, introduced us. And soon I was learning not only
from Chivers but from many of the researchers she called a “gathering critical
mass” of female scientists who were set on puzzling out the ways of eros in
women. There was Marta Meana with her high-tech eye-tracker and Lisa Diamond
with her low-tech, long-term studies of women’s erotic existences and Terri
Fisher with her fake polygraph machine. Men, too, were part of the project.
There was Kim Wallen with his monkeys and Jim Pfaus with his rats. There was
Adriaan Tuiten with his genetic screening and his specially designed
aphrodisiacs, Lybrido and Lybridos, that were headed to the Food and Drug
Administration for approval.
And while they tutored me in their labs and
animal observatories, I was listening as well to numberless everyday women who
shared their yearnings and their bewilderment, who explained what they could—and
couldn’t—understand about their sexuality. Some of their stories are laced
throughout these pages. There was Isabel, who, in her early thirties, was
tormented by a basic question: whether she should marry the handsome and adoring
boyfriend she had once—but no longer—desired. Every so often, when they stood at
a bar, she told him, “Kiss me like we’ve never met before.” She felt a
reverberation, terribly faint, instantly fading. It mocked her, teaching her
repeatedly: better not to make requests like that. “I’m not even thirty-five,”
she said to me. “That tingling—I don’t get to feel that anymore?” And there was
Wendy, who, ten years older than Isabel, had signed up for the Lybrido and
Lybridos trials, to see if an experimental pill could restore some of the
wanting that had once overtaken her with her husband, the father of her two
children.
Others I interviewed—like Cheryl, who was
slowly, deliberately reclaiming her capacity for lust after disfiguring cancer
surgery, or Emma, who wanted our conversation to start at the strip club where
she’d made her living a decade ago—don’t appear in these chapters but invisibly
inform them. I interviewed and interviewed and interviewed, hoping for yet more
sight lines, and in the end, recent science and women’s voices left me with
pointed lessons:
That women’s desire—its inherent range and
innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when
all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction.
That despite the notions our culture
continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained
by emotional intimacy and safety, as Marta Meana would stress both in front of
her eye-tracker and beside a casino stage.
And that one of our most comforting
assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that
female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely
more than a fairy tale.
Monogamy is among our culture’s most
treasured and entrenched ideals. We may doubt the standard, wondering if it is
misguided, and we may fail to uphold it, but still we look to it as to something
reassuring and simply right. It defines who we aim to be romantically; it
dictates the shape of our families, or at least it dictates our domestic dreams;
it molds our beliefs about what it means to be a good parent. Monogamy is—or we
feel that it is—part of the crucial stitching that keeps our society together,
that prevents all from unraveling.
Women are supposed to be the standard’s more
natural allies, caretakers, defenders, their sexual beings more suited,
biologically, to faithfulness. We hold tight to the fairy tale. We hold on with
the help of evolutionary psychology, a discipline whose central sexual theory
comparing women and men—a theory that is thinly supported—permeates our
consciousness and calms our fears. And meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies
search for a drug, a drug for women, that will serve as monogamy’s cure.
Content
Chapter One:
Animals
Chapter Two: Bodies
and Minds
Chapter Three: The
Sexual Fable of Evolutionary Science
Chapter Four: Monkeys
and Rats
Chapter Five:
Narcissism
Chapter Six: The
Alley
Chapter Seven:
Monogamy
Chapter Eight: Four
Orgasms
Chapter Nine:
Magic
Chapter Ten: A
Beginning
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