What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

stirred eight times more blood.
    Chivers’s subjects maintained that the strangers aroused them least of all the men they heard about. The plethysmograph said the opposite. Longtime lovers, male or female, were edged out by the unknown men or women—even though the lovers were dreams, perfect. Sex with strangers delivered a blood storm.
    This didn’t fit well with the societal assumption that female sexuality thrives on emotional connection, on established intimacy, on feelings of safety. Instead, the erotic might run best on something raw. This idea wasn’t completely new, but it tended to be offered as the exception rather than the rule: the raw was important to few women; it was the material of only intermittent fantasy for most. Here was systematic evidence to the contrary, the suggestion of a new, unvarnished norm.
    Chivers’s work emphasized discord not only between bodies and minds but between realities and expectations, and around her, other researchers, too, were calling conventions into doubt. One was the old notion that women’s sexuality is innately less visual than men’s. Kim Wallen, an Emory University psychology professor whose hordes of rhesus monkeys I visited between my tutorials with Chivers, collaborated with Heather Rupp, his former student and a sexologist at the Kinsey Institute, in showing erotic photographs to male and female subjects. They used viewing time, down to the thousandth of a second, to measure level of interest. The women gazed at the porn no less long than the men. It seemed they were just as riveted.
    Terri Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, had been dwelling for years on a series of studies, done over the past four decades, affirming repeatedly that men welcome casual sex while women, for the most part, don’t. In two of these experiments, males and females—“of average attractiveness,” as the researchers described them, and around twenty-two years old—were sent out onto a college campus to proposition two hundred members of the opposite sex. Either they asked for a date, or they asked, “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About the same percentage of men and women—50 percent or so—answered yes to the date. But close to three-quarters of the male responders and none of the females said yes to bed. The data had been used often to argue not only a vast but an intrinsic difference in the desires of men and women. Conley created a questionnaire to look at the topic in another way.
    Her two hundred college-aged subjects, all of them heterosexual, were asked to imagine scenarios like this: “You are fortunate enough to be able to spend your winter vacation in Los Angeles. One day, about a week into your stay, you decide to visit a trendy café in Malibu that overlooks the ocean. As you are sipping your drink, you look over and notice that the actor Johnny Depp is just a few tables away. You can hardly believe your eyes! Still more amazing, he catches your eye and then approaches you. . . .”
    “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Depp asked the female subjects. So did Brad Pitt and Donald Trump. The males were approached by Angelina Jolie, Christie Brinkley (chosen by Conley because she wondered whether at fifty-something a woman’s age would undercut her appeal despite her extreme beauty—it didn’t seem to), and Roseanne Barr. The experiment stripped away the social expectations, as well as the physical risks, that auger against a woman consenting to have sex with a stranger. Conley’s setup left only fantasy, frequently a clearer window into desire. The subjects scored how they felt about the propositions. The women were just as avid about saying yes to Depp and Pitt as the men were with Jolie and Brinkley; the women were just as hungry, impulsive, impelled. Trump was dismissed with as much distaste as Barr.
    Chivers, when she moved on to her next study, found something that complicated what she’d been seeing. But it also