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

crystalized the raw portrait of female lust that was emerging in her work and the research of her colleagues.
    A set of straight women looked at pictures of male and female genitalia. There were four kinds of photos: one with a dangling penis; another with a taut erection; a third with a demure vulva half-concealed by coy thighs. The fourth was a “full-on crotch shot,” Chivers said, with typical wry humor, of a woman with spread legs. In all four, the genitalia were tightly framed, mostly disembodied; there was little else to be seen. This time, the subjects’ blood wasn’t indiscriminate. It rushed much, much more when an erection occupied the screen than when any of the other images were on the monitor. Paradoxically, here was objective evidence that women were categorical after all. And this jibed with what Rebecca had said, that she didn’t quite think of herself as bisexual, that she felt an inescapable preference for men even as she harbored plenty of lust for women. It resonated, too, with the faint reactions of Chivers’s earlier subjects when the Adonis with the slack penis walked along the shore. It seemed that the visible slackness had nullified the rest of his impressive body. More than anything, though, as an isolated, rigid phallus filled vaginal blood vessels and sent the red line of the plethysmograph high, niceties vanished, conventions cracked; female desire was, at base, nothing if not animal.

Chapter
Three
    The Sexual Fable of
Evolutionary Science
    T he history
of sexuality, and perhaps above all the history of women’s sexuality, is a
discipline of shards. And it is men, with rare exceptions, whose recorded words
form the fragments we have of ancient and medieval and early modern ideas about
female eros. Such glimpses are worth only so much. But what can be said about
these fragments is that they add up to a particular sort of balance—or
imbalance—between an acceptance and even a celebration of desire and drive on
the one hand and, on the other, an overriding fear.
    A woman in the Bible’s Song of Songs:
    I sleep, but my heart
is awake
    I hear my love
knocking.
    “Open to me, my sister,
my beloved,
    My dove, my perfect
one,
    For my head is wet with
dew,
    My hair with the drops
of the night.”
    . . . My love
thrust his hand
    Through the hole in the
door.
    I trembled to the core
of my being.
    . . . Passion
as relentless as Sheol.
    The flash of it a flash
of fire,
    A flame of the Lord
himself.
    There is no sign of terror here, only a sacred
glory of thrusting and trembling. And there is this recognition of women’s
erotic need from Exodus: “If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment,
and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.” The archaic King James
phrasing can thwart contemporary understanding; the same line in more recent
biblical language reads, “He must not neglect the rights of the first wife to
food, clothing, and sexual intimacy.”
    From Paul in First Corinthians, in King James: “Let
the husband render unto the wife due benevolence.” Or, in a modern edition’s
version of “due benevolence”: “The husband should fulfill his wife
sexually.”
    A steady heat and urgency rises from the quills of
the Bible’s compilers in classical times and rises, too, from classical poetry
and myth and medical texts. “Eros, again now, loosener of limbs, troubles me,
uncontrollable creature,” Sappho wrote. And Ovid’s Tiresias, who lived as both
male and female, declaimed that women take nine times more pleasure in sex. And
Galen of Pergamum, physician to the Roman emperor and great anatomist of
antiquity, pronounced that female orgasm was necessary for conception: a woman’s
climactic emission had to meet up with a man’s. The contents of this female
substance seem never to have been specified, but the requirement of ecstasy—a
moment that appears to match our current definitions—was, for Galen,
absolute.
    For the next millennium and a half, until a