What Do Women Want

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 few
hundred years ago, Galen’s understanding dominated science. A woman’s “certain
tremor” was a key to procreation for the fifth-century Byzantine physician
Aetius of Amida. The Persian scholar Avicenna, whose eleventh-century Canon of Medicine was studied throughout the world,
worried that a small penis might be an impediment to reproduction. The woman
might not be “pleased by it,” might not feel enough sensation to send her into
blissful spasms, “whereupon she does not emit sperm, and when she does not emit
sperm a child is not made.” Gabriele Falloppio, discoverer of the Fallopian
tubes in sixteenth-century Italy, stressed that a man’s malformed foreskin might
impede a woman’s orgasm and impregnation.
    How did Galen’s thinking cling on so tenaciously?
The longevity of his teaching is all the more baffling, given that only about
one-third of women, nowadays, say they can climax through penetration alone.
Were men and women of Galen’s time, and long after, deftly attentive to the
clitoris during intercourse? Better coached in the methods of vaginal orgasms?
The shards offer up no answers. But, assuming that sexual skill was no better
then than now, didn’t women ever volunteer that they’d conceived without the
tremor? Hints and theories of procreation without pleasure did emerge over the
centuries, yet somehow Galen’s wisdom wasn’t supplanted. In the late sixteen
hundreds, the widely used English midwifery manual titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece , which asserted its scientific