What Do Women Want

ministers throughout the Eastern states, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
to her husband, “What terrible temptations lie in the way of your sex—till now I
never realized it—for tho I did love you with an almost insane love before I
married you I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could
be tempted in that way—there never was a moment when I felt anything by which
you could have drawn me astray—for I loved you as I now love God.” And
meanwhile, the renowned British gynecologist and medical writer William Acton
was making plain that “the majority of women, happily for society, are not very
much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.”
    Yet beyond reproductive science, feminism, and
religion, the Industrial Revolution had a tremendous impact on the West’s
thinking about what it meant to be female. Class barriers were breaking down;
men could climb. This placed a value on work and professional ambition to a
degree that may never have existed before, now that the rewards were potentially
unlimited. And work—to borrow from Freud, who both was and wasn’t a
Victorian—required sublimation. Eros needed to be tamped down, libido redirected
toward accomplishment. Victorianism assigned the tamping, the task of overall
sexual restriction, primarily to women.
    How far have we traveled in the last hundred or so
years? In one way of seeing, Victorianism is a curio, encased in the past, its
pinched rectitude easy to laugh at. This argument relies on a line of evidence
leading rapidly away from the minimizing or denial of female sexuality, a line
running through Freud’s candid investigations of the erotic in women, through
the brashness of the Jazz Age, the brazenness of flapper girls. It runs through
the invention of the birth control pill, through the social upending brought by
the sixties and the sexual revolution, and on through Madonna’s aggressive
cone-shaped breastplates and the pornographic self-displays of any number of
lesser female celebrities. The opposing argument begins, too, with Freud, with
the sections of his writing that render women as having, by nature, “a weaker
sexual instinct,” an inferior erotic capacity, and passes through post–World War
I advice books like one informing that, unlike just about all males, “the number
of women who are not satisfied with one mate is exceedingly small.” From the
forties and fifties, there is the story of Alfred Kinsey, whose research funds
were revoked when, unforgivably, he turned from cataloguing the sex lives of men
to publishing Sexual Behavior in the Human Female .
Then, from the late sixties, there is the bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex delivering emotional
law: “Before a woman can have sexual intercourse with a man she must have social
intercourse with him.” And finally there is the confluence between strains of
contemporary thought: between the virginal edicts aimed mainly at girls and
young women by evangelical Christianity, the waves of panic and sexual
protectionism that overtake secular culture when it comes to girls but not boys,
and the widely believed—and flimsily supported—thesis of evolutionary psychology
that, relative to men, who are hardwired to hunt for the gratification of sex,
women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.
    This confluence is telling. In subtle yet essential
ways, Victorian thinking about women and sex isn’t so alien to our era. And
science—evolutionary psychology—is an unlikely conservative influence.
Mainstream evolutionary theory nimbly explains our physiological traits, from
our opposable thumbs to our upright posture to the makeup of our immune systems.
By contrast, evolutionary psychology, a field that has bloomed over the last few
decades, sets out to use the same Darwinian principles to illuminate the
characteristics of the human psyche, from our willingness to cooperate to our
inclinations in one of the discipline’s main areas of investigation, sex. The
ambitions of the field are enticing and elusive, enticing because they hold out
the promise that Darwin’s grand logic can provide us with an all-encompassing
understanding of ourselves, and elusive because the characteristics are so
intricate and may have been created mostly by culture rather than inherited on
our chromosomes. Evolutionary psychologists put absolute faith in the idea that
our patterns of behavior and motivation and emotion are primarily