What Do Women Want

normal always wields a self-confirming and
self-perpetuating power. Because few people like to defy it, to stray from
it.
    One recent pop psychology mega-seller, The Female Brain , opens with lessons grounded in
parental investment theory and serves as an emblem of the ways evolutionary
psychology has spread its sexual vision throughout the culture. “The girl brain”
is a “machine built for connection,” for attachment. “That’s what it drives a
female to do from birth. This is the result of millennia of genetic and
evolutionary hardwiring.” The boy brain-machine is very different; it is built
for “frenzies” of lust.
    The book, like loads of others in the pop
psychology genre, pretends to back its evolutionary theory with something
concrete, with the technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging,
fMRI—with pictures of the brain at work. But the technology is nowhere near
being up to the task. To spend time in fMRI laboratories, to stare alongside
neuroscientists while fMRI data is sent from subjects’ brains to lab computers,
to listen as those neuroscientists strain to read and parse the pictures of
brain regions forming on their monitors, as I have, and to ask bluntly about the
state of our seemingly miraculous equipment, its capabilities much hyped by the
media, is to understand that our technology is not at all precise enough to
subdivide and apprehend the miniscule subregions and interlaced brain systems
that enact our complex emotions, among them the wish to have sex. When, on the
news or in a magazine, we hear or read something like, “The hippocampus lit up
as subjects looked at photographs of . . .” we are learning something
about as specific as a TV traffic reporter scanning from a helicopter and being
able to say only, “The heavy traffic is somewhere in northern New Jersey.” As
scientists told me again and again, brain imaging just isn’t a way to determine
much of anything definitive about female versus male emotional neurology, not
yet. And such technology may never be the right way to study inborn differences between the genders, because
experience—use and disuse, positive and negative reinforcement—is forever
altering neurological systems, strengthening some and weakening others.
    Proclamations like the ones in The Female Brain —about connection versus frenzies, or about how a
woman, to have satisfying sex, must be “comfortable, warm, and cozy” and, “most
important,” has “to trust who she is with”—are in striking parallel with the
teachings of fundamentalist Christianity. The secular version is less extreme,
but the messages are similar. As a pair of health education programs, designed
by evangelicals and used in thousands of public schools within the past decade,
instructed in their charts, the “five major needs of women” in marriage are
topped by “affection” and “conversation.” Sex is nowhere in the five. Across the
page, the male list is led by “sexual fulfillment.” In another graphic titled
“Guys and Girls are Different,” girls have an equals sign between “sex” and
“personal relationship.” Guys have the sign crossed out.
    So, with scientific or God-given confidence, girls
and women are told how they should feel.

Chapter Four
    Monkeys and Rats
    H er unruly red-blond hair tufting atop her head, Deidrah sat beside Oppenheimer. She lipped his ear. She mouthed his chest. She kissed his belly over and over, lips lingering with each kiss. After a while, he pulled himself up and strolled away from her attentions, glancing back over his shoulder to see if she was following. She was.
    Deidrah, who was probably the most reserved female monkey in the compound, started in again on his white-haired torso as they sat together on a concrete curb. The habitat, a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot square, was filled with ladders and ropes and assorted apparatus donated by a local fire department and by McDonald’s; an environment of trees and vines would have been too expensive to create and maintain. A trio of monkey children sprinted toward a tube, disappeared inside it, burst from the other end, and raced around for another run-through, berserk with joy.
    From a platform on a steel tower, I watched with Kim Wallen, his beard silver, his eyes alight. A psychologist and neuroendocrinologist, he spent much of his time here at Yerkes, an Emory University research center outside Atlanta that was home to two thousand primates. We gazed