What Do Women Want

down at the habitat’s seventy-five rhesus, a monkey species that had been sent into orbit in spaceships, in the fifties and sixties, as stand-ins for humans to see if we could survive trips to the moon. Wallen had lived on a farm as a child when his father, a psychologist, decided to try out a utopian dream of cooperative goat-rearing. Wallen’s observation of animal sexuality had begun then. He’d been watching monkeys now for decades.
    “Females were passive. That was the theory in the middle seventies. That was the wisdom,” he remembered the start of his career. Deidrah’s face, always a bit redder than most, was luminous this morning, lit scarlet with lust as she lifted it from Oppenheimer’s chest. “The prevailing model was that female hormones affected female pheromones—affected the female’s smell, her attractivity to the male. The male initiated all sexual behavior.” What science had managed to miss in the monkeys—what it had effectively erased—was female desire.
    And it had missed more than that. In this breed used as our astronaut doubles, females are the bullies and murderers, the generals in brutal warfare, the governors. This had been noted in journal articles back in the thirties and forties, but thereafter it had gone mainly unrecognized, the articles buried and the behavior oddly unperceived. “It so flew in the face of prevailing ideas about the dominant role of males,” Wallen said, “that it was just ignored.”
    What mostly male scientists had expected and likely wanted to see appeared to have blinded them. Wallen’s career had been about pulling away the blinders. At the moment, below us, one female clawed fiercely at another, bit into a leg, whipped the weaker one back and forth like a weightless doll. Harrowing shrieks rose up. Four or five more monkeys joined in, attacking the one, who escaped somehow, sped away, was caught again. The shrieks grew more plaintive, more piercing, the attackers piling on, apparently for the kill, then desisting inexplicably. Assaults like this flared often; Wallen and his team usually couldn’t glean the reasons. Full battle—one female-led family’s attempt to overthrow another—was rare. That tended toward death: death from wounds and, some veterinarians thought, from sheer fright and shock. Occasionally the compound was littered with corpses.
    When he thought about the way science had somehow kept itself oblivious to female monkey lust for so long, Wallen blamed not only preconceptions but the sex act itself. “When you look at the sexual interaction, it’s easy to see what the male is doing; he’s thrusting. It takes really focusing on the entire interaction to see all that the female is doing—and once you truly see it, you can never overlook it again.”
    Deidrah fingered Oppenheimer’s belly, caressing, desperate to win his favors. He flopped down on his front, inert in a strip of sun. She kissed where she could get access, his ear again. The red of her face bordered on neon. She was near or in the midst of ovulation, her libidinous hormones high. When it comes to their cycles and sex, female monkeys are somewhere between lower mammals and humans; rhesus mating isn’t limited to the time of ovulation, but in most situations, that’s when it’s a lot more likely to occur.
    What was happening between Deidrah’s ovaries and her brain as she stalked and stroked Oppenheimer is only partially understood, and the ways that biochemistry affects desire in women is even more complicated. Basically, though, sex hormones produced by the ovaries and adrenal glands—testosterone, estrogen—prime the primitive regions of the brain, territory lying not far from the brain stem and shared by species from Homo sapiens to lizards. This hormonal bathing then affects the intricate systems of neurotransmitters, like dopamine, that send signals within the brain, and this, in turn, alters perception and leads—in people and monkeys, in dogs and rats—to lust. The belief that animals, especially species less advanced than primates, don’t experience lust, that their mating is scripted to the point of making them sexual automatons, is wrong, as Jim Pfaus, a neuroscientist at Concordia University in Montreal, would soon explain to me. Now, on the far side of the ladders and ropes, Deidrah was mouthing Oppenheimer’s ear more and more ardently.
    Bulky and torpid, Oppenheimer and the habitat’s other adult male didn’t fully take part in the