What Do Women Want

depended almost completely on the female’s tracking, her ceaseless approaching, her lipping and stroking and belly-kissing and tap-tapping, her craving. Without her flood of ovulatory hormones, without the priming of her brain, copulation wasn’t going to occur.
    Are females the main sex-hunters in most other monkey species? The answer isn’t yet known, Wallen said; not enough meticulous science has been done. Capuchins, tonkeans, pigtails—he named three types whose females are the stalkers. With their sweeping tails and ebony faces, female langurs initiate fervently. And among the massive orangutans, scenes like this were documented, for the first time, in the late eighties: males lying on their backs, showing off their erections to females, and waiting passively; and females closing in, mounting, pumping. As for bonobos, with their strangely parted hair and reputation for abandon, females avidly get sex going with males and with each other.
    At last, with Deidrah tapping her crazed Morse code on the dirt, Oppenheimer reached out. Standing behind her, he set his hands on her hips. And suddenly she had what she sought, his swift thrusts. He pumped back and forth in a flurry. Then he paused, pulled out briefly, touched her flanks, and slid inside her again for another bout of thrusting. He humped and pulled out repeatedly. When he came, thighs quivering and eyes going fuzzy, she twisted, turned her face to his, smacked her lips at high speed, reached back to seize him, and yanked him violently forward.
    Her fulfillment was short-lived. Within minutes, she was hounding him again. At other moments, she might have moved on to the other male. “She has sex,” Wallen said, about rhesus females on the whole, “and when he goes into his post-ejaculatory snooze, what does she do? She immediately gets up and goes off and finds another.” Tracking the action of the compound, he asked himself, as he had so many times, whether the libido in women has similar drive, and whether “because of social conventions and imperatives, women frequently don’t act on or even recognize the intensity of motivation that monkeys obey.” He answered, “I feel confident that this is true.”
    W allen didn’t mean to imply perfect correspondence between Deidrah and the average human female. The distinctions included the impact of ovulation, so much more subtle in women. He and his former doctoral student Heather Rupp had been trying to grasp the ways that women’s monthly hormones spur the neurotransmitters of desire. In one study, they had taken three groups of straight females and showed them hundreds of similar pornographic pictures—all featuring women with men—in three rounds, at different points in the women’s cycles. Again, Wallen and Rupp used viewing time as a measure of the subjects’ interest in the porn. One result was predictable: in the first round, the women who were near ovulation stared longer than the other subjects. But something else caught them by surprise. These same women, whose first round of porn came at mid-cycle, when testosterone and estrogen peaked, stayed riveted when they returned to the lab for their second and third rounds, as the month wore on and these hormones faded. The women whose initial viewing came during lower hormonal stretches didn’t become transfixed when they ovulated. They continued to be less moved. Maybe, Wallen thought, some kind of conditioned arousal or indifference took hold. In later rounds, he guessed, the subjects still unconsciously linked the surroundings of the lab, the equipment, the porn to their reaction to their first viewing.
    “One lesson,” he said, “is that you don’t want a woman to form her first impression of you when she’s in the wrong menstrual phase. You’ll never recover.” He laughed.
    O ur conversation, on the platform above the compound, veered back to primatology, to the insights offered by our animal ancestors. He spoke about Deidrah’s abundance of lust and about its constraint in women—about a communal sense of danger, a half-conscious fear of societal disintegration, that lay behind the constraining. And as I listened, and afterward as I dwelled on things, I thought of the historic terrors, the carnal archetypes: of witches, whose evil “comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable,” according to the Christian doctrine of the Inquisition, “the mouth of the womb . . . never satisfied . . . wherefore for the sake of