What Do Women Want

fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils”; and of Eve, upon whose sinfulness all of Christianity is constructed, Eve, for whose evil the Son of God has to die, to sacrifice himself so that humanity can have a chance at redemption. This was the foundation, what lay beneath our culture’s primary religion; it was imbedded in our societal psyche. And I thought, too, of monogamy: our inchoate idea that monogamy girds against social chaos and collapse, and our notion—the desperate inversion of our terror—that the female libido is limited and that women are monogamy’s natural guardians. So we managed our fear.
    Why, from beginnings in equally obscure academic publications, had parental investment theory come to permeate cultural assumptions over recent decades while monkey realities, ancestral facts, remained much less known? We embraced the science that soothed us, the science we wanted to hear.
    “T his organ serves a pleasure god,” Jim Pfaus said. He held a plastic replica of the human brain in his hands. A Van Dyke beard and a hoop earring adorned his animated face. His expertise as a neuroscientist and his Concordia University labs were called on by the major pharmaceutical companies whenever they wanted to test, in rats, a new drug that might serve as an aphrodisiac in women—none had worked out in women so far. His labs sat in a university basement. There he studied his rats in a variety of cages and, in a surgical theater, removed their brains—about as big as a person’s thumb from the middle knuckle to the tip.
    Pfaus was obsessed with rat ways of seeing and feeling, learning and lusting, and when he wanted to investigate, say, exactly which set of neurons were sparked by a type of stimulation, by copulation-like prodding of the cervix or by the excitement of glimpsing a desirable male, one method was to provide a female rat with the experience, kill it, extract and freeze her brain, place the organ on a device resembling a miniature cold-cut slicer at a delicatessen, and shave off a specific, infinitesimally thin cross section. Peering at the slice through a microscope, he could pinpoint recent neural activity by noting the tiny black dots that told him where certain protein molecules—by-products of cell signaling—had been manufactured.
    It was due to one woman that Pfaus—in his spare time the lead singer in a punk band called Mold—had been drawn to his specialty. Until the late seventies, scientists didn’t study desire in rat females; they didn’t see it; it didn’t exist: as with the rhesus, scientists fixated on what the rat female did in the act of sex, not what she did to get there. And what she did in the act was go into paralysis. She froze in a position called lordosis, with her spine slung low and her butt cocked high, so the male could penetrate. Rat intercourse required female rigor mortis. It was easy to understand the female as absolutely passive, without will, a vessel whose involuntary perfume pulled the male in. Similar scientific ignorance had pervaded our idea of females across the animal kingdom, with “receptivity” being the key term.
    But then Martha McClintock, like Wallen, helped take scientists deeper. McClintock had begun to make herself famous years earlier while still an undergraduate at the all-women Wellesley College. She built a case that women living in close proximity responded to each other’s hormonal scents, causing the timing of their menstrual periods to converge, and her work was published in the revered journal Nature . Soon she was calling attention to female rat solicitations, to the female’s specific hops and darts, her head-pointings and prancings away—her methods of inciting the male to put his forepaws on her flanks; to set his paws into the whir of flank-patting that instantly immobilized her, as though by hypnosis; and to slide himself into her. While Pfaus and I talked about this in front of a bank of his Plexiglas cages, one of his females went further, as regularly happened. Dealing with a stolid, sexually uninterested male, she stood behind him, mounted his backside, and humped, as though to put ideas in his head. How, Pfaus marveled, could science not have noticed this?
    McClintock documented, too, that the female, if her cage allowed her to evade her partner, made sure to slip away from him, constantly, in the midst of his pumping, so the sex didn’t end too quickly for her. Under any circumstances, in rat as in