What Do Women Want

it measures the blood flow to the vagina. Surges of blood stir a process called vaginal transudation, the seeping of moisture through the cells of the canal’s lining. So, indirectly, the plethysmograph gauges vaginal wetness. It was a way to get past the obfuscations of the mind, the interference of the brain’s repressive upper regions, and to find out, at a primitive level, what turns women on.
    As they enrolled in the study, Chivers’s subjects had identified themselves as straight or lesbian. This is what all of them saw:
    A lush-bodied woman lay back beneath her lover on a green army blanket in the woods. His hair was cropped, his shoulders hulking. He propped his torso on rigid arms and slid inside her. She lifted her thighs and enwrapped him with her calves. The pace of his thrusting quickened, the muscles of his buttocks rippled, her fingers spread and seized his triceps.
    After each ninety-second clip of porn, the subjects watched a video that sent the plethysmograph’s readings back to a baseline state. The camera scanned jagged mountains and rested on a parched plateau.
    Then a man walked naked on a beach. His back formed a V, and ridges of muscle angled toward his groin above his taut thighs. He flung a stone into the surf. His chest was massive. So were his buttocks, without a hint of fat. He strode along a rock precipice. His penis, relaxed, slung from side to side. He tossed another stone and stretched his spectacular back.
    A slender woman with a soft, oval face and dark, curly hair sat on the lip of a large tub. Her skin was tan, her areolas dark. Another woman rose from the water, her soaked blond hair raked behind her ears. She pressed her face between the brunette’s thighs and whisked with her tongue.
    On his knees an unshaven man mouthed a sizeable penis that rose below a sheer, muscled stomach.
    A woman with long black hair leaned forward on the arm of a lounge chair, her smooth buttocks elevated. Then she settled her light brown body onto the white upholstery. Her legs were long, her breasts full, high. She licked her fingertips and stroked her clitoris. She pulled her spread knees up. She handled one breast. Her hips began to grind and lift.
    A man drove himself into the ass of another man, who let out a grateful moan; a woman scissored her legs in a solitary session of nude calisthenics; a bespectacled, sculpted man lay on his back and masturbated; a man slipped a woman’s black thong over her thighs and began with his tongue; a woman straddled another woman who wore a strap-on.
    Then a pair of bonobos—a species of ape—strolled through a grassy field, the male’s reedy, pig-colored erection on view. Abruptly, the female splayed herself, her back on the ground and legs in the air. While her mate thrust into her, his rhythm furious, she threw her hands above her head, as if in total erotic surrender.
    Sitting on the leatherette chair, Chivers’s subjects, straight and lesbian, were turned on right away by all of it, including the copulating apes. To stare at the data amassed by the plethysmograph was to confront a vision of anarchic arousal.
    T his was my initial glimpse of sexology’s strivings after female desire. Chivers’s husband, a psychologist whose thinking I’d sought out for another book about sex, introduced us. And soon I was learning not only from Chivers but from many of the researchers she called a “gathering critical mass” of female scientists who were set on puzzling out the ways of eros in women. There was Marta Meana with her high-tech eye-tracker and Lisa Diamond with her low-tech, long-term studies of women’s erotic existences and Terri Fisher with her fake polygraph machine. Men, too, were part of the project. There was Kim Wallen with his monkeys and Jim Pfaus with his rats. There was Adriaan Tuiten with his genetic screening and his specially designed aphrodisiacs, Lybrido and Lybridos, that were headed to the Food and Drug Administration for approval.
    And while they tutored me in their labs and animal observatories, I was listening as well to numberless everyday women who shared their yearnings and their bewilderment, who explained what they could—and couldn’t—understand about their sexuality. Some of their stories are laced throughout these pages. There was Isabel, who, in her early thirties, was tormented by a basic question: whether she should marry the handsome and adoring boyfriend she had once—but no longer—desired. Every so