What Do Women Want

means to tunnel beneath consciousness and perhaps beyond culture. She outlined the study, then said that she’d been thinking about the scene in her college lecture hall twenty years before, about the sound of “Eeew,” about that fleeting, unforgettable, half-funny syllable as an expression of a history and prehistory of “all kinds of prohibitions and restrictive perspectives on female sexuality.” Suddenly her voice leapt: “Look at all the barriers! Look at all the obstacles! But that isn’t what amazes me.”
    She was a fastidious scientist who chose to surround herself with surfaces of barely adorned cinder block, to spend her days in an almost monk-like cell, to avoid pronouncements, to let her data speak for itself. Now, though, she ignored the scientific restraints. “Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament. Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that.”

Chapter Five
    Narcissism
    O ne wall of Marta Meana’s cramped university office was covered with postcard-sized reproductions, portraits from past centuries. All were of women. The faces of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Portrait of a Young Woman floated on their dark backgrounds, their skin luminous, their eyes turned toward something or someone behind them.
    Below them, as a joke, Meana handed me a picture of two control panels. One symbolized the workings of male desire; the other, female. One had only a simple on-off switch; the other had countless knobs. “Trying to figure out what women want,” she said, “is a real dilemma.” It was a dilemma she was trying to address—as a scientist, as a couples counselor, and as the president of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, the most prominent organization in its clinical field—in different ways than Chivers.
    And it was a dilemma that Isabel, a lawyer at a nonprofit, was attempting to solve for herself as she debated whether she should stay with her boyfriend of eighteen months, Eric, and marry him if he proposed, which she sensed he would. The issue was that despite his good looks, his intelligence, his kindness, and his skill in bed, she rarely wanted to make love with him.
    Isabel, who was not one of Meana’s patients but was one of the women I spent my time learning from, recounted a scene from the evening of last year’s Valentine’s Day. In her small Manhattan apartment, Eric had run her a bath, strewn it with salts, surrounded it with candles, and considerately left her to lie alone in it. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she found her bedroom lit with more candles. And on her bed was a deluge of rose petals arranged in the shape of a heart. Through a fair amount of conscious effort, she managed to be seduced by this gift: while Eric took her place in the bathroom and showered, she lay back on the bed, brushed the petals across her lips, and dropped some onto her shoulders and breasts. When he emerged from the shower, she did feel pleasure as he went down on her, slid his broad shoulders up her body, and slid inside her. But the pleasure was precarious. And on many other nights what she felt was merely patience or something worse than that.
    She loved him, she was certain. She said, “I remember the first time I brought Eric home to St. Louis to meet my dad and my stepmother and my grandmother. She’s eighty-eight years old. She helped raise me when my parents were divorced. We call her The Patter. If she sits next to you, she’s going to find some part of you and pat it. She’s going to pat your hand or your knee or your arm. Pat-pat-pat as you sit there. She’s incredibly special to me. She’s incredibly affectionate. She’s deaf, mostly. I think that’s one reason she’s so tactile; her ability to communicate is hampered. There’s something very child-like about her. And one afternoon during that visit, I walked into the living room, and she and Eric were sitting on the couch, holding hands. He looked totally comfortable. There was nothing ironic in his expression. I think they had been talking, but talking is labor-intensive with Granny, and now they were watching TV. Probably she’d been patting him, and they’d wound up holding hands. I think most men would have been highly self-conscious. Holding hands with her like that would have been an ironic exercise. But for Eric it was natural.”
    She also said, “The shades in my bedroom let in a small amount of light,