What Do Women Want

crown of roses and baby’s breath. She couldn’t have been more pleased; the outfit was the prettiest she had ever put on. But when she glimpsed the girl chosen to walk alongside her, who wore the same flounce and trim and sash, and who seemed half Isabel’s size, the spell cast by the fairy-tale clothes floated away, replaced by bewilderment, then despair, that two seven-year-olds in identical gowns could look so far from identical. Ever since, she’d seen herself as encased by a soft excess, sometimes horrifically thick, sometimes subtle. She assaulted this flesh by dieting, or ignored yet never forgot it. And though as an adult she told herself that it had been years since anyone could rightly have called her even chunky, still there was this padding that dismayed her. Under Michael’s stare, she had felt pared away. The sharpness of his eyes had somehow cut her body to a better outline. Eric didn’t have that ability. He was gentle, while Michael had been gentlemanly; he was empathetic, while Michael was at once solicitous and commanding. Michael’s admiration had convinced her of her allure; Eric’s telling her she was beautiful couldn’t quite make it so.
    The relationship with Michael had ended only because she understood he would never commit to her, never marry her or even live with her, but it didn’t end cleanly at all. Months after breaking things off, she met him for dinner, and afterward, outside, he turned up the collar of her overcoat, hailed her a cab, and five minutes later sent her a text: I’m following you. Soon she was buzzing him into her building. There were lapses like that, lapses and lapses. The end point she had announced to her friends took forever, it seemed, to become fact, until she could no longer bear to confess her failures to them.
    “I could not part with him,” she said. “I couldn’t get him out of my skull.”
    M eana was a psychology professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and just before I flew out to meet her, she said that we should start by going together to a Cirque du Soleil show at one of the casinos. So, soon after my plane landed, we sat in a darkened U-shaped theater and began our conversation while a pair of topless, dark-haired women in G-strings dove backward into a giant water-filled champagne glass on stage. The women plunged in from opposite sides of the pool, swam toward each other, and entangled with each other, eel-like. They slid up the walls, arching their spines and dragging their breasts along the glass.
    Next, a wispy blonde came skipping like a schoolgirl out on stage. Wearing a tiny pleated skirt, she swirled her hips and kept a set of hula hoops spinning around her waist. Suddenly a cable snatched her up above the audience, hoisting her high. It was her act’s climactic moment, a symbolic ravishing. The nymphet opened her legs wide above our eyes, splitting them wider than seemed humanly possible; the splitting was almost violent.
    Then a sinewy black woman wearing only beads thrust and pumped her gleaming body to a tribal beat. The soft-porn performances followed each other in fast succession, the stage dominated by arresting women. The audience was divided equally between the sexes. Finally the platinum-wigged MC cried out, “Where’s the beef?” and a long-haired man in a cowboy’s vest and chaps climbed through a trap door. He strutted and swiveled and bared his abdominal ladder of muscle. He shed the chaps, kept only his groin covered, and stood in his cowboy boots, flexing his ass. Yet even as male nudity had its minutes, a dozen female bodies surrounded him.
    In her early fifties, Meana, wearing a shirtdress and tights that evening and wearing her bronze-colored hair in bangs, didn’t doubt the usual explanations for the fact that women far outnumbered men among the performers, though she didn’t believe they were terribly illuminating. Those explanations went like this: The men in the audience would have been made too uneasy by more male nudity on stage. For them—for the heterosexuals among them, anyway—the cowboy needed to be obscured by breasts. And for the women in the crowd, the female nakedness fed an addiction—judging their own looks against iconic beauty. So the ticket buyers were gratified, given a live version of what they were used to from a million images on billboards, in magazines, on television: for the men, an opportunity to lust; for the women, a chance to compare.
    Meana saw more in the