What Do Women Want

imbalance on stage. She began simply, with something that fit with what Chivers had found through her plethysmograph, as the flaccid Adonis tossed stones on the beach. “The female body looks the same whether aroused or not. The male without an erection,” Meana said, “is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion, of sex.” The suggestion sent a charge through both genders.
    And then, the imbalance served women in a further way, an essential way—a way that formed the crux of Meana’s thinking. To be desired was at the heart of women’s desiring. Narcissism, she stressed—and she used the word not in damning judgment but in plain description—was at the core of women’s sexual psyches. The females in the audience gazed, erotically excited, at the women on stage, imagining that their own bodies were as searingly wanted as those in front of them.
    F rom her office wall, in one of the two Vermeers Meana had put up, the young woman glanced back and outward, her thin-lipped mouth smiling timorously, as if she couldn’t be sure anyone was aware of her. In the other, the more full, parted lips were not smiling at all. The girl had no doubt she was being watched.
    “Being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically; it was at once the thing craved and the spark of craving. Her confidence about this narcissistic engine arose partly from a curtained area in her lab, from a contraption that seemed to belong in an ophthalmologist’s office. With chin clamped and immobilized on its little cradle, her subjects peered at a screen, at a series of soft-porn images. The contraption took hundreds of readings per second of how the eyes roamed and where they paused.
    For a few years, she had been comparing female and male patterns of focus. Long ago, she had earned a master’s in literature and planned on a career teaching great novels. But she found she couldn’t endure standing in front of a classroom and trying to make her students share what she felt. “I didn’t want to tarnish it,” she said. So she had returned to study as an undergraduate, to get the background she needed to start on her doctorate in psychology.
    In a study she had just published, her heterosexual subjects had gazed at pictures of men and women in foreplay, among them a couple standing at a kitchen sink, he behind her, tight against her, genitals out of sight, the two of them wearing little more than a few suds of dish soap. Viewing the sequence of pictures, the male subjects stared far more at the women on the screen, at their faces and bodies, than at the men. The females looked equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the women’s bodies—to the expressions, it seemed, of desire in the men and to the flesh desired in the women. For the females, heat seemed to radiate from the men’s urgency and from the women’s power to generate it.
    M eana wanted to test this further. She had to be certain that the females weren’t checking out the women’s bodies merely for the sake of comparison with their own. She had to dispense with this reason that she saw as intertwined but secondary; she had to confirm that her subjects were staring at what turned them on.
    One method might have been to run the same experiment while her subjects masturbated. That way, their eyes would more surely seek out what carried an erotic jolt. But there was little chance that she could get this kind of study approved by the university’s review board and, even if she could, too high a chance that research with masturbating women would bring Meana the outraged scorn of Las Vegas’s conservative press—condemnation that could, in turn, endanger all of her explorations. Las Vegas was a paradoxical place, with nearly all its advertising based on titillation and with prostitutes waiting at licensed ranches down the highway and yet with a prudish strain in the atmosphere, a resistance to the animal impulses that made people flock to the city. This divided psyche seemed an extreme version of a split that ran throughout the country. It left the erotic as hard to study as it was omnipresent. This was partially why Chivers, who had earned her PhD and done the first of her plethysmographic experiments in the States, had returned home to Canada after graduate school to continue. During her years in the United States, her research had been the target of ridicule. The Washington Times