What Do Women Want

had protested the American government dollars that helped to pay for her work. “Federally Funded Study Measures Porn Arousal,” the headline had read. A congressman had demanded an investigation. The outcry over her small project soon faded, but she worried about an acute American aversion to looking too closely, too carefully, at the sexual.
    Meana was going slowly with the review board. She was designing a study that would use eye-tracking and X-rated videos. The films would turn on her subjects more than the soft-porn photos could. In this more heightened state—a state less conducive to cognition and comparison—would the women’s eyes become less drawn to female body parts and more compelled by everything male? She didn’t think so. She expected that the pattern from her earlier experiment would hold, that when it came to bodies, the female figure would prove full of electricity.
    As she developed the new study and hoped for the review board’s approval, she didn’t yet know about Chivers’s research with the pictures of isolated genitals. Those results might have led her to wonder if, in her video experiment, women would seek—as well as female bodies—Deen-like erections, pure declarations of male desire.
    Meana’s ideas grew not only from her lab but also from her work as a clinician, some of it trying to help women besieged with dyspareunia, genital pain during intercourse. The condition is not, in itself, caused by an absence of lust, yet her patients reported less pain if their desire increased. So part of her challenge was how to enhance desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she said, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners.
    She rolled her eyes at such notions. She described a patient whose tender lover asked often during sex, “ ‘Is this okay?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but”— Meana winced at the misconception behind his delicate efforts—“there was no oomph,” nothing fierce, no sign from the man that his hunger for her was beyond control.
    T alking with Meana made me think of Freud and one of his followers, Melanie Klein. Sexologists don’t have much time for psychoanalytic theory; they tend to ignore or deride Freudian ideas as ungrounded in the empirical research that defines their discipline. Meana never mentioned Freud, yet his thinking, and Klein’s, seemed to float within hers. It seemed to hover, as well, behind Chivers’s readings of blood.
    For Freud, sexuality was etched into our psyches with our earliest rapture—and the mother’s breast was the dazzling source. “It was the child’s first and most vital activity,” he wrote a century ago, “his sucking at his mother’s breast. No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.” The primal need for sustenance dictated the child’s first lessons in eros; survival and sensuality converged. “The child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation.” The infant’s consciousness was flooded, immersed in moments of nearly orgasmic power.
    “The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.” Freud delineated the way our adolescent and adult desires took shape. We searched for the past, for the pleasures we once received, which were given by the mother not only in feeding but—all the more so by her, as opposed to the father, during Freud’s lifetime—in countless other ways of tending to the baby, from cleaning its genitals to nuzzling its neck to clutching it tight. “A mother would probably be horrified,” Freud continued, “if she were made aware” that she was “rousing sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity. She regards what she does as asexual, pure . . . after all, she carefully avoids applying more excitations to the child’s genitals than are unavoidable in nursery care.” She should, Freud assured, “spare herself any self-reproaches even after her enlightenment. She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love.”
    The erotic energy of girls, in Freudian theory, was soon led along intricate emotional routes and rechanneled from mothers