What Do Women Want

to fathers. But the original lessons lingered; the mother’s sexual pull was never erased.
    Then Klein amplified Freud’s thought. For Freud, nursing and the breast were far less important, finally, than the phallus or lack of it, in writing the psychic scripts of boys and girls. Klein toppled this hierarchy. The breast, for her, was nothing less than mountainous. Maybe it was inevitable that Freud, as a man, would magnify the phallus above all and that it would take a female psychoanalyst to overturn this. Maybe Klein’s thinking arose not only from her being a woman but from working, as a clinician, with young children, from observing the psyche close to its beginnings, rather than reconstructing childhood through the lives of grown patients, as Freud did. No matter what the reasons, Klein evoked a breast that seemed to occupy the infant’s entire vision. All else disappeared. The breast soothed and withheld, seduced and denied, gave itself and guarded itself, taught love and rage. It was “devouring . . . bountiful . . . inexhaustible . . . persecuting”—it consumed our earliest consciousness and never really relinquished its overwhelming role.
    Freud believed that homosexual attractions churned within women because of their experiences as infants; his and Klein’s writing offered an explanation for the pulsings of blood when Chivers’s women watched women together, women alone. The breast was the first locus of desire; a woman’s body was its owner; we are all on a quest of “refinding.”
    And the mother in Freud and yet more in Klein added depth to Meana’s thinking about women’s sexual narcissism. Through the female bodies in her lab or on the casino stage, through a mostly nude model washing dishes at a kitchen sink or topless swimmers diving into a giant champagne glass, women made themselves, unconsciously, vicariously, recipients of the unmanageable desire they themselves had once felt for the bodies of their mothers. They acquired their mothers’ erotic omnipotence.
    O n one of the laboratory walls, outside the curtained room where women’s pupils were tracked, there was a poster from an Annie Lennox concert Meana had been to. Lennox’s piercing, incantatory voice, her unflinching lyrics, her band’s icy, electronic sound, seemed almost audible sometimes as Meana spoke. “Sweet dreams are made of this; who am I to disagree,” Lennox sang. She then laid out, without judgment, without lament, some of the inescapable realities of lust. Meana’s face was round while Lennox’s was lean; Meana’s bangs were pixieish while Lennox’s hair was shorn half an inch from her skull; Meana’s voice didn’t hold the singer’s unremitting insistence. But there was a shared impatience with the tales people tell themselves about desire. Meana’s features were nimble, expressive; her mouth twisted occasionally, faintly, into something akin to a grimace. This happened when she talked about the legion of couples counselors who held to the idea that, especially for women, incubating intimacy would lead to better sex.
    Empathy, closeness—these were supposed to be the paths. For Meana, these paths might lead to lovely places. Lust, though, wasn’t likely to be one of them.
    “Female desire,” she echoed Chivers’s experiment with the strangers, the close friends, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality in contrast to men’s.” She was about to publish a study built on long interviews with women whose marriages were sexually bereft. It might be right, she said to me, that bad relationships can kill desire, but good ones don’t at all guarantee it. “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, I don’t know what it is,” she quoted from one subject. “We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area”—the area of their bed.
    It was important to distinguish, Meana went on, between what was prized in life and what was most potent as a source of lust. Women might set a high value on ideals of togetherness and understanding, constancy and permanence, but “it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose, they’re the primary source of women’s desire.” Again, she spoke of narcissism and the wish to be the object of primal need.
    The attainment of this wish, she argued, required not closeness but a measure of distance. An object of lust was, by necessity, apart. She warned against the expectation or even