What Do Women Want

score, in Meston’s words, “dating desirability” before and after the ride. The thrill of fear spilled over into eros: following the ride, the scores rose. The phenomenon, which Meston labeled “excitation transfer,” hinted at interweaving circuits of terror and sexual arousal within the brain, and perhaps made sense of what one woman told me, that she felt as though her rape fantasies had an immediate physical effect, that they coursed straight to her groin, causing the contractions of orgasm.
    There was anatomical logic to the idea that calling up thoughts of rape and feelings of fear—or feelings of shame brought on by transgressing taboo—could quickly provoke the spasms of climax. The theory belonged to Paul Fedoroff, a psychiatrist at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research, who treated paraphilics, people whose main erotic compulsions fall far outside the norm: fetishists, exhibitionists, zoophiles, sexual serial killers, pedophiles. Like so much surrounding our under-researched sexual selves, Fedoroff’s reasoning was backed by informed speculation rather than proof, yet his theory had resonance. Some of his patients, he had told me, when I was researching a book about paraphilias, seemed to suffer from what he called a “sticky switch” governing their parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. These are two branches of our autonomic circuitry, the wiring that regulates our automatic functions, like heart rate, sweating, and salivation. The parasympathetic system controls arousal while the sympathetic sends us into climax. “The natural progression during sex,” he said, “is that the parasympathetics are set off, and at some point when we become sufficiently aroused a switch flips and the sympathetics kick in and we start to have an orgasm. But the poor paraphilic has a sticky, sluggish switch and needs to do something extreme to get the sympathetics going.” Besides orgasm, the sympathetic system takes over in situations of emergency. Fedoroff’s idea was that some paraphilics use the deviant, the forbidden, to stoke their sense of danger or mortification—to create an emotional emergency, put extra pressure on the resistant switch, open up the sympathetic paths, and propel the brain and body into ecstasy.
    Many of Fedoroff’s patients were convicted criminals, but he told me about a case that wasn’t criminal at all. A heterosexual couple had sought him out; the woman could no longer climax, not with her partner. She’d taken to having sex with a series of men in the same night, to watching videos of women having sex with animals, to making videos of herself masturbating—these sent her toward orgasm. Climactic sex with her partner seemed a hopeless cause “until,” Fedoroff wrote in a journal article, “it was discovered that she consumed large amounts of L-tryptophan, available in health food stores, to help her sleep. This substance is metabolized into serotonin, which is known to cause difficulty reaching orgasm. She was advised to discontinue taking L-tryptophan. Soon afterward, her ability to reach orgasm through intercourse with her partner returned, and with it, her paraphilic interest in group sex, exhibitionism, and zoophilia disappeared.”
    According to Fedoroff’s theory, fantasies of sexual assault might well serve, for some non-paraphilic women, as a way to unstick the switch; they might supply an emotional emergency and enable orgasm.
    But for Meana, rape fantasies were rooted in the narcissism that was imbedded in the female sex drive. As we talked, she narrowed her ideas into an emblematic scene: a woman pinned and ravished against an alley wall. Here, in her vision, was an ultimate symbol of female lust. The ravager, overcome by craving for this particular woman, cannot restrain himself; he tears through all codes, through all laws and conventions, to seize her, and she—feeling herself to be the unique object of his unendurable need—is overcome herself.
    Right away, she regretted what she’d described, the alley image she’d called symbolic. She hadn’t used the word “rape,” but the scene evoked it.
    “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she said quickly. The phrase was paradoxical, she stressed; it had no meaning. “In fantasy we control the stimuli. In rape we have no control.” The two ideas couldn’t coexist.
    “They’re really fantasies of submission,” she continued. She elaborated on the pleasure of