What Do Women Want

couldn’t I be studying depression? Why couldn’t I be studying suicide? I had to stop myself. I had to remind myself, In what way is sex inconsequential?”
    She paused. “I have no insecurity about my feminism,” she said. “I feel on solid ground. What I said in the article stepped outside what have become the conventional, comfortable ways of talking about female sexuality, the soft ways, the ways that leave everyone feeling good, not anxious. I don’t think what I said was misogynistic. I don’t think it was harmful. Now, do I know whether certain turn-ons excite only because of a social structure that disempowers women? Whether certain fantasies are an eroticization of disempowerment? No, I don’t know. But I do see the world from a feminist perspective. And part of that is wanting women to be able to be who they are sexually.”
    She sounded almost at ease. She seemed almost to have located solid ground. Yet the footing seemed unsure, as if at any instant it could turn treacherous. The alley was no place to stand.
    D id the fantasies, as Meana asked, “excite only because of social structure”? What about the narcissistic longing that lay beneath, that led to the grammar school principal, to the landowner’s son, to fantasizing about the rape against the pinball machine in The Accused —was this “an eroticization of disempowerment”? She raised the quandary that was always near: culture or genes?
    To think back to Deidrah was to see an immense societal impact. How else but culture to explain the vast difference between Deidrah’s aggressive sexuality, her stalking of mates, and women’s desire to be desired, which dictated the pleasure of being chased? Men made objects of girls and women; girls and women, living in a male-run world, absorbed the male outlook as their own and made objects of themselves. Hadn’t culture taken Deidrah’s drive and, in women, both partially quelled and completely recast it?
    Yet when Meana contemplated the psyche, she called herself an essentialist, mostly. About the interplay between nature and nurture, she placed more weight on the inborn. She placed the weight gingerly. Her essentialism was a hunch, a sensibility; there was no way, she knew, to measure the inherent against the acquired, not for the time being; there was no way to assign a percentage to its role in narcissism, in rape fantasies. (A wealth of pop psychology writing declares confidently that there is an all-determining link between inborn levels of testosterone and myriad forms of aggression or passivity—sexual forms high among them—in men and women. Genetic factors give boys and men a lot more of the hormone, as counted in the bloodstream, and this makes boys and men a lot more aggressive. But among the list of problems with this seductively simple logic is evidence that comes, again, from Deidrah. Compared with male rhesus, females have as little testosterone as women do in contrast with men. Yet female rhesus run the sexual show, incite warfare, and rule the world of rhesus politics.)
    Meana’s intuitive leaning toward the innate added to her uneasiness about the appeal of the alley scene. Emphasizing the genetic meant that there was no escape; it meant that the allure was fundamental.
    Chivers was haunted in a similar way. She saw the culture’s relentless sculpting of women’s sexuality, but her mission was always to look past that, to seek and examine what lay beyond society’s reach, and this put her into a wrenching confrontation with rape. She knew about emerging results from a close colleague’s experiment: genital blood flow spiked when women listened to rape scenes in a lab. (An experiment of her own demonstrated, as well, that situations of fear or euphoric excitement triggered no vaginal pulsing if sex wasn’t involved. In one comparison, she played videos of a woman being chased up a flight of stairs by a rapist or by a rabid dog. Only the sexual scene flooded the genitals.) She dwelled on studies of victims that documented not only lubrication but sometimes orgasm during sexual assault. And she remembered—from her postdoctoral program in Toronto, when she had done work as a therapist—rape survivors who’d confided their own arousal, their own climaxes, to her.
    How to understand this? How to comprehend this harrowing evidence? Was something deeply scripted, something intrinsic, at work?
    Chivers felt that it was. And she helped to develop a reassuring theory: that