What Do Women Want

prehistoric women had been constantly subject to sexual attack, and that the ability to lubricate automatically in reaction to all sorts of sexual cues evolved genetically as a protection against vaginal tearing, against infection, against the infertility or death that might follow. Genital arousal might not represent desire, she argued, but might, rather, be part of a purely reflexive, erotically neutral system, a system that was somehow intertwined with but separate from the wiring of women’s libidos. And the instances of orgasm might reflect nothing more than friction.
    Yet the theory of separate systems was elaborate, precarious. It defied more straightforward thinking: that being wet meant being turned on, that there wasn’t much that was neutral about it, just as was true for men and being hard. Gradually Chivers settled on what had perhaps, she told me, been obvious all along, that it was possible to be stirred by all sorts of things one didn’t, in fact, want. By sex featuring bonobos, by sex featuring assault.
    “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly” about rape, she said. “I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her own body. Arousal is not consent.”
    T his was one of Ndulu’s fantasies: “A faceless white man slams me against a wall and holds me in place with his elbow as he strokes his rock-hard dick. He whispers into my ear all the vile things he wants to do to my body. He tells me he’s going to shove his cock so far into my pussy I’ll feel it in my belly; he says if I don’t behave, he’ll call in his friend, who’s right outside, ear pressed to the door, violently masturbating, to come fuck me as well. Would I like that? he asks. Would I like two hot cocks in me? He takes me rough and hard from behind, standing up. Just when he begins to call out loudly as he comes inside me, his friend bursts in and comes on my ass. Both men are calling out in such pleasure that it almost sounds like they’re crying.”
    This was the way Ndulu’s imaginings usually went, and the violence of the men, the unrestrainable lust of the men, the ecstasy of the men that poured out in their “almost crying” were made more heated for her—and terribly painful for her—by race. Ndulu had grown up on American oil company compounds in West Africa and Europe, gone to college in the American Midwest, and now lived in New York, where she worked as a graphic designer. Over the course of her childhood, her adolescence, and her young adulthood, she had learned to believe that her skin and hair and features added up to an overall appearance that fell somewhere between tolerable and not. This was true, above all, about the shade of her complexion. “In winter,” she said, “it’s medium. In summer, though, no matter what I do, it gets dark. In summer, I can’t even look at myself.”
    She spoke of how her mother had always made it clear that lighter skin was more attractive than darker. During her own childhood, Ndulu’s mother had watched her mother’s adoring eyes on the paler face of Ndulu’s aunt. “In black families, there’s always this issue,” Ndulu said. “It’s no different in Africa. My aunt was the belle of her village, because she was so light. My grandmother spent all her time on her.”
    As a teenager, Ndulu had done what all the girls of her West African city did, what she had begun to learn from her mother before she could talk. Into her hair, to make it less kinky, she slathered a grease that was the pale yellow of custard. “It wasn’t as thick as butter, but it was thick, and it was oilier than butter, and you had to put a lot on. It would drip down the sides of your face in the sun.”
    These days, in New York, she was trying to wean herself from oil by wearing her hair fairly short. But she hadn’t yet quit; she didn’t expect to. “It’s so common. I don’t think I know a single black woman who doesn’t use it. It’s just something we have to do. To make our hair look more white. I hate it. It reminds me of what I am and what I’m not.”
    She added, “I’ve read The Bluest Eye ,” and she talked about the lessons of Toni Morrison’s novel. “I know how I should be, I know the way it’s supposed to go—the whole empowerment thing. In college I wrote essays out the wazoo about everyone being equal and equally beautiful. I don’t feel any of