What Do Women Want

of a player, that he was not only shorter and chubbier but slower and less coordinated than his teammates. He raised this in a matter-of-fact way with his parents. When he said that he would prefer a spot in “the front office,” they laughed, talked the decision through with him, hugged him, and agreed. Yet in his first season in his new position, Alison had gradually stopped coming to practices and soon also to games, because of her own work as an attorney, she told her husband and son, and because Derek’s younger sister was getting old enough to have her own schedule. What Alison suspected, though, what she suspected with something awfully like certainty, was that she wasn’t merely avoiding the sight of her son draping towels around the shoulders of the boys and girls on the team (the league was coed) or the cooing, complimentary remarks she received about Derek from the other moms, but that she was avoiding a new—no, a partially new—vision of Thomas. She just didn’t want to see him teaching the box-out technique or charting another play on his clipboard in a time-out huddle.
    Then, as Derek’s second front-office season was about to start, her son begged her to watch the opener. So, after Thomas had cooked Saturday pancakes, scrubbed the griddle, loaded the dishwasher, and driven off with Derek to the New Jersey community center to make sure all was ready for the Blazers’ arrival, Alison helped Derek’s sister pick out a special outfit and followed in her car.
    A circle and a line defined a debate in sexology, a debate about the natural course and velocity of female desire, a dispute entangled with a question: how well do marriage and monogamy work for women’s libidos?
    Rosemary Basson, a physician and professor of psychiatry and gynecology at the University of British Columbia, had started devising and drawing the circle over a decade ago, sketching it for female patients and couples, for women worried about their lack of lust. She was just past sixty now, feathery brown hair cropped above her ears. Her voice was wispy, her skin pale. As we talked across a coffee table in her Vancouver office, she wore a flowing skirt with a pattern of leaves; she seemed almost formless, ethereal. Yet there was something quietly stern, no-nonsense, governess-like in her speech. She’d been pulled toward the field of eros as an internist in England. Assigned to a ward of patients with spinal-cord injuries, a floor with a steady supply of men left paralyzed by motorcycle accidents, she found herself confronting, now and then, a man who had worked up the courage to ask how—or whether—he could ever have sex. She asked a supervisor for advice. “Change the subject,” he told her. “Change the subject.” She still remembered his tone: tight, panicked. She’d been dealing with the subject of sex ever since.
    Pen in her white fingers, she drew her circular flow chart for me. Proudly she recalled its first journal publication. Now the psychiatric profession’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the DSM, was about to enshrine her thinking in its pages. A massive volume filled with criteria for conditions from autism to sexual dysfunction, the DSM distinguishes the normal from the abnormal. In her diagram, Basson rendered a picture of women’s desire as intrinsically slow to build. It was the result of a series of decisions; it was hardly a drive at all. “We’re just not talking about an innate hunger,” she said.
    The intricate diagram was meant to evoke the step-by-step progress of a successful sexual encounter for women, beginning with a box at the top of the circle. Inside the box—the outset of the encounter—was the phrase “reasons for sex.” Raw desire wasn’t likely to be the reason, though the chart allowed for it as a possibility. Much more probably, Basson said as she sketched, the woman was going to make a deliberate calculation based on the hope of outcomes like “feeling positive emotionally, feeling loved.” About two-thirds of the way around the circle, the words “arousal” and then, finally, “desire” appeared; at this belated stage, physical sensations, pleasure, and wanting took over, to some degree. But this depended, she explained, on the partner showing “respect,” on the woman feeling “safe,” on the couple’s being in “an appropriate context,” on the partner’s touches being considerate, being just right. Listening, it was