What Do Women Want

male classmates, Chivers had sketched the vulva’s anatomy, a map to help the boys in finding the clitoris. Now, surrounded by the women’s voluble wincing, she thought, This is the way you feel about your own bodies?
    After the lecture course, she enrolled in a sexuality seminar. She gave a presentation on women’s problems with orgasm; she played a video of a woman in her sixties talking about a new partner, a late awakening. She led an electric discussion and left the room elated, but she couldn’t conceive of any career dealing directly with sex, besides being a sex therapist, which she didn’t want. Sticking with neuropsychology, she wound up doing a thesis experiment that added to fledgling evidence: that homosexual men perform less well than heterosexuals on a type of test involving three-dimensional shapes, just as females, on average, perform less well than males.
    This bit of undergraduate research wasn’t very politic. It fell within an area of science that is fiercely debated, mostly because of its signs that there are certain differences in intelligence between women and men due not to culture but to genes. Yet Chivers didn’t much care about the politics; she was gazing at an intriguing nexus: between gender (the skill discrepancies between women and men at rotating three-dimensional shapes in their minds), desire (the similar discrepancies between gays and straights), and aspects of neurology that might well be innate. After graduation, she begged her way into an assistant’s job at the Toronto lab that would later, after she got her doctorate, contain her cramped chamber with its La-Z-Boy and plethysmograph; it is part of one of Canada’s most prestigious psychiatric teaching hospitals. When she arrived at the age of twenty-two, she was the only woman on the floor. Male sexuality was the sole focus of the science being done, and one day she asked the oldest researcher, Kurt Freund, an eighty-one-year-old icon in sexology, why he never turned his attention to women.
    Bald, with a bladelike nose and oversized ears that seemed to be sly instruments of detection, Freund, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, had been hired by the Czech military half a century earlier to catch conscripts who were trying to escape service by pretending to be homosexual. He’d developed a male version of the plethysmograph. This was long before a female equivalent existed. A glass tube was placed over the penis with an airtight seal around the base of the shaft. Images were shown. A gauge determined air pressure and marked the swelling. If, with a Czech draftee, the pressure didn’t rise when Freund showed provocative pictures of young men, the conscript was headed into the army.
    Freund didn’t make a career out of hunting homosexuals. Early on, he tried to cure gays through psychoanalysis; eventually he called in his patients and gave their money back. Arguing that homosexuality arose from prenatal biology rather than upbringing, and insisting that it could not be treated, he fought Czech laws that criminalized gay sex. After he fled communist rule and settled in Toronto, his vision of male sexual orientation as permanent—and being gay as nothing like a sickness—helped to convince the American Psychiatric Association, in 1973, to strike homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
    Like all the researchers at the Toronto lab, Freund highlighted the inborn scripting of desire. Nurture was in constant interplay with nature, but it wasn’t a fifty-fifty partnership. Answering Chivers, he asked a question of his own: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women when I am a man?” His words put her on the far side of a divide—a chasm, in his view. For her, they laid down a challenge. There were experiments to be constructed, data to be compiled, deductions to be distilled, results to be replicated. She imagined one day drawing a map that would capture female eros. “I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” she said, when we first spoke. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.”
    In her sense of quest, there were echoes of Sigmund Freud, of his words to Marie Bonaparte almost a century ago. A great-grandniece of Napoleon, she was one of Freud’s psychoanalytic disciples. “The great question that has never been answered,” he told her, “and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, What