What Do Women Want

hard not to imagine flowers given, a bedroom with the lights low or off, a wife with basically cuddly inclinations, a husband’s gentle caresses.
    And what waited at the circle’s end? What was the culmination? “Sexual satisfaction +/- orgasms” was on the diagram, but in some versions it wasn’t even part of the chart’s main track; the physical, the carnal, didn’t matter all that much. At the end was “non-sexual rewards . . . intimacy.”
    For Basson, such was the natural state of women’s sexuality. She didn’t make this case based on formal research; she’d developed her chart, she said, from her own clinical experience, and grateful patients had begged her to publish it. Yet while it seemed that her diagram might well represent the wan realities of many women’s bedrooms, her assertion that she had drawn a picture of the inborn ignored the immediate genital reactions of Chivers’s women, the overwhelming randiness of Wallen’s monkeys and Pfaus’s rats. She put forward a quaint and demure portrait, and strangely, stunningly, it was being adopted by the psychiatric profession—from the editors of the DSM to hordes of sex therapists—as though it were something wise and new.
    One reason for this backward reeling was aesthetic and political. Basson’s circle was supplanting a line, a diagram—credited to Masters and Johnson, along with psychotherapist and sexologist Helen Singer Kaplan—that had long been applied to both men and women, its progression going something like this: desire (first rather than laggard and nearly last) followed by physical arousal followed by pleasure. The line, the linear, could seem, from a certain feminist angle, phallic and patriarchal, decidedly unfemale in its symbolism, and at last Basson had provided an alternative, no matter that her lust-free woman was almost a Victorian paragon.
    Another reason was bound up with a David-and-Goliath battle that some therapists saw themselves fighting heroically against the drug industry—against its rush to find, win FDA approval for, and market what was loosely known as a female Viagra. Since the late nineties, when pharmaceutical companies had begun making billions by assisting erections with a chemical that affected the capillaries of the penis, the corporations had been seeking an equivalent for women. But this hadn’t been going smoothly, because women’s sexual problems usually aren’t genital; they’re entrenched in psychological complexities. Meanwhile, a set of clinicians had taken up a campaign, waged mostly within the psychiatric profession but also through the media, to make sure that the industry didn’t manage to persuade huge numbers of women that they should feel more drive, that they needed a drug, soon to be discovered, to help them. The circle served as a useful emblem for the campaign, which was led by a New York University psychiatry professor, Leonore Tiefer, the author of a collection of polemics. Its title, Sex Is Not a Natural Act , amplified Basson’s words, “We’re just not talking about innate hunger.” As for Basson’s own attitude about the industry’s search, she told me, “There are already enough date rape drugs around.” Men would be sneaking lust pills instead of sleeping tablets into women’s drinks to ease their assaults. Female modesty needed protection.
    But maybe most of all, the circle was being consecrated as psychiatric doctrine because it gave sex therapists and couples counselors a solution to one of their most prevalent and stubborn problems—women’s faint or non-existent desire for their husbands or long-term partners. The solution was low expectations. Clinicians had latched on to the diagram. They’d distilled it into a three-word lesson that they taught in treatment: “Desire follows arousal.” They taught that arousal might take some time. Patience was a necessity; slowness and faintness were entirely fine; “lust” should be banished from the vocabulary. By lowering the bar, the circle offered therapists a standard for treatment that they might have a chance to meet.
    And all the while, monogamy seemed to hover like an invisible angel above Basson’s diagram. Occasionally Basson acknowledged that the new might be a key to combustion. But commitment, faithfulness, trust, familiarity—for her, these were the allies of female eros. Tenderness and intimacy ushered women along the circle toward the grand prize of yet more tenderness and intimacy.
    B