What Do Women Want

women she met with who, she said, hadn’t stopped desiring but who had merely stopped wanting, or had trouble wanting, their partners. Yes, she agreed, there was this tangle in psychiatry’s reasoning.
    She dwelled for a minute on the way our dreams and promises of forever seemed inevitably at odds with our sexual beings. “There is an element of sadness,” she said, “when I think about the women I see, when I think about the couples I know, when I think about myself personally.” She let out another sigh—or something akin to a sigh, a wordless note of grieving in a lower octave.
    L eaning against the rail of his viewing tower, staring down at his monkeys and remembering the small cages that distorted the sexual interaction between females and males, Wallen thought that monogamy was, for women, a cultural cage—one of many cultural cages—distorting libido. He spoke about the research Brotto had mentioned: hundreds of women followed for fifteen years or longer, their relationships, biochemistry, desire relentlessly recorded. “The idea that monogamy serves the natural sexuality of women may not be accurate,” he said.
    Meana was sure that it wasn’t. “I have male friends who tell me about new relationships. They say they’ve never been with a woman who’s so sexual. They’re thrilled. And I’m thinking, Just wait.” Not only did monogamy not enhance female sexuality, but it was likely worse for women than men. There wasn’t enough research on the topic, she said, but she talked about a German survey of committed relationships, showing that women felt desire wane more swiftly.
    One reason for this, in her mind, stemmed from narcissistic need. Within the bounds of fidelity, the heat of being desired grew more and more remote, not just because the woman’s partner lost a level of interest, but, more centrally, because the woman felt that her partner was trapped, that a choice—the lust-impelled selection of her —was no longer being made.
    Like Brotto, Meana wasn’t arguing against loyalty, against marriage. She alluded often to her husband; with adoration, she described his career as a professor of literature, a life she’d once wanted for herself. But when she discussed the work she did with couples, she made clear that she expected only very rare success in the realm of eros, if the measure of success was reviving lust. In around one-third or so of her cases, she could bring back something more mild.
    Her method sometimes came down to scheduling sex, whether or not it was wished for, if sex hadn’t been happening. She became a monitor, an enforcer. It was as though she were trying, almost brutally, to spade free something buried. “Fuck night,” one of her female patients named it caustically. One of the married women I interviewed saw this kind of scheduling in a happier way. It was like exercising, she said, if you were one of the majority of people who would rather be reading or watching TV. By the time you left the gym, “with the endorphins going,” you were glad to have been there, though you might not be anxious to turn around the next day and go back.
    Therapists who claimed to restore lust on a regular basis, to instill desire in a high percentage of their patients, Meana thought, weren’t judging their outcomes in any rigorous way, were deluding themselves, deceiving everyone. “This is big business—the books, the workshops. You could write a book full of promises every year, and every year you could have a bestseller.”
    She recalled giving, at a conference, a candid speech about her track record. One therapist, she said, approached her afterward with a common story. In sessions, a wife had suggested that if only her husband would be sensitive enough to help out around the house, she would want him in bed. So the therapist set him to work. She had him scouring pots. She had him tidying. She had him taking the kids to school and picking them up. But the sex didn’t follow. “We tell men to water this little bonsai of women’s desire,” Meana said to me, “we tell them the bonsai has to be treated just so—and guess what?”
    She wasn’t objecting to men doing their half of the chores, any more than her eye-rolls about intimacy meant that she didn’t nurture, in counseling, empathy between couples. It was just that these things weren’t likely to undwarf the tree’s constricted limbs.
    While Meana explained the problem with monogamy through her theory of