What Do Women Want

her with a new male, and she is primed for sex within an hour and a half.
    Meana, Wallen, Chivers, Pfaus, Brotto, Hrdy—all, in their different ways, from their different work in labs and observatories, in sessions of therapy and in the animal wild, pried apart assumptions about women, sex, constancy. Then there was Lisa Diamond, who began our series of conversations by emphasizing emotional bonding as the basis of women’s desire.
    Diamond, a professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, was a petite woman whose winning, raspy voice was always accompanied by big gestures. She talked with her hands, her shoulders, her neck, her dark eyebrows. When she and I first met, before a lecture Chivers had invited her to give to her department, she had just made herself semifamous with a book titled Sexual Fluidity . It carried the academic blessing of being published by Harvard University Press. “In 1997,” she wrote in her introductory lines, “the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man. The actress Cynthia Nixon of the HBO series Sex and the City developed a serious relationship with a woman in 2004 after ending a fifteen-year relationship with a man. Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After twelve years together, the pair separated and Cypher—like Heche—has returned to heterosexual relationships.” The opening went on to catalogue the sexual shifts, in both directions, of several more female figures, then asked, “What’s going on?”
    Diamond was a tireless researcher; the study at the center of her book had been running for more than a decade. Through long interviews and questionnaires, she’d been monitoring the erotic attractions of a hundred women who, at the outset, declared themselves lesbians or bisexuals or declined any label. From her analysis of the many leaps they made between sexual identities and from their detailed descriptions of their sexual lives, Diamond concluded that the direction of female desire was, above all, fluid. And after the book was published, she began collecting data among heterosexual women that helped to solidify her argument, that left her evidence less blurred by subjects whose sexuality seemed inevitably more likely to bend and transform.
    Diamond, whose longtime partner was a woman, didn’t claim that women were without innate orientations. But, she contended, female desire was generated—even more than traditionally assumed—by emotional entwining. Attachment was so sexually powerful that orientation could be easily overridden. Despite Diamond’s provocative book title, in a way her thesis couldn’t have been more conventional: closeness was almost all.
    Yet something lurked, unaddressed, within her data on fluidity; her subjects weren’t staying close to the same person. Relationships were being traded in periodically, and in the realm of sexual fantasy, they were being betrayed all the time. And suddenly, two years after our first meeting, when I mentioned the predicament of a woman whose story I will recount here in a moment, Diamond said, “In the lesbian community, the monogamy problem is being aired more and more. For years, gay men have been making open arrangements for sex outside the couple. Now, increasingly, gay women are doing it. It’s interesting that lesbians like to call it polyamory, as though to stress love or friendship, instead of just letting it be motivated primarily by sex.” She sounded almost like Meana; there was impatience with the veneer. As she continued, she turned to lesbian tastes in the X-rated, to “the difference between what’s feminist-approved and what gets you off,” to the doubtful presumptions that women need more narrative and more emotional meaning in their pornography, while men are more visual, more objectifying. “The stereotypes of male versus female, that male desire is far more promiscuous, seem more and more open to question.”
    M assage oil, a blindfold: the items Isabel had bought—hoping to alter the feeling of Eric’s touch—when she ventured into the sex-toy boutique. On their visits, Calla and Jill weren’t so reserved. Several months before, they had purchased a double-headed dildo—long shaft,