What Do Women Want

met at a summer colony when he was fifteen and she was two years younger. They’d gone steady right away and married five years later. At twenty-nine, she was diagnosed. She had just given birth to their second child. The metastases were swift and filled her with fluid and put her in such excruciating pain that she tore out her IV tubes and crawled across the hospital floor, trying somehow to escape her agony. “And I’m standing there like a dummy,” he remembered, “unable to do anything.”
    His work at the time involved studying how sexual stimulation blocked pain in female rats, a tunnel of research that he’d branched onto after following a grand ambition, since college, to seek out the neurological underpinnings of consciousness. Watching his wife on her hands and knees, “I said to myself, I’ve got to do something useful.” He would devote himself more thoroughly, he vowed, to understanding pain and figuring out whether sex might hold a natural analgesic. Could he distill an organic pain blocker to rescue sufferers like her? Along the way, after his wife died, his explorations with rats drew the attention of Beverly Whipple, nurse and sexologist and author of the early-eighties bestseller The G-spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality . While he went on hunting for an analgesic on his own, he teamed with Whipple on experiments dealing with nerve tracks and women’s varied climaxes, and that had led him here.
    “Now we’re getting it!” he exclaimed, eyes on the screen while Shanti worked. The clusters of dots were growing more dense.
    “Wow!” Wise let out. “It’s a Christmas tree!”
    “She’s moving fast,” he noted, lifting his eyes fleetingly from screen to subject.
    “For a Tantra girl,” Wise said.
    Shanti was imagining, she recounted later, “My lover touching me; him showing someone else how to touch me; lots of people watching; a line of guys waiting to stroke me, to lick me; then a cute, butchy girl putting her hand up my skirt.”
    “She’s getting close,” Komisaruk said. “That’s the insula!”
    Shanti raised her free hand.
    “It’s popcorn brain!” Wise said, inspired by the points of light.
    B ut Shanti’s session, it turned out, wasn’t a great success. There had been some miscommunication, it seemed, when she’d been signed up as a subject. Erotic guru though she was, she told me afterward that she didn’t think she’d ever had, in her life, a G-spot orgasm, and she knew she’d never had a cervical one. Her efforts with Komisaruk’s homemade dildo didn’t produce the data he was hoping for.
    And then, too, he may have been overly optimistic in aiming to distinguish climaxes through brain imaging. In the months that followed, he didn’t manage it, even once he had a set of subjects more versatile than Shanti. The needed machinery probably didn’t exist yet, something he seemed both to have known and not let himself know as he leaped with scientific exuberance into the study. Brain regions could be glimpsed but not the terrain within and not the way those areas interacted. And the identifiable regions were broad, immeasurably complex. The insula—whose illumination had made Komisaruk’s voice spring upward—was a neurological territory of pain as well as pleasure. When all his subjects had been through the experiment, Komisaruk could point to distinct spots in the brain that jolt into action with a touch of the clitoral exterior, the vaginal walls, or the cervix, but this was a long, long way from being able to separate out the almost infinitely intricate systems of ecstasy—systems encompassing much of the brain, from front to mid to back, from the prefrontal cortex to the hypothalamus to the cerebellum—in a trio of orgasms.
    And that was assuming that the three different kinds of climax were a reality, that G-spot and cervical orgasms weren’t a figment of popular suggestion and personal imagination. About the culmination of women’s desire there was a swirl of uncertainty and a tangle of angry scientific and political debate, and it was all a reminder that in the twenty-first century it wasn’t only the psychological questions of female eros that were unresolved but something seemingly much more basic: the mechanical workings of women’s genitalia.
    The array of plausible orgasms was a reminder, too, of Tiresias, who lived for seven years as a woman and informed Zeus and Hera that women are given the greater part of ecstasy.
    T he