What Do Women Want

answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.
    The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.
    Because of the way the questions were phrased—somewhat delicately, without requiring precise numbers, Fisher told me, in deference to the conservative undertone she sensed on her satellite campus—the study couldn’t pinpoint rates of masturbation or porn use; yet, she went on, it left no doubt as to the constraints most women feel about acknowledging the intensity of their libidos. When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the phony electrodes. Diligently, she ran this part of the experiment a second time, with three hundred new participants. The women who thought they were being polygraphed not only reported more partners than the rest of the female subjects, they also—unlike their female counterparts—gave numbers a good deal higher than the men.
    This kind of conscious suppression could well have distorted the self-reports of Chivers’s straight women, but had it insinuated itself with the lesbians? Many of them might have adopted a stance of defiance about their sexuality—wouldn’t this have lessened any impulse toward lying? Maybe, though with these women another sort of restraint could have been at work: the need for fidelity to their orientation, their minority identity.
    Fisher’s research pointed to willful denial. Yet, Chivers believed, something more subtle had to be at play. In journals she found glimmers of evidence—unconfirmed, insubstantial, like so much that she wished she could rely on, build on, as she attempted to assemble sexual truth—that women are less connected to, less cognizant of, the sensations of their bodies than men, not just erotically but in other ways. Was there some type of neural filter between women’s bodies and the realms of consciousness in the brain? Something tenuous about the pathways? Was this especially the case with sexual signals? Was this a product of genetic or societal codes? Were girls and women somehow taught to keep a psychic distance from their physical selves? Deep into our seven-year conversation, Chivers spoke bluntly about the congenital and the cultural, about nature and nurture and women’s libidos. For a long while, though, she made no pronouncements. Her scientific intentions were aggressive, the stripping away of the societal, the isolation of the inherent. But she had a researcher’s caution, an empiricist’s reserve, a reluctance to declaim more than the data could support.
    Fisher, meanwhile, was emphatic about the contortions imposed, the compressions enforced. “Being a human who is sexual,” she said, “who is allowed to be sexual, is a freedom accorded by society much more readily to males than to females.” Her lie detector was unequivocal.
    R ebecca was a forty-two-year-old elementary school music teacher with three children. One afternoon, on the computer she shared with her husband, she discovered a picture of a woman who was plainly his lover. In all sorts of ways, this was devastating. There was the difference in age between the two women, clear to Rebecca immediately. More particularly and insidiously, there were the woman’s breasts, exposed in the photograph and, in Rebecca’s eyes, significantly superior to her own, which had shrunk, she was sure, more than most do from nursing. And then there was her sense—instantaneous—that her husband wanted the photo to be found and the affair to be found out, because he hadn’t had the courage to end the marriage and move in with the