What Do Women Want

and Paul Eastwick at the University of Texas at Austin, noticed what is known to scientists as a confound, a factor that might distort the data, insinuating illusion under the guise of insight. The factor was obvious, yet none of the speed-dating researchers made anything of it. No one discussed it in their academic papers; no one treated it as relevant. What would happen, Finkel and Eastwick wondered, if the instruction was “Women rotate,” if the men waited while the women stood and strode forward?
    T he science and thinking I have brought together in this book are a beginning, only that. None of the researchers I have learned from, not Meredith Chivers or Kim Wallen, not Marta Meana or Jim Pfaus, would claim to have definitive, fully formed answers about female desire. All of them, no matter how evocative their experiments and piercing their ideas, are acutely aware of the layers of unknowns—and of the impediments to getting beneath. The investigation of women’s sexual psyches is, with the exception of pharmaceutical quests, dismally funded, supported in strangely inverse proportion to its importance. Eros lies at the heart of who we are as human beings, yet we shun the study of our essential core, shun it perhaps most of all where it is least understood, in women. Where there should be an abundance of exploration, there is, instead, common assumption, unproven theory, political constraint, varieties of blindness.
    Once, I asked Chivers why I never found myself phoning the psychology departments of Harvard or Yale or Princeton, why I never spent time with their professors, why so few of America’s most elite universities devoted any attention to her field. “Because there is a kind of taboo,” she said. “Because we who do this work are second-class citizens.” Second-class citizens for digging toward the primary, the primitive, the primal. Unseemly to be down there, metaphorically, literally. And unsettling to have scientists constantly threatening to send back information that might, experiment by experiment, study by study, paper by paper, tear presumption to shreds.
    The presumption that while male lust belongs to the animal realm, female sexuality tends naturally toward the civilized; the belief that in women’s brains the more advanced regions, the domains of forethought and self-control, are built by heredity to ably quiet the libido; the premise that emotional bonding is, for women, a potent and ancestrally prepared aphrodisiac; the idea that female eros makes women the preordained if imperfect guardians of monogamy—what nascent truths will come into view, floating forward if these faiths continue to be cut apart?
    F inkel and Eastwick set up fifteen speed-dating events with a total of three hundred and fifty women and men. At half of the gatherings, the men carried out the approaches. At the rest, when the bell sounded, the women took this part; in just this one momentary way, repeatedly over the course of an hour, traditional romantic roles were upended. A hint of Deidrah, of the sexually stalking rhesus females, was written into the rules.
    The researchers asked the participants not only to check yes or no after each four-minute meeting but to rate their sexual feelings for every partner.
    The results were straightforward. Social structure—and maybe something imbedded physically in the act of initiating—altered perceptions, decisions, eros. Improbably, yet unmistakably, the shift took hold right away. The numbers were plain. When the women were the ones who moved near, they said yes as often, as indiscriminately, as the men. When the women were the ones who crisscrossed the room and closed in, their ratings of desire became just as lustful. With the rules adjusted, a new reality leapt fleetingly into sight.

Readings
    Behind this book lies a labyrinth of reading. There are the scores of books that line my shelves, from Richard Posner’s cost-benefit analysis of erotic motivation, Sex and Reason , to Karen Horney’s reappraisal of Freud, Feminine Psychology , from a collection of sexologists’ biographies, How I Got into Sex , to Max Wolf Valerio’s memoir of metamorphosis from woman to man, The Testosterone Files , to a legion of sexual self-help volumes spanning the pragmatic and the spiritual. In the following list of readings, I include a few of the books that my readers might find most directly relevant to the topics I’ve raised, as well as academic papers that detail much