What Do Women Want

rapid speed whether she should and could go through with this to spare the prostitute’s feelings, so that the problem was no longer how to soften the exploitation of a body but how to avoid letting this woman know that her body was unexploitable.
    Rebecca all but prayed that her boyfriend would somehow solve everything. He told the escort that Rebecca had suddenly come down with something, that she wasn’t up to it, an excuse that sounded about as convincing as her fourth-graders’ explanations for not practicing their instruments, though the woman, who smiled graciously, seemed to accept the reason or, either way, to be grateful not to have to perform. He gave her some minor cash for her time, and Rebecca said good-bye in sweet tones, and she and her boyfriend went upstairs to click on his computer and stare for a few moments in befuddlement at the immense disparity between the picture and the person and to discuss the mystery of how other customers had handled this difference and whether it was a common dilemma in securing an escort and how you were supposed to prevent this from happening. “I think you just have to spend more,” Rebecca said.
    So they did. The second woman was pretty and young. She, too, was at odds with her picture, but not drastically, and Rebecca immersed herself in the escort’s breasts, in her thighs, in her lips, in all the parts that had been paid for, lost herself in the textures and sights and smells, and was nearly euphoric afterward, both because, after years and years of yearning, she’d broken through the range of barriers that stood between her and another woman’s body and lost her virginity in this sense and because, leaving the breakthrough aside, there’d been such pleasure in having, among other things, the prostitute’s nipples in her mouth.
    When Rebecca and I talked, she said that while she hoped for another threesome with a woman soon and might like to have a woman alone, she didn’t much think of herself as a lesbian nor really as bisexual. She had no doubt that she preferred the romantic company of men. She fantasized mostly about men, was still happily with the same boyfriend, and definitely wouldn’t want to replace him with a woman. I described Chivers’s plethysmographic readings and asked for her thoughts.
    The results didn’t mean that women secretly want to have sex with bonobos, she began, laughing. And it might not be right to label most women as bi, even if lots of women, like her, did wish to have sex with women or would if they permitted themselves to know it. “It’s hard to find the right words,” she said. “The phrase that keeps coming into my head is that it’s like a pregnancy of wanting. Pregnancy’s not a good word—because it means pregnancy. It’s that it’s always there. Or always ready. And so much can set it off. Things you actually want and things you don’t. Pregnant. Full. The pregnancy of women’s desire. That’s the best I can do.”
    S tranger. Close friend. Lover of long-standing.
    This was the focus of a new experiment Chivers was finishing during one of my visits. The results made her pulse quicken.
    It didn’t race all that often. The daily labors of her research were painstaking; her office in Kingston was about as spare as a monk’s cell. The cinder-block walls were nearly bare. Taped above her desk were a few splotches of purple and green painted by her toddler son. On the opposite wall was a small photographic triptych she’d taken of stone carvings at an Indian temple. A man, in the first image, had sex with a mare while another masturbated; a couple tongued each other’s genitals in the middle picture; in the last photo seven human figures were lost in orgiastic heat. Yet for all its drama, the triptych was miniature enough to overlook. The cinder block dominated; there was minimal distraction; she wanted it like this. She could imagine herself surrounded by what she was venturing into, the forest of female desire.
    One morning at her metal desk, with a flat November light making its way through her window, she bent over her laptop, poring through plethysmographic readings she’d collected in her latest study. Her eyes tracked a jagged red line that ran across the screen, a line that traced one subject’s blood flow, second by second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to take the data and arrange them in a meaningful form, she needed to eliminate errant points, moments when a