The New York Times Magazine had a long feature article this past weekend on research into that great mystery:  Women’s sexual desire.   (And yes, they lacked imagination and titled it What Do Women Want? in homage to Freud’s timeless question.  I’ve decided to be a bit more tabloidesque with my title.)
 
It’s a great article (linked above) but in case you’re short on time, I’m going to use this post to summarize some of the key findings by the all female band of researchers that were interviewed, as well as adding my own thoughts.  (All bold type segments are quotes from the article.)

Meredith Chivers, a Canadian psych professor, attached both men and women to plethysmographs (contraptions that measure physical response in their genitals – in women, it’s a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and measures engorgement and lubrication), and then showed them various visual stimuli, including film of bonobos mating, as well as clips of “heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.”   

Part of what happened was unsurprising:  The men responded in “category specific” ways – the straight men to all the images of women, including lesbian sex but “mostly unmoved” when only men were on the screen, whereas the gay men were aroused in the exact opposite fashion.  None of the men were excited by the bonobos.  Participants were also given a keypad on which they rated their subjective measurement of their own desire, and these ratings corresponded to what the plethysmographs showed – or as the article says, “The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.”   But:

All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.


This research suggests that the answer to Freud’s question, “What do women want?” is: “Just about everything -- but they don’t know that.”


Perhaps I should pause at this point to raise a question some of you may be pondering:  Why is it so important to know what women desire?

Well, unlike men, for whom sexual dysfunction is rarely about lack of desire but instead about functional issues (inability to get or maintain an erection or premature ejaculation, etc.) for women, the primary sexual dysfunction is lack of desire.  Even as I write this, pharmaceutical companies are working feverishly to try to find a way to boost female desire, because if they do, they’ll have a multi-billion dollar goldmine that would put ED drugs like Viagra to shame.  But so far women’s feelings of sexual desire have remained largely immune to pharmaceutical answers.

In men who have trouble getting erect, the genital engorgement aided by Viagra and its rivals is often all that’s needed. The pills target genital capillaries; they don’t aim at the mind. The medications may enhance male desire somewhat by granting men a feeling of power and control, but they don’t, for the most part, manufacture wanting. And for men, they don’t need to. Desire, it seems, is usually in steady supply. In women, though, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body, so the physiological effects of the drugs have proved irrelevant. The pills can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn’t do much to create a conscious sense of desire.

As researchers seek to unravel the secrets of women’s sexual desire, some tantalizing information is beginning to emerge.  One that Chivers’ research with the plethysmographs suggests is that women seem to have an “inborn system of arousal,” but one that is almost entirely physiological, which accounts for the disparity between women’s subjective reading of their desire and what the instruments in their genitals show.  (And invites a new version of an old saying, “Your mind may say No No, but your vagina says Yes Yes.”)  

A corollary of this finding is simple but startling:  Since for women the feeling of sexual desire often doesn’t register until after their bodies become physically aroused, they often will not feel sexual desire until after they have already begun to have sex.

While men tend to feel desire first and initiate sexual activity in response, for women, more often desire arises during sexual activity.  This probably seems dead obvious to both women and men who have sex with women, since it’s well-known that women need more foreplay than men do to “be ready”.   But it also suggests that waiting for female desire to appear may be pointless.  If you don’t feel “in the mood,” the best way to get there is to just start having sex.  If you have an open mind and a loving, patient partner, chances are you’ll get in the mood before too long.  

However, this becomes a trickier issue when one separates physiological readiness from subjective desire, something that all women may be familiar with without ever having had a plethysmograph attached to them.  Sometimes you feel desirous as all get out, but your genitals seem to be asleep on the job, while other times you’d rather be reading a book, but your vagina’s so hot to trot that you’re slipping off the couch.  Hormonal fluctuations play a big role (see “days right after period” for Scenario A and “ovulation!” for Scenario B) but they aren’t the whole story.   Added to this is the strange fact that while men always know when they have an erection, women may often be unaware if their genitals are having a Britney Spears or a Mother Theresa moment until someone provides tactile confirmation.  We really don’t always know if we’re ready to go or not, as the disparity between those plethysmographs and the women's subjective ratings of desire showed.

Still another tricky issue is equating physiological readiness with desire.  One theory holds that women’s “inborn system of arousal” is a survival mechanism evolved from earlier human times when human sexuality on a day to day basis was not exactly oriented towards female consent, much less desire.  For pure survival reasons, women’s bodies needed to be able to adjust to sex quickly, even if they didn’t want to have it.  (Contemporary research revealing arousal and even orgasm in some female victims of rape and molestation despite the trauma they have suffered also suggests that a woman’s physiological response may be quite separate from her emotional state.)

Still more controversy may arise when researchers delve into what turns women on, including in fantasy.

 From early glances at her data, Chivers said, she guesses she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers.

Similarly, another researcher, Marta Meana, raises the tantalizing idea that far from sex being more emotional for women, as is always suggested, it may actually be less so than for men.

For women, “being desired is the orgasm,” Meana said somewhat metaphorically — it is, in her vision, at once the thing craved and the spark of craving.

The generally accepted therapeutic notion that, for women, incubating intimacy leads to better sex is, Meana told me, often misguided. “Really,” she said, “women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic” — it is dominated by the yearnings of “self-love,” by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. Still on the subject of narcissism, she talked about research indicating that, in comparison with men, women’s erotic fantasies center less on giving pleasure and more on getting it. “When it comes to desire,” she added, “women may be far less relational than men.”

Meana’s research dovetails with Chivers’ in the tricky area of what most turns women on, and the collision of that hot fantasy with women’s pragmatic and emotional sides:


Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring. If I had to pick an actor who embodies all the qualities, all the contradictions, it would be Denzel Washington. He communicates that kind of power and that he is a good man.”

While men’s desire seems focused on “the other” – what their partner looks like, etc – for women it may be more about how they are seen.  Men want to desire their partners; women want to be desired.  Men can be aroused by a picture of naked woman without any idea if she’s sexually aroused, but some research shows that woman only find male nudes arousing if the man is himself visibly aroused (and in fact, experience the sight of an unerect penis as a sign of rejection).  Men are used to women’s sexual desire being suggested by their demeanor but ultimately hidden until there is intimate contact, whereas women are used to a blatant confirmation that a man wants them, and wants them bad.

Turning from het sex, another researcher, Lisa Diamond, has focused on women’s sexual “fluidity” as exemplified by some famous cases of straight women (e.g., Anne Heche and Julie Cypher) who became “lesbians” for one partner and then reverted to heterosexuality after the relationships ended.  Diamond’s research with other non-famous women suggests that emotional connection and closeness are such primary drivers of desire that they will override innate sexual orientation.  Or that women’s sexual orientation is by nature more fluid, even as society and culture point most women towards heterosexuality.  As someone who has seen female friends “switch sides,” I have to give some credence to this theory.

The article concludes with a thought that I first had about twenty years ago, and which may render any scientific research moot for the time being:

There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women’s lust too deeply to unearth, to view.

Given that women’s sexuality has been shrouded in religious, cultural and societal norms for all of human history -- and yes, I think it’s still clouded by all these elements even now, and even in “progressive” societies like ours -- I think it’s impossible to say what truly unfettered female sexuality would feel like and look like in action.  Perhaps I’ll live long enough to find out. 

 In the meantime, research continues, including in my own home.

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