^{(Photo by me)}

The answer to Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?” increasingly seems to be:  Not even women know.

Last week, actress Meredith Baxter, best known as über-mom Elyse Keaton on the 1980’s sitcom “Family Ties,” came out on “The Today Show,” telling Matt Lauer that after three marriages and five children (now all adults) she finally realized she was a lesbian after she fell in love with a woman. In a statement that I've heard from other women who’ve discovered their true sexuality in mid-life, Baxter said that being with her partner, Nancy Locke, made the difficulties she'd always experienced with men suddenly become clear.  “I thought I was just a bad picker,” she told Lauer in explaining how she’d made sense of her failed heterosexual relationships.

And indeed she was. For 30-plus years, she was picking partners of the entirely wrong gender.

As a straight woman whose own sexual desires have been achingly clear since adolescence, I find this phenomenon downright puzzling. How can someone reach midlife without knowing that they're attracted to a different gender than the one they've been shagging all that time?

Mind you, I'm not talking about feeling the need to be closeted in a society that still heaps discrimination and even hatred on homosexuality -- that's perfectly understandable. But some people are apparently so distanced from their own sexual desire that they don't even suspect what it is until some lovely lesbian comes along and ignites their libido.

I say "lesbian" because the people who experience these kinds of later-in-life epiphanies almost always seem to be women. While the number of men who are closeted or fighting their same-sex desires may be legion, most gay men seem to have not only figured out but acted on their desires by a fairly young age. Resist it they may, deny it some must, but feel it and act on it, they do, even if only intermittently and furtively. It's the women who seem to be clueless as to what they want.

But it may not just be the lesbians who have that problem. As Baxter was coming out last week, a New York Times Magazine article was coincidentally describing "Women Who Want to Want” -- women who wish to experience sexual desire but don’t, and the scientists who are searching for an answer to their quest. Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry is panting to find a drug that would spark female desire, since it would be a multi-billion dollar goldmine (even if women didn't want the drug, men would be slipping it into their yogurt).

However, what the (mostly female) researchers are finding is that for women, desire does not generally precede but instead follows sexual behavior. Women often don’t feel much desire until sexual activity begins, and many may never feel it in the abstract. Like the old saying that “when you don't know what to write, you should just start writing,” for women it seems to be true that if you aren’t in the mood for sex, the best remedy is to just start having it. Desire tends to proceed from action for women, rather than from mere thought or visual stimuli as it does for men. For both genders, desire and arousal may be so closely linked as to be nearly inseparable, but, unlike men, most women need actual physical stimulation to register either. (As other research has shown, even when their genitals say they’re aroused, women often will report feeling no desire at all.)

Which may explain why women like Baxter can't even imagine wanting sex with a woman until they actually try it, or at least are in the presence of a woman who really turns the key in their lock. Over the years, I’ve encountered other women who’ve had that same nearly instantaneous discovery of their true sexuality after a lifetime with no clue that they were attracted to their own gender.

Famous examples of this phenomenon include the actress Cynthia Nixon, who also fell in love with a woman after leading an otherwise heterosexual life, and of course Anne Heche, although she subsequently reneged on her “conversion.”  To be fair, Heche resisted defining herself as a lesbian, instead saying she fell in love with a person, Ellen DeGeneres, who happened to be a woman. The fact that her previous and subsequent relationships have been with men suggests that she was accurately describing her desires. It also raises the interesting question of whether women's sexuality is more fluid than men's, or at least more tied to relationship than gender, since I've witnessed other instances of "I'm straight but I fell in love with a person who just happened to be my same gender" -- but they've all occurred with women.  Straight men don't suddenly fall in love with another man and make an "exception" to their sexual preference for him.

But it’s not just famous people who have epiphanies about their sexuality. A female friend of mine attributed her lifelong sexual difficulties to having been molested, and struggled with the issue when single as well as throughout a 20-year marriage before suddenly and unexpectedly falling in love with a lesbian in her 40’s. Echoing Thelma’s immortal line, “I finally know what all the fuss is about,” she excitedly reported having gone from disinterest in sex to having a baker’s dozen of orgasms the first weekend with her new lover.

A male friend had a similar experience with his wife, who to his frustration (and self-recrimination) never enjoyed sex until she unexpectedly became involved with a woman a few years after their divorce. She too had attributed her problems to having been molested, only to have them evaporate once she started having sex with women.

These two anecdotes point to one possible reason that women may be distanced from their desires:  Women are far more likely to have experienced sexual assault than men are, and often at a young age. And the perpetrators of sexual assault (on both genders) are generally men. That can trigger an understandable mistrust and discomfort with the very gender that girls are raised to think they should be attracted to, as well as conflicted feelings about the act of sex itself. When sexual difficulties occur, they have an all-too-ready explanation: They think it’s their history, when in fact it may be geography. If the body touching theirs had a different topography, perhaps they would respond differently.

For every woman like Baxter, there are probably several who haven’t yet put their finger on the problem, much less on another woman. Years ago, a male friend brought a woman to a party I was throwing who I would have sworn was a lesbian – except that I knew they were in love and about to move in together. I brushed off my feeling until several of the other guests casually asked me, “So, who’s the lesbian with Sam?” – including a lesbian friend who asked me if she was available. I thought perhaps she was bisexual, but delicate questioning afterward revealed that the possibility hadn’t ever crossed either her or Sam’s mind. I still have no idea whether we were all stereotyping or whether we sensed something she didn’t yet know about herself, but over the years, I’ve met a number of other ostensibly straight (usually married) women who triggered the same question, and late-in-life realizations like Baxter's make me wonder how many women may be walking around unaware of their own desires.

With men, the issue seems somewhat different. I once worked with an executive who everyone pegged as gay, except that he’d been married for 25 years and had several children. After the last one left home, he revealed that for many years he’d had a male lover in nearby San Francisco who he was leaving his shocked wife for. “Secret life” scenarios like this occur not infrequently, but they always seem to involve men. By contrast, women often hide their desires not from their families or communities, but from themselves. And if women don’t know what they really want, how are they ever going to get it?

In her interview with Lauer, Baxter makes a confession that any woman who feels dissatisfied with her partner may wish to consider: “I was involved with people who made me think they were the problem -- because there were problems with the people I chose. So it never occurred to me to think, ‘Oh, it’s me.’”

Which raises an interesting question that could be applied to any one of us:  What don’t I know about myself that may be keeping me from having what I really want?  

Beyond what others can see that we fail to, there are the internal truths that only we can perceive about ourselves, if we’re willing to do so. We all at times push away thoughts and desires because they challenge our comfortable existence and would require us to define or declare ourselves differently, or to do the hard work of decisively pursuing our dreams.  When it comes to intimate relationships, if you aren’t happy, it’s all too easy to blame your partner – after all, they’re human and offer any number of failings for you to pin the donkey’s tail on.  Like Meredith Baxter, we may continue to indulge this blame for decades without ever considering our own actions.  Yet all too often the problem lies within us – and even when it doesn’t, the solution does.

All it takes is honestly answering two questions: “What do I really want?” and “What am I willing to do to get that?” and then acting on them.

(I wrote at some length about the second NYT article I linked above in my post "What Makes Women Hot?  Uh, Everything, It Seems."  The Advocate has a good interview with Baxter here.)