What Do Women Want Read Free

base of the shaft. Images were shown. A gauge determined air pressure and marked the swelling. If, with a Czech draftee, the pressure didn’t rise when Freund showed provocative pictures of young men, the conscript was headed into the army.
    Freund didn’t make a career out of hunting homosexuals. Early on, he tried to cure gays through psychoanalysis; eventually he called in his patients and gave their money back. Arguing that homosexuality arose from prenatal biology rather than upbringing, and insisting that it could not be treated, he fought Czech laws that criminalized gay sex. After he fled communist rule and settled in Toronto, his vision of male sexual orientation as permanent—and being gay as nothing like a sickness—helped to convince the American Psychiatric Association, in 1973, to strike homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
    Like all the researchers at the Toronto lab, Freund highlighted the inborn scripting of desire. Nurture was in constant interplay with nature, but it wasn’t a fifty-fifty partnership. Answering Chivers, he asked a question of his own: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women when I am a man?” His words put her on the far side of a divide—a chasm, in his view. For her, they laid down a challenge. There were experiments to be constructed, data to be compiled, deductions to be distilled, results to be replicated. She imagined one day drawing a map that would capture female eros. “I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” she said, when we first spoke. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.”
    In her sense of quest, there were echoes of Sigmund Freud, of his words to Marie Bonaparte almost a century ago. A great-grandniece of Napoleon, she was one of Freud’s psychoanalytic disciples. “The great question that has never been answered,” he told her, “and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”
    W hile they watched the clips of erotica, Chivers’s subjects didn’t just wear a plethysmograph; they also held a keypad. On this, they rated their own feelings of arousal. So Chivers had physiological and self-reported—objective and subjective—scores. They hardly matched at all. All was discord. And this dissonance resonated loudly with findings from other researchers.
    Women with women, men with men, men with women, lone men or women masturbating—Chivers’s objective numbers, tracking what’s technically called vaginal pulse amplitude, soared no matter who was on the screen and regardless of what they were doing, to each other, to themselves. Lust was catalyzed; blood flow spiked; capillaries throbbed indiscriminately. The strength of the pulsings did hold a few distinctions, variations in degree, one of them curious: the humping bonobos didn’t spur as much blood as the human porn, but with an odd exception. Among all women, straight as well as gay, the chiseled man ambling alone on the beach—an Adonis, nothing less—lost out to the fornicating apes. What to make of such strangeness?
    There was some further discrimination on the part of the lesbians. Over the series of studies Chivers did—to be sure her data were no fluke—they were a little selective; amplitude leapt more during videos starring women. Yet the lesbians’ blood rushed hard during scenes of gay male porn. When Chivers analyzed the evidence, transmitted from vaginal membranes to sensor to software, when she set it out in graphs of vertical bars, the female libido looked omnivorous.
    The keypad contradicted the plethysmograph, contradicted it entirely. Minds denied bodies. The self-reports announced indifference to the bonobos. But that was only for starters. When the films were of women touching themselves or enmeshed with each other, the straight subjects said they were a lot less excited than their genitals declared. During the segments of