What Do Women Want Read Free Page A

gay male sex, the ratings of the heterosexual women were even more muted—even less linked to what was going on between their legs. Chivers was staring at an objective and subjective divide, too, in the data from the lesbians: low keypad scores whenever men were having sex or masturbating in the films.
    She put heterosexual and homosexual males through the same procedure. Strapped to their type of plethysmograph, their genitals spoke in ways not at all like the women’s—they responded in predictable patterns she labeled “category specific.” The straight men did swell slightly as they watched men masturbating and slightly more as they stared at men together, but this was dwarfed by their physiological arousal when the films featured women alone, women with men, and, above all, women with women. Category specific applied still more to the gay males. Their readings jumped when men masturbated, rocketed when men had sex with men, and climbed, though less steeply, when the clips showed men with women. For them, the plethysmograph rested close to dead when women owned the screen.
    As for the bonobos, any thought that something acutely primitive in male sexuality would be roused by the mounting animals proved wrong. The genitals of both gay and straight men reacted to these primates the same way they did to the landscapes, to the pannings of mountains and plateaus. And with the men, the objective and subjective were in sync. Bodies and minds told the same story.
    How to explain the conflict between what the women claimed and what their genitals said? Plausible reasons swirled. Anatomy, Chivers thought, might be one factor. Penises extend, press against clothes. Visibly they shrink and shrivel. Boys grow up with a perpetual awareness; male minds are used to being fed information from their groins. A sexual loop between body and cognition, each affecting the other, develops; it runs fast and smooth. For women, more covert architecture might make the messages less clear, easier to miss.
    But were the women either consciously diminishing or unconsciously blocking out the fact that a vast scope of things stoked them—stoked them instantly—toward lust?
    The discord within Chivers’s readings converged with the results of a study done by Terri Fisher, a psychologist at Ohio State University, who asked two hundred female and male undergraduates to complete a questionnaire dealing with masturbation and the use of porn. The subjects were split into groups and wrote their answers under three different conditions: either they were instructed to hand the finished questionnaire to a fellow college student, who waited just beyond an open door and was able to watch the subjects work; or they were given explicit assurances that their answers would be kept anonymous; or they were hooked up to a fake polygraph machine, with bogus electrodes taped to their hands, forearms, and necks.
    The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group—the ones who could well have worried that another student would see their answers—said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated. The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.
    Because of the way the questions were phrased—somewhat delicately, without requiring precise numbers, Fisher told me, in deference to the conservative undertone she sensed on her satellite campus—the study couldn’t pinpoint rates of masturbation or porn use; yet, she went on, it left no doubt as to the constraints most women feel about acknowledging the intensity of their libidos. When Fisher employed the same three conditions and asked women how many sexual partners they’d had, subjects in the first group gave answers 70 percent lower than women wearing the