What Do Women Want by Daniel Bergner Page B

power to generate it.
    M eana wanted to test this further. She had to be certain that the females weren’t checking out the women’s bodies merely for the sake of comparison with their own. She had to dispense with this reason that she saw as intertwined but secondary; she had to confirm that her subjects were staring at what turned them on.
    One method might have been to run the same experiment while her subjects masturbated. That way, their eyes would more surely seek out what carried an erotic jolt. But there was little chance that she could get this kind of study approved by the university’s review board and, even if she could, too high a chance that research with masturbating women would bring Meana the outraged scorn of Las Vegas’s conservative press—condemnation that could, in turn, endanger all of her explorations. Las Vegas was a paradoxical place, with nearly all its advertising based on titillation and with prostitutes waiting at licensed ranches down the highway and yet with a prudish strain in the atmosphere, a resistance to the animal impulses that made people flock to the city. This divided psyche seemed an extreme version of a split that ran throughout the country. It left the erotic as hard to study as it was omnipresent. This was partially why Chivers, who had earned her PhD and done the first of her plethysmographic experiments in the States, had returned home to Canada after graduate school to continue. During her years in the United States, her research had been the target of ridicule. The Washington Times had protested the American government dollars that helped to pay for her work. “Federally Funded Study Measures Porn Arousal,” the headline had read. A congressman had demanded an investigation. The outcry over her small project soon faded, but she worried about an acute American aversion to looking too closely, too carefully, at the sexual.
    Meana was going slowly with the review board. She was designing a study that would use eye-tracking and X-rated videos. The films would turn on her subjects more than the soft-porn photos could. In this more heightened state—a state less conducive to cognition and comparison—would the women’s eyes become less drawn to female body parts and more compelled by everything male? She didn’t think so. She expected that the pattern from her earlier experiment would hold, that when it came to bodies, the female figure would prove full of electricity.
    As she developed the new study and hoped for the review board’s approval, she didn’t yet know about Chivers’s research with the pictures of isolated genitals. Those results might have led her to wonder if, in her video experiment, women would seek—as well as female bodies—Deen-like erections, pure declarations of male desire.
    Meana’s ideas grew not only from her lab but also from her work as a clinician, some of it trying to help women besieged with dyspareunia, genital pain during intercourse. The condition is not, in itself, caused by an absence of lust, yet her patients reported less pain if their desire increased. So part of her challenge was how to enhance desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she said, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners.
    She rolled her eyes at such notions. She described a patient whose tender lover asked often during sex, “ ‘Is this okay?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but”— Meana winced at the misconception behind his delicate efforts—“there was no oomph,” nothing fierce, no sign from the man that his hunger for her was beyond control.
    T alking with Meana made me think of Freud and one of his followers, Melanie Klein. Sexologists don’t have much time for psychoanalytic theory; they tend to ignore or deride Freudian ideas as ungrounded in the empirical research that defines their discipline. Meana never mentioned Freud, yet his