Evolution has given the human brain a vast prefrontal cortex, a ball of neural tissue that enables us to engage in abstract reasoning, reflect on the past, and make predictions about the future.
It also allows us to wander a mental landscape filled with emotional minefields, says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin.
"It allows us to screw up our emotions far more than other animals," he said during a visit to the University of Utah this week. "It allows us to persist in emotional responses beyond which they are still useful."
The answer to that disordered brain function may lie in mental training perfected by Buddhist monks over the centuries in Tibet, Davidson told a crowd of at least 600 who overflowed the Utah Museum of Fine Arts auditorium Wednesday for the Tanner Lecture on Human Values.
Davidson has become famous for using high-tech imaging to document the startling control the monks demonstrate over their emotional states. His resulting ideas about "neuroplasticity" -- the notion that we can enhance brain function through purposeful mental training -- threaten to upend conventional psychotherapy, which has little scientific basis.
"We were all taught that the brain is different from other organs in the way it changes over time. We thought the process was one of irrevocable death," Davidson said. "We now know that view is definitively wrong. The brain is capable of generating 7,000
to 9,000 cells a day."
Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, allows researchers like Davidson to observe brain function with unprecedented precision, bringing new scientific rigor to social science, experts said Thursday morning at a follow-up panel discussion. Davidson's findings hold potential for developing mental training techniques to improve people's health and quality of life, said psychiatrist Daniel Siegel.
"These are not just weird ideas. These are research-based interventions that can be applied in the real world," said Siegel, an expert in the field of interpersonal neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "When you teach these reflective skills to kids, they not only do better emotionally and socially, they also do better academically."
Davidson's work with monks was triggered by a visit with the Dalai Lama. The exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism recruited masters of the faith, monks who had spent an average of 34,000 hours in intense meditation, for Davidson's studies.
Using scans that track brain function, the psychologist recorded high levels of activity in the parts of the monks' brains associated with emotional well-being. In further studies on other people, Davidson documented measurable changes in brain activity after two-week periods of mental training.
"The brain is the only organ designed to change in response to experience. Musical training changes the structure of the brain and when it begins earlier in life the greater the influence," he said.
Showing posts with label Human behavior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Human behavior. Show all posts
Feb 27, 2009
Money Can Buy You Happiness, If It's Spent the Right Way
By Shari Roan
Los Angeles Times
Money is an emotional issue, especially during economic hard times. Social scientists have always warned that once a person's basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness.
But if you're wondering, or maybe even arguing over, what to do with any precious discretionary income these days, a new study suggests how to get the biggest emotional bang for your buck.
Ryan Howell, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, found that buying experiences - such as vacations, going to the theater or renting a sailboat - gave people more happiness than buying material things. The study, of 154 people ages 19 to 50, showed that experiences increase happiness because they are often social in nature.
In addition, experiences tend to make people feel more alive. "People report a sense of feeling invigorated or inspired," Howell said. Experiences may also yield more happiness because people are left with positive memories, a sort of return on their investment.
"It's not that material things don't bring any happiness. It's just that they don't bring as much," Howell said. "You're happy with a new television set. But you're thrilled with a vacation."
The study may yield some lessons for Americans in despair over the recession. "For whatever you can afford, you'll maximize your happiness, and the happiness of others around you, if you spend it on a life experience," Howell said.
It doesn't matter how much money you spend, either. "Whether you spent a little or a lot on the life experience, you still have the same level of happiness," he said.
The study was presented earlier this month at an annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and will be published later this year in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
Los Angeles Times
Money is an emotional issue, especially during economic hard times. Social scientists have always warned that once a person's basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness.
But if you're wondering, or maybe even arguing over, what to do with any precious discretionary income these days, a new study suggests how to get the biggest emotional bang for your buck.
Ryan Howell, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, found that buying experiences - such as vacations, going to the theater or renting a sailboat - gave people more happiness than buying material things. The study, of 154 people ages 19 to 50, showed that experiences increase happiness because they are often social in nature.
In addition, experiences tend to make people feel more alive. "People report a sense of feeling invigorated or inspired," Howell said. Experiences may also yield more happiness because people are left with positive memories, a sort of return on their investment.
"It's not that material things don't bring any happiness. It's just that they don't bring as much," Howell said. "You're happy with a new television set. But you're thrilled with a vacation."
The study may yield some lessons for Americans in despair over the recession. "For whatever you can afford, you'll maximize your happiness, and the happiness of others around you, if you spend it on a life experience," Howell said.
It doesn't matter how much money you spend, either. "Whether you spent a little or a lot on the life experience, you still have the same level of happiness," he said.
The study was presented earlier this month at an annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and will be published later this year in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
Feb 18, 2009
The Dating Go Round
Speed dating offers scientists a peek at how romance actually blossoms
By Bruce Bower
February 14th, 2009
Dating is hell. It’s a tiptoe traipse on a high wire strung across the Grand Canyon. One wrong move and you’re in free fall, tumbling crazily toward a final goodnight. It’s no accident that single adults laugh and commiserate over dating horror stories. Tales of dating bliss just don’t cut it at the watercooler.
Dating can also be a monumental chore. All too often, someone who seems cute and funny chatting in line at the coffee shop turns into a date from — well, you know.
Enter Rabbi Yaacov Deyo. He is generally credited with inventing speed dating in 1998 to help Jewish singles in Los Angeles meet each other. Deyo gave people literally looking for love a way to cut to the chase and perhaps even avoid catastrophic spills.
In the past decade, speed dating has spread. No major metropolitan area in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada lacks speed dating opportunities. Entrepreneurs now run events for speed networking, speed interviewing and speed friending. About a dozen speed dating companies have emerged as major players in the United States. That doesn’t include, though, specialty operations geared toward arranging meetings between members of particular groups, such as Christians or gays.
Even psychologists have gotten into the act, for purely scientific reasons. Without intending to, Deyo devised a way to study real-life romantic attraction and relationship formation. That’s no small feat — couples who have just met and started dating are usually in no mood to be scrutinized by nosy researchers.
At a typical speed dating event, the romantically inclined pay a fee to go on a series of brief “dates” with potential partners. Men sit across from women, and the pairs of speed daters talk for no more than eight minutes. Each man then moves and sits across from another woman. This process continues until all the men and women have had brief conversations.
Afterward, speed daters describe on a questionnaire or a website which people they would or would not want to meet again. If two participants express interest in each other, the host of the event provides them with contact information so that the pair can chat further or arrange a traditional date.
For the past 40 years, attempts to discern how relationships get off the ground have largely relied on questionnaires and laboratory tasks that probe for qualities people value in prospective dates and mates. “There’s a big difference between evaluating people’s dating preferences on paper and evaluating living, breathing potential partners,” says psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
New speed dating research indicates that men and women in fledgling relationships anxiously long for an emotional bond with each other, even if it takes years for such a connection to form. This gut-wrenching reaction may draw couples together with the same pull as mutual sexual desire.
Speed dating investigations also illuminate a considerable gap between what people say they’re looking for in a romantic partner and traits of the people they actually want to go out with. Some evidence raises doubts about whether men value women’s physical attractiveness and whether women cherish men’s financial prospects to the degree that questionnaire responses would suggest.
Other findings hint that, for good evolutionary reasons, female speed daters become more choosy as they meet larger numbers of potential dates. Evolution may also lie behind women’s tendency to mask their romantic intentions more than men do. Intriguingly, though, during speed dating, women’s dating palates become much less discriminating if they move from one man to the next, rather than waiting for men to approach them.
No other available research method could yield such findings, remarks psychologist Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “It cracks me up that speed dating was invented by a rabbi because it seems like it was designed by a psychologist,” Diamond says.
Worried love
The late psychologist Dorothy Tennov studied love more than 30 years ago, well before the advent of speed dating. After interviewing thousands of people, she concluded that romantic passion feeds off a mix of hope and uncertainty. Love grows out of opposing beliefs that the other person reciprocates one’s feelings but, at the same time, may not really be as interested as he or she seems, Tennov proposed.
A speed dating study conducted by Finkel and Northwestern University psychologist Paul Eastwick supports Tennov’s view. Worries about desired partners’ underlying romantic feelings flare up in many people — and it is this worry that motivates pursuit of the relationship, Eastwick and Finkel say. Anxiety toward a love interest, combined with hope that one’s feelings will be returned, triggers the same attachment system that forges emotional bonds between children and their parents, Eastwick and Finkel conclude in the September Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“We see an embryonic stage of the attachment process as soon as a person develops a romantic attraction to someone else,” Finkel says. Scientists have usually assumed that mutual sexual desire largely motivates people to pair up in the first place, with attachment bonds forming only after at least two years together.
Eastwick and Finkel conducted seven speed dating events for college students, 81 women and 82 men. After an event, students used a website the researchers set up to both view and communicate with matches. For one month after a speed dating session, students visited the website every three days and completed relationship-related questionnaires.
In particular, the scientists tracked what they call partner-specific attachment anxiety. Volunteers scored high on this measure by affirming statements such as, “I need a lot of reassurance that [partner’s name] cares about me” and “I worry that [partner’s name] doesn’t care about me as much as I care about him/her.”
This uncertainty kept people interested. Participants were far more likely to date someone and to stay romantically focused on that person if they thought he or she liked them, but only if at the same time those participants experienced constant twinges of attachment anxiety.
These conflicting responses are precariously balanced in budding relationships, Eastwick says. One couple stopped dating after a couple of weeks because one person felt insufficiently desired by the other. Another breakup occurred after one person’s attachment anxiety toward the other had declined sharply for more than a week. In that case, one dater may have lost interest in another whose romantic intentions were no longer in doubt, Eastwick suggests.
For one couple that dated casually throughout the follow-up period, each person’s feelings of desirability and attachment anxiety ebbed and flowed, but both reactions were always present.
Fledgling daters who experienced attachment anxiety reported far more interest in forming a serious relationship than in having a one-night stand. People with troubled backgrounds, who generally felt anxious about their standing in any close relationship, usually didn’t contact their speed dating matches.
But for the vast majority of daters, partner-specific attachment anxiety accompanies romantic attraction and imbues unrequited love with its signature sense of wretched despair, the researchers suggest.
Some researchers believe that worries stirred up by budding relationships should not be called attachment anxiety, since actual, traditional attachment bonds have yet to form.
Eastwick demurs. “It is almost as if a central component of passionate love is the fantasy that one will ultimately possess an attachment bond with the desired partner,” he says.
Feminine mystique
Evolution-minded psychologists regard women as more likely than men to want a committed relationship and to feel anxious about getting one. Because women have, since the dawn of humanity, faced much greater pressure to raise children, they have evolved to behave relatively cautiously and coyly with potential mates, according to these researchers. This tactic improves a woman’s chances of weeding out the users and the losers.
Men, on the other hand, are more apt than women to pursue short-term sexual relationships with many partners. Physical signs of a woman’s youth and beauty initially stand out for men. This perspective suggests that it is only after deciding to seek a long-term mate that men look beyond women’s surface qualities.
Consider a 2005 analysis of speed dating data, by psychologist Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Men tended to choose to have further contact with every other woman they met. Women only wanted to meet again with one in three men.
Related evidence comes from a speed dating study in the January Psychological Science. Psychologist Peter Todd of Indiana University in Bloomington and his coworkers found that observers of speed dating encounters are moderately good at picking out who later expresses romantic interest in whom, with women being harder to read than men.
In Todd’s investigation, 28 female and 26 male college students who don’t speak German watched video clips of 24 speed dating interactions among German young adults. Clips lasted either 10 or 30 seconds and featured different parts of each speed date.
Observers correctly judged others’ romantic interest in a partner about 60 percent of the time, a good but not great accuracy rate. “Some people hid their true intentions in this dating context, especially females,” Todd says.
The true feelings of the female speed daters were harder to identify in general, and five women were nearly impossible for observers of either sex to figure out.
Observers judged speed daters’ intentions best when viewing clips taken from the latter parts of encounters. Speed daters must have gathered information about each other throughout their brief interactions, making their intentions easier to read toward the end, Todd suggests. If so, then partners evaluate much more than each others’ physical attractiveness during the few minutes of a speed date.
Nonetheless, men being men, they still focus on what women look like, even if unwilling to come right out and admit it. In a 2007 speed dating study, Todd and colleagues found that men and women alike said beforehand that their ideal mate possessed all sorts of physical and personal attributes that reminded them of their own. Yet men’s choices of which women to contact after speed dates were, by admission on later questionnaires, based mostly on physical attractiveness.
Women were again the choosier sex. And each woman used judgments of her own physical allure to pick a few men having comparable desirability, based on a woman’s perceptions of each man’s wealth, status, family commitment, physical appearance and health. In other words, a woman’s opinion of her own physical beauty determined what she aspired to in a partner. Women’s self-perceived beauty lay behind their determinations of which men were good prospects.
Women become especially choosy given a large pool of prospects, picking only a few men ranked highly by nearly all female daters, Todd’s group reports in January in Animal Behaviour.
Females in many nonhuman animal species do just the opposite, expanding their mating choices when faced with plentiful male options. In those situations, high-ranking males find it more difficult to control low-ranking males’ access to fertile females.
Speed daters play the mating game in a peculiarly human way, Todd proposes. Given only a handful of choices, women get less picky because they can evaluate many characteristics of each potential date. But faced with 20 or 30 alternatives, it’s possible to track only a few obvious clues for each man, such as facial appearance and body type, narrowing the woman’s pool of choices.
Moving attractions
There’s a simple and until now unexplored way to get female speed daters to lower their romantic standards, according to Finkel. Just have them move from one man to the next, rather than waiting for each man to approach them, as is the practice at virtually all speed dating events. “The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner increases one’s attraction to that person,” Finkel says.
Finkel and Eastwick describe this phenomenon in a paper to be submitted for publication. Related research has already shown that individuals tend to feel more positively toward objects or people that they physically approach, versus those viewed from a stationary position.
At 15 speed dating events organized by the Northwestern University researchers, either men or women rotated from one partner to the next while the other sex remained seated.
When men approached and women sat, men reported far more romantic desire for their various partners than women did. Men also cited greater romantic chemistry with partners, relative to the seated women, and picked larger numbers of speed dating partners for further contact. But when women approached and men sat, the number of people men and women wanted to date was about the same.
Men are generally expected, if not required, to approach women in most situations that offer romantic opportunities, Finkel notes. This subtle social expectation may substantially explain why women are choosier daters than men.
In a related 2008 study, Finkel and Eastwick found no differences between male and female speed daters’ tendencies to favor partners with good looks or promising careers. Yet on questionnaires, the men had described a preference for physically attractive dates and women had emphasized a search for guys with good earning prospects.
“Purported sex differences in mating strategies have been touted as part of our evolved legacy, but that’s a vastly oversimplified view,” Utah’s Diamond says.
Todd disagrees. Until other researchers confirm that women become less selective when told to approach prospective dates, he reserves judgment on Finkel and Eastwick’s new study. The Northwestern researchers study college-aged daters, who may not exhibit clear sex differences in dating preferences because most seek short-term relationships, Todd notes.
His own speed dating studies include 20- to 50-year-olds. Todd regards members of this age group as the best bets for seeking a committed partner and showing sex-specific mating strategies.
However evolutionary scenarios pan out, speed dating offers an efficient tool for studying real-life love connections, remarks Columbia University economist Raymond Fisman. Dating websites and census data on marriages offer other avenues for such research.
These research approaches can help answer other questions about love, such as why some people experience no qualms about interracial dating while others do. Last year, a team led by Fisman reported that prevailing racial attitudes and racial diversity in people’s home regions strongly influence their willingness to contact speed dating partners of other races. Fisman now investigates people’s attitudes about organizational and corporate corruption. When considering either corruption or dating, he says, it’s important to remember that people often lie both to themselves and others about their underlying motives. “We all tell ourselves comforting stories,” Fisman observes.
By Bruce Bower
February 14th, 2009
Dating is hell. It’s a tiptoe traipse on a high wire strung across the Grand Canyon. One wrong move and you’re in free fall, tumbling crazily toward a final goodnight. It’s no accident that single adults laugh and commiserate over dating horror stories. Tales of dating bliss just don’t cut it at the watercooler.
Dating can also be a monumental chore. All too often, someone who seems cute and funny chatting in line at the coffee shop turns into a date from — well, you know.
Enter Rabbi Yaacov Deyo. He is generally credited with inventing speed dating in 1998 to help Jewish singles in Los Angeles meet each other. Deyo gave people literally looking for love a way to cut to the chase and perhaps even avoid catastrophic spills.
In the past decade, speed dating has spread. No major metropolitan area in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada lacks speed dating opportunities. Entrepreneurs now run events for speed networking, speed interviewing and speed friending. About a dozen speed dating companies have emerged as major players in the United States. That doesn’t include, though, specialty operations geared toward arranging meetings between members of particular groups, such as Christians or gays.
Even psychologists have gotten into the act, for purely scientific reasons. Without intending to, Deyo devised a way to study real-life romantic attraction and relationship formation. That’s no small feat — couples who have just met and started dating are usually in no mood to be scrutinized by nosy researchers.
At a typical speed dating event, the romantically inclined pay a fee to go on a series of brief “dates” with potential partners. Men sit across from women, and the pairs of speed daters talk for no more than eight minutes. Each man then moves and sits across from another woman. This process continues until all the men and women have had brief conversations.
Afterward, speed daters describe on a questionnaire or a website which people they would or would not want to meet again. If two participants express interest in each other, the host of the event provides them with contact information so that the pair can chat further or arrange a traditional date.
For the past 40 years, attempts to discern how relationships get off the ground have largely relied on questionnaires and laboratory tasks that probe for qualities people value in prospective dates and mates. “There’s a big difference between evaluating people’s dating preferences on paper and evaluating living, breathing potential partners,” says psychologist Eli Finkel of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
New speed dating research indicates that men and women in fledgling relationships anxiously long for an emotional bond with each other, even if it takes years for such a connection to form. This gut-wrenching reaction may draw couples together with the same pull as mutual sexual desire.
Speed dating investigations also illuminate a considerable gap between what people say they’re looking for in a romantic partner and traits of the people they actually want to go out with. Some evidence raises doubts about whether men value women’s physical attractiveness and whether women cherish men’s financial prospects to the degree that questionnaire responses would suggest.
Other findings hint that, for good evolutionary reasons, female speed daters become more choosy as they meet larger numbers of potential dates. Evolution may also lie behind women’s tendency to mask their romantic intentions more than men do. Intriguingly, though, during speed dating, women’s dating palates become much less discriminating if they move from one man to the next, rather than waiting for men to approach them.
No other available research method could yield such findings, remarks psychologist Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “It cracks me up that speed dating was invented by a rabbi because it seems like it was designed by a psychologist,” Diamond says.
Worried love
The late psychologist Dorothy Tennov studied love more than 30 years ago, well before the advent of speed dating. After interviewing thousands of people, she concluded that romantic passion feeds off a mix of hope and uncertainty. Love grows out of opposing beliefs that the other person reciprocates one’s feelings but, at the same time, may not really be as interested as he or she seems, Tennov proposed.
A speed dating study conducted by Finkel and Northwestern University psychologist Paul Eastwick supports Tennov’s view. Worries about desired partners’ underlying romantic feelings flare up in many people — and it is this worry that motivates pursuit of the relationship, Eastwick and Finkel say. Anxiety toward a love interest, combined with hope that one’s feelings will be returned, triggers the same attachment system that forges emotional bonds between children and their parents, Eastwick and Finkel conclude in the September Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
“We see an embryonic stage of the attachment process as soon as a person develops a romantic attraction to someone else,” Finkel says. Scientists have usually assumed that mutual sexual desire largely motivates people to pair up in the first place, with attachment bonds forming only after at least two years together.
Eastwick and Finkel conducted seven speed dating events for college students, 81 women and 82 men. After an event, students used a website the researchers set up to both view and communicate with matches. For one month after a speed dating session, students visited the website every three days and completed relationship-related questionnaires.
In particular, the scientists tracked what they call partner-specific attachment anxiety. Volunteers scored high on this measure by affirming statements such as, “I need a lot of reassurance that [partner’s name] cares about me” and “I worry that [partner’s name] doesn’t care about me as much as I care about him/her.”
This uncertainty kept people interested. Participants were far more likely to date someone and to stay romantically focused on that person if they thought he or she liked them, but only if at the same time those participants experienced constant twinges of attachment anxiety.
These conflicting responses are precariously balanced in budding relationships, Eastwick says. One couple stopped dating after a couple of weeks because one person felt insufficiently desired by the other. Another breakup occurred after one person’s attachment anxiety toward the other had declined sharply for more than a week. In that case, one dater may have lost interest in another whose romantic intentions were no longer in doubt, Eastwick suggests.
For one couple that dated casually throughout the follow-up period, each person’s feelings of desirability and attachment anxiety ebbed and flowed, but both reactions were always present.
Fledgling daters who experienced attachment anxiety reported far more interest in forming a serious relationship than in having a one-night stand. People with troubled backgrounds, who generally felt anxious about their standing in any close relationship, usually didn’t contact their speed dating matches.
But for the vast majority of daters, partner-specific attachment anxiety accompanies romantic attraction and imbues unrequited love with its signature sense of wretched despair, the researchers suggest.
Some researchers believe that worries stirred up by budding relationships should not be called attachment anxiety, since actual, traditional attachment bonds have yet to form.
Eastwick demurs. “It is almost as if a central component of passionate love is the fantasy that one will ultimately possess an attachment bond with the desired partner,” he says.
Feminine mystique
Evolution-minded psychologists regard women as more likely than men to want a committed relationship and to feel anxious about getting one. Because women have, since the dawn of humanity, faced much greater pressure to raise children, they have evolved to behave relatively cautiously and coyly with potential mates, according to these researchers. This tactic improves a woman’s chances of weeding out the users and the losers.
Men, on the other hand, are more apt than women to pursue short-term sexual relationships with many partners. Physical signs of a woman’s youth and beauty initially stand out for men. This perspective suggests that it is only after deciding to seek a long-term mate that men look beyond women’s surface qualities.
Consider a 2005 analysis of speed dating data, by psychologist Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Men tended to choose to have further contact with every other woman they met. Women only wanted to meet again with one in three men.
Related evidence comes from a speed dating study in the January Psychological Science. Psychologist Peter Todd of Indiana University in Bloomington and his coworkers found that observers of speed dating encounters are moderately good at picking out who later expresses romantic interest in whom, with women being harder to read than men.
In Todd’s investigation, 28 female and 26 male college students who don’t speak German watched video clips of 24 speed dating interactions among German young adults. Clips lasted either 10 or 30 seconds and featured different parts of each speed date.
Observers correctly judged others’ romantic interest in a partner about 60 percent of the time, a good but not great accuracy rate. “Some people hid their true intentions in this dating context, especially females,” Todd says.
The true feelings of the female speed daters were harder to identify in general, and five women were nearly impossible for observers of either sex to figure out.
Observers judged speed daters’ intentions best when viewing clips taken from the latter parts of encounters. Speed daters must have gathered information about each other throughout their brief interactions, making their intentions easier to read toward the end, Todd suggests. If so, then partners evaluate much more than each others’ physical attractiveness during the few minutes of a speed date.
Nonetheless, men being men, they still focus on what women look like, even if unwilling to come right out and admit it. In a 2007 speed dating study, Todd and colleagues found that men and women alike said beforehand that their ideal mate possessed all sorts of physical and personal attributes that reminded them of their own. Yet men’s choices of which women to contact after speed dates were, by admission on later questionnaires, based mostly on physical attractiveness.
Women were again the choosier sex. And each woman used judgments of her own physical allure to pick a few men having comparable desirability, based on a woman’s perceptions of each man’s wealth, status, family commitment, physical appearance and health. In other words, a woman’s opinion of her own physical beauty determined what she aspired to in a partner. Women’s self-perceived beauty lay behind their determinations of which men were good prospects.
Women become especially choosy given a large pool of prospects, picking only a few men ranked highly by nearly all female daters, Todd’s group reports in January in Animal Behaviour.
Females in many nonhuman animal species do just the opposite, expanding their mating choices when faced with plentiful male options. In those situations, high-ranking males find it more difficult to control low-ranking males’ access to fertile females.
Speed daters play the mating game in a peculiarly human way, Todd proposes. Given only a handful of choices, women get less picky because they can evaluate many characteristics of each potential date. But faced with 20 or 30 alternatives, it’s possible to track only a few obvious clues for each man, such as facial appearance and body type, narrowing the woman’s pool of choices.
Moving attractions
There’s a simple and until now unexplored way to get female speed daters to lower their romantic standards, according to Finkel. Just have them move from one man to the next, rather than waiting for each man to approach them, as is the practice at virtually all speed dating events. “The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner increases one’s attraction to that person,” Finkel says.
Finkel and Eastwick describe this phenomenon in a paper to be submitted for publication. Related research has already shown that individuals tend to feel more positively toward objects or people that they physically approach, versus those viewed from a stationary position.
At 15 speed dating events organized by the Northwestern University researchers, either men or women rotated from one partner to the next while the other sex remained seated.
When men approached and women sat, men reported far more romantic desire for their various partners than women did. Men also cited greater romantic chemistry with partners, relative to the seated women, and picked larger numbers of speed dating partners for further contact. But when women approached and men sat, the number of people men and women wanted to date was about the same.
Men are generally expected, if not required, to approach women in most situations that offer romantic opportunities, Finkel notes. This subtle social expectation may substantially explain why women are choosier daters than men.
In a related 2008 study, Finkel and Eastwick found no differences between male and female speed daters’ tendencies to favor partners with good looks or promising careers. Yet on questionnaires, the men had described a preference for physically attractive dates and women had emphasized a search for guys with good earning prospects.
“Purported sex differences in mating strategies have been touted as part of our evolved legacy, but that’s a vastly oversimplified view,” Utah’s Diamond says.
Todd disagrees. Until other researchers confirm that women become less selective when told to approach prospective dates, he reserves judgment on Finkel and Eastwick’s new study. The Northwestern researchers study college-aged daters, who may not exhibit clear sex differences in dating preferences because most seek short-term relationships, Todd notes.
His own speed dating studies include 20- to 50-year-olds. Todd regards members of this age group as the best bets for seeking a committed partner and showing sex-specific mating strategies.
However evolutionary scenarios pan out, speed dating offers an efficient tool for studying real-life love connections, remarks Columbia University economist Raymond Fisman. Dating websites and census data on marriages offer other avenues for such research.
These research approaches can help answer other questions about love, such as why some people experience no qualms about interracial dating while others do. Last year, a team led by Fisman reported that prevailing racial attitudes and racial diversity in people’s home regions strongly influence their willingness to contact speed dating partners of other races. Fisman now investigates people’s attitudes about organizational and corporate corruption. When considering either corruption or dating, he says, it’s important to remember that people often lie both to themselves and others about their underlying motives. “We all tell ourselves comforting stories,” Fisman observes.
Keeping Score Get a girl in record time, then get another one
By Craig Malisow published: June 02, 2005
Well, some people try to pick up girls / And get called asshole / This never happened to Pablo Picasso — Jonathan Richman, “Pablo Picasso”
We’re upstairs at the Red Door when Bashev sees his target: four girls in a flurry of tight pants and spaghetti straps. They’re hot babes. HBs.
It's a warm Friday night, and the Midtown rooftop is packed with well-dressed, attractive twentysomethings. Beautiful people in the know go to the Red Door, and the owners ward off everyone else by not even having a sign.
Before I know it, Bashev's in the girls' midst, and I think, What is he doing? A solo sortie like that takes guts. But Bashev's been studying fast-seduction for three years. He told me earlier he doesn't usually try to pick up girls ("to sarge") with wingmen, but I offer my services anyway. If we run into a pairing that includes an ugly girl (UG), I may have to -- in fast-seduction lingo -- jump on the grenade.
Bashev decided earlier to use one of his favorite stories. If a girl asks what the 24-year-old does, he's not going to say he's an engineering grad student at Rice. He's studied hypertechnical concepts at Amherst and the University of Massachusetts, but big freakin' deal: Women don't like the "ultra-rational" mind, he says. They like the unpredictable.
He spends most of his time in class, bogged down in technical studies. He once worked on a project titled "Automated Synthesis of Numerical Programs for Control, Simulation and Animation of Virtual Robots." Women don't want that dude, he says. They want mystery, romance, fun.
Bashev once took a girl he liked to his computer lab at school, where he deconstructs algorithms and multivariable calculus. He wooed her for a semester with linear algebra and software design methodology. Unbelievably, she split.
So that's why he'll get women to ask what he does, whereupon he'll point to his shoes and casually say, "I'm a foot model." Tonight, I'm to be his colleague, a model of the posterior. He doesn't expect them to really believe it; it's just supposed to distinguish us from the endless succession of cheeseballs who drop the same tired lines.
Bashev is tall and lean, with short light brown hair and a friendly Bulgarian accent. So he should have an edge, but by the time I work up the nerve to actually say something like "Yes, you heard correctly; I'm an ass model," a girl with long black hair has already shot him down. He didn't even get to his foot-model spiel. So he just opens with one of her friends. He asks if she thinks American reality shows are really real.
The first girl looks at me, rolls her eyes and says she doesn't care in the first place. I just stand there and do a really good impression of a dude who has nothing to say.
Bashev's not a bad-looking guy, but he's not getting anywhere. In the parlance of fast-seduction, these girls have just demonstrated the bitch shield. It's kind of like an electrified razor-wire force field they activate to fend off idiots at places like this. It doesn't mean the girl's a bitch. It means she's acting like one to protect herself from the silk-shirted vultures who want to talk about their Beemers and Bulovas.
A genuine pickup artist (PUA) can penetrate the bitch shield through sheer wit and charm. But Bashev's not an official PUA, and pretty soon we're treated like we're invisible. The girls eventually form their own continent and drift away to a table. Bashev smiles, shrugs it off. He's just getting warmed up. There's plenty more sarging to take care of. I head to the bar while the lazy lion of the Serengeti surveys the scene.
When I return from the bar with reinforcements, I see that Bashev's fellow fast-seducer has arrived. He says to call him Mr. X. They met at the Austin PUA Summit, held last Valentine's weekend, when some of the top players in the biz gave seminars on how to close the deal, as well as open one in the first place.
By the end of the evening, the Bombay-born Mr. X will explain why most women are here tonight: "They're hoping that Prince Charming is going to sweep her off her feet, take her home and give her a nice rogering."
When it comes to going after women, guys have been hoodwinked for the last 20 or 30 years, Mr. X says. Flowers and boring old dinners don't work. Women need mystery, excitement, romance. That comes naturally to some guys. But what about everyone else? What about the average frustrated chump (AFC)?
Fortunately, there's an entire online industry built around turning castoffs into Casanovas. The brand names differ, but the fast-seduction concept is the same: You don't have to be rich or extremely handsome to get the most beautiful girl in the bar. Whether you're looking for a girlfriend, a wife or a one-nighter, there are techniques that, if properly applied, can make you the kind of guy you say you hate but secretly want to be.
It's an incredibly scientific process, but one renowned pickup artist has boiled it down to its essence: Cocky + Funny = Laid. It's the theory of relativity with nice pants and a martini. And in bars and clubs throughout the world, AFCs and PUAs are putting this theory to the test.
The life of an adult woman is one of dichotomies. In her everyday life, she wants to feel like a lady -- respected and admired. But in the bedroom, she wants to feel sexual. She wants to be fucked like a slut. -- David Shade, What Women Really Look For in a Man
No doubt there was a caveman at some point in prehistory who taught his fellow Cro-Mags how to get the least hairy, least snaggle-toothed cavewoman in the clan, even if they couldn't slay a woolly mammoth or build a fire.
But the modern age of fast-seduction began around 1990, when a SoCal dweeb named Paul Ross Jeffrey self-published How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. Jeffrey, better known as Ross Jeffries, developed a system known as Speed-Seduction. It's based on neuro-linguistic programming, the pseudo-scientific practice of eliciting desired behavior from others. This is achieved subconsciously through subtle body language and "implanted" words.
Behold the Discovery Channel Pattern. If delivered with the right tone and body language, this formula can get your target thinking about mind-blowing sex. First, tell her you recently saw a show on the Discovery Channel about the people who design roller coasters. Tell her you learned about the three components to a successful attraction to the ride: an initial overwhelming arousal; an urge to get back on once you "get off"; and a feeling of danger even though you know you're in the hands of something safe. From there, you launch into the experience of riding a roller coaster: heart-pounding excitement, a buildup and release of tension, etc. Voilà. She's yours for the taking.
Jeffries used the Web as early as 1993 to spread the gospel of Speed-Seduction throughout the world. He made tapes, gave seminars, got lots of press. To AFCs, the whole idea of Speed-Seduction was the Holy Grail. Finally, there was a chance for shy, fat or bald guys to shine. User groups popped up online, as did countless Jeffries imitators, each boasting exponentially better techniques.
Jeffries's Web site promises you'll seduce at least three women in 90 days or "you pay nothing." His home-study courses range from $225 to $370.
But for $18.95 at AdvancedMacking.com, a guy named Anthony Berger says he'll get you three girls per week by showing you how to "talk to chicks and get them wet DURING the conversation." One can only hope Berger's better at macking than spelling. Choice quote: "Seduce & Mind-Fuck Women: That's were we shine!"
And in What Women Really Look For in a Man, David Shade includes chapters titled "Getting Her to Pose for Pics," "Slip in the Back Door" and "The Nipple Orgasm."
The field got crowded enough that, in 1999, Jeffries sued fellow poonhound R. Don Steele, author of How to Date Young Women (For Men Over 35). Steele had attacked Jeffries online, calling him a fraud and a kike, and Jeffries sued for libel. (Somewhat cryptically, Steele told the New Times Los Angeles, "I'm not anti-Semitic. I just hate kikes.")
The lawsuit achieved nothing; both men are still in business, but Jeffries is more popular. That may have to do with the fact that, as preposterous as it may sound, he bends over backward to explain that he is not a misogynist, that these techniques are designed to bring pleasure to both men and women.
On the other hand, Steele names the women he's slept with, including an 18-year-old when he was 48.
Cradle-robbing anti-Semites aside, the fast-seduction community isn't the lechfest it might sound like. There are those out there who want to share confidence-building techniques with the archetypal "nice guy," as on fastseduction.com.
Created about five years ago by Boston-based PUA Formhandle, the site is the most comprehensive compendium of techniques from big-time players as well as average guys who've stumbled into lucky streaks. There is a general forum, as well as discussion groups for different cities. The site also offers a wingman-pairing service for a seducer whose regular buddy is unavailable.
The 32-year-old Formhandle says his site is not a den of deception, but a way for guys all over the world to improve their attitude, social skills and confidence. It's a way for them to get over their insecurities and become the kind of guy a woman would like to get to know.
"Basically, it's no more deceptive than women putting on makeup to improve their…level of attraction to men," Formhandle says from Boston. "It's no more deceptive than push-up bras or heels or going to the gym to work out…This isn't just a game of words and seduction, it's an overall life improvement."
That's not to say the board doesn't have its share of coarse language. This is, after all, a community of guys, many of whom are sexually frustrated and have more on their mind than elegant prose. So you'll find guys like Nashvilleplayboy, whose mantra is "Pussy is pussy. It just happens to be wrapped in different wrappers. Don't get caught up in the wrapper."
Sayings like that will protect Formhandle from his fear that his site will mutate into an "Oprah board." As crass as they can be, guys give better advice in this area than women, he says.
A woman "truly doesn't know what causes her to be attracted to a man," he says. "She's not going to sit down logically at any point and make her list of things that you know make her attracted to a man. There are the obvious things -- the wish list that women have, like tall, dark, handsome, rich…funny. Those are just so common that they're meaningless. And they don't actually -- they aren't the real thing that causes her to be attracted or aroused. They may be the thing that maybe causes her to have some interest in the man in the first place…ultimately, she doesn't know for sure."
But what about "just be yourself"?
"When somebody says be yourself…what they mean is be better than yourself," he says. "Be somebody who's obviously better than what you are now."
Formhandle elaborates: "She has to look across at the guy…and decide, you know, 'Whatever I see, if it interests me, is it really this person for real, or is he faking it?' And that's ultimately this whole 'be yourself' thing. Well, women will say that because they want the guy to be himself so they can better judge who they're dealing with. But as far as people who need something to improve themselves, that advice doesn't work. And you have to kind of tell them, 'Pick another person and be that.' "
Tim Perper, an independent researcher and author of Sex Signals: The Biology of Love, has studied courtship for 25 years. A biologist by training, he doesn't have faith in the scientific validity of neuro-linguistic programming, but he understands why so many guys would be drawn to a set of techniques that promise to build confidence and luck with women.
Men have a tendency to be cautious with women, he says. "And women sometimes comment on that -- 'Here we are, dressed up to the nines, and nobody talks to us.' Too many men have simply gotten shot down, or watched other guys get shot down, really, to want to risk walking across the bar. One guy described that to me as saying, 'It's like climbing Mt. Everest, but slower.' "
The fear of rejection is coupled with the nearly innate belief that all women are experts in the rules of attraction.
"We men tend to think that women know all the lines and all the rules, but she may be just as shy as we are," Perper says from his home office in Philadelphia. "She may be looking for the guy to say something inviting to her."
The best bet is avoiding lines altogether.
"They're very, very treacherous," he says. "They might work because the girl was charmed by them…or they're being used truly spontaneously, or they're just plain funny. But used manipulatively, as a ploy, they're probably going to bomb."
Neil Strauss, a writer for The New York Times and Rolling Stone, spent two years within the community, which he details in his upcoming book, The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists. Strauss says an editor pitched the idea, and he went into it simply wanting to understand the guys who "seemed like gods on earth, living every man's fantasy." No one was more surprised than Strauss when he became one of the community's foremost experts and wound up leading fast-seduction workshops.
"I really have love for the guys who are trying to learn," says Strauss, who's also ghostwritten books for Jenna Jameson, Tommy Lee and Marilyn Manson.
Generally, Strauss says, guys don't give one another sexual advice. Conversations on the matter usually begin with "Did you get some?" and end with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
"To admit that you're not getting any is to admit you're not a man," he says. "And here are guys" in the community "who had the confidence to say, 'I'm completely unconfident.' "
Talk of one-night stands is rare, and misogyny is rarer, Strauss says. More typical are the quiet guys afraid of rejection. For them, he says, fast-seduction is a set of training wheels that can put them at ease around women.
Strauss learned under perhaps the most legendary PUA in the biz, a tall Canadian magician named Erik von Markovik, a.k.a. Mystery.
According to Mystery's self-propagated backstory, he discovered his skills accidentally, picking up a girl at a Toronto juice bar after performing a magic trick. He soon developed a set of principles and techniques, and before long AFCs were flocking to Toronto to study under him. Today, his two-day seminars command around $650.
Mystery is perhaps the most written-about PUA and holds the improbable status of being profiled in both the Utne reader and Elle, in which he tried to woo writer Lauren Sandler into his hot tub.
The Mystery Method Web site encourages integrity: "We specifically advocate NOT lying to or deceiving women -- not only is it unnecessary (we teach you how to get what you want, even threesomes or multiple women, by being a man about it and establishing a strong frame rather than lying and deceiving) but it is also beneath us."
Mystery writes that this honest approach works at all levels, from one-nighters to finding a spouse. But in his years in the community, Strauss says, he didn't hear much talk about the former.
"Some of these guys just want girlfriends," he says. "Some might want to sleep with a woman, but it doesn't have to be that night. Everyone's in it for different reasons, but a lot of guys, you know, just want a woman because they haven't kissed a woman in a couple years."
In his AFC days, he'd shower a woman with gifts and flowers and try to make her feel like a princess. "And that's what a woman wants when she's dating a guy. But before she's dating a guy…she doesn't want that. She wants to feel a challenge…If you have to work for it, it's a little bit of a challenge, you appreciate it more. It's true about anything in life. If it comes too easy, it must not have value."
So is Mr. X right? Have guys been conditioned with bad information for years on end?
"So the whole thing about putting her on a pedestal -- that's not going to get you anywhere?" I ask Strauss.
He's quick to respond with a question that's really an answer.
"What's happened within your experience when you've done that?"
It is a proven fact that women have certain hard-wired attraction switches, and also automatic avoidance mechanisms, for certain types of behavior. Wouldn't it be useful to know how that works? -- Mystery, www.mysterymethod.com
Sarging at Baker Street is impossible tonight; it's too packed to hear yourself think.
So Bashev and I walk across the street to Brian O'Neill's. Rice Village is a target-rich environment; a string of bars and plenty of single young women.
As we enter, Bashev stops to talk with a woman he knows.
"Social proof -- I know the manager," he says. Social proof means you're the man. If HBs see you in the company of other women, or if you're keeping a crowd entertained, you must have value, and she's hooked.
This demonstration of social proof is good for Bashev, who's a bit subtler -- he doesn't peacock, like Mystery, who wears black nail polish and platform boots.
At the bar, we sip on some nourishing gin and tonics and look for HBs. Bashev spots a seven and an eight sitting at a table. It helps to calculate a woman's beauty on the standard one-to-ten scale, because that influences the approach. (Some seducers use a bifurcated scale; e.g., seven-nine means a seven face and a nine body.)
When approaching anything above a seven, it's wise to use a "neg," or a slight insult, like "Nice nails -- are they real?" The thinking here is that extremely attractive women are used to simpering fools showering them with corny compliments, and that just ain't cool. If you neg -- and follow it up by turning your back to her -- you're making her notice you. But you've got to know how to use a neg. The Fast Seduction site recommends no more than two negs for a seven and a maximum of three for a ten.
Unfortunately, the eight's boyfriend returns from the bathroom and puts the kibosh on that table. Some seducers can and even enjoy sarging women with boyfriends, but there are enough women here that such a complication is unnecessary.
We move out to the patio as the band launches into "Wish You Were Here," a morose song if there ever was one, and not one especially suited for sarging. Hell, "Taps" would be more uplifting.
Outside, Bashev busts into his foot-model spiel with two women who are less than thrilled. He doesn't offer to buy them a drink, nor will he do that with anyone else. A firm fast-seduction rule prohibits such activity; it merely signals your submission. An HB will have guys offer her drinks all night, but the one who negs her, won't buy her a drink or refuses her request for one surely will distinguish himself.
The girls excuse themselves to a table. A minute later I follow, hoping they don't pack pepper spray. I tell them Bashev's not really a foot model, and I'm not a foot model's friend. I tell them I'm observing fast-seducers, like Jane Goodall and the chimps, and ask for their input.
Sarah, with black curls and a black shirt, describes the two of them as "science nerds" in their upper twenties. "Dude -- I'm getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry; the whole foot-model thing doesn't do it for me," says Sarah. She says she's read a bit about fast-seduction and finds it laughable.
"Typically, my response to that is: 'Dude, you're an asshole,' " she says, adding later, "my asshole meter is pretty finely tuned."
Julie, a zoologist, says she found Bashev's opener cute for about a minute, but then she lost interest. She says fast-seduction might work "if you do it to the right kind of girl."
Sarah says that if Bashev or anyone else was hoping to get her into bed that night, they'd be wasting their time.
"If I actually like a guy, I'm not going to drag a guy home from a bar," she says. "I'm going to call him for dinner next week."
By the time I report back to Bashev, he's already found two other women, and is expressing a clear interest in the brunette. In an effort to give them space, I sacrilegiously offer to buy her blond friend a drink inside the bar. We take our drinks over to a long couch and break into small talk. I don't even attempt fast-seduction, because I've realized by now that I would feel like a complete tool. There's no way I could tell this girl, with a straight face, about an interesting show I saw on the Discovery Channel last night. I don't even have cable.
But here we are, and we aren't going anywhere, because Bashev has locked onto her friend for the remainder of the evening. Before long, they're on the couch across the coffee table from us, and she's in his lap. He and I make eye contact, and he gives me this look as if to say, See what I mean?
According to the story Bashev tells me later, he began by "busting her balls," which was okay, since she was easily an eight. He saw the pack of Marlboros in her back jeans pocket, which to Europeans is a cowboy cliché. So he told her she looked like a cowboy.
Don't say that -- I don't like that image, she said.
Bashev responded by ignoring her. I'm just looking at your ass, he said. He said this because her ass is firm, and she knows it. But it was all part of the setup.
She asked if he liked it because it's firm; that's why all the guys like to look.
I didn't say I liked it. I think you should work on it in the gym.
Disbelief: Are you saying I'm fat?
Well, honey, you're really losing it. You need to hit the gym.
"And when I said that," Bashev explains, "she was really attracted to me."
Now she was hooked. He moved her inside, where, as serendipity would have it, a horse race was on TV. He caught her watching.
I thought you weren't a cowboy.
Oh, I wasn't really looking there.
Again, he ignored her, and tried running a pattern: Imagine what it would be like to be in the stands, and to not care about the competition, and get close to each other and make out…
Suspicion: Are you saying you want us to make out?
Whoops. Went too far. Time for damage control. He directed her attention to a couple at a table a few yards away.
No, I was talking about them -- see how they look into each other's eyes? A gentle nudge to her side. What, did you think I wanted to kiss you? I don't kiss strangers right away. Bingo. He reversed the frame, used her own language on herself. Damage controlled.
They moved to the couch, where he busted out an effective gimmick: palm-reading. It works for those who've really paid attention to what the girl's been saying all evening. Earlier, she told him that she changes friends a lot. So he traced along a line and said, You seem unattached to people.
Wow…remember, I told you that I was not attached to my friends?
Oh, my God. Well, I'm getting really good at this.
While he read her palms, her fingers were gently grasping the backs of his wrists. He told her he liked how it felt. So he asked where she liked to be touched.
My knees.
"I started touching her knees," he explains later. "I think that was the turning point, right there."
He left with her number and a date for Wednesday night.
Well, some people try to pick up girls / And get called asshole / This never happened to Pablo Picasso — Jonathan Richman, “Pablo Picasso”
We’re upstairs at the Red Door when Bashev sees his target: four girls in a flurry of tight pants and spaghetti straps. They’re hot babes. HBs.
It's a warm Friday night, and the Midtown rooftop is packed with well-dressed, attractive twentysomethings. Beautiful people in the know go to the Red Door, and the owners ward off everyone else by not even having a sign.
Before I know it, Bashev's in the girls' midst, and I think, What is he doing? A solo sortie like that takes guts. But Bashev's been studying fast-seduction for three years. He told me earlier he doesn't usually try to pick up girls ("to sarge") with wingmen, but I offer my services anyway. If we run into a pairing that includes an ugly girl (UG), I may have to -- in fast-seduction lingo -- jump on the grenade.
Bashev decided earlier to use one of his favorite stories. If a girl asks what the 24-year-old does, he's not going to say he's an engineering grad student at Rice. He's studied hypertechnical concepts at Amherst and the University of Massachusetts, but big freakin' deal: Women don't like the "ultra-rational" mind, he says. They like the unpredictable.
He spends most of his time in class, bogged down in technical studies. He once worked on a project titled "Automated Synthesis of Numerical Programs for Control, Simulation and Animation of Virtual Robots." Women don't want that dude, he says. They want mystery, romance, fun.
Bashev once took a girl he liked to his computer lab at school, where he deconstructs algorithms and multivariable calculus. He wooed her for a semester with linear algebra and software design methodology. Unbelievably, she split.
So that's why he'll get women to ask what he does, whereupon he'll point to his shoes and casually say, "I'm a foot model." Tonight, I'm to be his colleague, a model of the posterior. He doesn't expect them to really believe it; it's just supposed to distinguish us from the endless succession of cheeseballs who drop the same tired lines.
Bashev is tall and lean, with short light brown hair and a friendly Bulgarian accent. So he should have an edge, but by the time I work up the nerve to actually say something like "Yes, you heard correctly; I'm an ass model," a girl with long black hair has already shot him down. He didn't even get to his foot-model spiel. So he just opens with one of her friends. He asks if she thinks American reality shows are really real.
The first girl looks at me, rolls her eyes and says she doesn't care in the first place. I just stand there and do a really good impression of a dude who has nothing to say.
Bashev's not a bad-looking guy, but he's not getting anywhere. In the parlance of fast-seduction, these girls have just demonstrated the bitch shield. It's kind of like an electrified razor-wire force field they activate to fend off idiots at places like this. It doesn't mean the girl's a bitch. It means she's acting like one to protect herself from the silk-shirted vultures who want to talk about their Beemers and Bulovas.
A genuine pickup artist (PUA) can penetrate the bitch shield through sheer wit and charm. But Bashev's not an official PUA, and pretty soon we're treated like we're invisible. The girls eventually form their own continent and drift away to a table. Bashev smiles, shrugs it off. He's just getting warmed up. There's plenty more sarging to take care of. I head to the bar while the lazy lion of the Serengeti surveys the scene.
When I return from the bar with reinforcements, I see that Bashev's fellow fast-seducer has arrived. He says to call him Mr. X. They met at the Austin PUA Summit, held last Valentine's weekend, when some of the top players in the biz gave seminars on how to close the deal, as well as open one in the first place.
By the end of the evening, the Bombay-born Mr. X will explain why most women are here tonight: "They're hoping that Prince Charming is going to sweep her off her feet, take her home and give her a nice rogering."
When it comes to going after women, guys have been hoodwinked for the last 20 or 30 years, Mr. X says. Flowers and boring old dinners don't work. Women need mystery, excitement, romance. That comes naturally to some guys. But what about everyone else? What about the average frustrated chump (AFC)?
Fortunately, there's an entire online industry built around turning castoffs into Casanovas. The brand names differ, but the fast-seduction concept is the same: You don't have to be rich or extremely handsome to get the most beautiful girl in the bar. Whether you're looking for a girlfriend, a wife or a one-nighter, there are techniques that, if properly applied, can make you the kind of guy you say you hate but secretly want to be.
It's an incredibly scientific process, but one renowned pickup artist has boiled it down to its essence: Cocky + Funny = Laid. It's the theory of relativity with nice pants and a martini. And in bars and clubs throughout the world, AFCs and PUAs are putting this theory to the test.
The life of an adult woman is one of dichotomies. In her everyday life, she wants to feel like a lady -- respected and admired. But in the bedroom, she wants to feel sexual. She wants to be fucked like a slut. -- David Shade, What Women Really Look For in a Man
No doubt there was a caveman at some point in prehistory who taught his fellow Cro-Mags how to get the least hairy, least snaggle-toothed cavewoman in the clan, even if they couldn't slay a woolly mammoth or build a fire.
But the modern age of fast-seduction began around 1990, when a SoCal dweeb named Paul Ross Jeffrey self-published How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. Jeffrey, better known as Ross Jeffries, developed a system known as Speed-Seduction. It's based on neuro-linguistic programming, the pseudo-scientific practice of eliciting desired behavior from others. This is achieved subconsciously through subtle body language and "implanted" words.
Behold the Discovery Channel Pattern. If delivered with the right tone and body language, this formula can get your target thinking about mind-blowing sex. First, tell her you recently saw a show on the Discovery Channel about the people who design roller coasters. Tell her you learned about the three components to a successful attraction to the ride: an initial overwhelming arousal; an urge to get back on once you "get off"; and a feeling of danger even though you know you're in the hands of something safe. From there, you launch into the experience of riding a roller coaster: heart-pounding excitement, a buildup and release of tension, etc. Voilà. She's yours for the taking.
Jeffries used the Web as early as 1993 to spread the gospel of Speed-Seduction throughout the world. He made tapes, gave seminars, got lots of press. To AFCs, the whole idea of Speed-Seduction was the Holy Grail. Finally, there was a chance for shy, fat or bald guys to shine. User groups popped up online, as did countless Jeffries imitators, each boasting exponentially better techniques.
Jeffries's Web site promises you'll seduce at least three women in 90 days or "you pay nothing." His home-study courses range from $225 to $370.
But for $18.95 at AdvancedMacking.com, a guy named Anthony Berger says he'll get you three girls per week by showing you how to "talk to chicks and get them wet DURING the conversation." One can only hope Berger's better at macking than spelling. Choice quote: "Seduce & Mind-Fuck Women: That's were we shine!"
And in What Women Really Look For in a Man, David Shade includes chapters titled "Getting Her to Pose for Pics," "Slip in the Back Door" and "The Nipple Orgasm."
The field got crowded enough that, in 1999, Jeffries sued fellow poonhound R. Don Steele, author of How to Date Young Women (For Men Over 35). Steele had attacked Jeffries online, calling him a fraud and a kike, and Jeffries sued for libel. (Somewhat cryptically, Steele told the New Times Los Angeles, "I'm not anti-Semitic. I just hate kikes.")
The lawsuit achieved nothing; both men are still in business, but Jeffries is more popular. That may have to do with the fact that, as preposterous as it may sound, he bends over backward to explain that he is not a misogynist, that these techniques are designed to bring pleasure to both men and women.
On the other hand, Steele names the women he's slept with, including an 18-year-old when he was 48.
Cradle-robbing anti-Semites aside, the fast-seduction community isn't the lechfest it might sound like. There are those out there who want to share confidence-building techniques with the archetypal "nice guy," as on fastseduction.com.
Created about five years ago by Boston-based PUA Formhandle, the site is the most comprehensive compendium of techniques from big-time players as well as average guys who've stumbled into lucky streaks. There is a general forum, as well as discussion groups for different cities. The site also offers a wingman-pairing service for a seducer whose regular buddy is unavailable.
The 32-year-old Formhandle says his site is not a den of deception, but a way for guys all over the world to improve their attitude, social skills and confidence. It's a way for them to get over their insecurities and become the kind of guy a woman would like to get to know.
"Basically, it's no more deceptive than women putting on makeup to improve their…level of attraction to men," Formhandle says from Boston. "It's no more deceptive than push-up bras or heels or going to the gym to work out…This isn't just a game of words and seduction, it's an overall life improvement."
That's not to say the board doesn't have its share of coarse language. This is, after all, a community of guys, many of whom are sexually frustrated and have more on their mind than elegant prose. So you'll find guys like Nashvilleplayboy, whose mantra is "Pussy is pussy. It just happens to be wrapped in different wrappers. Don't get caught up in the wrapper."
Sayings like that will protect Formhandle from his fear that his site will mutate into an "Oprah board." As crass as they can be, guys give better advice in this area than women, he says.
A woman "truly doesn't know what causes her to be attracted to a man," he says. "She's not going to sit down logically at any point and make her list of things that you know make her attracted to a man. There are the obvious things -- the wish list that women have, like tall, dark, handsome, rich…funny. Those are just so common that they're meaningless. And they don't actually -- they aren't the real thing that causes her to be attracted or aroused. They may be the thing that maybe causes her to have some interest in the man in the first place…ultimately, she doesn't know for sure."
But what about "just be yourself"?
"When somebody says be yourself…what they mean is be better than yourself," he says. "Be somebody who's obviously better than what you are now."
Formhandle elaborates: "She has to look across at the guy…and decide, you know, 'Whatever I see, if it interests me, is it really this person for real, or is he faking it?' And that's ultimately this whole 'be yourself' thing. Well, women will say that because they want the guy to be himself so they can better judge who they're dealing with. But as far as people who need something to improve themselves, that advice doesn't work. And you have to kind of tell them, 'Pick another person and be that.' "
Tim Perper, an independent researcher and author of Sex Signals: The Biology of Love, has studied courtship for 25 years. A biologist by training, he doesn't have faith in the scientific validity of neuro-linguistic programming, but he understands why so many guys would be drawn to a set of techniques that promise to build confidence and luck with women.
Men have a tendency to be cautious with women, he says. "And women sometimes comment on that -- 'Here we are, dressed up to the nines, and nobody talks to us.' Too many men have simply gotten shot down, or watched other guys get shot down, really, to want to risk walking across the bar. One guy described that to me as saying, 'It's like climbing Mt. Everest, but slower.' "
The fear of rejection is coupled with the nearly innate belief that all women are experts in the rules of attraction.
"We men tend to think that women know all the lines and all the rules, but she may be just as shy as we are," Perper says from his home office in Philadelphia. "She may be looking for the guy to say something inviting to her."
The best bet is avoiding lines altogether.
"They're very, very treacherous," he says. "They might work because the girl was charmed by them…or they're being used truly spontaneously, or they're just plain funny. But used manipulatively, as a ploy, they're probably going to bomb."
Neil Strauss, a writer for The New York Times and Rolling Stone, spent two years within the community, which he details in his upcoming book, The Game: Undercover in the Secret Society of Pick-up Artists. Strauss says an editor pitched the idea, and he went into it simply wanting to understand the guys who "seemed like gods on earth, living every man's fantasy." No one was more surprised than Strauss when he became one of the community's foremost experts and wound up leading fast-seduction workshops.
"I really have love for the guys who are trying to learn," says Strauss, who's also ghostwritten books for Jenna Jameson, Tommy Lee and Marilyn Manson.
Generally, Strauss says, guys don't give one another sexual advice. Conversations on the matter usually begin with "Did you get some?" and end with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
"To admit that you're not getting any is to admit you're not a man," he says. "And here are guys" in the community "who had the confidence to say, 'I'm completely unconfident.' "
Talk of one-night stands is rare, and misogyny is rarer, Strauss says. More typical are the quiet guys afraid of rejection. For them, he says, fast-seduction is a set of training wheels that can put them at ease around women.
Strauss learned under perhaps the most legendary PUA in the biz, a tall Canadian magician named Erik von Markovik, a.k.a. Mystery.
According to Mystery's self-propagated backstory, he discovered his skills accidentally, picking up a girl at a Toronto juice bar after performing a magic trick. He soon developed a set of principles and techniques, and before long AFCs were flocking to Toronto to study under him. Today, his two-day seminars command around $650.
Mystery is perhaps the most written-about PUA and holds the improbable status of being profiled in both the Utne reader and Elle, in which he tried to woo writer Lauren Sandler into his hot tub.
The Mystery Method Web site encourages integrity: "We specifically advocate NOT lying to or deceiving women -- not only is it unnecessary (we teach you how to get what you want, even threesomes or multiple women, by being a man about it and establishing a strong frame rather than lying and deceiving) but it is also beneath us."
Mystery writes that this honest approach works at all levels, from one-nighters to finding a spouse. But in his years in the community, Strauss says, he didn't hear much talk about the former.
"Some of these guys just want girlfriends," he says. "Some might want to sleep with a woman, but it doesn't have to be that night. Everyone's in it for different reasons, but a lot of guys, you know, just want a woman because they haven't kissed a woman in a couple years."
In his AFC days, he'd shower a woman with gifts and flowers and try to make her feel like a princess. "And that's what a woman wants when she's dating a guy. But before she's dating a guy…she doesn't want that. She wants to feel a challenge…If you have to work for it, it's a little bit of a challenge, you appreciate it more. It's true about anything in life. If it comes too easy, it must not have value."
So is Mr. X right? Have guys been conditioned with bad information for years on end?
"So the whole thing about putting her on a pedestal -- that's not going to get you anywhere?" I ask Strauss.
He's quick to respond with a question that's really an answer.
"What's happened within your experience when you've done that?"
It is a proven fact that women have certain hard-wired attraction switches, and also automatic avoidance mechanisms, for certain types of behavior. Wouldn't it be useful to know how that works? -- Mystery, www.mysterymethod.com
Sarging at Baker Street is impossible tonight; it's too packed to hear yourself think.
So Bashev and I walk across the street to Brian O'Neill's. Rice Village is a target-rich environment; a string of bars and plenty of single young women.
As we enter, Bashev stops to talk with a woman he knows.
"Social proof -- I know the manager," he says. Social proof means you're the man. If HBs see you in the company of other women, or if you're keeping a crowd entertained, you must have value, and she's hooked.
This demonstration of social proof is good for Bashev, who's a bit subtler -- he doesn't peacock, like Mystery, who wears black nail polish and platform boots.
At the bar, we sip on some nourishing gin and tonics and look for HBs. Bashev spots a seven and an eight sitting at a table. It helps to calculate a woman's beauty on the standard one-to-ten scale, because that influences the approach. (Some seducers use a bifurcated scale; e.g., seven-nine means a seven face and a nine body.)
When approaching anything above a seven, it's wise to use a "neg," or a slight insult, like "Nice nails -- are they real?" The thinking here is that extremely attractive women are used to simpering fools showering them with corny compliments, and that just ain't cool. If you neg -- and follow it up by turning your back to her -- you're making her notice you. But you've got to know how to use a neg. The Fast Seduction site recommends no more than two negs for a seven and a maximum of three for a ten.
Unfortunately, the eight's boyfriend returns from the bathroom and puts the kibosh on that table. Some seducers can and even enjoy sarging women with boyfriends, but there are enough women here that such a complication is unnecessary.
We move out to the patio as the band launches into "Wish You Were Here," a morose song if there ever was one, and not one especially suited for sarging. Hell, "Taps" would be more uplifting.
Outside, Bashev busts into his foot-model spiel with two women who are less than thrilled. He doesn't offer to buy them a drink, nor will he do that with anyone else. A firm fast-seduction rule prohibits such activity; it merely signals your submission. An HB will have guys offer her drinks all night, but the one who negs her, won't buy her a drink or refuses her request for one surely will distinguish himself.
The girls excuse themselves to a table. A minute later I follow, hoping they don't pack pepper spray. I tell them Bashev's not really a foot model, and I'm not a foot model's friend. I tell them I'm observing fast-seducers, like Jane Goodall and the chimps, and ask for their input.
Sarah, with black curls and a black shirt, describes the two of them as "science nerds" in their upper twenties. "Dude -- I'm getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry; the whole foot-model thing doesn't do it for me," says Sarah. She says she's read a bit about fast-seduction and finds it laughable.
"Typically, my response to that is: 'Dude, you're an asshole,' " she says, adding later, "my asshole meter is pretty finely tuned."
Julie, a zoologist, says she found Bashev's opener cute for about a minute, but then she lost interest. She says fast-seduction might work "if you do it to the right kind of girl."
Sarah says that if Bashev or anyone else was hoping to get her into bed that night, they'd be wasting their time.
"If I actually like a guy, I'm not going to drag a guy home from a bar," she says. "I'm going to call him for dinner next week."
By the time I report back to Bashev, he's already found two other women, and is expressing a clear interest in the brunette. In an effort to give them space, I sacrilegiously offer to buy her blond friend a drink inside the bar. We take our drinks over to a long couch and break into small talk. I don't even attempt fast-seduction, because I've realized by now that I would feel like a complete tool. There's no way I could tell this girl, with a straight face, about an interesting show I saw on the Discovery Channel last night. I don't even have cable.
But here we are, and we aren't going anywhere, because Bashev has locked onto her friend for the remainder of the evening. Before long, they're on the couch across the coffee table from us, and she's in his lap. He and I make eye contact, and he gives me this look as if to say, See what I mean?
According to the story Bashev tells me later, he began by "busting her balls," which was okay, since she was easily an eight. He saw the pack of Marlboros in her back jeans pocket, which to Europeans is a cowboy cliché. So he told her she looked like a cowboy.
Don't say that -- I don't like that image, she said.
Bashev responded by ignoring her. I'm just looking at your ass, he said. He said this because her ass is firm, and she knows it. But it was all part of the setup.
She asked if he liked it because it's firm; that's why all the guys like to look.
I didn't say I liked it. I think you should work on it in the gym.
Disbelief: Are you saying I'm fat?
Well, honey, you're really losing it. You need to hit the gym.
"And when I said that," Bashev explains, "she was really attracted to me."
Now she was hooked. He moved her inside, where, as serendipity would have it, a horse race was on TV. He caught her watching.
I thought you weren't a cowboy.
Oh, I wasn't really looking there.
Again, he ignored her, and tried running a pattern: Imagine what it would be like to be in the stands, and to not care about the competition, and get close to each other and make out…
Suspicion: Are you saying you want us to make out?
Whoops. Went too far. Time for damage control. He directed her attention to a couple at a table a few yards away.
No, I was talking about them -- see how they look into each other's eyes? A gentle nudge to her side. What, did you think I wanted to kiss you? I don't kiss strangers right away. Bingo. He reversed the frame, used her own language on herself. Damage controlled.
They moved to the couch, where he busted out an effective gimmick: palm-reading. It works for those who've really paid attention to what the girl's been saying all evening. Earlier, she told him that she changes friends a lot. So he traced along a line and said, You seem unattached to people.
Wow…remember, I told you that I was not attached to my friends?
Oh, my God. Well, I'm getting really good at this.
While he read her palms, her fingers were gently grasping the backs of his wrists. He told her he liked how it felt. So he asked where she liked to be touched.
My knees.
"I started touching her knees," he explains later. "I think that was the turning point, right there."
He left with her number and a date for Wednesday night.
Feb 3, 2009
What Do Women Want? By DANIEL BERGNER
Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed 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.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.
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.
“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”
Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.
In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he replied: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?”
Freund’s words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison reformer who once served as New York City’s first female commissioner of corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field’s leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to illuminating the realm of women’s desire.
It’s important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute’s current director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft’s history, between behavior and what underlies it. Kinsey’s data on sexuality, published in the late 1940s and early ’50s in his best-selling books “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” didn’t reveal much about the depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by cataloging species of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious of examining emotion. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late ’60s and early ’70s that concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the ’70s, through the writing of Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods — though sexologists prefer to etch a line between what they see as their scientific approach to the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis. Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology’s venerable investigators, conducted, as a doctoral candidate in the ’70s, some of the earliest research using the vaginal plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers’s, Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late ’90s. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women’s sexuality, not only generating an effort — mostly futile so far — to find drugs that can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search for a full understanding of women’s lust. This search may reflect, as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology, on nature’s dominance over nurture — and, because of this, on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain of sex. “Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,” Heiman said. “Now it’s research on differences that gets funded, that gets published, that the public is interested in.” She wondered aloud whether the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days it may be among the factors that infuse sexology’s interest in the giant forest.
“No one right now has a unifying theory,” Heiman told me; the interest has brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study, for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation, certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.
Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to orgasm while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner — he aims to chart the activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four types of climax: orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating the anterior wall of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by stimulating the cervix; and by “thinking off,” Komisaruk said, without any touch at all. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in considerable doubt, in 1992 Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of the G spot in the ’80s), carried out one of the most interesting experiments in female sexuality: by measuring heart rate, perspiration, pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that some rare women can think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like “Short- and long-term effects of ginkgo biloba extract on sexual dysfunction in women” and “The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in exercise-induced sexual arousal in women” and “Sex differences in memory for sexually relevant information” and — an Internet survey of 3,000 participants — “Why humans have sex.”
Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of terrain as complex as women’s desire. But Chivers, with plenty of self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence she has collected — with the question, first, of why women are aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn’t hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence. “The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”
Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren’t activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey’s experiment, didn’t appear to be an explanation for men’s narrowly focused desires. Early results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men and women — including the divergence in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind — arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.
Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the split between women’s bodies and minds in 130 studies by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire.
By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though plenty of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to drive up the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It’s a demand, in any event, that hasn’t been met. 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.
Chivers isn’t especially interested at this point, she said, in pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of consulting for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can’t, contractually, discuss what she describes as her negligible involvement in the development of the drug, and the company isn’t prepared to say much about the workings of its chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and Drug Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat depression — it singles out the brain’s receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving depression, it left female — but not male — subjects feeling increased lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn’t understand or doesn’t yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently trying out in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources of desire in the female brain.
Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well, and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment’s advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn’t yet been sanctioned by the F.D.A.
Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest for comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking will eventually have some benefit for women’s sexuality. “I wanted everybody to have great sex,” she told me, recalling one of her reasons for choosing her career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons she once gave on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it’s the aim of understanding in itself that compels her. For the discord, in women, between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture and culture — and here was culture again, undercutting clarity — with a dimmer awareness of the erotic messages of their genitals. Chivers said she has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.
Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke — always with a scientist’s caution, a scientist’s uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture — about female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, “I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos.”
Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”
Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape’s erection, stimulated this reaction because apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the exposure and tilt of the woman’s vulva during her calisthenics was processed as a sexual signal while the man’s unerect penis registered in the opposite way.
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”
The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than filmed scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a friend, some with a stranger: “You meet the real estate agent outside the building. . . .” 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.
Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and one would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the mechanisms of desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that cause physiological response — but that do not elicit a positive rating on the keypad — lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual activity with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.
Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers’s generation, looks at women’s erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem at odds with Chivers’s data about sex with strangers.
“In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man.” So begins Diamond’s book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire,” published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues: “Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher — like Heche — has returned to heterosexual relationships.” She catalogs the shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, “What’s going on?” Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.
Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work, identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label. From her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities and from their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.
“Fluidity is not a fluke,” Diamond declared, when I called her, after we first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers’s university, to ask whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories — wasn’t it to be expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years, both in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told, was toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its true expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is embedded in the nature of female desire.
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.
Intimacy isn’t much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana, who serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior, entered the field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working clinically and carrying out research on dyspareunia — women’s genital pain during intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female desire that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research. Before discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a Cirque du Soleil show called “Zumanity,” a performance of very soft-core pornography that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.
On the stage of the casino’s theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam underwater, arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe blonde took over the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short schoolgirl’s skirt. She spun numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist and was hoisted by a cable high above the audience, where she spread her legs wider than seemed humanly possible. The crowd consisted of men and women about equally, yet women far outnumbered men onstage, and when at last the show’s platinum-wigged M.C. cried out, “Where’s the beef?” the six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up through a trapdoor and started to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already almost-bare women.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers’s thinking. “The female body,” she said, “looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex” — a suggestion that sends a charge through both men and women. And there was another way, Meana argued, by which the Cirque du Soleil’s offering of more female than male acrobats helped to rivet both genders in the crowd. She, even more than Chivers, emphasized the role of being desired — and of narcissism — in women’s desiring.
The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the birth-control pill and the women’s liberation movement, she said, the predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was fueled from within, that it didn’t depend on another’s initiation. One reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to counter the field’s infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory measurements.
Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it comes to desire, “the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders,” that lust is infinitely complex and idiosyncratic.
She pronounced, as well, “I consider myself a feminist.” Then she added, “But political correctness isn’t sexy at all.” 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. About the dynamic at “Zumanity” between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana’s ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females, their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, “ ‘Is this O.K.?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph” — no urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
“Female desire,” Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her dyspareunic patients, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s.” She finished a small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20 women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships often kill desire, she argued, good ones don’t guarantee it. She quoted from one participant’s representative response: “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area” — the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of lust.
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.”
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and longevity of relationships: “But it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire.”
Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy, masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men, and second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it takes a greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman’s libido than a man’s. “If I don’t love cake as much as you,” she told me, “my cake better be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it.” And within a committed relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases considerably, not only because the woman’s partner loses a degree of interest but also, more important, because the woman feels that her partner is trapped, that a choice — the choosing of her — is no longer being carried out.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana’s talk of female lust: a woman pinned against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana’s vision, was an emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the scene.
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.”
After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic — as opposed to aversive — fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an analysis that defines rape as involving “the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will,” between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.
Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the unsettling evidence of women’s arousal during rape and during depictions of sexual assault in the lab.
As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote “semantics” in the margin of my notes before she said, “The word ‘rape’ comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage.” She continued: “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my students, ‘Arousal is not consent.’ ”
We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure glimpse into desire, without meaning — especially in the case of sexual assault — that the actual experiences are wanted.
“It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought,” Chivers said about rape fantasies. “To be all in the midbrain.”
One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital and subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged red line that ran across the computer’s screen, a line that traced one subject’s vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to analyze her data, she needed to “clean” it, as the process is called — she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a subject’s shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contraction that might have jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the readings and distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the line, with all its tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the inordinate height of a peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her that arousal wasn’t at work, that this particular instant was irrelevant to her experiment. She highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then continued peering. She would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a single subject. “I’m going blind,” she said, as she stared at another suspicious crest.
It was painstaking work — and difficult to watch, not only because it might be destroying Chivers’s eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by the vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers was constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with numberless aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she possibly complete in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the sexologists in the world who focus on female desire, whether they were wiring women with plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains in fM.R.I. scanners or fitting them with goggles or giving them questionnaires or following their erotic lives for years? What more could sexologists ever provide than intriguing hints and fragmented insights and contradictory conclusions? Could any conclusion encompass the erotic drives of even one woman? Didn’t the sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by Diamond, commingle with Meana’s forces of narcissism? Didn’t a longing for erotic tenderness coexist with a yearning for alley ravishing? Weren’t these but two examples of the myriad conflicting elements that create women’s lust? Had Freud’s question gone unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to address it but because it is unanswerable?
Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help women, she said that it could “shift the way women perceive their capacity to get turned on,” that as her lab results make their way into public consciousness, the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects might get women to realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of stimuli, that the state of desire is much more easily reached than some women might think. She spoke about helping women bring their subjective sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to aiding those who complain that desire eludes them. But didn’t such thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of the physiological and the subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it might. The giant forest seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.
And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn’t visible at all, as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have left women’s lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. “So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality,” she said. “If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control it? Why is it so frightening?” There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. 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.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book, “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing,” will be published this month.
While the subjects watched on a computer screen, Chivers, who favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses, measured their arousal in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The participants sat in a brown leatherette La-Z-Boy chair in her small lab at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, where Chivers was a postdoctoral fellow and where I first talked with her about her research a few years ago. The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.
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.
“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”
Full of scientific exuberance, Chivers has struggled to make sense of her data. She struggled when we first spoke in Toronto, and she struggled, unflagging, as we sat last October in her university office in Kingston, a room she keeps spare to help her mind stay clear to contemplate the intricacies of the erotic. The cinder-block walls are unadorned except for three photographs she took of a temple in India featuring carvings of an entwined couple, an orgy and a man copulating with a horse. She has been pondering sexuality, she recalled, since the age of 5 or 6, when she ruminated over a particular kiss, one she still remembers vividly, between her parents. And she has been discussing sex without much restraint, she said, laughing, at least since the age of 15 or 16, when, for a few male classmates who hoped to please their girlfriends, she drew a picture and clarified the location of the clitoris.
In 1996, when she worked as an assistant to a sexologist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, then called the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, she found herself the only woman on a floor of researchers investigating male sexual preferences and what are known as paraphilias — erotic desires that fall far outside the norm. She told me that when she asked Kurt Freund, a scientist on that floor who had developed a type of penile plethysmograph and who had been studying male homosexuality and pedophilia since the 1950s, why he never turned his attention to women, he replied: “How am I to know what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women, when I am a man?”
Freund’s words helped to focus her investigations, work that has made her a central figure among the small force of female sexologists devoted to comprehending female desire. John Bancroft, a former director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, traces sexological studies by women at least as far back as 1929, to a survey of the sexual experiences of 2,200 women carried out by Katharine Bement Davis, a prison reformer who once served as New York City’s first female commissioner of corrections. But the discipline remains male-dominated. In the International Academy of Sex Research, the 35-year-old institution that publishes Archives of Sexual Behavior and that can claim, Bancroft said, most of the field’s leading researchers among its 300 or so members, women make up just over a quarter of the organization. Yet in recent years, he continued, in the long wake of the surveys of Alfred Kinsey, the studies of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the sexual liberation movement and the rise of feminism, there has been a surge of scientific attention, paid by women, to illuminating the realm of women’s desire.
It’s important to distinguish, Julia Heiman, the Kinsey Institute’s current director, said as she elaborated on Bancroft’s history, between behavior and what underlies it. Kinsey’s data on sexuality, published in the late 1940s and early ’50s in his best-selling books “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,” didn’t reveal much about the depths of desire; Kinsey started his scientific career by cataloging species of wasps and may, Heiman went on, have been suspicious of examining emotion. Masters and Johnson, who filmed hundreds of subjects having sex in their lab, drew conclusions in their books of the late ’60s and early ’70s that concentrated on sexual function, not lust. Female desire, and the reasons some women feel little in the way of lust, became a focal point for sexologists, Heiman said, in the ’70s, through the writing of Helen Singer Kaplan, a sex therapist who used psychoanalytic methods — though sexologists prefer to etch a line between what they see as their scientific approach to the subject and the theories of psychoanalysis. Heiman herself, whom Chivers views as one of sexology’s venerable investigators, conducted, as a doctoral candidate in the ’70s, some of the earliest research using the vaginal plethysmograph. But soon the AIDS epidemic engulfed the attention of the field, putting a priority on prevention and making desire not an emotion to explore but an element to be feared, a source of epidemiological disaster.
To account partly for the recent flourishing of research like Chivers’s, Heiman pointed to the arrival of Viagra in the late ’90s. Though aimed at men, the drug, which transformed the treatment of impotence, has dispersed a kind of collateral electric current into the area of women’s sexuality, not only generating an effort — mostly futile so far — to find drugs that can foster female desire as reliably as Viagra and its chemical relatives have facilitated erections, but also helping, indirectly, to inspire the search for a full understanding of women’s lust. This search may reflect, as well, a cultural and scientific trend, a stress on the deterministic role of biology, on nature’s dominance over nurture — and, because of this, on innate differences between the sexes, particularly in the primal domain of sex. “Masters and Johnson saw men and women as extremely similar,” Heiman said. “Now it’s research on differences that gets funded, that gets published, that the public is interested in.” She wondered aloud whether the trend will eventually run its course and reverse itself, but these days it may be among the factors that infuse sexology’s interest in the giant forest.
“No one right now has a unifying theory,” Heiman told me; the interest has brought scattered sightlines, glimpses from all sorts of angles. One study, for instance, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior by the Kinsey Institute psychologist Heather Rupp, uses magnetic resonance imaging to show that, during the hormonal shifts of ovulation, certain brain regions in heterosexual women are more intensely activated by male faces with especially masculine features. Intriguing glimmers have come not only from female scientists. Richard Lippa, a psychologist at California State University, Fullerton, has employed surveys of thousands of subjects to demonstrate over the past few years that while men with high sex drives report an even more polarized pattern of attraction than most males (to women for heterosexuals and to men for homosexuals), in women the opposite is generally true: the higher the drive, the greater the attraction to both sexes, though this may not be so for lesbians.
Investigating the culmination of female desire, Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, has subjects bring themselves to orgasm while lying with their heads in an fM.R.I. scanner — he aims to chart the activity of the female brain as subjects near and reach four types of climax: orgasms attained by touching the clitoris; by stimulating the anterior wall of the vagina or, more specifically, the G spot; by stimulating the cervix; and by “thinking off,” Komisaruk said, without any touch at all. While the possibility of a purely cervical orgasm may be in considerable doubt, in 1992 Komisaruk, collaborating with the Rutgers sexologist Beverly Whipple (who established, more or less, the existence of the G spot in the ’80s), carried out one of the most interesting experiments in female sexuality: by measuring heart rate, perspiration, pupil dilation and pain threshold, they proved that some rare women can think themselves to climax. And meanwhile, at the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin, the psychologist Cindy Meston and her graduate students deliver studies with names like “Short- and long-term effects of ginkgo biloba extract on sexual dysfunction in women” and “The roles of testosterone and alpha-amylase in exercise-induced sexual arousal in women” and “Sex differences in memory for sexually relevant information” and — an Internet survey of 3,000 participants — “Why humans have sex.”
Heiman questions whether the insights of science, whether they come through high-tech pictures of the hypothalamus, through Internet questionnaires or through intimate interviews, can ever produce an all-encompassing map of terrain as complex as women’s desire. But Chivers, with plenty of self-doubting humor, told me that she hopes one day to develop a scientifically supported model to explain female sexual response, though she wrestles, for the moment, with the preliminary bits of perplexing evidence she has collected — with the question, first, of why women are aroused physiologically by such a wider range of stimuli than men. Are men simply more inhibited, more constrained by the bounds of culture? Chivers has tried to eliminate this explanation by including male-to-female transsexuals as subjects in one of her series of experiments (one that showed only human sex). These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn’t hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence. “The horrible reality of psychological research,” Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.”
Still, she spoke about a recent study by one of her mentors, Michael Bailey, a sexologist at Northwestern University: while fM.R.I. scans were taken of their brains, gay and straight men were shown pornographic pictures featuring men alone, women alone, men having sex with men and women with women. In straights, brain regions associated with inhibition were not triggered by images of men; in gays, such regions weren’t activated by pictures of women. Inhibition, in Bailey’s experiment, didn’t appear to be an explanation for men’s narrowly focused desires. Early results from a similar Bailey study with female subjects suggest the same absence of suppression. For Chivers, this bolsters the possibility that the distinctions in her data between men and women — including the divergence in women between objective and subjective responses, between body and mind — arise from innate factors rather than forces of culture.
Chivers has scrutinized, in a paper soon to be published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, the split between women’s bodies and minds in 130 studies by other scientists demonstrating, in one way or another, the same enigmatic discord. One manifestation of this split has come in experimental attempts to use Viagra-like drugs to treat women who complain of deficient desire.
By some estimates, 30 percent of women fall into this category, though plenty of sexologists argue that pharmaceutical companies have managed to drive up the figures as a way of generating awareness and demand. It’s a demand, in any event, that hasn’t been met. 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.
Chivers isn’t especially interested at this point, she said, in pharmaceutical efforts in her field, though she has done a bit of consulting for Boehringer Ingelheim, a German company in the late stages of testing a female-desire drug named Flibanserin. She can’t, contractually, discuss what she describes as her negligible involvement in the development of the drug, and the company isn’t prepared to say much about the workings of its chemical, which it says it hopes to have approved by the Food and Drug Administration next year. The medication was originally meant to treat depression — it singles out the brain’s receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin. As with other such drugs, one worry was that it would dull the libido. Yet in early trials, while it showed little promise for relieving depression, it left female — but not male — subjects feeling increased lust. In a way that Boehringer Ingelheim either doesn’t understand or doesn’t yet want to explain, the chemical, which the company is currently trying out in 5,000 North American and European women, may catalyze sources of desire in the female brain.
Testosterone, so vital to male libido, appears crucial to females as well, and in drug trials involving postmenopausal women, testosterone patches have increased sexual activity. But worries about a possibly heightened risk of cancer, along with uncertainty about the extent of the treatment’s advantages, have been among the reasons that the approach hasn’t yet been sanctioned by the F.D.A.
Thinking not of the search for chemical aphrodisiacs but of her own quest for comprehension, Chivers said that she hopes her research and thinking will eventually have some benefit for women’s sexuality. “I wanted everybody to have great sex,” she told me, recalling one of her reasons for choosing her career, and laughing as she did when she recounted the lessons she once gave on the position of the clitoris. But mostly it’s the aim of understanding in itself that compels her. For the discord, in women, between the body and the mind, she has deliberated over all sorts of explanations, the simplest being anatomy. The penis is external, its reactions more readily perceived and pressing upon consciousness. Women might more likely have grown up, for reasons of both bodily architecture and culture — and here was culture again, undercutting clarity — with a dimmer awareness of the erotic messages of their genitals. Chivers said she has considered, too, research suggesting that men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate at moments of heightened stress and that men may rely more on such physiological signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are hints, she told me, that the disparity between the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study she mentioned, is accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their own bodies.
Ultimately, though, Chivers spoke — always with a scientist’s caution, a scientist’s uncertainty and acknowledgment of conjecture — about female sexuality as divided between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective. Lust, in this formulation, resides in the subjective, the cognitive; physiological arousal reveals little about desire. Otherwise, she said, half joking, “I would have to believe that women want to have sex with bonobos.”
Besides the bonobos, a body of evidence involving rape has influenced her construction of separate systems. She has confronted clinical research reporting not only genital arousal but also the occasional occurrence of orgasm during sexual assault. And she has recalled her own experience as a therapist with victims who recounted these physical responses. She is familiar, as well, with the preliminary results of a laboratory study showing surges of vaginal blood flow as subjects listen to descriptions of rape scenes. So, in an attempt to understand arousal in the context of unwanted sex, Chivers, like a handful of other sexologists, has arrived at an evolutionary hypothesis that stresses the difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire. Genital lubrication, she writes in her upcoming paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, is necessary “to reduce discomfort, and the possibility of injury, during vaginal penetration. . . . Ancestral women who did not show an automatic vaginal response to sexual cues may have been more likely to experience injuries during unwanted vaginal penetration that resulted in illness, infertility or even death, and thus would be less likely to have passed on this trait to their offspring.”
Evolution’s legacy, according to this theory, is that women are prone to lubricate, if only protectively, to hints of sex in their surroundings. Thinking of her own data, Chivers speculated that bonobo coupling, or perhaps simply the sight of a male ape’s erection, stimulated this reaction because apes bear a resemblance to humans — she joked about including, for comparison, a movie of mating chickens in a future study. And she wondered if the theory explained why heterosexual women responded genitally more to the exercising woman than to the ambling man. Possibly, she said, the exposure and tilt of the woman’s vulva during her calisthenics was processed as a sexual signal while the man’s unerect penis registered in the opposite way.
When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”
The study Chivers is working on now tries to re-examine the results of her earlier research, to investigate, with audiotaped stories rather than filmed scenes, the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal. But it will offer too a glimpse into the role of relationships in female eros. Some of the scripts she wrote involve sex with a longtime lover, some with a friend, some with a stranger: “You meet the real estate agent outside the building. . . .” 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.
Chivers is perpetually devising experiments to perform in the future, and one would test how tightly linked the system of arousal is to the mechanisms of desire. She would like to follow the sexual behavior of women in the days after they are exposed to stimuli in her lab. If stimuli that cause physiological response — but that do not elicit a positive rating on the keypad — lead to increased erotic fantasies, masturbation or sexual activity with a partner, then she could deduce a tight link. Though women may not want, in reality, what such stimuli present, Chivers could begin to infer that what is judged unappealing does, nevertheless, turn women on.
Lisa Diamond, a newly prominent sexologist of Chivers’s generation, looks at women’s erotic drives in a different way. An associate professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, with short, dark hair that seems to explode anarchically around her head, Diamond has done much of her research outside any lab, has focused a good deal of her attention outside the heterosexual dyad and has drawn conclusions that seem at odds with Chivers’s data about sex with strangers.
“In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man.” So begins Diamond’s book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire,” published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues: “Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher — like Heche — has returned to heterosexual relationships.” She catalogs the shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, “What’s going on?” Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.
Diamond is a tireless researcher. The study that led to her book has been going on for more than 10 years. During that time, she has followed the erotic attractions of nearly 100 young women who, at the start of her work, identified themselves as either lesbian or bisexual or refused a label. From her analysis of the many shifts they made between sexual identities and from their detailed descriptions of their erotic lives, Diamond argues that for her participants, and quite possibly for women on the whole, desire is malleable, that it cannot be captured by asking women to categorize their attractions at any single point, that to do so is to apply a male paradigm of more fixed sexual orientation. Among the women in her group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.
“Fluidity is not a fluke,” Diamond declared, when I called her, after we first met before a guest lecture she gave at Chivers’s university, to ask whether it really made sense to extrapolate from the experiences of her subjects to women in general. Slightly more than half of her participants began her study in the bisexual or unlabeled categories — wasn’t it to be expected that she would find a great deal of sexual flux? She acknowledged this. But she emphasized that the pattern for her group over the years, both in the changing categories they chose and in the stories they told, was toward an increased sense of malleability. If female eros found its true expression over the course of her long research, then flexibility is embedded in the nature of female desire.
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.
Intimacy isn’t much of an aphrodisiac in the thinking of Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Meana, who serves with Chivers on the board of Archives of Sexual Behavior, entered the field of sexology in the late 1990s and began by working clinically and carrying out research on dyspareunia — women’s genital pain during intercourse. She is now formulating an explanatory model of female desire that will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sex Research. Before discussing her overarching ideas, though, we went together to a Cirque du Soleil show called “Zumanity,” a performance of very soft-core pornography that Meana mentioned to me before my visit.
On the stage of the casino’s theater, a pair of dark-haired, bare-breasted women in G-strings dove backward into a giant glass bowl and swam underwater, arching their spines as they slid up the walls. Soon a lithe blonde took over the stage wearing a pleated and extremely short schoolgirl’s skirt. She spun numerous Hula-Hoops around her minimal waist and was hoisted by a cable high above the audience, where she spread her legs wider than seemed humanly possible. The crowd consisted of men and women about equally, yet women far outnumbered men onstage, and when at last the show’s platinum-wigged M.C. cried out, “Where’s the beef?” the six-packed, long-haired man who climbed up through a trapdoor and started to strip was surrounded by 8 or 10 already almost-bare women.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, Meana explained the gender imbalance onstage in a way that complemented Chivers’s thinking. “The female body,” she said, “looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal. The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex” — a suggestion that sends a charge through both men and women. And there was another way, Meana argued, by which the Cirque du Soleil’s offering of more female than male acrobats helped to rivet both genders in the crowd. She, even more than Chivers, emphasized the role of being desired — and of narcissism — in women’s desiring.
The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the birth-control pill and the women’s liberation movement, she said, the predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was fueled from within, that it didn’t depend on another’s initiation. One reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to counter the field’s infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory measurements.
Meana made clear, during our conversations in a casino bar and on the U.N.L.V. campus, that she was speaking in general terms, that, when it comes to desire, “the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders,” that lust is infinitely complex and idiosyncratic.
She pronounced, as well, “I consider myself a feminist.” Then she added, “But political correctness isn’t sexy at all.” 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. About the dynamic at “Zumanity” between the audience and the acrobats, Meana said the women in the crowd gazed at the women onstage, excitedly imagining that their bodies were as desperately wanted as those of the performers.
Meana’s ideas have arisen from both laboratory and qualitative research. With her graduate student Amy Lykins, she published, in Archives of Sexual Behavior last year, a study of visual attention in heterosexual men and women. Wearing goggles that track eye movement, her subjects looked at pictures of heterosexual foreplay. The men stared far more at the females, their faces and bodies, than at the males. The women gazed equally at the two genders, their eyes drawn to the faces of the men and to the bodies of the women — to the facial expressions, perhaps, of men in states of wanting, and to the sexual allure embodied in the female figures.
Meana has learned too from her attempts as a clinician to help patients with dyspareunia. Though she explained that the condition, which can make intercourse excruciating, is not in itself a disorder of low desire, she said that her patients reported reduced genital pain as their desire increased. The problem was how to augment desire, and despite prevailing wisdom, the answer, she told me, had “little to do with building better relationships,” with fostering communication between patients and their partners. She rolled her eyes at such niceties. She recalled a patient whose lover was thoroughly empathetic and asked frequently during lovemaking, “ ‘Is this O.K.?’ Which was very unarousing to her. It was loving, but there was no oomph” — no urgency emanating from the man, no sign that his craving of the patient was beyond control.
“Female desire,” Meana said, speaking broadly and not only about her dyspareunic patients, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s.” She finished a small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20 women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships often kill desire, she argued, good ones don’t guarantee it. She quoted from one participant’s representative response: “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area” — the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of lust.
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.”
Like Chivers, Meana thinks of female sexuality as divided into two systems. But Meana conceives of those systems in a different way than her colleague. On the one hand, as Meana constructs things, there is the drive of sheer lust, and on the other the impetus of value. For evolutionary and cultural reasons, she said, women might set a high value on the closeness and longevity of relationships: “But it’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire.”
Meana spoke about two elements that contribute to her thinking: first, a great deal of data showing that, as measured by the frequency of fantasy, masturbation and sexual activity, women have a lower sex drive than men, and second, research suggesting that within long-term relationships, women are more likely than men to lose interest in sex. Meana posits that it takes a greater jolt, a more significant stimulus, to switch on a woman’s libido than a man’s. “If I don’t love cake as much as you,” she told me, “my cake better be kick-butt to get me excited to eat it.” And within a committed relationship, the crucial stimulus of being desired decreases considerably, not only because the woman’s partner loses a degree of interest but also, more important, because the woman feels that her partner is trapped, that a choice — the choosing of her — is no longer being carried out.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana’s talk of female lust: a woman pinned against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana’s vision, was an emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the scene.
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.”
After our discussion of the alley encounter, we talked about erotic — as opposed to aversive — fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an analysis that defines rape as involving “the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will,” between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.
Chivers, too, struggled over language about this subject. The topic arose because I had been drawn into her ceaseless puzzling, as could easily happen when we spent time together. I had been thinking about three ideas from our many talks: the power, for women, in being desired; the keen excitement stoked by descriptions of sex with strangers; and her positing of distinct systems of arousal and desire. This last concept seemed to confound a simpler truth, that women associate lubrication with being turned on. The idea of dual systems appeared, possibly, to be the product of an unscientific impulse, a wish to make comforting sense of the unsettling evidence of women’s arousal during rape and during depictions of sexual assault in the lab.
As soon as I asked about rape fantasies, Chivers took my pen and wrote “semantics” in the margin of my notes before she said, “The word ‘rape’ comes with gargantuan amounts of baggage.” She continued: “I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about this subject. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her body. I hammer home with my students, ‘Arousal is not consent.’ ”
We spoke, then, about the way sexual fantasies strip away the prospect of repercussions, of physical or psychological harm, and allow for unencumbered excitement, about the way they offer, in this sense, a pure glimpse into desire, without meaning — especially in the case of sexual assault — that the actual experiences are wanted.
“It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought,” Chivers said about rape fantasies. “To be all in the midbrain.”
One morning in the fall, Chivers hunched over her laptop in her sparsely decorated office. She was sifting through data from her study of genital and subjective responses to audiotaped sex scenes. She peered at a jagged red line that ran across the computer’s screen, a line that traced one subject’s vaginal blood flow, second by second. Before Chivers could use a computer program to analyze her data, she needed to “clean” it, as the process is called — she had to eliminate errant readings, moments when a subject’s shifting in her chair caused a slight pelvic contraction that might have jarred the plethysmograph, which could generate a spike in the readings and distort the overall results. Meticulously, she scanned the line, with all its tight zigs and zags, searching for spots where the inordinate height of a peak and the pattern that surrounded it told her that arousal wasn’t at work, that this particular instant was irrelevant to her experiment. She highlighted and deleted one aberrant moment, then continued peering. She would search in this way for about two hours in preparing the data of a single subject. “I’m going blind,” she said, as she stared at another suspicious crest.
It was painstaking work — and difficult to watch, not only because it might be destroying Chivers’s eyesight but also because it seemed so dwarfed by the vastness and intricacy of the terrain she hoped to understand. Chivers was constantly conjuring studies she wanted to carry out, but with numberless aberrant spikes to detect and cleanse, how many could she possibly complete in one lifetime? How many could be done by all the sexologists in the world who focus on female desire, whether they were wiring women with plethysmographs or mapping the activity of their brains in fM.R.I. scanners or fitting them with goggles or giving them questionnaires or following their erotic lives for years? What more could sexologists ever provide than intriguing hints and fragmented insights and contradictory conclusions? Could any conclusion encompass the erotic drives of even one woman? Didn’t the sexual power of intimacy, so stressed by Diamond, commingle with Meana’s forces of narcissism? Didn’t a longing for erotic tenderness coexist with a yearning for alley ravishing? Weren’t these but two examples of the myriad conflicting elements that create women’s lust? Had Freud’s question gone unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to address it but because it is unanswerable?
Chivers, perhaps precisely because her investigations are incisive and her thinking so relentless, sometimes seemed on the verge of contradicting her own provisional conclusions. Talking about how her research might help women, she said that it could “shift the way women perceive their capacity to get turned on,” that as her lab results make their way into public consciousness, the noncategorical physiological responses of her subjects might get women to realize that they can be turned on by a wide array of stimuli, that the state of desire is much more easily reached than some women might think. She spoke about helping women bring their subjective sense of lust into agreement with their genital arousal as an approach to aiding those who complain that desire eludes them. But didn’t such thinking, I asked, conflict with her theory of the physiological and the subjective as separate systems? She allowed that it might. The giant forest seemed, so often, too complex for comprehension.
And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn’t visible at all, as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have left women’s lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. “So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality,” she said. “If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control it? Why is it so frightening?” There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. 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.
It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.
Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the magazine. His new book, “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing,” will be published this month.
Feb 2, 2009
Data Mine: Sexual Strategy -The poker face and sexual goals, and the pros and cons of the office romance
By: PT Staff
Relationship goals are in your face.
It's hard to hold your cards close to your chest when they're reflected in your face. Research published in Evolution and Human Behavior reveals that people can predict your "sexual strategy"—how open you are to casual hookups—simply by viewing your headshot. "Although we know that observers are sensitive to subtle correlations between behavior and appearance," Lynda Boothroyd of Durham University in the UK says, "I was very surprised that people could pick up on sociosexuality so well."
In women's faces, one strong indicator of sexual strategy is attractiveness. The more beautiful they are, the more sexual opportunities they have, which may condition their sexual attitudes to be less restricted—a pattern people pick up on.
In men, the key visual clues remain a mystery. But one result is clear: Women prefer—for both long-term and short-term relationships—men who appear to avoid sex without love. Ben Jones of Aberdeen University in the UK says that, considering the possibility of conception, "it would be risky for a woman to pursue a relationship of any length with a man who is unwilling to commit."—Matthew Hutson
Relationships: Punching In and Hooking Up
What are the pros and cons of office romances?
* 33% would like the personal and professional convenience of sharing an office.
* 65% feel their coworkers would look down on an office romance.
* 90% are most worried about the awkwardness of a breakup.
* 17% have had an office romance.
* 42% would enjoy work more if they dated a colleague.
* 80% are concerned about office gossip.
* 47% want someone who understands their work issues.
* 15% of office romances end in engagements.
Psychology Today Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008
Last Reviewed 18 Dec 2008
Article ID: 4719
Relationship goals are in your face.
It's hard to hold your cards close to your chest when they're reflected in your face. Research published in Evolution and Human Behavior reveals that people can predict your "sexual strategy"—how open you are to casual hookups—simply by viewing your headshot. "Although we know that observers are sensitive to subtle correlations between behavior and appearance," Lynda Boothroyd of Durham University in the UK says, "I was very surprised that people could pick up on sociosexuality so well."
In women's faces, one strong indicator of sexual strategy is attractiveness. The more beautiful they are, the more sexual opportunities they have, which may condition their sexual attitudes to be less restricted—a pattern people pick up on.
In men, the key visual clues remain a mystery. But one result is clear: Women prefer—for both long-term and short-term relationships—men who appear to avoid sex without love. Ben Jones of Aberdeen University in the UK says that, considering the possibility of conception, "it would be risky for a woman to pursue a relationship of any length with a man who is unwilling to commit."—Matthew Hutson
Relationships: Punching In and Hooking Up
What are the pros and cons of office romances?
* 33% would like the personal and professional convenience of sharing an office.
* 65% feel their coworkers would look down on an office romance.
* 90% are most worried about the awkwardness of a breakup.
* 17% have had an office romance.
* 42% would enjoy work more if they dated a colleague.
* 80% are concerned about office gossip.
* 47% want someone who understands their work issues.
* 15% of office romances end in engagements.
Psychology Today Magazine, Nov/Dec 2008
Last Reviewed 18 Dec 2008
Article ID: 4719
Too Much Communication As Bad As Not Enough
People communicate poorly and excessively when they exchange for the sake of communicating. This is the thesis of a new book, "Arrêter de communiquer: vous en faites trop!," co-authored by André-A. Lafrance, a communications professor at the Université de Montréal, and François Lambotte of the Université libre de Bruxelles.
Technology has greatly facilitated communication. But there's a hitch: the communication networks are often used simply because they are available and not to satisfy a need or to communicate a pertinent message. It is communication for the sake of communication. This observation applies to both technological tools and traditional ones such as group meetings.
"There is a lot of information but very little communication," says Lafrance. "Communication requires interaction between the communicator and the receiver, and the message must be tailored to the reaction of the other."
The book, written for communication students with an eye to the general public, has three premises. All communication aims to bring about change in the receiver: change in knowledge, attitudes or practices. All change comprises a risk to the person concerned: lack of expertise, an unreasonable amount of effort required or a questioning. The communicator must have more power than the receiver in order to convince him or her of any change.
Technology has greatly facilitated communication. But there's a hitch: the communication networks are often used simply because they are available and not to satisfy a need or to communicate a pertinent message. It is communication for the sake of communication. This observation applies to both technological tools and traditional ones such as group meetings.
"There is a lot of information but very little communication," says Lafrance. "Communication requires interaction between the communicator and the receiver, and the message must be tailored to the reaction of the other."
The book, written for communication students with an eye to the general public, has three premises. All communication aims to bring about change in the receiver: change in knowledge, attitudes or practices. All change comprises a risk to the person concerned: lack of expertise, an unreasonable amount of effort required or a questioning. The communicator must have more power than the receiver in order to convince him or her of any change.
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