Read Online What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner - Free Book Online
Authors: Daniel Bergner
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divider, she’s having better sex. Better vaginal and clitoral stimulation. Better cervical stimulation.” He described a study showing that intercourse stimulated the rat’s clitoris: a colleague had painted males with ink, then charted the inky areas on their mates. About orgasms, Pfaus couldn’t be sure whether female rats were having them; there was no easily measured sign, like ejaculation in males, to mark subjective explosion. But about pleasure and very intense desire, he was certain.
Proof ran like this: If, right after a rat finished a long-lasting session of mating, she was placed alone in another chamber, she would associate the new chamber with the sex she’d just had. Next, when given a choice between this new chamber and yet another, she would spend her time in the one linked with mating. She would make this choice even if the alternate chamber was set up to be much more inviting in other ways—even if the alternate space was dark, speaking to the nocturnal rat’s sense of safety, while the chamber linked with pleasure was brightly lit, screaming of mortal danger. Run the same test with a female who’d just had quick—unsatisfying—intercourse and she would, afterward, opt for the dark space.
One of Pfaus’s graduate students had lately performed and filmed a straightforward demonstration of desire—of motivation derived from the learned expectation of reward, just as desire develops in humans. Sitting with me in his office a few floors above his rat chambers, Pfaus played the video. The student picked up a female rat and, with a tiny brush, stroked the clitoris, which protruded from the genitalia like a little eraser head. She stroked a few times, then put the animal back down in her cage. Swiftly the creature poked her nose out of the open door. She clamped her teeth on the white sleeve of the student’s lab coat and tugged the woman’s hand inside the cage. The student brushed the rat’s clitoris again, set her down again. And again the rodent bit into the sleeve, pulling, communicating unmistakably what she craved. This went on and on and on.
As we watched, Pfaus mentioned the anatomical oversights that had squelched our understanding of the clitoris—rat and human—until a decade before. The organ has sizeable extensions, lying internally in the shape of bulbs and wings. These are positioned, in part, just behind the front wall of the vagina. Yet these nerve-rich formations had gone mostly unnoted by modern anatomists, who either left them undrawn or gave them no import. Science seemed almost to have willfully diminished the organ, cutting it metaphorically away. It was another lesson in the minimizing of women’s desire. Then, beginning in the late nineties, Helen O’Connell, an Australian urologist, detailed the organ’s sprawl, its many inches in reach. And she championed its sensitivity to pressure through the vaginal sheath—sensitivity perhaps responsible for vaginal climaxes and possibly the explanation for the fabled and debated G-spot. O’Connell was blunt about the averted eyes of her scientific predecessors. “It boils down,” she said, “to the idea that one sex is sexual and the other is reproductive.”
Now Pfaus pulled apart his plastic model of a human brain, his fingers in the folds. He spoke about the neurotransmitters that define eros for women as well as men. The libido is, in a sense, two-tiered. There’s the lower realm, in which hormones rise up from the ovaries and adrenal glands, float along the bloodstream to the brain, and fuel the production of the brain’s neurotransmitters. How exactly this fueling happens is still a mystery; so is the quantity of fuel needed to keep the production line running well. The higher realm is the brain itself, the domain of the neurotransmitters. These biochemicals, not the lowly hormones, form the essence of lust.
Dopamine—its atoms arranged like an antennaed head with a spikey tail—is, in a way, the molecular
Proof ran like this: If, right after a rat finished a long-lasting session of mating, she was placed alone in another chamber, she would associate the new chamber with the sex she’d just had. Next, when given a choice between this new chamber and yet another, she would spend her time in the one linked with mating. She would make this choice even if the alternate chamber was set up to be much more inviting in other ways—even if the alternate space was dark, speaking to the nocturnal rat’s sense of safety, while the chamber linked with pleasure was brightly lit, screaming of mortal danger. Run the same test with a female who’d just had quick—unsatisfying—intercourse and she would, afterward, opt for the dark space.
One of Pfaus’s graduate students had lately performed and filmed a straightforward demonstration of desire—of motivation derived from the learned expectation of reward, just as desire develops in humans. Sitting with me in his office a few floors above his rat chambers, Pfaus played the video. The student picked up a female rat and, with a tiny brush, stroked the clitoris, which protruded from the genitalia like a little eraser head. She stroked a few times, then put the animal back down in her cage. Swiftly the creature poked her nose out of the open door. She clamped her teeth on the white sleeve of the student’s lab coat and tugged the woman’s hand inside the cage. The student brushed the rat’s clitoris again, set her down again. And again the rodent bit into the sleeve, pulling, communicating unmistakably what she craved. This went on and on and on.
As we watched, Pfaus mentioned the anatomical oversights that had squelched our understanding of the clitoris—rat and human—until a decade before. The organ has sizeable extensions, lying internally in the shape of bulbs and wings. These are positioned, in part, just behind the front wall of the vagina. Yet these nerve-rich formations had gone mostly unnoted by modern anatomists, who either left them undrawn or gave them no import. Science seemed almost to have willfully diminished the organ, cutting it metaphorically away. It was another lesson in the minimizing of women’s desire. Then, beginning in the late nineties, Helen O’Connell, an Australian urologist, detailed the organ’s sprawl, its many inches in reach. And she championed its sensitivity to pressure through the vaginal sheath—sensitivity perhaps responsible for vaginal climaxes and possibly the explanation for the fabled and debated G-spot. O’Connell was blunt about the averted eyes of her scientific predecessors. “It boils down,” she said, “to the idea that one sex is sexual and the other is reproductive.”
Now Pfaus pulled apart his plastic model of a human brain, his fingers in the folds. He spoke about the neurotransmitters that define eros for women as well as men. The libido is, in a sense, two-tiered. There’s the lower realm, in which hormones rise up from the ovaries and adrenal glands, float along the bloodstream to the brain, and fuel the production of the brain’s neurotransmitters. How exactly this fueling happens is still a mystery; so is the quantity of fuel needed to keep the production line running well. The higher realm is the brain itself, the domain of the neurotransmitters. These biochemicals, not the lowly hormones, form the essence of lust.
Dopamine—its atoms arranged like an antennaed head with a spikey tail—is, in a way, the molecular
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