What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner Page A

conditioned arousal or indifference took hold. In later rounds, he guessed, the subjects still unconsciously linked the surroundings of the lab, the equipment, the porn to their reaction to their first viewing.
    “One lesson,” he said, “is that you don’t want a woman to form her first impression of you when she’s in the wrong menstrual phase. You’ll never recover.” He laughed.
    O ur conversation, on the platform above the compound, veered back to primatology, to the insights offered by our animal ancestors. He spoke about Deidrah’s abundance of lust and about its constraint in women—about a communal sense of danger, a half-conscious fear of societal disintegration, that lay behind the constraining. And as I listened, and afterward as I dwelled on things, I thought of the historic terrors, the carnal archetypes: of witches, whose evil “comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable,” according to the Christian doctrine of the Inquisition, “the mouth of the womb . . . never satisfied . . . wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils”; and of Eve, upon whose sinfulness all of Christianity is constructed, Eve, for whose evil the Son of God has to die, to sacrifice himself so that humanity can have a chance at redemption. This was the foundation, what lay beneath our culture’s primary religion; it was imbedded in our societal psyche. And I thought, too, of monogamy: our inchoate idea that monogamy girds against social chaos and collapse, and our notion—the desperate inversion of our terror—that the female libido is limited and that women are monogamy’s natural guardians. So we managed our fear.
    Why, from beginnings in equally obscure academic publications, had parental investment theory come to permeate cultural assumptions over recent decades while monkey realities, ancestral facts, remained much less known? We embraced the science that soothed us, the science we wanted to hear.
    “T his organ serves a pleasure god,” Jim Pfaus said. He held a plastic replica of the human brain in his hands. A Van Dyke beard and a hoop earring adorned his animated face. His expertise as a neuroscientist and his Concordia University labs were called on by the major pharmaceutical companies whenever they wanted to test, in rats, a new drug that might serve as an aphrodisiac in women—none had worked out in women so far. His labs sat in a university basement. There he studied his rats in a variety of cages and, in a surgical theater, removed their brains—about as big as a person’s thumb from the middle knuckle to the tip.
    Pfaus was obsessed with rat ways of seeing and feeling, learning and lusting, and when he wanted to investigate, say, exactly which set of neurons were sparked by a type of stimulation, by copulation-like prodding of the cervix or by the excitement of glimpsing a desirable male, one method was to provide a female rat with the experience, kill it, extract and freeze her brain, place the organ on a device resembling a miniature cold-cut slicer at a delicatessen, and shave off a specific, infinitesimally thin cross section. Peering at the slice through a microscope, he could pinpoint recent neural activity by noting the tiny black dots that told him where certain protein molecules—by-products of cell signaling—had been manufactured.
    It was due to one woman that Pfaus—in his spare time the lead singer in a punk band called Mold—had been drawn to his specialty. Until the late seventies, scientists didn’t study desire in rat females; they didn’t see it; it didn’t exist: as with the rhesus, scientists fixated on what the rat female did in the act of sex, not what she did to get there. And what she did in the act was go into paralysis. She froze in a position called lordosis, with her spine slung low and her butt cocked high, so the male could penetrate. Rat intercourse required female rigor mortis. It was easy to understand the female as