What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner Page B
Authors: Daniel Bergner
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absolutely passive, without will, a vessel whose involuntary perfume pulled the male in. Similar scientific ignorance had pervaded our idea of females across the animal kingdom, with “receptivity” being the key term.
But then Martha McClintock, like Wallen, helped take scientists deeper. McClintock had begun to make herself famous years earlier while still an undergraduate at the all-women Wellesley College. She built a case that women living in close proximity responded to each other’s hormonal scents, causing the timing of their menstrual periods to converge, and her work was published in the revered journal Nature . Soon she was calling attention to female rat solicitations, to the female’s specific hops and darts, her head-pointings and prancings away—her methods of inciting the male to put his forepaws on her flanks; to set his paws into the whir of flank-patting that instantly immobilized her, as though by hypnosis; and to slide himself into her. While Pfaus and I talked about this in front of a bank of his Plexiglas cages, one of his females went further, as regularly happened. Dealing with a stolid, sexually uninterested male, she stood behind him, mounted his backside, and humped, as though to put ideas in his head. How, Pfaus marveled, could science not have noticed this?
McClintock documented, too, that the female, if her cage allowed her to evade her partner, made sure to slip away from him, constantly, in the midst of his pumping, so the sex didn’t end too quickly for her. Under any circumstances, in rat as in monkey sex, the animals attach, copulate, detach, and reattach repeatedly until the male ejaculates. The female rat, experiments showed, likes to prolong the process, to make it last longer than the male otherwise would. All of this, the solicitations and the preference for more drawn-out intercourse, suggested will and desire.
And McClintock established that by controlling the pace of mating, by getting the protracted stimulation and the rhythm that pleases her, the female can raise her odds of getting pregnant. She can raise them a lot. The extra thrusts, Pfaus said, cause contractions that aid sperm on their way into the uterus. And the deeper thrusts—for the male rat, forestalled from ejaculating, starts to pump harder—plies or jolts the cervix in a way that leads to a hormonal release that then helps to sustain a fertilized egg.
Pregnancy, though, is not an animal motivation, as McClintock and Pfaus, like Wallen with his monkeys, saw clearly. This was a critical point. Animal species have been designed by evolution to perpetuate themselves, to reproduce, but in the individual animal, it isn’t reproduction that impels. The rat does not think, I want to have a baby. Such planning is beyond her. The drive is for immediate reward, for pleasure. And the gratification has to be powerful enough to outweigh the expenditure of energy and the fear of injury from competitors or predators that might come with claiming it. It has to outweigh the terror of getting killed while you are lost in getting laid. The gratification of sex has to be extremely high.
Pfaus had been following the early light shone by McClintock. Partly because of her research, he saw that a rat’s brain was not merely a brain but a mind, that a rat’s psychological experience could be a revealing version of our own. An array of experiments, of brain shavings, of injections of chemicals that boosted or blocked one neurotransmitter or another, of observations of rats making choices in all sorts of carefully constructed habitats and scenarios, fed his knowledge. One line of studies building on McClintock’s work used a special cage with a Plexiglas divider down the middle. The divider had holes just big enough for a female rat—but not a male—to squeeze through. A female could determine the pace of sex by slipping from one side of the partition to the other and back again. “Female rats do what feels good. With the
But then Martha McClintock, like Wallen, helped take scientists deeper. McClintock had begun to make herself famous years earlier while still an undergraduate at the all-women Wellesley College. She built a case that women living in close proximity responded to each other’s hormonal scents, causing the timing of their menstrual periods to converge, and her work was published in the revered journal Nature . Soon she was calling attention to female rat solicitations, to the female’s specific hops and darts, her head-pointings and prancings away—her methods of inciting the male to put his forepaws on her flanks; to set his paws into the whir of flank-patting that instantly immobilized her, as though by hypnosis; and to slide himself into her. While Pfaus and I talked about this in front of a bank of his Plexiglas cages, one of his females went further, as regularly happened. Dealing with a stolid, sexually uninterested male, she stood behind him, mounted his backside, and humped, as though to put ideas in his head. How, Pfaus marveled, could science not have noticed this?
McClintock documented, too, that the female, if her cage allowed her to evade her partner, made sure to slip away from him, constantly, in the midst of his pumping, so the sex didn’t end too quickly for her. Under any circumstances, in rat as in monkey sex, the animals attach, copulate, detach, and reattach repeatedly until the male ejaculates. The female rat, experiments showed, likes to prolong the process, to make it last longer than the male otherwise would. All of this, the solicitations and the preference for more drawn-out intercourse, suggested will and desire.
And McClintock established that by controlling the pace of mating, by getting the protracted stimulation and the rhythm that pleases her, the female can raise her odds of getting pregnant. She can raise them a lot. The extra thrusts, Pfaus said, cause contractions that aid sperm on their way into the uterus. And the deeper thrusts—for the male rat, forestalled from ejaculating, starts to pump harder—plies or jolts the cervix in a way that leads to a hormonal release that then helps to sustain a fertilized egg.
Pregnancy, though, is not an animal motivation, as McClintock and Pfaus, like Wallen with his monkeys, saw clearly. This was a critical point. Animal species have been designed by evolution to perpetuate themselves, to reproduce, but in the individual animal, it isn’t reproduction that impels. The rat does not think, I want to have a baby. Such planning is beyond her. The drive is for immediate reward, for pleasure. And the gratification has to be powerful enough to outweigh the expenditure of energy and the fear of injury from competitors or predators that might come with claiming it. It has to outweigh the terror of getting killed while you are lost in getting laid. The gratification of sex has to be extremely high.
Pfaus had been following the early light shone by McClintock. Partly because of her research, he saw that a rat’s brain was not merely a brain but a mind, that a rat’s psychological experience could be a revealing version of our own. An array of experiments, of brain shavings, of injections of chemicals that boosted or blocked one neurotransmitter or another, of observations of rats making choices in all sorts of carefully constructed habitats and scenarios, fed his knowledge. One line of studies building on McClintock’s work used a special cage with a Plexiglas divider down the middle. The divider had holes just big enough for a female rat—but not a male—to squeeze through. A female could determine the pace of sex by slipping from one side of the partition to the other and back again. “Female rats do what feels good. With the
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