The Other Side of Desire (9 page)

In her lab, in a faceless concrete building belonging to one of Canada’s most important psychiatric teaching hospitals, on a floor of sexuality researchers where she was the only woman, she wore narrow, stylish rectangular glasses and graceful black boots that laced up almost to her knees. Her blond hair fell over a low-necked black top.

She joked that she’d been studying sex since the age of five, when she first contemplated the reasons for kissing: “I was sitting next to my mom in our family’s giant Chevrolet Impala station wagon, and feeling very small—cars have always made me feel small—and my five-year-old brain was chugging away. Why would they do this, why would people kiss? My parents weren’t kissing at that moment, but I’d seen them, and I’d seen other people, and I wanted to know why this would occur. We were pulling out from our compound of townhouses onto Three Valleys Drive. It’s bizarre to me that I remember this one event in such detail. As we were going over the curb, right at that instant, the thought suddenly went through my head:
That’s
why they do it; men and women kiss because they’re going to have babies.”

Twenty-eight years later she was not only alone as a woman among her colleagues but alone in studying female eros. When she’d first arrived on the floor of sexologists, Kurt Freund was still alive and doing research there. She asked why he never studied women.

Half a century earlier, in Czechoslovakia, Freund had been employed by the Czech military to help catch conscripts who were trying to evade service by pretending to be homosexual. He developed a mechanism, called a plethysmograph, to quantify male arousal to various stimuli. A glass tube was placed over the penis, with an airtight seal around the base of the shaft. Images were shown. A gauge detecting increases in air pressure measured the swelling of the organ. If the air pressure didn’t rise when Freund showed erotic slides of young men, the conscript was headed into the army.

Freund was, meanwhile, among the first modern-era psychiatrists to argue that homosexuality arose from prenatal biology rather than childhood experience, and that it could not be treated. At the start of his career, he had tried to cure gays through psychoanalysis; eventually he called in his patients and gave back their money. He worked to repeal Czech laws that criminalized gay sex, and later, after he’d fled Communist rule and settled in Toronto, his understanding of homosexuality as permanent and harmless helped to convince the American Psychiatric Association, in 1973, to remove the orientation from its list of psychiatric disorders.

Bald, with big ears and a nose like a scythe, Freund answered Chivers’s question with his own: “How am I to understand what it is to be a woman? Who am I to study women when I’m a man?” And in his words she heard an affirmation of what she suspected, that when it came to the workings of erotic attraction men and women might be entirely different.

She knew of an unpublished study showing that the degree of genital arousal in heterosexual women watching videos of heterosexual and lesbian sex was “undifferentiated.” The women, Chivers said, “were responding to everything.” In a series of studies of her own, she replicated this result and added other stimuli, including a video featuring the copulation of bonobos, a species of ape closely related to the chimpanzee. She made the bonobo movie herself, finding footage of bonobo sex. Because the soundtrack was insufficient (“bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex, though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds”), she dubbed in some animated screeching. She led both women and men, heterosexual and homosexual, into her lab to watch and listen.

The lab consisted of two small rooms. One held a brown vinyl chair, a small TV sitting on a table, and, depending on the subject, a penile plethysmograph or the bulb and wires of the vaginal model. The bulb was long and slender, about a quarter-inch in diameter, with a broad stopper at the base to prevent it from slipping in too far. The light from the bulb was reflected off the vaginal walls; a photocell measured the reflection. The greater the flow of blood to the genitals, the more light bounced back. On a computer in the adjoining room, Chivers controlled the videos and monitored the subject’s level of physiological arousal.

As the bonobos humped, blood ran to the women’s vaginas. It didn’t take long; physiological excitement was immediate, just as it was—no matter what the female subject’s sexual orientation—when the screen showed women going down on women, men going down on men, men screwing men, and men copulating with women. The male subjects, though, grew physically aroused mostly in categorical ways: straight males responded to images of lesbian or heterosexual sex, gay males to scenes involving men. And the male subjects were unexcited by the apes.

Every thirty seconds, a question popped up on the subject’s screen: “How sexually aroused do you feel right now?” The subject punched in a number on a keypad. The males answered in ways that corresponded to the measures of the plethysmograph. Their minds and penises, their subjective and objective scores, were in agreement. The females replied in ways that were much less related to the responses of their vaginas. They reported no immediate arousal to bonobo sex. To lesbian scenes, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their genitals indicated, to scenes of gay men they reported a great deal less, and to heterosexual scenes they reported much more. For women, all seemed confusion. Adding to the muddle, Chivers pondered a study demonstrating women’s arousal to sexual assault, and a report showing that some women reach orgasm during rape. Her own experience as a clinician confirmed this.

The muddle, she believed, might be due to thinking about female sexuality in male terms. Men’s genitals responded to specific categories of stimuli, and these responses matched their psychological desires: if this was
the
standard, then women were a mess. But what if it was only
a
standard? What if, for women, physical readiness for sex was distinct from the lust for it? What if there was another legitimate system of desire?

“I feel like a pioneer on the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said. Between stints in Toronto, she’d done another version of her obsessive research, while working under Michael Bailey, a renowned sexologist at Northwestern University in Chicago. Looking at Chivers’s data showing swift vaginal engorgement to images of all sorts of human sexual activity, Bailey had suggested that women are inherently bisexual, but Chivers had balked at this idea. It seemed to apply a male paradigm—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual—to something deeply unknown. “I do think that for women preferences exist,” she told me. “Women do choose to have sex with men or with women or with both. But I don’t know if it happens for the same reasons men seek out partners. I don’t know that it’s driven by a sexually motivated system, by sexual desire in and of itself. Is there a basic sexual rudder for women?” she asked, and said that she suspected there might not be, that “emotional kindling” might prove to be far more important in the erotic directions women took.

There was an “interesting relationship,” she wrote to me later, describing the work of another researcher, “between sex drive and attraction to same-sex or opposite-sex people. As sex drive becomes stronger in men, their attractions to men and women are more polarized. Women, however, show greater sexual attraction to both women and men as sex drive gets stronger. This suggests that sex drive is working in concert with a mechanism in men to direct sexuality toward one gender or another, whereas in women this mechanism may not exist and therefore greater sex drive is expressed with both genders.”

“There’s this gravity,” she said, “in the academic world, to look at male and female sexuality from the perspective of equality, of sameness. Any indicators of difference are seen as socially constructed—or else the methodology of the research is seen as flawed. I feel like I’m going to fight an uphill battle in saying, ‘No, male and female sexuality are really different, and you’re going to have to look at them differently.’”

She didn’t know what she would find in the forest. The genital arousal to assault she and others saw as self-protection; in evolutionary terms, prehistoric women had needed to be vaginally receptive to sexual aggression in order to avoid laceration and tearing. Perhaps female responsiveness to bonobo sex was related to this. Perhaps the sight of an erect penis was all it took to stir this primordial system of self-preservation. But then why the physiological arousal to lesbian scenes, an arousal more powerful than to scenes of homosexual men? And why—as she added videos—the arousal to a lone naked woman more than to a solitary nude man? And what would happen if she replaced the apes with chickens? How closely did the sexual participants have to resemble humans? What exactly were the women responding to?

Young though she was, Chivers knew that a lifetime of research might take her barely inside the forest’s edge, might allow her only a dim glimpse of the factors that shaped female desire. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the diad 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-and-get-it kind of sexuality it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this diad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk-taking, is probably a bit 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. We just don’t know much about it right now.”

On her floor of sexologists, Chivers was surrounded by men studying paraphilias, and she wondered if the scarcity of female deviants was the result of male definitions. If the system for women was fundamentally different, then the paraphilias would be different as well. They wouldn’t be on the existing list. For women, the map of the typical and the aberrant hadn’t yet been drawn. The mapmaker would have to work her way through the giant forest. But in terms of traditionally defined paraphilias, it made sense to her that women seemed most likely to be masochists. Flesh bared and waiting for the whip, or limbs bound, or body suspended from the ceiling, the masochist was desired, receptive, the focus of the sadist’s lustful gaze.

Chivers knew that women might be undercounted among traditional paraphiliacs. The man who flashed his erection at a toll booth would be arrested and perhaps treated for exhibitionism; the woman who flashed her breasts would more likely win applause. The expectations and allowances of the culture might be distorting the numbers. And she knew that the forces of culture might be affecting her own research. Physiological arousal to wide-ranging stimuli might be, as Freud had argued, the natural state for both males and females. Was it simply that the culture taught men more emphatically to restrict their lust to limited sets of targets while female desire was allowed more freedom? Was it merely that men, having internalized these lessons at the deepest level, responded physically within categories that were learned rather than natural? Were men and women different primarily because of experience rather than the innate? Chivers and her husband, Michael Seto, one of the researchers on her floor, talked about someday attempting an experiment that would use a type of magnetic resonance imaging to test whether particular inhibitory regions of the brain were more active in males than females as a variety of erotic stimuli were shown. And Chivers had already tried to eliminate learned inhibition as an explanation of her results. She had included male-to-female transsexuals among her subjects. These medically created women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, showed categorical response patterns. They responded like men. This seemed to point to a system that was inborn. Yet one could argue that the forces of culture, of learning, had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their surgeries and their emergence as females could have shifted the culture’s input. Chivers couldn’t fully isolate the innate, knew she might never be able to. The forest often looked impenetrable.

But one thing was almost certain: women like the Baroness were nearly alone.

And for much of her life, feeling a difference she could not identify, she had wanted to die.

AROUND
the time of our trip to Master R’s, the Baroness heard a Latin phrase. She had left school at thirteen. Now she listened to Proust on tape, was proud of her self-education, and was enamored, right away, of the words
sui generis
. The phrase means “of its own kind.” She felt this described her perfectly, felt she had been generated as though out of air. The hardships of her growing up, she insisted, had little or nothing to do with who she had become. They couldn’t explain her style or power or sexuality. “I am
sui generis
,” she said, elated, then paused in contemplation. “Yes. I like that.”

She’d grown up in group homes and small orphanages in Britain until she was twelve. “There was nothing really horrible going on. The cruelest thing I remember is having to eat Spam, throwing up, and being made to continue eating it.” Much of her time had been taken up by reading. She’d been captivated by a series of books called
The Famous Five
: four kids and a dog hunting treasure and tracking down thieves. She wrote her own version. “It was a compilation of all the kids in one character. There was no damned dog, not even a cat. She was orphaned at a young age, free and independent, and I took my book around to the neighbors to sell.”

At twelve she was adopted; her new parents soon moved with her to the States, to Los Angeles. At thirteen she began running away repeatedly. She spent long stretches of her teenage years in San Francisco during the sixties. “This is how I remember that period. I was awake and muttering for days at a time. I was frightened of people. The police picked me up off the street. If you’d told me there was something about me that was fabulous, I certainly wouldn’t have believed it. I had suicide headaches. For two or three years I saw only in black-and-white. I had shock treatments. Two times? Three times? Thirteen or fourteen would have been the first one. I feel I deserve everything I have now because I paid for it.