What Do Women Want?. Daniel Bergner
rendition, her “shameless mind and deceitful nature”—made her as dangerous as Eve. Lust-drunk witches of the Middle Ages left men “smooth,” devoid of their genitals; and to the long line of living nightmares caused by female carnality, French and Dutch anatomists of the seventeenth century contributed the clitoris that grew with too much touching into a full-blown phallus, turning women into men who ravished their former sex.
But if the pre-Enlightenment West had always been frightened by female heat, sometimes extoling it, yet corralling it carefully within the bounds of marriage—where, for the sake of women’s as well as men’s sexual release, England’s early Protestant clergy prescribed conjugal relations exactly three times per month, with a week off for menstruation—what followed eventually, with Victorianism, was a focused effort at extinguishing it. Lately historians have made the case that the Victorian era in Europe and America wasn’t as prudish as we’ve tended to think; still, on the subject of female desire, it was a period of ardent denial. As with all the tectonic shifts of history, this one had uncountable reasons. One explanation has beginnings in the sixteen hundreds, with scientists’ incipient realizations about the ovum, about the egg’s part in reproduction. Slowly, incrementally, this ended Galen’s legacy; gradually it separated women’s ability to ignite from their ability to get pregnant. The ever-haunting female libido became less and less of a necessity. It could be purged without price.
Then, too, at the outset of the nineteenth century, nascent feminist campaigns and evangelical Christian rallying cries converged around the theme of irreproachable female morality. The two voices were intertwined; they amplified each other. Nineteenth-century feminists made humankind’s salvation, here on earth and forever, their own womanly mission; Christianity made womanhood its exemplar. American prison reformer Eliza Farnham preached that “the purity of woman is the everlasting barrier against which the tides of man’s sensual nature surge.” Without this feminine barricade, “dire disorder will follow.” And educational crusader Emma Willard proclaimed that it was for women to “orbit . . . around the Holy Centre of perfection” in order to keep men “in their proper course.” One well-read American manual for young brides captured the inextricable feminist and evangelical spirits: women were “above human nature, raised to that of angels.”
This was all a long way from “by nature much delight accompanies the ejection of seed.” The innately pious had replaced the fundamentally carnal. The new rhetoric both instilled and reflected a transformation. In the mid–eighteen hundreds, in a letter about the sexual lapses of ministers throughout the Eastern states, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to her husband, “What terrible temptations lie in the way of your sex—till now I never realized it—for tho I did love you with an almost insane love before I married you I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could be tempted in that way—there never was a moment when I felt anything by which you could have drawn me astray—for I loved you as I now love God.” And meanwhile, the renowned British gynecologist and medical writer William Acton was making plain that “the majority of women, happily for society, are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.”
Yet beyond reproductive science, feminism, and religion, the Industrial Revolution had a tremendous impact on the West’s thinking about what it meant to be female. Class barriers were breaking down; men could climb. This placed a value on work and professional ambition to a degree that may never have existed before, now that the rewards were potentially unlimited. And work—to borrow from Freud, who both was and wasn’t a Victorian—required sublimation. Eros needed to be tamped down, libido redirected toward accomplishment. Victorianism assigned the tamping, the task of overall sexual restriction, primarily to women.
How far have we traveled in the last hundred or so years? In one way of seeing, Victorianism is a curio, encased in the past, its pinched rectitude easy to laugh at. This argument relies on a line of evidence leading rapidly away from the minimizing or denial of female sexuality, a line running through Freud’s candid investigations of the erotic in women, through the brashness of the Jazz Age, the brazenness of flapper girls. It runs through the invention of the birth control pill, through the social upending brought by the sixties and the sexual revolution, and on through Madonna’s aggressive cone-shaped breastplates and the pornographic self-displays of any number of lesser female celebrities. The opposing argument begins, too, with Freud, with the sections of his writing that render women as having, by nature, “a weaker sexual instinct,” an inferior erotic capacity, and passes through post–World War I advice books like one informing that, unlike just about all males, “the number of women who are not satisfied with one mate is exceedingly small.” From the forties and fifties, there is the story of Alfred Kinsey, whose research funds were revoked when, unforgivably, he turned from cataloguing the sex lives of men to publishing Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Then, from the late sixties, there is the bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex delivering emotional law: “Before a woman can have sexual intercourse with a man she must have social intercourse with him.” And finally there is the confluence between strains of contemporary thought: between the virginal edicts aimed mainly at girls and young women by evangelical Christianity, the waves of panic and sexual protectionism that overtake secular culture when it comes to girls but not boys, and the widely believed—and flimsily supported—thesis of evolutionary psychology that, relative to men, who are hardwired to hunt for the gratification of sex, women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.
This confluence is telling. In subtle yet essential ways, Victorian thinking about women and sex isn’t so alien to our era. And science—evolutionary psychology—is an unlikely conservative influence. Mainstream evolutionary theory nimbly explains our physiological traits, from our opposable thumbs to our upright posture to the makeup of our immune systems. By contrast, evolutionary psychology, a field that has bloomed over the last few decades, sets out to use the same Darwinian principles to illuminate the characteristics of the human psyche, from our willingness to cooperate to our inclinations in one of the discipline’s main areas of investigation, sex. The ambitions of the field are enticing and elusive, enticing because they hold out the promise that Darwin’s grand logic can provide us with an all-encompassing understanding of ourselves, and elusive because the characteristics are so intricate and may have been created mostly by culture rather than inherited on our chromosomes. Evolutionary psychologists put absolute faith in the idea that our patterns of behavior and motivation and emotion are primarily the expressions of our genes. What is, evolutionary psychologists say, is meant to be, genetically speaking. This is equally true for the fact that we all have thumbs that help grasp and for the fact that—judging by appearances—men are the more lustful gender.
The role of social learning, of conditioning, isn’t given much weight by the field’s leaders. If promiscuity were considered normal in teenage girls and not in teenage boys, if it were lauded in girls and condemned as slutty and distasteful in boys, if young women instead of young men were encouraged to collect notches on their belts, how might the lives of females and males—how might the appearances that evolutionary psychology treats as immutable—be different? This kind of question doesn’t much interest evolutionary psychologists like David Buss, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the field’s premier sexual theorists. He dispenses with such challenges by amassing evidence that, all over the globe, male randiness and female modesty are celebrated. The widespread, in his view, proves the predetermined, the genetically encoded. Look, he has written in one of the discipline’s academic manifestos, at the ideal number of sexual partners named by college students as they think forward over a lifetime; research has shown far higher figures for men than women. Look, around the world, at preferences in mates. From Zambia to towns of Arab Palestinians to America, societies set great value on chastity or some measure of propriety or reserve in women.
Evidence like this piles up in Buss’s pages. And then he adds another worldwide mating reality—that from Zambia to America, financial prospects are prized in men—and this takes him to one of evolutionary psychology’s pivotal conceits. Within the field, it is known as “parental investment theory.” To the public, it may not be known by any name at all. And by most, the theory’s components may be only hazily comprehended. Yet the conceit has traveled from academia through the media and into general consciousness. It has been fully embraced,