Love v.

Lust What Women Want (It May Shock You) by Lizzie Crocker Daniel Bergner's new book tackles the science of female lust and evolutionary pr omiscuity but does it do a disservice to the 'fairer sex'? Lizzie Crocker investig ates.Share?facebook?twitter?google plus?email?print?0Throughout history, female desire has been portrayed as one of the most destabilizing and dangerous of forc es. It caused Cleopatra to throw away her kingdom for an ill-fated dalliance wit h Marc Antony. It felled Eve, led Anna Karenina astray and doomed Emma Bovary. E ven after the sexual revolution of the sixties, lusty women still tend to be slu t-shamed by their peers and reduced by popular culture to a Girls Gone Wild ster eotype. American society has yet to escape those old Madonna/Whore dichotomies, no matter how hard we try. Meanwhile, the true nature of women s sexuality remains as elusive as ever. The la test attempt to tackle the mysteries of Eros, which will surely be one of the su mmer s hottest new reads: Daniel Bergner s What Do Women Want? Based off of his popu lar New York Times Magazine cover story, Bergner s book attempts to pull back the societal veil on female sexual urges, to argue that our post-feminist, scientifi cally-advanced age still gets the issue all wrong and that women are even more ani malistic, promiscuous and dependent upon sexual novelty than men. The provocativ e 2009 cover story stirred up plenty of controversy, prompting even the liberal author Greg Mitchell to gawk at its photos of women mid-orgasm, while cultural a nthropologists criticized Bergner for making blanket statements about women desp ite the fact that none of his research ventured outside the Western hemisphere. But let s allow Bergner to lay out his case. Tripping through history, from evolut ionary biology and psychology to The Bible, the author slowly picks apart our de ep-seated belief that monogamy is the natural domain of women and that females a re uniquely qualified to thrive inside of a long-lasting commitment to only one sexual partner. Among his most compelling and titillating pieces of evidence tha t women are built to be just as horny as men: that their arousal, measured by bl ood flow to the vagina in a lab, spikes while watching hardcore pornography; tha t female monkeys will relentlessly pursue lazy male monkeys to mate; that female rats will take it upon themselves to mount male rats; that women account for on e in three online porn users. He also notes how female rats and other mammals ha ve clitorii, which seem to exist only for the purpose of sexual arousal a fact tha t has intrigued evolutionary biologists and upended notions about female desire across a variety of species. Is Bergner s survey more than a little voyeuristic? Sure. Whether he s interviewing women about their darkest fantasies or watching a tantric expert bring herself t o climax, his accounts of these moments often read like erotica, so much that th e reader can t help but wonder about a 52-year-old man s motivations for writing thi s book. Still, Bergner seems to be onto something when he comes to the conclusion that w omen also crave sexual novelty and that they struggle with monogamy just as much a s their male counterparts. Take, for example, a woman who signed up for a trial of a female arousal drug out of desperation she wanted to get her freak back in the bedroom with her partner of seven years. And then there s the issue of multiple orgasms. Bergner writers that it was evoluti on s method of making sure that females are libertines, that they move efficiently

from one round of sex to the next and frequently from one partner to the next, that they transfer the turn-on of one encounter to the stimulating of the next, building towards climax. So here we finally have the real problem with that it takes a sharp nosedive in monogamous that if only the wives were more enthusiastic ds, the thorny mystery that is monogamy would . female lust, according to Bergner: relationships. The implication is about having sex with their husban be solved (or, at least, improved)

But Bergner thinks a tiny pharmaceutical company called Emotional Brain has stum bled upon a solution that will help women desire their partners more: Lybrido, a ka female Viagra. Lybrido and its close cousin, Lybridos, were developed by Adriaa n Tuiten, a 58-year-old Dutch researcher with a doctorate in pharmacology. Both drugs tamper with the interplay of serotonin and dopamine, giving dopamine the bra in s lust courier a temporary edge over the libido-snuffing serotonin. While the for mer consists of a Viagra-like chemical that causes blood to engorge the genitals as well as testosterone, which triggers dopamine production, the latter contain s buspirone, a compound that can temporarily suppress serotonin. But many critics believe Lybrido is unlikely to cure monogamy, after all.

The search for a pill to fix monogamy just seems like an attempt to medicate away a social psychology and cultural problem, says Greg Downy, a neuroanthropologist b ased in Sidney, Australia. Our expectations are unreachable, but rather than chan ge them, we ll just use a performance enhancing drug. While Downy isn t opposed to women or men using drugs to alter their physical desi re, he does note a certain irony behind the idea that a society so conflicted ab out mood-altering and performance-enhancing substances in the realms of sports a nd academia might be so quick to embrace them to shore up the marriage unit. And of course, there s also the risk that women will start to become used to the high er levels of testosterone in their system and that, like an addict, will need bi gger and bigger shots of Lybrido in order to feel the same arousing high. If you don t fix the underlying problem, you re just going to have to keep upping the dosage, says Downy. We could easily have a group of women taking these drugs who are still in situations where there s too much stress in their lives, they re unheal thy, they re not getting enough sleep, and maybe they re not in an ideal emotional r elationship with themselves or their partners. As Downy suggests, perhaps what we really need isn t a sexy new arousal pill, but a new way of thinking about sex and commitment. Perhaps then we will be better e quipped to get out of bad relationships or stay in good ones. More important, pe rhaps it will stop us from clinging to dissatisfaction because we re afraid of the unknown. Tuiten would never have developed Lybrido or Lybridos were it not for his dogged determination to better understand why a girlfriend suddenly stopped desiring h im, leaving him brokenhearted, after living with him for years. She maintained t hat she didn t menstruate when they were dating because it was her body s way of tel ling her that she didn t love him, but he later said that dieting and running had thrown her hormones out of balance at the time. The psychological hadn t dictated t he hormonal, Bergner writes. Rather, biochemistry had determined the trajectory of lust and love; it had destroyed everything. Tuiten s obsession with bridging the discrepancy between the psychological and the hormonal in committed relationships with a magic pill is one way of attempting to understand sex and commitment. But even Bergner admits that a pill can only g

o so far. And while What Do Women Want? unveils exciting new research about wome n s sexuality, he also admits that much remains unknown about female desire. Even the researchers whose studies he quotes seem to be as mystified as the rest of u s about how and why women get aroused (or not). How many different types of orga sms can women actually have? It s still unclear (and depends on the woman). Does t he elusive G-spot exist? No one apparently knows for sure, even after decades of searching. So what do we know? We know that an arousal pill for women may be available as s oon as 2016, and that sexually frustrated women can then presumably have it all a dependable, if slightly boring husband at one moment and a passionate, almost il licit lover at the next. Well, at least for a bit.