by Ogi Ogas
It appears that for a man, youthful sexual experiences are crucial for forming lifelong sexual interests—both common cued interests like big butts, and accidental uncued interests like ants in your pants. The enduring potency of interests forged in adolescence may explain the popularity of “vintage porn” on the Internet; vintage is the 57th most popular category of sexual search on Dogpile and numerous well-trafficked Web sites—such as the Classic Porn and My Retro Tube—that feature movie clips from the ’70s and ’80s.
Men are wired for blasts from the past.
ELMER FUDD, WABBIT HUNTER
In many ways, tube sites like PornHub are technological innovations that are perfectly designed to appeal to the male sexual brain. They offer unlimited visual stimuli that can be easily searched by body part, age, and weight. Video streaming technology allows viewers to instantly jump ahead to the good stuff—or pause to examine some especially enticing visual. Many men spend hours online each week hunting for images that perfectly match their own personal set of cued and uncued interests.
Male desire is instantly activated by visual cues and is directed toward immediate action—in particular, behavior leading toward orgasm. Once male desire is triggered, it does not easily subside. As comedian Louis C.K. put it, “If you showed me my mother’s decapitated head while I was fucking, I would tell you: ‘We’re going to have to talk about this just as soon as I’m done.’ ”
On the Internet, male desire is a solitary affair. Men sit alone clicking on videos and images, rarely seeking to share their tastes and experiences with other men. Other men’s opinions about what is sexy are irrelevant or distracting. Men don’t require any information about a woman other than what they can see with their own eyes. They’re also quite happy to masturbate in the airplane bathroom or at the back of a university classroom—or in their office at the Pentagon.
Solitary, quick to arouse, goal-targeted, driven to hunt . . . and a little foolish. In other words, the male brain’s desire software is like Elmer Fudd. Fudd, the comic foil of Bugs Bunny in the Loony Tunes cartoons, is always on the hunt for a specific target: rabbits. Or as Fudd says it, wabbits. Fudd is a solitary hunter who likes to work alone. Fudd is trigger-happy. The moment he sees a wabbit—or thinks he sees a wabbit—he squeezes the trigger and fires. Fudd is easily fooled by ducks dressed up as rabbits and other tricks played on him by Bugs Bunny. But even when Fudd shoots his gun at a phony rabbit, he never gets discouraged. He reloads and gets back out there. Tomorrow’s another day for the hunt. Another chance to bag a wabbit.
But if male desire software is like Elmer Fudd, what about female desire?
CHAPTER 4
The Miss Marple Detective Agency
Female Desire
The best way to a man’s heart is to saw through his ribs.
—Sai’s ex-girlfriend
Though social psychologist Elaine Hatfield is one of the nicest people you could ever meet, her life has been filled with controversy, mostly because of her independent streak. When she was a young professor at the University of Minnesota in 1963, there were two rules. Women were not allowed to hang their coats in the faculty cloak room. Women were not allowed to dine at the Faculty Club. One Monday evening, Hatfield decided to challenge the rules.
She and fellow psychologist Ellen Berscheid approached the table where their male colleagues were sitting.
When we walked into the Faculty Club and chorused: “May we sit down?” our six colleagues couldn’t have been more courtly. “Of course! Do sit down.” But, Colleague #1 glanced at his watch and declared, “Oh, do excuse me I have to run.” Colleague #2 shifted uneasily, then remembered that his wife was picking him up. Colleague #3 snatched up a dinner roll and said that he better walk out with his friend. The remaining men realized that they’d better be going, too. Within minutes Ellen and I were sitting alone at the elegant table, surrounded by six heaping plates.
Shamed but undeterred, they kept returning to the Faculty Club until they finally obtained their own table. Eventually, Hatfield became a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, where she pioneered research into the psychology of falling in love. The National Science Foundation awarded her a grant for her research; ironically, this grant led to a much bigger setback than she experienced that Monday evening at the Faculty Club.
In 1975, she was awarded the Golden Fleece Award, which was no award at all. This notorious “honor” was bestowed by Wisconsin senator William Proxmire on federally funded research projects that didn’t meet his notions of “good science.” He launched his well-publicized smear campaign against Elaine Hatfield’s research with a press release:I object to this not only because no one—not even the National Science Foundation—can argue that falling in love is a science; not only because I’m sure that even if they spend $84 million or $84 billion they wouldn’t get an answer that anyone would believe. I’m also against it because I don’t want the answer.
After newspapers published accounts suggesting that her research was silly and perhaps immoral, she lost her research funding. But even worse was the public shame—even her neighbors believed she had fleeced the government for bogus research.
She didn’t give up. In 1978, she wrote a book called A New Look at Love, summarizing what was known about the psychology of passionate and companionate love. It won the American Psychological Association’s National Media Award. She went on to author more than one hundred academic papers on desire and romance. She’s published other well-received science books, like Love, Sex, and Intimacy, and applied her knowledge of human psychology in several detective novels, such as Vengeance Is Mine. But the publication that generated the most lasting controversy for Hatfield was also one of her shortest—a psychology research paper focused on the differences between the desires of women and men.
One sunny afternoon, Hatfield and fellow psychologist Russell Clark sent nine research assistants onto the college campus of Florida State University: four young men and five young women from an undergraduate psychology class, all neatly dressed in casual attire. The male confederates were instructed to approach female students. The female confederates were instructed to approach male students. Each confederate asked his or her target one of three questions:1. Would you go out with me tonight?
2. Would you come over to my apartment tonight?
3. Would you go to bed with me tonight?
How do you think the male students responded? The results are on the next page, but before you look, try to guess. What percentage of men do you think would say yes to a sexual solicitation from an attractive but completely unknown stranger?
Men were apparently more motivated to sleep with a woman than to date her. But what about women? What percentage of college women do you think would say yes to an invitation to go home with an attractive college guy who just walked up to her on campus?
For almost a decade, Hatfield and Clark couldn’t get these dramatic results published. Some journal editors suggested that it must be something unique to Florida State—perhaps the torrid weather. Journal editors expressed disbelief, denigrating the research as unscientific, naive, or simply too provocative. One editor wrote, “This paper should be rejected without possibility of being submitted to any scholarly journal. If Cosmopolitan won’t print it then Penthouse Forum might like it.”
But by now, Hatfield was used to such setbacks. She and Clark repeated the same study at Florida State. They obtained nearidentical results: this time, no women agreed to go home with the male research confederate. The results were finally published in the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality in 1989. Today, the paper is considered a social psychology classic.
In the 2000s, the Hatfield and Clark study was replicated in Belgium, Denmark, and Germany with similar results. The results were also reinforced by the responses of more than 6 million users on the online dating site OkCupid. One primary feature of OkCupid is member answers to member-created questions. One such question asked, “How would you react if so
meone sent you a text message and quickly started talking about sex?” There was an enormous gender difference in the responses: only 15 percent of women said they would react positively, compared to 60 percent of men. Another question asked, “Would you consider sleeping with someone on a first date?” Most women said no. Most men said yes.
These fascinating results suggest that the desires of men and women are different. But what is the source of this difference? Maybe it’s culture. Perhaps men and women possess fundamentally similar desire software, it’s just that Western society encourages us to express our desires differently. How much would you be willing to bet that the brain software for female desire is the same as the brain software for male desire?
The pharmaceutical companies bet millions.
A SEXIST DRUG
Angina pectoris is a medical condition that causes severe chest pain due to the obstruction of the heart’s blood vessels. Drugmakers are interested in this condition because of its prevalence: roughly 6.5 million Americans experience angina, mostly in middle age. In 1996, researchers at Pfizer’s Kent facility in England developed a test compound known as 5 cyclic GMP-specific phosphodiesterase inhibitor. The Kent researchers were one of many teams at Big Pharma companies battling to reach the holy grail of drug discovery: a successful Phase III treatment of human subjects. Success would mean hundreds of millions of dollars of annual drug profits. Unfortunately for Pfizer, Phase III was a failure.
The phosphodiesterase inhibitor had no significant effect on unblocking the heart’s blood vessels. But the researchers did notice something quite interesting. Even though the male subjects’ angina did not improve, many of them asked for more of the test drug. When the researchers asked why, the men rather shyly explained it was helping their marriage. The researchers took a closer look at the drug’s effects. What they found would revolutionize male desire. The drug did facilitate blood flow after all—just not where they expected. They published their findings in an impotence research journal as “Sildenafil: An Orally Active Type 5 Cyclic GMP-Specific Phosphodiesterase Inhibitor for the Treatment of Penile Erectile Dysfunction.”
Viagra was born.
When Pfizer launched Viagra in 1998, its share price doubled within days. Since then, the little blue pill has been a multibilliondollar cash cow and transformed the sexual lives of millions of middle-age men. But what was good for the gander was surely good for the goose. Almost immediately, Pfizer and other Big Pharma multinationals turned their attention to developing “pink Viagra”—a pill to treat female sexual dysfunction. Around the world, state-of-the-art biotech labs became focused on developing an effective female aphrodisiac—what in previous eras had been an urban myth known as the “Spanish fly.” The prize for this research? With twice as many women as men suffering from “sexual desire disorders,” the profits from pink Viagra could be astronomical.
Vivus, a California-based biopharmaceutical company that designed drugs to restore male sexual function, joined the quest. It started testing a Viagra-like drug that widened blood vessels and increased blood flow, known as a vasodilator. It reasoned that increasing blood flow to the vagina would increase women’s feeling of arousal, just as it does for men. It even hired a documentarian to shoot pornographic movies to test female subjects’ arousal. But after dozens of trials and $10 million of costs, the Vivus vaso-dilator failed to boost female desire.
Pfizer itself encountered similar problems. It tested Viagra itself on more than seven hundred women, including two hundred estrogen-deficient women. None of the women felt more aroused, though many reported headaches. Next, Pfizer tried Vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) a compound that is believed to control vaginal blood flow. This also failed to show any improvement in female libido. In fact, almost every attempt at stimulating female desire through “peripherally acting agents” was a failure. Though the male brain responds to the physical changes wrought by Viagra, Cela, and Levitin with increased sexual interest, the female brain does not.
It wasn’t just the behaviors of men and women that seemed different—their brains seemed different, too. Why did so many Big Pharma and biotech companies fail to find female Viagra? The answer also explains Hatfield and Clark’s dramatic results.
THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
Meredith Chivers is an assistant professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Canada. As the director of the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at the university, she is one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuropsychology of female desire. In 2004, Chivers conducted an ingenious experiment to find out what turns women on.
She invited women to her lab and showed them a variety of erotic pictures. Chivers measured their arousal from viewing the pictures in two different ways. First, she asked them how they felt—a measure of conscious, psychological arousal. Second, she inserted a plethysmograph into their vaginas—the female version of the device used to measure erections in the jar of pennies experiment. The plethysmograph measured blood flow in women’s vaginal walls—a measure of physical arousal. But the most interesting part of Chivers’s experiment was the pictures themselves.
They consisted of photographs depicting exercising men, exercising women, gay sex, lesbian sex, straight sex—and monkey sex. One of the images showed copulating bonobos, a type of primate also known as the pygmy chimpanzee.
So which images elicited physical arousal in the women? All the images, even the monkey porn. Women’s vaginal blood flow increased after viewing each erotic picture. Which images elicited psychological arousal—which caused the women to say they were turned on? Heterosexual sex generated the greatest psychological arousal, followed by lesbian sex. Watching people exercise wasn’t much of a turn-on. The reported amount of psychological arousal from watching monkey porn? A very emphatic zero.
In other words, there was a dissociation between the conscious arousal of the mind and the unconscious (or semiconscious) arousal of the body. When the exact same experiment was conducted with male subjects, there was virtually no dissociation between the two types of arousal. If a man was physically turned on, he was also psychologically turned on. And none of the men got turned on by monkey sex.
This intriguing dissociation between the mind and body in women seems to reflect a common experience among women that is frequently unvoiced. “Thanks to you women who wrote about the dichotomy between getting turned on and (intellectually) being turned off,” writes one woman on Salon.com, in response to an article addressing why women don’t watch porn. “Just last night my husband was asking me to watch porn with him and I was trying to explain that after about 10 minutes of it I’m more turned off than on (even if I’m turned on too—the other part won’t let me enjoy it). I think it would be easier to be a guy when it comes to porn—having all this conflicting stuff flying around my brain and body makes me crazy.”
In the same online discussion, when several men expressed disbelief that it’s possible to be physically aroused and psychologically grossed out, another woman responded: “It’s hard not to notice when your panties are soaking wet. It’s just that being aroused by something that disgusts you is very, very unpleasant.”
After obtaining her provocative results, Chivers reviewed 132 different laboratory studies published between 1969 and 2007 that simultaneously investigated physical and psychological arousal. The results were very clear. Men experienced a strong correlation between the arousal of mind and body. Women did not. In fact, the correlation between physical and psychological arousal in women was so low that it’s safe to say a woman’s vaginal lubrication is a poor predictor of what she is actually feeling. In fact, many women report lubrication and even orgasm during unwanted and coercive sex: a woman’s body responds, even as her mind rebels. In contrast, if a man is erect, you can make a very reasonable guess about what’s going on in his mind.
The conclusions from Meredith Chivers’s groundbreaking research are inescapable: psychological and physical arousal are usually linked in men, but in women there’s
a disconnect. It’s as if the carnal signals from a woman’s body somehow get cut off before they enter her conscious awareness. Male sexuality, in contrast, is like the knee-jerk reflex: a message of arousal from the body triggers instant mental desire. Elmer Fudd readies, aims, fires at the slightest hint of a wabbit.
This is a profound difference in the brain software of men and women. It explains why the pharmaceutical industry’s quest for female Viagra kept running into dead ends. Stimulating the vagina or the spine does not automatically fire up desire in the conscious mind. Instead, women need to feel psychologically aroused. This dichotomy was even present in a rare sex survey in the 1920s that found that the most frequent complaint among a thousand married women was a failure to reach orgasm—and that their obstacles to sexual pleasure were primarily psychological rather than biological. The drug companies might have garnered better results if they had first considered the wild popularity of romance novels, which stimulate women’s minds without ever touching their bodies.
In the past few years, Big Pharma have changed their tactics. Now they realize that any pharmaceutical solution to desire disorders will have to act on the brain itself, and likely involve conscious mechanisms. Ironically, the drug with the greatest promise for improving libido resulted from a botched attempt at solving a different problem, just like the discovery of Viagra. The German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim was trying to develop a fast-acting antidepressant. Though the drug, known as Flibanserin, failed in its Phase III trials, researchers found that it resulted in a surging libido for the female subjects. What part of the brain does Flibanserin target? Regions involved in the conscious processing of emotion. It operates by stimulating the conscious mind, not the body.