Sex at Dawn

If it’s true that women’s sexuality is much more contextual than most men’s, we might need to reconsider a lot of what we think we know about female sexuality. In addition to the distortions created by the age bias we discussed earlier (are twenty-year-olds representative?), how useful are the responses of women answering questions in a cold classroom or laboratory setting? How would our understanding of female sexuality be different if George Clooney distributed the questionnaires by candlelight and collected them after a glass of wine in the Jacuzzi?

Sexologist Lisa Diamond spent over a decade studying the ebb and flow of female desire. In her book Sexual Fluidity, she reports that many women see themselves as attracted to specific people, rather than to their gender. Women, in Diamond’s view, respond so strongly to emotional intimacy that their innate gender orientation can easily be overwhelmed. Chivers agrees: “Women physically don’t seem to differentiate between genders in their sex responses, at least heterosexual women don’t.”

Apparently, many women see the Mona Lisa looking back at them from the mirror.

What are the practical effects of this crucial difference in erotic plasticity? To start with, we’d expect to find far more transitory, situational bisexual behavior among women than among men. Various studies of heterosexual couples engaging in group sex or “swinging” agree that it is common for women to have sex with other women in these situations but that men almost never engage with men. Additionally, while we’d be the last to suggest popular culture is a reliable indicator of innate human sexuality, it’s probably significant that women kissing women has quickly become accepted as mainstream behavior while depictions of men kissing each other on television or films remains unusual and controversial. Most women presumably wake up the morning after their first same-sex erotic experience more interested in finding some coffee than in conducting a panicked reassessment of their sexual identity. The essence of sexuality for most women seems to include the freedom to change as life changes around them.

There is, after all, a liberating simplicity in Mona Lisa’s complexity, which Freud seems to have missed. The answer to his question couldn’t be simpler, yet it contains multitudes. What does woman want? It depends.

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This disconnect is also relevant to the research on jealousy we discussed in Chapter 10.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Pervert’s Lament