Free What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner

build and the possibility that he gave slightly more eye contact than the average porn stud, the basics were the basics: a maximally sized erection, a minimum of dialogue, a dose of violence (“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole life,” he told one interviewer, “so I’m not, like, bad at it”), lots of female moaning, many genital close-ups.
    Like Deen’s popularity, Suki Dunham’s nascent success as an entrepreneur pointed to changes taking place. In her case, the changes ranged over age groups. In a New Hampshire town of four thousand, in a farmhouse bordered by a white picket fence, with a tree house out back for her two kids, Dunham designed state-of-the-art vibrators like the Freestyle and the Club Vibe 2.OH.
    The predecessors to her devices had been around for over a century—initially as aids to doctors and nurses who believed they needed to massage patients to “paroxysm” as a cure for hysteria—but during the last few decades the percentage of women saying they’ve used a vibrator has gone from one to over fifty, and a few years ago vibrators appeared on the shelves at Walmart, at CVS, at Duane Reade. Trojan spotted an opportunity, entered the market, advertised its Tri-Phoria on TV, and watched sales leap in a period of cataclysmic economic decline. Durex, another condom maker, did the same and had the same results. And Dunham, who grew up in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, the daughter of a man who ran a small excavation outfit, was developing a high-end niche.
    Dunham, who has an eager, thin-lipped smile, had worked at Apple for nine years, marketing iMacs. One Christmas in her mid-thirties, she received in her fireplace stocking an iPod and a vibrator from her husband, who traveled a great deal on business. Using the two devices together started her thinking, and now she had a warehouse packed with merchandise. She was shipping to thirty countries and had just begun teaming with a reality TV star who was turning the products and Dunham herself into a regular part of the show. Dunham’s company sold sleekly curved vibrators, aggressively bifurcated vibrators, discreetly streamlined vibrators, and an app that let the user program a vibrator to pulse and tremble to the rhythm of an iPod’s music. The newest item, the bullet-shaped 2.OH, slipped into a bullet-shaped pocket stitched into a thong. The 2.OH massaged, at an array of intensities, to the music of a club or party. It had enough charge to last three hours.
    W ith females hopping and darting in front of us, Pfaus asked, “Why do we have Pandora’s box—why have we boxed in women’s sexuality? Why do we keep women’s desire relatively repressed? We men are afraid that if we open the box, open her control, we’re opening ourselves to being cuckolded. We’re afraid of what’s inside.”
    He laughed over a memory of mine: not too long ago, porn on cable TV in New York had, by law, included a blue dot. Always, the dot covered the male member. Women’s bodies were thoroughly exposed, yet the dot floated wherever the penis went.
    And I thought, as well, of trips I’d made in other parts of my writing life, trips to places where the blue dot took other, not so comical forms. Once, in a remote village in northern Kenya, I’d asked a group of Samburu men why their culture practiced clitoridectomy. They answered matter-of-factly, “So our wives will be faithful.”
    Sometime later I spoke again with Chivers. She’d been designing a new experiment that would use subliminal images as another means to tunnel beneath consciousness and perhaps beyond culture. She outlined the study, then said that she’d been thinking about the scene in her college lecture hall twenty years before, about the sound of “Eeew,” about that fleeting, unforgettable, half-funny syllable as an expression of a history and prehistory of “all kinds of prohibitions and restrictive perspectives on female sexuality.” Suddenly her voice leapt: “Look