Just because women, to be sexually fully alive, need to feel safe doesn’t mean they can sexually tolerate being bored. Dr. Pfaus, as you may recall, emphasized the negative role of “bad stress” and the erotic potential of “good stress.” I would tease this out as excitement and “safe danger.” A profound dilemma—that looks at first like a paradox—in female consciousness may be built into female neurobiology. The data we saw above on hormone fluctuations during the menstrual cycle show that when we are ovulating, we are attracted to high-testosterone, risk-taking, unpredictable males—and when we are not ovulating, we are drawn to nurturing, safer, more reliable mates.43
This dualism, of course, makes perfect evolutionary sense, from the perspective of Dr. Helen Fisher’s theory: women are not, she argues, by nature monogamous, though it is in their interest to pair-bond with a safe, reliable male for at least the first two years of a child’s life. But she also argues that adultery can be evolutionarily valuable to women because they get the sperm competition, as scientists call a situation in which more than one man’s ejaculate is inside a not monogamous woman, and this aids conception. A woman can raise the baby, for at least the vulnerable first two years of its life, with the (reliable) helpmate provider. This unresolvable, even tragic tension—the sexy drive to be impregnated by the unpredictable stranger, and the equally compelling emotional drive to “marry” the predictable, nurturing man—may be built into our evolutionary wiring as women; and it is certainly built into our monthly variability. Rochester or St. John? Brett or Ashley? It may depend on the time of the month, and on our baseline SNS levels.
This tension may also explain an enduring problem within female heterosexuality, which is so tenacious but so shameful that we tend to shy away from discussing it. And this is the problem of the obvious and enduring appeal to many heterosexual women of the “bad boy” and of themes in female sexual response around domination, submission, and power. The slightly S&M novel series Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James, sold millions of copies to women in 2012. These themes are great feminist unsayables of female sexuality. But if you look at the dozens of these scenes in, say, Nancy Friday’s collection of women’s erotica, My Secret Garden, or similar scenes of being “swept away” by a dominant male in any Harlequin romance or Mills and Boon novel, one must confront the fact that there can be something magnetic about, not force in men, but about a kind of capacity for mastery.
The really beloved bad boys of women’s literature don’t bully or abuse the heroine, but they continually provoke and tease her—they are teasing her to release her own latent wildness. And one thing the romantic heroes of women’s fiction, even the bad boys, who can be brusque or verge on rudeness, never, ever do is actually snap at, that is, negatively startle, the heroine; think of the edgy but grudgingly respectful repartee of Darcy and Elizabeth. Virtually every woman’s genre romance novel follows a script of a man who seems bad—insensitive, corrupt, womanizing—but turns out to be good. It also often features a heroine who begins demure and unripe—“Poor, obscure, plain and little” in Jane Eyre’s speech—but who becomes herself, grows into herself, under the provocation of this bad boy who is secretly good.
This seeming paradox or politically incorrect fantasy is, I would argue, an essential archetype of the female heterosexual journey. A skilled, even at times slightly dangerous, male provocateur can help the female sexual journey to begin. “Badness” is not literal badness—it is otherness, wildness, the dimensions of the unknown. The motorcycle boots, the Harley—they are about her adventures, her penchant for the open road, erotically and in terms of her own creativity and subversiveness, that society has generally repressed in her and forbidden her to claim as a longing, let alone as part of her “good girl” identity. His male “badness” is simply the projected dark anima of her own unacknowledged wild self.
The difficult secret is that there is something about power—or skill, or mastery of a situation—in men that is erotic to many heterosexual women, and that probably has to do with that hormonal variation that leaves us alert to high-testosterone signals, as well as the “good stress” of SNS activation in a context a woman can ultimately control. Old-fashioned, male-centered theories of evolutionary biology have popularized notions such as the one espoused by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, which support the idea that men who are old, rich, and powerful can attract young, beautiful women seeking security; and that women will always be at a disadvantage in the mating dance, because they desire commitment whereas men want to spread their seed. But Dr. Helen Fisher’s theory tells a very different story about male attractiveness to women: it is not the males who are sexually selecting but the females—which is the case throughout the mammal kingdom. In this scenario, a woman isn’t looking for an old guy with a gold MasterCard. She is looking for a helpmate, and she is looking for high-quality sperm—a dual mission that can lead to pair-bonding with simultaneous female adultery. Could her hormonal fluctuations, and the “good stress” appeal of a man who can be dangerously exciting but not actually injurious, also intensify the duality of this mission and help explain why male fantasy figures in women’s films and books manifest such opposing, even irreconcilable traits?
I have been listening to the language of women who have left their marriages or who have committed adultery. The following is another cultural secret: a substantial theme that surfaces when women say why they left solid, stable marriages, or committed adultery against good, devoted, faithful men, is that they were bored. Our cultural script tells us that women never leave or stray unless the men they married have done something awful to them, but I cannot count how many perfectly nice, reasonable, sane, considerate women have confided to me that the reason they left or strayed is that they “couldn’t stand” the sexual boredom caused by the good, safe, nice, predictable man. They are not proud of what they have been driven to do, but they use the language of survival in explaining this: “I thought I would die if I didn’t ever get this again in my life,” said one adulteress, referring to the erotic chemistry of her affair. Others remarked, “I thought I would die if I stayed,” and “I was dying inside.” The men who were being left, or deceived, by the women who told me their stories were all incredibly nice; but they had stopped relating intellectually to the women in their lives from a condition of growth or adventure. They had stopped bringing seduction and drama into the marital bed. They had stopped seeing the women in their lives as if the women themselves needed excitement and drama within the relationship and were themselves not to be taken for granted. This seemed to have a knock-on effect: the women stopped treating the men as if their needs for excitement and novelty mattered, and started to treat them as if they were uninteresting. I believe that women’s monthly need for drama in intimate settings means that when men do not provide it in positive forms, heterosexual women tend to become provocative and bitchy so they will get the stimulation they crave from men even if it arrives in a negative form such as an argument. By becoming so changeless, so predictable, many husbands lock themselves into the staid, less sexy, provider role in women’s psyches, and they abandon the provocateur role—leaving nothing to fire the imagination or the SNS during the times of the months when a woman craves adventure, the “dance,” and excitement. Could these women have married the men who provide for half of the need sets that our hormones prime us for—but that ignore the other half—the high-risk, unpredictable half?
Is there also something about the unpredictability of the “bad boy” that boosts the female SNS? Yes. When “bad stress” takes over the SNS, it focuses the woman’s attention on anxiety rather than sexual arousal. But, as Dr. Pfaus puts it, “Good stress can sometimes be good for your sex life.” Vacation sex is so arousing because of the novelty and unpredictability of the setting, which boost the SNS in a sexual way rather than an anxiety-producing way. “Some women can’t quite reach orgasm without activation of the SNS produced by, say, a spanking or by hair pulling,” explains Dr. Pfaus. He notes
that these tastes have often been construed as evidence of these women’s innate masochism, but they can simply result from the fact that these women’s baseline SNS needs a bit more activation than is typical.44
It strikes me that this nonweird explanation for a bit of aggression being exciting to some women may explain many women’s attraction to rape fantasies and other kinds of role playing, all of which heighten the SNS. (Knowing that these tastes may not derive from any psychological masochism does not mean, though, that I believe one should ignore the risk of habituation to violent sexual imagery or practices, and the risk of escalation through habituation, that I discussed in Chapter 12, “The Pornographic Vagina.”)
The SNS-activating excitement and unpredictability that is good for female arousal can come from more gentle surprises, too. I know a very happily married couple; they have every stress other long-married couples have: bills, commutes, jobs, two kids who sometimes whine and who need braces and who will need college tuition eventually. But the wife is sparkling and “in the Goddess” well into her forties, and the man is very pleased with his life. For her birthday, at a time when they had very little money, the husband booked a cheap long-weekend flight to a second-class Caribbean resort.
They could have been like every other bored couple: standing in line at security together; reading magazines together; arriving at the resort tired and hungry and putting away their clothes with all the usual stresses and familiarities of every other long-married marital unit. But that is not what happened to them. Because the husband never told his wife where they were going—he only told her to pack some clothes for warm weather, and a swimsuit. He went ahead of her to the gate to explain the surprise to the bemused airline personnel. Then he went back to where she was waiting, opened a bottle of champagne, took out a dish of strawberries, poured her a glass, handed her some fruit, and then, with her permission, blindfolded her while they got onto the plane. Though her blindfold came off once they were seated, she had no idea where she was going and wouldn’t find out until she landed and disembarked. Her husband said she was grinning the entire flight.
His steadiness, combined with his sense of fun, risk taking, and surprise, activate both sets of her needs at all times of the month.
Does that mean that nice, overscheduled, hardworking men reading this should despair, or take stupid lessons from seduction con men, as in Neil Strauss’s The Game, about how to be mean to women? No. But it may mean that one way to keep a woman interested and faithful for life, if you are a man, is to never give up your role as seducer, and to never stop growing, changing, and finding little and big ways to surprise her.
Both archetypes of the male are there to provoke her, to get all her complex and continually shifting carnal and evolutionary needs met; and it may be her challenge in her real life to build enough excitement and unpredictability into her “safe” relationship, or to secure enough safety and emotional commitment in contexts in which the risky mastery that may attract her is what prevails.
DO WHATEVER SHE LIKES TO HER NIPPLES
Whatever she likes you to do to her nipples—do it the way she likes it, and as much as she likes. As we saw earlier, nipple stimulation releases oxytocin, which will make a woman feel that the world is a good place, that love exists, that it is meaningful, and that her circumstances can be trusted (men also can have nipple stimulation during sex, but it is less sustained and frequent, in general). It may also help her see the connections between things and help her to read subtle emotional cues better—making her a more sensitive partner, a better leader, a more gifted creative artist within the circumstances of her own life, and a more tender mother. I find it very interesting that when I ask women to reflect on when they encourage nipple stimulation from their lovers, what I find anecdotally is that women want their nipples touched, pinched, or sucked by men they love or like. They can have very hot sex with men they do not like, but many women reported to me finding those men’s touches of, or suckling upon, their nipples unbearable. You may have to trust your partner already to want to encourage your body to feel even more trust.
As we saw, it is scientifically well established that a baby’s sucking on a mother’s breasts releases oxytocin in the mother, which in turn firms the bonded feelings the mother has toward the baby. A man’s sucking on a woman’s breasts would also release oxytocin—generating that chemical response in women that makes them feel relaxed and affectionate, making the woman, in short, feel bonded to the person suckling her nipples. Given this possibility, women would be well advised not to let those men (or women) to whom they do not wish to feel attached and trusting, engage with their breasts. Oxytocin appears to play a big role in easing “neophobia” or “fears of the new” and anxiety; the more a lover sucks on your breasts, the more like “home” he will feel. Because of oxytocin, women are both aroused and relaxed by a lover’s sucking on their nipples. In this way, too, women become “hooked” on sexual attention from their lovers, “hooked” on love.
Women may wish to be aware that if they want to have hot anonymous sex with some guy they may not trust, but don’t want to fall in love with him—they would be well advised to discourage him from interacting with their nipples.
EJACULATE
Does male ejaculate affect women’s feelings? Dr. Helen Fisher takes so seriously the psychological effect of sex on women that she warns that, since antidepressants can suppress ejaculation, men who are prescribed the medications should be told that if they can’t ejaculate, they may “lose the ability to send courtship signals.”45
Receiving his ejaculate during lovemaking may make a woman feel differently about a man than does lovemaking in which she does not receive his ejaculate. Semen has sugar, sperm, and some aromatic compounds. Because it is viscous, it is sexually stimulating to more parts of a woman’s vagina and cervix than penile thrusting can manage alone; a woman actually ingests the sugar in an ejaculation through the walls of her vagina. If she feels energized and “up” after sex with ejaculation, it may also be because she is on a minor sugar high, combined with the deeper stimulation she receives from hot viscous liquid. Dr. Cindy Meston and David M. Buss, in Why Women Have Sex, assert that semen contains trace mood elevators: “Semen contains hormones including testosterone, estrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin, and several types of prostaglandins. All of these hormones,” they claim, “have potential mood-altering abilities and can be absorbed into a woman’s bloodstream through the vaginal walls.”46 If people practice safe sex, then sex without a condom can signal that lovemaking is taking place in the context of a secure, committed relationship that is conducted with safe sex practices—boosting still more the oxytocin and opioids she may experience. Many women reported to me that they did indeed feel differently about a man after making love with ejaculation, without a condom, than they had felt before. They felt closer to him, more satisfied, and more joyful, and little things that had annoyed them before seemed less bothersome.
I conducted informal interviews with groups of women with whom I met both in person and online. I told them about the possible effects of semen, and then I asked them to remember back to a relationship in which they had at first religiously used condoms, and then after they had taken their STD tests—this was a group of very sexually responsible women—had stopped using condoms. Same guy, same sexual style, same scent: any difference?
I saw looks of shocked recognition cross my interviewees’ faces. “Totally different,” said Julia, a graphic designer. “Oh my God. Once we stopped using condoms—the little things [a boyfriend] did that had annoyed me were cute. He looked better! His geeky shirts didn’t bother me! I felt the relationship was somehow more serious and not just because of the commitment implied by not using condoms anymore. . . . I can’t believe this.”
“I felt different afterward,” confirmed Anastasia, a student in New York City. “I felt much more involved. I had seen him with some detachment before. After we stopped using co
ndoms—I felt connected to him, fired up about him, motivated.”
“Different. I felt different with him when we stopped using condoms,” confirmed Dianne, an operations manager. “I felt more in love. I felt more satisfied. Happier. More connected.”
“Our relationship completely escalated when we stopped using condoms,” said Nina. “And now that I think of it our best times were right after we had made love. My mood lifted right up at those times. I hadn’t felt he was that great before, when he wasn’t ejaculating inside of me—I hadn’t felt he was the right guy for me. But when we stopped using condoms, that coincided with my feeling that he could be the one.”
Many women tried hard to remember if they had the same emotional alteration of mood upon swallowing semen after giving oral sex; several reported that they believed, in retrospect, this may have affected their mood to some extent—the sugar rush, perhaps—but that the effect was much less obvious than it had been with ejaculate in the vagina, with its opioid-boosting, and possibly other kinds of mood-elevating, action.
I am in no way seeking to undermine the important message of always practicing safe sex. But I do think it is important to understand what may happen to the female mind when we do take in semen. Think of a time when you were falling in love with a man, and using condoms. Then, after you committed to each other exclusively, you may have stopped using condoms; you were making love frequently, intoxicated by his nearness and smell, and it may also be that your sense of safety was enhanced by the exclusivity this implies, which as we now know boosts female orgasm. Think of the emotional exaltation after such lovemaking. Now think of a time when, for whatever reason, you reentered the dating scene and made love again using condoms. Did you feel a letdown, a sense of distance, and did you feel emotionally very different, after the act?