Desire

It has surprised me recently to find almost no professional literature discussing why a person becomes sexually excited. There are, of course, innumerable studies that have to do with that tantalizingly vague word "sexuality": ... Statistical studies of the external genitals, foreplay, afterplay, accompanying activity, duration, size, speed, distance, metric weight and nautical miles. Venereal disease, apertures, pregnancy, berdaches, morals, marriage customs, subincision, medical ethics, sexism, racism, feminism, communism and priapism. Sikkim, Sweden, Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Indonesia and all the tribes of Africa and Araby. Buttocks, balls, breasts, blood supplies, nervous supplies, hypothalamic supplies, gross national product, pheromones, implants, plateaus, biting, squeezing, rubbing, swinging. Nude and clothed, here and there, outlets and inlets, large and small, up and down, in and out. But not sexual excitement. Strange.

Robert Stoller, "Sexual Excitement"

I am a Veteran of the sexual revolution, or, perhaps more accurately, one of its correspondents. I collect war stories. The walls of my library are filled with books on the various aspects of human sexuality. I started my collection when I was a boy scout. My motto, then and now, is, Be prepared. I read everything there was to read about sex, in case it ever happened to me. I have read The Joy of Sex, More Joy, Human Sexual Inadequacy, Human Sexual Response, Homosexuality in Perspective, Xaviera's Supersex, Sex in History, Sexercise, Total Sex, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, The Hite Report, The Redbook Report on Female Sexuality, The Herpes Book, It's Your Body, Our Bodies, Ourselves, The Clitoris, Whipped Waitress, Chained Cheerleaders, Jungle Fever, Office Gynecology, etc.... And nowhere in those volumes was there a paragraph on why we like the things we like, why we want the things we want, why we do the things we do. We know how it's done in Micronesia, Polynesia, in the blue-blood streets of Boston, up in Berkeley and out in Queens, but we don't know why. What is this thing called lust?

"You can't photograph desire. You can't put it on tape. You can't measure it in any way. It is a very slippery concept." That was the response of the first sex researcher I called. A month later, I was mostly willing to believe him.

I had talked with therapists, social psychologists, medical investigators, biologists, friends and lovers. I had added another shelf of books to my library. I had discovered that we are just beginning to look at the roots of sexual excitement, at what turns us on and why. The research is as intriguing as it is incomplete. Is desire the result of the male hormone testosterone? Is immediate, undying love an altered state of consciousness, a by-product of a kissing cousin of Dexedrine that the body releases in the brain? Is lust the result of learning, or is horniness inherited? Can the fascinating variety of sexual behavior be traced to fantasy, the secret garden of erotic daydreams? Is the desire that drives a rapist to commit his crime the same that causes the rest of us to cruise for action? Perhaps it's all of the above. As one of my contacts noted, "It's amazing what can be crammed into one erection, isn't it?"

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Sociobiology is a theoretical discipline that tries to analyze social behavior in terms of genetic imperatives of natural selection. In the sociobiological scheme of things, I try to get into your jeans because my genes want to get into your genes. In lower life forms, mating behavior is automatic, the result of genetically inherited signals and responses. At first glance, it seems that the biochemical puppet strings have been severed in humans. We are the only species that deliberately separates sex from reproduction. We have to invent reasons to reproduce and reasons to have sex. Pleasure is our rationale.

It is suggestive work, this sociobiology. Its premise is that we are not far removed from our ancestors stalking the savanna, and, in fact, I've been to bars where some of the males have not yet descended from the trees. One sociobiologist--Richard Hagen, author of The Bio-Sexual Factor--cites studies that seem to suggest, for all the potential equality of the sexes, that males are far and away the more interested party. One study revealed that the average male has over 1500 orgasms before marriage, while the average female has fewer than 250. Another study suggests that the difference begins early: During adolescence, single males report 20 times as many orgasms from all sources as do single females. Single males report 131 times as many orgasms from nocturnal dreams as do single females. A nocturnal dream is not learned behavior; it is what the body discovers for itself.

"Why did we ever start the myth that women are just as orgasmic as men?" asks Hagen. "There is no evidence for it. In fact, there is all kinds of evidence against it. And from an evolutionary standpoint, there is no logical justification for it." Hagen parades an intriguing array of statistics showing that approximately half of the sexual encounters that end in orgasm for a male partner do not end in orgasm for a female partner. It is not a matter of technique or of timing.

Hagen believes that nature has "selected" males who are both more interested in sex and more successful at sex for two reasons: (1) the fact that, historically, males have had to be aroused in order to copulate, while females can copulate while unaroused; and (2) the fact that males must be orgasmic if they are to pass on their genes, while females may pass on their genes whether they are orgasmic or not. In other words, men are horny because they are descended from generations of fathers who were horny at least once in their lives. Hagen does some nice probability studies to show that it is to nature's advantage for males to mate with anything that moves, while it makes little difference to females. Lenny Bruce apparently understood this--he once noted that a man will fuck mud.

Sociobiologists believe that the trigger for desire is testosterone, the so-called male sex hormone. Actually, testosterone is present in both males and females. So, for that matter, is estrogen, the female hormone.

During adolescence, the surge of sex hormones ignites the development of secondary sex characteristics that separate the men from the boys, and--hallelujah!--the women from the girls. In the female, progesterone causes the hips to flare and the breasts to swell--producing the hourglass shape of the mature woman. Girls develop internal genitalia and the ability to lubricate--which is a sign of receptivity according to some and of arousal according to others. On the other side of the fence, the tide of testosterone gives the boy a beard, lowers his voice, broadens his shoulders, puts hair on his chest and starts to take it off his head, precipitates sexual fantasies, frequent erections, nocturnal emissions--the whole ball game.

It is obvious that testosterone is a likely suspect in rampaging teenage sexuality--at least for boys. Kinsey found that most males reach their peak of orgasmic frequency within two or three years of pubertal onset. The boys who catch the wave of hormones at an earlier age than their peers become involved in more types of sexual activity, have higher frequency rates in each type of activity and subsequently remain at higher rates of total orgasmic outlet. It's the old story--first served, first come.

In contrast, women who have only about one tenth as much testosterone are relatively unaffected by the hormones and do not reach their peak sexual activity until their mid-20s and 30s. They discover masturbation at a later age and are less inclined to show up in line at the patent office when they do.

Testosterone seems to be partly responsible for whatever level of desire there is in women. A man who is castrated may gradually lose interest in sex. If a woman loses her adrenal gland (the source of testosterone in females), the same thing may happen. There are also suggestions that women with high levels of testosterone experience greater levels of desire.

Some researchers have suggested that rapists, who seem to be unable to control their desire, might be puppets of high levels of testosterone. Yet a recent study of rapists revealed that their hormone levels were normal. Another research team thought there might be a connection between the amount of damage inflicted on a rape victim and the level of testosterone in the rapist. There was no correlation. If a little does a lot, more doesn't seem to help. John Wincze, a clinical psychologist at Brown University in Rhode Island, found that if a normal male takes a shot of testosterone, he can get an erection quicker--but he'll lose it quicker, too. Big deal. Anke Ehrhardt, a psychologist who specializes in gender differences, warns against making too much of testosterone. "We like to say that testosterone is the fuel of desire," she says. "It puts gas in the tank. It adds octane. But the basic vehicle is already there."

The onset of the sex hormones in puberty is dramatic. Most of us experience our first infatuation around the age of 13 and our first real love around 17. But (continued on page 228)Desire(continued from page 182) after we reach adulthood, there doesn't seem to be a clear connection between hormones and sexuality. As long as we're not running on empty, the level of sex hormone doesn't seem to account for the variety of desire. Says Ehrhardt, "It is an open system. We know that hormones affect behavior, but behavior also affects the level of hormones. Soldiers facing battle have low levels of testosterone. Fear reduces testosterone. But after a battle, levels return to normal.

"Even in lower primates, you can castrate an adult male, but he will still be able to function with his preferred partner--at least a bit. Choice is as important as hormone level."

Biologists have looked for other combinations of hormones in their search for the source of desire. One of the hot subjects of the Seventies was pheromones, the scent lower species emit that initiates sexual behavior. Perhaps, thought researchers, smell was the key--that we just follow our noses.

But the closest scientists have come to isolating a human pheromone is a chemical that smells like a horny male pig--called Boar Mate. A research team in England put some of this substance on a chair in a waiting room and found that women tended to choose that chair to sit on. The jury is still out on pheromones, but at least one thing seems sure: If they can figure out a way to work pig scent into a line of after-shave or mustache wax, we men are in business.

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Two New York psychoanalysts, Donald F. Klein and Michael R. Liebowitz, believe they've found the secret of desire. They speculate that passionate love, the sudden surge of attraction we feel for another, is the result of an amphetamine-like substance in the brain. When we fall in love or lust, the brain produces phenylethylamine--a molecule that is one carbon atom away from amphetamine. When we fall out of love, the brain shuts down the speed pump and we experience all the symptoms of withdrawal.

Indeed, the similarity between love-sickness and "crashing" was what suggested the theory to Klein in the first place. He was treating a group of women who were classic sensation seekers. They took more than their usual amount of cocaine and amphetamines. When they fell in love, they felt a zap that many compared to the rush from amphetamines, or the rush of adrenaline one would experience when she worked onstage. When they experienced a setback in love, they became depressed, irritable. They overslept and overate--in short, they exhibited the symptoms of someone crashing from a 30-to-40-grain-per-day amphetamine habit. They did not respond to tricyclic antidepressants, but they did seem to respond to chemicals called MAO--inhibitors that slow down the breakdown of phenylethylamine. Interestingly, the women often consumed large quantities of chocolate, a substance rich in phenylethylamine.

Throughout my investigation, I found people struggling for the proper word to describe a phenomenon of horniness, or yearning, that we have all experienced. Dorothy Tennov, a psychologist at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, interviewed more than 1000 people, many of whom had experienced a state of intense attraction that she termed "limerence." The symptoms are easy to identify: "Suddenly, you are in a condition of sustained alertness, a heightening of awareness, with an enormous fund of energy to pursue the limerent object." The list of symptoms during limerence--or romantic attraction--reads like a DEA chart describing the effects of a controlled substance. According to Tennov, we become totally preoccupied with the object of our desire. We rake over memories of past encounters, seeking clues that our feelings are reciprocated. We rehearse the lines we will deliver at our next meeting. We experience intense ecstasy and complete agony, fearing rejection. We ignore reality. We exist on hope. We are hooked. Love is an addiction, an altered state of consciousness.

Klein and Liebowitz stress that their theory of chemical attraction is pure speculation, but it seems to make some sense. We have learned that the brain produces its own pharmacology--the endorphins are the body's own morphine. There appears to be a natural Valium, a natural PCP, a natural psychedelic. Given its choice, it seems logical that nature would choose the most potent substance to fuel reproduction. Klein: "If social approval and coupling are important to nature, it seems that there would be a mechanism in the body that would make social approval very rewarding."

There are levels of pleasure, or, to put it another way, temptation takes many forms. College professors used to pose the following ethical problem: If you could plug yourself into a machine that would create ecstasy, would you be able to unplug it? It seems to depend on the quality of the ecstasy. In one study, rats given an opportunity to self-administer amphetamines or cocaine showed different levels of interest. The amphetamine group hit the lever five times an hour, the coke group 30 times per hour. Rats will press a lever up to 4000 times for a single hit of coke. Arousal is its own reward.

Prior to working for Playboy, I was an editor of Psychology Today. One of the gems that crossed my desk was an article we called "Adrenaline Makes the Heart Grow Fonder," by Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid. The two researchers had found that any state of intense arousal can be interpreted as the stirrings of desire--even if the arousal is the result of an irrelevant experience. In one experiment after another, they discovered that if a man were afraid, jealous, euphoric, angry, terrified or excited, he was inclined to interpret those symptoms as romantic--if given the "appropriate" cue.

For example, a guy who crossed a 1000-foot gorge on a narrow, swinging bridge was more likely to express interest in an attractive lab assistant than was someone who had crossed a safe concrete bridge. A person who had been told that he would receive electric shocks expressed more interest in an attractive lab assistant than did someone who faced a normal task. A student who had been insulted was more attracted to a woman than was a male who had been flattered. The article noted that there were historical precedents for such behavior. El Cid wooed the proud heart of Diana Ximene, whose father he had slain, by shooting one after another of her pet pigeons. It's not our idea of foreplay, but if it works, hey.

I contacted Hatfield at the University of Wisconsin. She told me that the experiments had been duplicated with female subjects and that women were just as inclined to seize a spur-of-the-moment romantic opportunity and go for it. "I think it is a significant change," says Hatfield. "Risk taking is no longer a male perk. Women are not afraid of excitement. They are not coy. I think that a woman who has had 17 sexual partners will not be condemned by her partner."

Now that women have an equal potential for pleasure, and an equal permission, one would expect to see fewer differences between the sexes. But there are still plenty. Men and women may be equally motivated to have sex, but men still initiate most encounters. Hatfield and a team of researchers asked a group (continued on page 314)Desire(continued from page 228) of students and newlyweds what they wanted from sex. Both men and women seemed to be equally concerned with acceptance, affection and caring (though women were more eager for expressions of love during sex). It was thought that women would be more interested in intimacy or closeness. The researchers found that the sexes were equal--indeed, on some items, men seemed to express a greater longing for intimacy than did women. "Both dating couples and newly-weds wish their partners were slightly more warm and involved during sex, and wish their partners would engage in slightly more oral/genital sex; it is newlyweds who wish their partners would be slightly more seductive than they are now. Women are more satisfied with the status quo." Not surprisingly, men were more interested in excitement and variety. They wished their partners would be slightly rougher during sex, would be more experimental sexually and slightly more variable about where they had sex. "It was men who wished their partners liked more impulsive sex, and who wished their partners would be slightly more wild and sexy." And, finally, the researchers found that women wanted their men to be more dominant--to guess what they wanted and do it all night, without being told. In contrast, men wanted their partners to be less submissive.

Hatfield speculates that the nature of relationships will change. "It used to be that men went into a relationship wanting sex and ended up liking the relationship. Women wanted the relationship but ended up liking sex. Now it appears that men--once they become sexually experienced--are more open to intimacy. And intimacy is not the same as sexual satisfaction. It includes the heights of ecstasy, but also the dark side of hostility, resentment, depression. A casual partner can only please or discomfort you. The longer you stay with someone, the more he knows about you. The more important his approval, the more devastating his rejection. The threat that it might end is a constant source of arousal."

Also, says Hatfield, "The way couples judge their first relationships depends on fantasy, what they've been told about relationships by society. First affairs are always unreal projections. Later, lovers become more open to experience. You can almost measure the success of a relationship with a formula--it is directly dependent on the number of good experiences, the sequence of positive reinforcement. Fantasy is usually replaced by a reality that is full of surprises. You begin to judge a relationship by the events of the past."

Men and women are beginning to drift toward each other, but I suspect that the socialization process, if that's what it is, begins too early to revert. If you put a barrier between a boy and a girl playmate at the age of six months, the girl will sit there crying. The boy will try to find a way around the barrier. He initiates the behavior.

Perhaps in the two years the girls are waiting for boys to go through puberty, they sit and compare notes, decide on the quotes, the standards for success. Their erotic fantasies encompass real estate, children, the status quo. They develop the sexual confidence of a Customs official. When a relationship falls apart, women are resigned to it. They still have their standards. The man almost never knows why it went wrong. He is likely to feel more depressed, more lonely and less happy after a breakup. He is three times as likely to commit suicide after a bad affair as is a woman. He is also more likely to start a new affair as quickly as possible. The only cure for a woman is another woman.

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Hatfield and Berscheid spent years studying attraction. "We find," says Hatfield, "that physical beauty is crucial. If you ask people what they would like to have, the desire for the most beautiful is never extinguished. Given a choice, we would all like to date the most beautiful partner available. But if faced with a real date, that choice is held in rein by our sense of self-esteem, what we have to offer. Sexual relations seem to be based on a marketing model. You settle for what you can get. People end up with partners who are similar in physical appearance, mental health, physical health, family background (including race, religion, parents' status, education and income) and family solidity (i.e., happiness of parents' marriage) and popularity. It's astonishing. When you see an imbalance in a couple, the discrepancy is usually accounted for by an imbalance on one of the other scales. Economic. Power. It is a bargain.

"We do seem to have an erotic type," says Hatfield. "It seems that we like people who look like us--and yet the intensity of the affair comes not from the similarities but from the perceived differences.

"I know this is going to sound illogical, but if I had to bet, from just talking to lots of people, I would say that passion is the result of these differences. What we want is someone who is mostly similar to us, so that he doesn't seem bizarre. But what people describe when they talk about intense attraction goes all the way back to Reich. We feel that we are missing something, that there is a part of us that isn't expressed or isn't fulfilled, and out there in the world is someone who is the essence of what we're missing. When we find someone who has everything we wish we had, that person tends to have a really strong impact. The research to date has measured only the similarities--that lovers tend to be alike in ear-lobe length, eye color, I.Q., personality. But we have yet to measure those passion-inspiring differences, the things that make us think, This person is everything I'm not."

There are tit men, ass men, eye, ear, nose and throat men, and there are the female equivalents. Why do we focus on one aspect of a person and not on the entire person? The late Ernest Becker suggested that the dynamics of normal attraction are similar to those of the fetishes. In an essay called Everyman as Pervert, he wrote, "There is nothing per se about a large breast that has any more inherent sexual stimulation to the partner than a small one. Obviously, it is all in the eye of the beholder. But our culture teaches us to become committed in some way to the body of the opposite sex, and we are eager for cues that give us a passport to permissive excitation. When we learn such a cue, we invest it with rich significance. Each culture heightens the meaning of certain qualities of objects so that its members can easily bring into play the approved responsive behavior: lace underwear and steatopygia for sex objects, tailfins and chrome for cars."

Tennov says that part of the process of falling in love is the cataloging of the "perfect" cues in our partners. We run the selective memories like erotic slide shows, to confirm, fuel, reinforce our choices. When it starts to go bad, we flip to the negatives to kill desire.

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The penile transducer, or strain gauge, is a semicircular stainless-steel band, not unlike a bracelet, that encloses the shaft of the penis. Tiny elastic cords, not unlike the bungi cords used to attach luggage to a motorcycle, complete the circuit. These bands translate fluctuations in the diameter of the penis, via a bundle of tiny wires, to a needle moving on a polygraph. The strain gauge is the scientific tool by which we determine the truth of the body. It gives an objective measure of sexual arousal.

If you attach a strain gauge to a volunteer, then show him an erotic movie--or, better yet, play him a tape recording of an erotic fantasy that allows him to fill in the gaps with his own details--he will be able to tell you what turns him on--or how turned on he is at any given moment--some 90 percent of the time. The rise and fall of his self-report will agree with the rise and fall of the polygraph.

In contrast, if you take a female volunteer and plug her into a machine that records changes in the vaginal mucosa--lubrication is the equivalent of erection--she can accurately assess the state of her arousal only 50 percent of the time. Arousal is a rogue. The initial stages of sexual excitement are characterized by physiological responses that are not distinct from those of other emotional responses. The body reacts the same way to anger, fear, danger, anxiety--with subtle increases in heartbeat, respiration and galvanic skin response. The physiology doesn't become unmistakably sexual until the body alerts the biochemical chain of command to close a valve in the penis and trap the blood in an erection, or--in females--to begin the process of lubrication.

In the early Sixties, psychologist Stanley Schacter theorized that all emotions are the result of two conditions: (1) the physiological symptoms of arousal (as described above) and (2) the labeling of the symptoms, according to situational cues. Neither physiological arousal nor mere labeling alone is sufficient to produce an emotional experience. Perhaps the following joke applies:

The first umpire says, "I calls 'em like I sees 'em."

The second umpire says, "I calls 'em like they is."

The third umpire says, "They ain't nothing till I calls 'em."

Karen Rook and Constance Hammen, two psychologists from UCLA, claim that the differences in desire, in the way we interpret the truth of the body, can be traced to anatomical differences. The male has instant evidence of arousal. He calls 'em like he sees 'em. An erect penis is hard to ignore. So males are more in touch with the cues that elicit arousal. They let their sex organ do the thinking. The signs of arousal in a woman are more subtle and easily overlooked. They ain't nothing till she calls 'em. Many women have to be taught that what they are experiencing is an orgasm.

Gene Abel is a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, working in a large tan-brick building up around 168th Street in New York City. He uses the strain gauge to investigate sexual arousal of sex offenders--rapists and child molesters--and the idiosyncratic. He starts with the bizarre, because funding is available for the study of the bizarre. "We study people with unacceptable erotic fantasies because that's what society is interested in."

According to Abel, the stranger the turn-on, the less likely you are to have a match between the subject's self-report and the truth of the body, as measured by the strain gauge. "People can't always identify what it is that's erotic to them."

When I read about Abel and the strain gauge, I told my editor that I might volunteer to be tested, to spend an afternoon in the lab, looking at pictures and listening to tapes, in order to find out once and for all what it was I was really looking for in my sex life. He was aghast.

I replied that since I was turned on by anything alive, identifiably female and of legal age, I could stand to narrow that down a bit. With my luck, I would find that I was turned on by the machine. My editor replied by quoting Oscar Wilde: "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the second is getting it."

Faced with those alternatives, I contacted Abel and asked if he had ever shown a group of standard fantasies to a "normal" population. He said no, that sex research is not TV programing. He is more interested in the subtle components of desire. He tries to isolate the cues that accelerate arousal and to edit out the extraneous ones that decelerate it.

In one study, Abel presented two groups--rapists and nonrapists--with three scenarios. The first tape describes mutually consenting intercourse between a male and a female who initiates sex: "She really cares about you ... she says, 'Let's make love' ... she's unsnapping your pants ... she spreads her legs and she's helping you get your penis into her ... she's taking your hands and moving your hands on her tits.... She's really getting into it...." Both rapists and nonrapists responded to this fantasy. So, for that matter, did I.

The second tape describes a brutal rape: "You've broken into a house, where you know a woman is ... you get your hands out ... put them right over her mouth so she can't scream out ... you've got a knife. If she doesn't he still, you're going to kill her ... she's trying to get away. It's no use ... you tell her, 'Come on, spread your legs or I'll kill you.' She's got nice tits. A nice ass. You're right on top of her there."

The scenario continues--indeed, it reads like a police-blotter account of rape, including constant threats, body injury and fear for her life. In one such study, the group of nonrapists literally dropped out, the strain gauge recording minimal arousal. In contrast, the rapists were very aroused, recording more than 50 percent of a full erection.

The third tape describes a pure physical assault, with no sex: "You've broken into an apartment ... it's a girl lying there on the bed. You're going to beat the shit out of her. You take that belt and you slash her across the back. She's pleading with you to stop ... you take your fist. You give her your fist right into the back. You can see the bruises starting to form."

The nonrapists did not respond to the assault scenario, but the rapists did. In fact, says Abel, the relationship between their arousal to aggression and their arousal to rape was "disgustingly lawful." The rapists' erection to pure violence was 40 percent of their erection to rape.

The study produced one final curiosity. Abel asked each group to listen to the scenarios and try to inhibit their erections. The nonrapists were able to control their response to the rape and the aggression tapes. The rapists were able to control their response to the mutual-intercourse scene and the rape scene, but when they listened to the assault, they achieved greater erection. They could not control their arousal, and the more they tried, the more they became aroused.

What if you are one of those men who are aroused by such an inappropriate cue? Is there anything that can be done? Abel believes there is. He claims that each of us carries around a potent fantasy. "The thoughts we recall and use a lot become tied in or associated with orgasm and generate more arousal. Those things we don't remember fade, so we have a constantly altering and evolving arousal pattern, depending upon our idiosyncratic retrieval pattern. Our past leads us into the future, to make us try to make the world match our fantasy."

Abel treats rapists with something called the masturbatory satiation technique. He has the patient reach orgasm to a scenario of mutual intercourse, then, while the erection fades, has the patient repeat aloud, over and over, the offensive fantasy until it becomes boring. Eventually, the rape fantasy, or child-molestation fantasy or whatever, loses its power--to be replaced by something more flexible, resilient and legally available. The message is, if you want to change the quality of your sexual excitement, you have to change the quality of your sexual fantasies. Freud gave fantasy a bad name by suggesting that only neurotics played in the secret garden of erotic daydreams. Nowadays, we know that everyone has fantasies and that the normal can be pretty weird.

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In the fantasy that was catalyst for Robert Stoller's book Sexual Excitement, a patient mentioned that she had a persistent erotic daydream in which she was being raped by a horse:

A cruel man, The Director, a Nazi type, is directing the activity. It consists of Belle being raped by a stallion, which has been aroused to a frenzy by a mare held off at a distance beyond where Belle is placed. In a circle around the periphery stand vaguely perceived men, expressionless, masturbating while ignoring each other, the Director and Belle. She is there for the delectation of these men, including the Director, who, although he has an erection, makes no contact with her; her function is to be forced to unbearable sexual excitement and pleasure, thereby making a fool of herself before these men. She has been enslaved in this obscene exhibition of humiliation because it creates erections in these otherwise unfeeling men; they stand there in phallic, brutal indifference. All that, however, is foreplay, setting the scene. What sends her excitement up and almost immediately to orgasm as she masturbates is not this scene alone, for obviously, if it were really happening, she would experience horror, not pleasure. Rather, what excites her is the addition of some detail that exacerbates her humiliation; e.g., the horse is replaced by a disreputable, ugly old man, or her excitement makes her so wild she is making a dreadful scene: or her palpitating genitals are spotlighted to show that she has lost control of her physiology. And, behind the scenes, a part of herself permits the excitement because it (she) knows that she, who is masturbating in the real world, is not literally the same as "she" who is the suffering woman in the story. In the story, she is humiliated; in reality, she is safe.

As the analysis continued, Stoller began to suspect that this woman had condensed her entire erotic life into a single scenario. That theory eventually led to his hypothesis that "people in general have a paradigmatic erotic scenario--played in a daydream, or in choice of pornography, or in object choice, or simply in actions (such as styles of intercourse)--the understanding of which will enable us to understand the person."

Stoller returns to that idea again and again through the pages of his writings: "Sexual excitement depends on a scenario. The person to be aroused is the 'writer,' who has been at work on the story line since childhood. The story is an adventure, in which the hero/heroine runs a risk that must be escaped. Disguised as function, it is autobiography in which are hidden crucial intrapsychic conflicts, screen memories of actual events, and the resolution of all these elements into a happy ending, best celebrated by orgasm. The characters are chosen because they resemble (though are usually not identical in appearance with) important people of childhood such as oneself and one's parents and one's siblings. Most often, the writer becomes director, moving the action out into the world of real people or other objects; these are chosen because they are perceived by the writer-director as filling the criteria already written into the role. (Prostitutes are available to those without better resources for casting.) If the chosen characters pretty much fit the parts, they work. They should, however, have just a touch of unpredictability in their behavior; that introduces the illusion of risk. If unvaryingly predictable, they are boring. On the other hand, if they do not stick close enough to their assigned role, too much anxiety results and they are traded in. Every detail counts for increasing excitement and avoiding true danger or boredom. For many people, sexual excitement is like threading a mine field."

Like Abel, Stoller believes that we are driven by an imperative fantasy, something we have shaped over the years and come to rely upon. It is not a scenario--a set of steps or moves that have to be performed in sequence. Rather, it is something akin to what the spies in World War Two called microdots: "The fantasy is a microdot, an amalgam that contains our entire sexual history, the fabric of what excites us. We call it into play in the precoital moments, when we masturbate, when we orgasm. It may not be conscious, but it is there. The process of condensing is guided with shrewdness, and at times with genuine creativity. It is never just a smashing together of elements into a compaction of junk, but rather is moved by clear-cut vigor. It is an act of intellect, will, foresight and synthesis, not just primal instinct seeking release."

The sum of one's sexual life is there, ready for instantaneous recall. Like a hologram, illuminating part of the image can re-create the whole, though faintly. Maybe that's what turns us on--the brain sweeps through the memories and a chair, or long blonde hair, or a name, or a song, can trigger the whole. Sexual excitement, says Stoller, "is a mixture of hostility, mystery, risk, illusion, revenge, reversal of trauma or frustration to triumph, safety factors and dehumanization. And all of these are stitched together into a whole--the surge of sexual excitement--by secrets."

The mention of hostility has been the source of a great deal of controversy. Stoller explains: "The hostility of erotism is an attempt, repeated over and over, to undo childhood traumas and frustrations that threatened the development of one's masculinity or femininity. The same dynamics, in different mixes and degrees, are found in almost everyone, those labeled perverse and those not labeled."

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John Money, a sex researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital, also believes that desire is the result of a core fantasy--that we reach adulthood equipped with an, erotic map that dictates the perfect love affair, the perfect lover, the perfect erotic sexual experience. "The profile of one's erotic turn-on imagery is as personally idiosyncratic as one's signature, one's face or one's fingerprints," says Money.

When we reach adolescence, the map reveals itself in our erotic fantasies. The young boy already knows if he prefers Miss May to Miss October. So he begins the hunt.

"There is a sophisticated riddle about what a boyfriend (or girlfriend) and a Rorschach inkblot have in common," says Money. "The answer is that you project an image of your own onto each."

Money believes that the erotic map is the result of a hard-fought struggle against a repressive society. It's a wonder, he says, that any of us turns out remotely normal, and in his book Love and Love Sickness, he points out that if you take a young monkey away from its mother and its playmates, then reintroduce them at a later age, the monkey will attempt to mate, but its moves will be ludicrous and inaccurate. A young male monkey will try to mount the female sideways. It has been suggested that the sexual isolation imposed on young girls may contribute to inorgasmia in later years. In other words, if we interrupt the natural cycle, we end up with adults who don't know enough to do it right.

"If we grew up in a permissive society," says Money, "everyone would become healthy heterosexuals. I don't have to tell you that we prohibit and punish children for sexual rehearsal play, especially if it is heterosexual rehearsal play."

What we have instead is the mine field, the obstacle course of growing up absurd and asexual. "Part of the natural mating dance gets displaced, put on center stage," says Money. "In the natural course of events, for example, primates show their sex organs to each other. In our society, that kind of behavior is punished. So it becomes the supercharged obsession. In order to get an erection, you have to rush down to the bus stop or shopping mall and flash your organs to some unsuspecting female in order to see the shock on her face, and maybe hear her screams. And then you run home. These men seldom ejaculate on the spot. They keep the arousal and run home to do it with their wives."

According to Money, we are not born with our basic sexual imagery. We learn from our parents and peers. We acquire our sexuality the way we acquire our native language. We are not born speaking English or French, but we soon acquire the words and the grammar, enough to make ourselves understood. We are not born heterosexual, but something in the mind lies waiting for the appropriate cues. We acquire our sexual imagery in the same years we acquire our language--between the ages of two and eight. "I could call it our native imagery, our native fantasy," says Money, "but we don't have a word for it, and there's a perfectly good reason. Because we believe in the innocence and asexualism of childhood. We are constantly looking for evidence of original sin, of premature wickedness."

The monkey has visual models--it can watch adults do it. We have the taboo of privacy, the taboo of age, the taboo of gender. Parents don't discuss the nature of intimacy, do not include their children in sexual behavior, so children grow up with the most deprived sense of what sex is about. Excitement is something unacceptable, to be hidden, something not to be discussed in mixed company. The basic mating position that results from this societal isolation booth is as ludicrous as that of the monkey trying to mount sideways. Masters and Johnson found that 80 percent of the couples in their lab engaged in the great American mating dance: a kiss on the lips, a hand on the breasts, a dive for the pelvis and, finally, mounting in the missionary position. The same old same old, what we could just about expect to discover on our own.

"Something sends the normal sexuality underground," says Money, "then we don't know what's happening to this imagery. Sometimes it gets very bizarre. The child and then the adolescent struggles with a fantasy, is aware of it, and it scares the bejesus out of him. The anxiety is so deep that he deals with it by not having sex.

"People who are apathetic about sex don't even know that they have no sexual desire, because they don't know what sexual desire is. If you are color-blind, you don't know what color is, so you don't know what other people see, do you?"

Money believes that males are more susceptible to "improper" cues. Most of the 30 or so paraphilias (aberrations) that are recognized by Money are male practices. "It is easy for a male to become fixed on some anomaly of the visual world," says Money. "The ease of identifying male core fantasies, permissive cues, may be the reason that homosexual behavior is so ritual. They have codes and signals for their mutual fantasy. If you wear a key on the right, it means you like to be beaten; if you wear it on the left, it means you like to beat. There is an immediate match-up of the fantasy, and the results can be incredible.

"The chances of finding a satisfactory partner in a heterosexual relationship, the perfect fit for your fantasy, doesn't have much chance of success. Women really have only two core fantasies--the masochistic, or martyr fantasy, in which they sacrifice themselves to the idiosyncratic urges of their partner. They can never allow themselves to show enthusiasm for the sex act, nor initiate their own. It is not a perfect match, and, believe me, the male can read the signals. We are uncannily cagey at picking up each other's core fantasies.

"The other predominant fantasy that women have--of soft objects and touch, does not really lend itself to a perfect fit with the normal array of male core fantasies. So you are likely to end up with a disastrous marriage, where finally the guy decides that it's too much work to get up an erection for someone who won't go along with his fantasy."

Since sex is the same as a native language, I asked Money if we could measure desire the same way we measure intelligence--by how well a child learns to master the sexual vocabulary. Is there the erotic equivalent of an intelligence quotient--an E.Q.? Is there such a thing as an erotic genius?

"I don't think the erotic genius would be the person with the largest vocabulary, who was turned on to all 30 of the recognized sexual aberrations," Money said. "We seldom find a person who is turned on by more than one core fantasy.

"No, I would say that the erotic genius is the person most able to satisfy his erotic map--to find his way to the right person, the right position."

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The big lie of the past few decades has been that all orgasms are created equal, that every boy and girl can grow up to become polymorphously perverse, that we have made the world safe for sensuality. We were told that pleasure was a self-evident truth, a somewhat absentminded guide through life, the body's way of telling us that we were on the right track. If it felt good, do it--that was the only permission we needed to reach the full potential of our bodies.

Masters and Johnson suggest that lovemaking is a skill that can be learned, that all orgasms are identical, the result of a certain sequence of physiological events. Men and women, they say, have similar response patterns to "effective sexual stimulation." Learn the basics, perform a few simple exercises and we're back in the game. Problems that once might have been crippling--premature ejaculation, frigidity, impotence--aren't cause for years on the couch. Ecstasy is only skin-deep. A violin string vibrating at 440 cycles per second emits an A. Muscles contracting at .8-second intervals produce the O of orgasm.

Unfortunately--or perhaps fortunately--all orgasms are not identical. And while the sexes have similar response patterns, they seem to be radically different in terms of desire. The August 1980 issue of Psychology Today challenged the notion that sex was the same for all of us. "Apparently," wrote associate editor Virginia Adams, "the culture has cured simpler problems by making sex information easier to obtain and by easing up on old taboos; it is all right, now, to enjoy sex. But, paradoxically, a lot of people aren't much interested in it, even though they are capable of sexual functioning and wish they had an appetite for it. 'The problem most often presented today is lack of desire.' "

Dr. Helen Singer Kaplan, a New York--based analyst, has also found that Masters and Johnson's model of the healthy, potentially orgasmic male and female doesn't hold up. In Disorders of Sexual Desire, she writes, "A person's physical response to emotion is as specific and individual as his fingerprint. From early childhood on, one person will respond to any form of stress with an increased flow of gastric acid, another's muscles will tense up, while a third's genital blood vessels will be particularly responsive. This characteristic response pattern predisposes one person to develop specific psychosomatic disorders, another to inhibit his orgasmic response, and the libido of another to be more vulnerable."

The potential for orgasm is not enough to cure sexual inertia or apathy, nor to explain the mysteries of why sex is better with some people than with others, or better on some nights than on others. Questions about desire are more interesting than statistics on performance in bed. Our pursuit of pleasure tells us more about ourselves than we ever imagined. Whether that pursuit is fueled by testosterone or guided by an erotic map is almost beside the point. The core fantasy crumbles, then reassembles around experience. The pursuit of pleasure becomes a quest for quality.

I realize that my willingness to plug myself into the strain gauge, the stainless-steel band that would reveal to me the truth of my body, was simply a means of testing the wisdom I was beginning to extract from my past sexual experience. I know some of the cues that accelerate my arousal. The fantasies that a lab assistant could produce would be general, the stuff of soap operas and the Penthouse Forum.

I know friends who are more likely to take an educated guess, with more pleasurable results, than some guy in a white coat. I know I've learned discretion. Daryl Hall wrote a song in which a lover turns down a one-night encounter with the line: "She wants five minutes of what's taken me a lifetime."

I can see that I'm attracted to a certain erotic type, a gracious lady/wise-ass chick. Women who are strong, independent, muscle toned, more likely to be blonde, who have the grace of someone in touch with her body, whose nerve endings are not hidden, whose eyes are intelligent. As a friend says about life in Aspen: "The only requirement is keeping up." I am more responsive to collarbones and sacral dimples than to tits and ass. Jan Smithers more than Loni Anderson. I have a favorite piece of pornography, chapter seven of Jungle Fever, by Marcus van Heller. I discovered it when a potential lover said her favorite piece of pornography was something by Marcus van Heller she'd read as a kid. If we ever get together, we could be dangerous.

I probably have a favorite position, but then, I've had good teachers. I can recall afternoons tangled in satin sheets on a water bed, unsure of who was doing what to whom or, for that matter, whose genitals were whose. As long as no one left with more than one set, fine. I remember an affair in a hotel room, when sex seemed to have invited us there to deliver its own lecture. When I left, I looked at the ruins and said, That's what I mean. It will take me a while to refold that erotic map.

The lover who now occupies my thoughts is one who can read the movements behind the movements. Who can perceive the image when I place her arms over her head, to suggest bondage, and later have her suggest the opposite, hanging me from a chin-up bar and ... never mind. Who is not afraid to initiate her own fantasies, be it the sudden possession in a car parked in the Los Angeles airport, revisiting teenage lust while a voice intones: This white zone is for loading and unloading only. This is the source of sexual excitement. Trying to find a partner who fits, or comes close.

The third tragedy in life, greater than getting what you want or not getting what you want, is not being willing to try. As Han Solo says, Don't ever tell me the odds.

" 'We like to say that testosterone is the fuel of desire. It puts gas in the tank. It adds octane.'"

"El Cid wooed Diana by shooting her pet pigeons. It's not our idea of foreplay, but if it works, hey."