A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire by Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam Page B

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