Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of four books of nonfiction: What Do Women Want? , The Other Side of Desire , In the Land of Magic Soldiers , and God of the Rodeo . In the Land of Magic Soldiers received an Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting and a Lettre-Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. God of the Rodeo was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In addition to the New York Times Magazine, Daniel’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Talk, and the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times. His writing is included in The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction.

Daniel Bergner: Let’s talk about a particularly provocative set of experiments that Meredith Chivers has done. This is fascinating Canadian research I’ve spent so much time with. So several years ago when I first got interested in her work and I kind of stumbled into her lab. I was working on a different unrelated project at the time. When I stumbled into her lab I found her showing an array of pornography – so men with women, women with women, men alone, women alone, and even bonobos having sex to self-identified straight women, gay women, straight men, gay men. And measuring both their physical response that is vaginal or response in terms of erection for men and then their subjective response via keypad. How turned on do I say I am. And finding something fascinating which was that the male response was pretty predictable. The straight men actually did mostly just get turned on to men with women or women with women. Gay men equally predictable. The women were very unpredictable and kind of anarchic in at least their physical response.

Again there was this big dichotomy. The women were saying I’m turned on by what I “should be turned on” by straight women, by, you know, men with women or to a certain degree I suppose men with men and gay women by images of women, et cetera. But their bodies were saying something completely different and their bodies were saying they were turned on by all of it. And perhaps most strikingly you might think those bonobos having sex would at least reach something animalistic in men. No the men showed zero response subjectively or physically. But the women did show this physical response to the image of bonobos having sex. So a lot of interesting things about this, probably too many to name but one for sure is that the idea of women’s sexuality as somehow more controlled needs to be put aside if we’re going to do any serious searching about Eros in women. And too this idea that women are somehow less visual, less immediate in their sexuality than men. Again you need to put that aside if we’re going to do any serious looking at truths about women’s sexuality.

Now here’s a bit of later Chivers research that both goes along with but also pulls us in a slightly different direction than that original set of studies. So remember part of the original set of studies shows women being quite anarchic in what they’re drawn to. Chivers decides okay, let me take a set of straight women, self-declared straight women and show them just four types of photographs and see what happens. Four types of pornographic photographs. So we’ve got a flaccid – and these are kind of disembodied genital shots just so we have nothing to distract us, not a pretty face, not a handsome face, et cetera. So we’ve got a dangling flaccid penis. We’ve got an erect penis. We’ve got a kind of coy soft porn female crotch shot, legs together. And then we’ve got a legs spread more hard core shot. So the straight women do respond to all of it physically. But that erect penis sends the plethysmograph, a measure of physical response, soaring. And it’s just an indication again of rawness, immediacy and just a kind of this is about sex. Let’s be careful before we complicate it with all the factors that we eventually complicate female sexuality with. There is a core to this and we shouldn’t be so quick to look away from it.