What you really, really want

Almost a century ago, Sigmund Freud asked his female disciples: "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, 'what does a woman want?"' Now, a new generation of researchers and clinicians are trying to find the answer to that question - and discovering things that Freud could never have imagined.

John Walsh grapples with the male libido What is desire? It's a streetcar in New Orleans. It's a Bob Dylan album, and a Marlene Dietrich movie. It's the title of 13 songs by, among others, U2 and Geri Halliwell. It's the name of a brand of dark chocolates. And it's the cause of endless trouble between men and women.

Freud's unanswered dilemma endures and our questions have become more urgent. Do women desire sex to the same degree as men? Do they want to be stroked with a feather or enjoy a wild, anonymous roll in a hay-barn? Do they want to be respected as beautiful Gainsborough heiresses attending a ball in cascades of tulle, or lusted after as trashy harlots? Do straight women secretly fancy each other and admire each other's beauty, bodies and scents, in a way that straight men don't, secretly or otherwise? Do women get turned on by erotica rather than porn?

The answers to the above seem to be yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and both, thanks very much - not that most women are disposed to admit to such polymorphous desire.

Modern sexual psychologists are exploring uncharted territories of female desire and trying to understand its complexities. The oddest is, perhaps, the experiment conducted by Professor Meredith Chivers, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world's leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behaviour.

In her laboratory at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a prestigious psychiatric teaching hospital in Ontario, Chivers showed a group of men and women footage of straight sex, male and female gay sex, a woman exercising naked, a naked man walking on a beach - and a film clip of bonobo apes mating, with some appreciative hoots and screeches dubbed in.

The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs, measuring their physical reactions to what they were viewing. They also were given an electronic pad to record whether or not they enjoyed what was being shown. The results were amazing. Among the male participants, the degree of desire they claimed on the keypads matched the degree of response recorded on the machines: they liked to watch straight sex and female gay sex action, and they knew they did.

Among women, things were different. No matter how much their keypads insisted they weren't interested in the scenes before them, their physical monitors showed they were turned on by everything: straight sex, gay sex, the nude gymnast - even the mating simians got a thumbs-up.

The findings were startling: apparently, women don't know what turns them on - but an awful lot of things do. But being turned on by random stimuli is not the same as desire, is it? The psychology of desire, rather than the mechanics of lust, is the subject of much head-scratching in the pages of the Archives of Sexual Behaviour.

Academics are pondering the importance of being desired in inspiring desire; how women are turned on by the thought of being wanted - not just loved by a caring and empathetic partner, but urgently, physically craved to a level of derangement. "Women's desire," said one (female) professor, "is not relational, it's narcissistic." English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge expressed the same idea 170 years earlier: "The man's desire is for the woman," he wrote, "but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man."

What, though, about male desire? I recall being given, by an old girlfriend, a joke picture of two control panels, supposedly showing what it took to turn men and women on. The panel marked "Women" was like the flight deck of a 747, full of knobs to be twiddled, valves and minute calibrations of this and that. The panel marked "Men" was just an on/off switch.

Is that how women see us? Women would be amazed if they knew what men desire about them. Yes, of course, they want to see women naked, supine and melting, but male desire is far more readily stimulated by what the oblique glance discovers: the parted lips, the micron of eyelash which the mascara brush missed, the changing angle and shadow of cleavage, the bra-strap alternately displayed and covered up, the plumpness at the edge of hips. There is, inside every adult man, a perennial 14-year-old boy, still amazed by the phenomenon of women on display.

When we've finished ogling and peeping and noting the details (the way that girl's hair follows, and touches, the curve of her chin, moves away from it, touches it again...) then desire becomes personal. We see sexual allure in movement (Maggie Gyllenhaal's fabulously slouchy walk in Mona Lisa Smile), in haughtiness (Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, looking down at the drink smearing her front and responding to William Hurt's "Maybe I'll help you wipe it off" with "You mean you don't wanna lick it off?") and in pure sass (Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, looking up through her curtain of hair and asking Bogart, "You know how to whistle, don't you Steve?").

Voices can provoke desire before anything else. It was Scarlett Johansson's beguiling croak that brought men out in a sweat in Lost in Translation, before they registered everything else about her. We desire the personality we discern in the walk, the clothes, the laugh ... We look, and sigh, and wish to do certain things to her; but we also hunger to have her do certain things to us, unimaginable though it may seem - we want her to want us. We don't just want her to surrender, we want her approbation, her adoration; we want to enchant her to desire us back. For, no matter how humble we feel before the dizzying fact of female beauty, men are just as narcissistic as women.

For men, desire involves the primal urge to possess the object of their attention, but also the more sophisticated urge to invade her (or his) life, to become the object of her attention and affection. Male desire does not cease once the sex is over.

In many respects, his urge to explore every nook and cranny of her body and soul has only just begun. Male lust is an ignorant, blind, bullying thing - an immediate need, as real as hunger though not quite so life-threatening. Male desire is more subtle and strategic than wanting sex. It yearns to satisfy something more long-term, something awkwardly freighted with spiritual components.

However, desire is never free of its ugly sisters, passion and conquest. Modern metrosexuals may find it hard to admit but, mingled in amid the urge to entwine destinies, a smidgeon of cruelty resides as well. It's the reason why sex is generally less than ecstatic when your partner is someone with whom you're really cut out to be friends rather than lovers. True desire seeks to conquer.

We're not proud of ourselves for having this tyrant/caveman streak lurking in there along with Mr Nice Guy and Mr Caring and Protective. But according to the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, the girls are okay about that, albeit at a subconscious level ... So there we are. Two genders, designed to slot together and entwine to the unending joy of both, and we're hopelessly confused about what we want from each other.

For women, according to a leading sexologist, "desire is malleable, it cannot be captured by asking women to categorise their attractions ... To do so is to apply a male paradigm of fixed sexual orientation." Don Draper, the alpha-male hero of TV's Mad Men, spends one whole episode asking, "What do women want?" Finally he answers: "Any excuse to get closer." But closer to what? To whom? And why to him and not me?

Catherine Townsend on female passion

The experiment sounded beautiful in its simplicity. As John Walsh relates, Professor Chivers put men and women in a room and screened lots of porn - of heterosexual sex, gay sex, and bonobo apes. But the results were astounding. When Chivers measured the womens' physical reactions, she found that they weren't just interested in the fit naked man walking down the beach. They were excited by the monkey sex, too.

And the weird thing was, they didn't even know it - or at least, what the women said was turning them on was far removed from what the physical monitors said. This wasn't the first study that exposed the complexity of female sexuality.

"There's definitely a mind/body disconnect in women," says Mary Roach, the author of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. "One researcher found that women will say that they prefer female-centered porn, instead of the stag porn. But when you measure their blood volume, the level of arousal is the same. So the whole thing is just more subtle."' It hardly seems groundbreaking that women look at womens' bodies as much as men do: we are raised practically from birth to look at naked women as sex objects. I'm not surprised that they turn us on. But I am thrilled that Chivers is looking for answers without having to resort to drastic measures. After all, history hasn't always been so kind to sexually frustrated women.

In her book, Roach describes how Marie Bonaparte (the great-great-niece of Napoleon) was frustrated by her inability to climax. She thought her lack of stimulation had something to do with clitoral-vaginal distance. So instead of changing sexual positions, she measured herself, and other women - and went so far as to have a doctor operate on her. Sadly, it didn't work. But there are still double standards out there.

The women in Chivers' study may not have consciously realised they felt aroused, or maybe, even on a deeper level, they were embarrassed about the fact that watching screeching apes appealed. Women have been much more concerned about having the "right" kind of sex ever since Freud started the orgasm debate back in 1905. He gave several generations of women instantaneous inferiority complexes when he wrote that the clitoral orgasm was an "adolescent" phenomenon that "mature" women would outgrow.

Female desire can be a paradox - as Chivers reports, we may want a wild encounter with a stranger and also want someone who can be tender and caring. But I'm always amazed by how male writers manage to make that sound impossible, when really, women are not that complicated. Our sexuality just doesn't parallel men's; we can't always be viewed through the same filter.

So perhaps when they study women, scientists should drop the unifying theory idea. As Roach says, "[Scientists] saying that they want to increase orgasms, or boost libido is much more helpful than saying: 'I want to understand women."' The recent study results are fascinating and raise more questions: are we, as one researcher ventured, "narcissists" who enjoy being desired? Or do we have much more wide-ranging desires than we realise?

It may be a while before the researchers and volunteers have all of the answers. We can't wait to see what they come up with next.

- INDEPENDENT