"You meet the real-estate agent outside the building. The agent is a handsome man with a firm handshake. He shows you the empty apartment. You sense that he finds you attractive. You are distracted by his gorgeous smile and ask him to repeat the features of the kitchen a third time. 'Can we delay this?' you ask, 'I'm a bit distracted.' He smiles, knowing exactly why you are so distracted. You take his hand and pull him close, and kiss him. He hesitates, and then kisses you back. You run your hands over his broad back, feeling his muscular form through his suit, then strip off his jacket. You lean into his hard chest, pushing your breasts against him. You unbuckle his belt and slide your hand down, his eyes astonished and breath coming in gasps."
This could be from the script for a porn flick, but it is part of one of several tape-recorded stories that psychologist Meredith Chivers asked women to listen to in her most recent experiment exploring the nature of the female sexual response.
The 36-year-old Queen's University assistant professor is already garnering international attention from the media and in scholarly circles for documenting how women can be physically aroused by a wide variety of sexual imagery but not feel any lust or desire. Her innovative approach has made her a major player in her field; she is charting new territory in the understanding of the disconnect that can occur between the vagina and brain.
She has been approached by the Oprah show, and her work was featured prominently in a recent New York Times magazine story, although she says she was shocked when she read the opening paragraph, which described her as "a creator of bonobo pornography." She has blond hair and stylish glasses, and in interview is sharp and funny.
She says she made the tape of two bonobos having intercourse for an experiment published in 2005 in the journal Biological Psychology. Female volunteers sat comfortably in a private room while they watched the libidinous apes and a number of other sexual videos.
The women had inserted a tampon-sized probe into their vaginas, part of a device called a plethysmograph that measures blood flow to the genitals. Increased blood flow leads to lubrication and is a sign of sexual arousal.
The women were also given a keypad to register how they were feeling. While the probes revealed that women were physically aroused by the mating bonobos, they reported via their keypads that they weren't the least bit turned on.
The same phenomenon has been demonstrated by other researchers, although Dr. Chivers was the first to use animal sex videos.
Women, she says, are physically aroused by non-specific stimuli, everything from copulating primates to two men having sex. Even rape scenes can trigger a physical response.
But physical arousal doesn't equate with lust or desire.
The men who took part in the experiment, on the other hand, didn't get aroused when they watched bonobo sex, and if they were straight, they weren't stimulated by images of two guys getting it on. They did get excited watching two women have sex or a man and a woman copulating. When the men reported their level of arousal using their keypads, it corresponded to what was happening with their penises.
Dr. Chivers's work helps explain why Viagra and similar drugs work for men, but why no one has yet come up with one that is effective for women. Those drugs help to improve the blood flow to the genitals, which for women, doesn't equate with feeling aroused.
She wants to understand how the two components of the female sexual response - brain and body - fit together.
Dr. Chivers looks at the question from an evolutionary standpoint. As modern humans evolved, women who became lubricated at the slightest sexual signal would have been less likely to get injured or to contract diseases during sex, especially if it was forced on them. It could be a protective mechanism.
But that kind of system would need checks and balances. Given that pregnancy and childbirth consume so much energy, indiscriminate sex isn't a good strategy. Women need to be choosy about who might father their baby.
"Maybe it makes sense for women's sexual motivation not to be so connected to their physical response," she says.
Dr. Chivers, who joined Queen's this fall after taking a one-year maternity leave, is now analyzing data from the experiment in which volunteers listened to tapes about the real-estate agent with the broad back and other scenarios. The scenarios can get pretty graphic, and include phrases like "silky hot cock." She wants to know if listening to a story about sex is as arousing for women as watching explicit videos. She is also curious to see whether the idea of sex with a stranger is more stimulating than imagining a romp with a long-time partner.
In the future, she hopes to investigate whether the genital arousal female volunteers experience during her experiments leads to greater sexual activity in the days that follow. This will help her learn more about the connections between the two spheres of arousal. She also wants to follow up on her hunch that for women, feeling desired is an important component of lust. She says she hopes her work will give women insight into their sexuality and, ultimately, help them have better sex.
As a teenager growing up in Ottawa and Trenton, she says, she always felt comfortable talking about sexual matters. She once drew a diagram of the vulva to show a shy male friend how to find the clitoris.
"It was in religion class. I pointed everything out. It was a public education opportunity."
She was studying psychology at the University of Guelph when she took her first course in human sexuality. "I knew that if I could do that for the rest of my life, I would be a pretty happy person."
She became fascinated by the female sexual response. After graduate work at Northwestern University in Chicago, she became a research fellow at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where she conducted the experiment using the bonobo video.
Her parents, who are still in Ottawa, are proud of her success, "They are very supportive, but they don't always want to hear the intimate details," she says.
That may include the methodology section of Dr. Chivers's 2004 article in the journal Psychological Science, which described the six two-minute films that were used in an experiment.
"Content varied by the sex of the actors (male or female) and the type of sexual activity depicted (oral or penetrative sex). Each participant saw films featuring female-female oral sex, female-female penetration (with a strap-on dildo), male-female cunnilingus, male-female penetration (penile-vaginal), male-male fellatio, and male-male penetration (penile-anal.)."
Work like this must make for some interesting conversations around the dinner table at the Kingston house where she lives with her husband, Michael Seto, a forensic psychologist specializing in male sexuality and pedophilia who works the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group in Brockville. Sometimes they collaborate; they worked together on a paper, soon to be published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, that analyzed 130 other articles on the split between body and mind in female sexual arousal.
She says they talk about their work all the time. But she makes an effort not to talk about sex when they go to dinner parties or are in public venues, and she certainly doesn't appreciate strangers sharing intimate details about their sex lives, an imposition that happens more frequently than she would like.
On airplanes, she sometimes lies when people ask her about her work.
"I tell them I'm a psychologist who studies cognitive mechanisms and they leave me alone," she says. "I used to talk a lot about what I do. Now, I try not to. It attracts a lot of attention. Sometimes you need a break, and need to talk about what people were wearing to the Oscars."
Anne McIlroy is The Globe and Mail's science reporter.