Until that moment, I never knew what people meant by the term "Lifetime Porn." In the first of three short films, a boring but "sensual" couple engage in soft-focus foreplay in the sunlight next to a gazebo. I started to think of that crappy '70s song "Afternoon Delight" so by the time the woman had the man's dick in her mouth I was completely turned off. Cut to a slightly overweight businesswoman wearing glasses and her hair in a bun. She and a man in a suit go at it on a desk while phones ring in the background. That was a little more interesting because I could extrapolate a story about their office relationship, which involved lots of power plays and suggestive but mean remarks written on Post-It notes. In the third, a young couple screws on a rooftop while muttering dirty things to each other in French. I was so proud I understood what they were saying I wanted to intercom the tester and tell her, but I held my tongue.
The porn itself did nothing for me. But the surreal dirtiness of the situation — sitting on campus in the dark under a pink blanket with my vagina hooked up to a computer — did have some effect, although I couldn't figure out exactly what it was, and even if I could figure out what it was I couldn't figure out how much I was feeling it on a scale of one to seven. When it was over, the intercom told me to fill out the same questionnaire again. "Kafkaesque" was unfortunately not on the list.
Visit #3: Drugs and Porn, Part II
As soon as I stepped through the door each visit, I was asked to pee in a cup, presumably because pregnancy would have thrown off the results of the experiment. After this third test/third sigh of relief, the tester said she had to have me initial a crossed-out answer on the previous questionnaire. While I had been trying to figure out how much my breasts were throbbing, they stopped, so for "breast sensations" I had crossed out three and circled two. I thought she would commend my attention to detail, but instead she said she could be charged with fraud if any answers were changed without initialing.
Something had been weighing on my mind. "I guess I should have asked you this before," I said, "but am I supposed to think sexy thoughts or anything? Should I try to be aroused?"
The tester looked shocked. "No!" she said. "It's totally passive on your part." I felt dirty for asking, though not as dirty as I guess I would have felt had I started masturbating during the film and been yelled at through the intercom.
Past that, everything was the same as visit two, except that when the drug was supposed to be kicking in, my cheeks flushed and I started feeling more conscious of the probe in me, though I couldn't figure out if it had just moved out of place a little, like when you insert a tampon wrong. I also felt kind of speedy and couldn't stop making weird faces at the TV. The cat films began to take on a sexual significance. I wondered if they had included these particular nature films because of lines like "the soothing sensation of the tongue against fur."
The porn did less for me than the cat film, but it was even more hilarious this time. The first one was of a couple in front of a campfire, with the girl's ass torn out of her jeans, much to her rugged boyfriend's delight. The second was of a couple on the edge of a bed in an L.A. glam apartment with oceans of fog on the floor. In the third, a forlorn-looking sheik and a well-eyelined temptress did it in black-and-white, a ceiling fan above them, a dourly erotic French song playing in the background. They seemed fascinated with each other's toes.
When I opened my bag to schedule the last appointment, I hoped the tester wouldn't notice that I'd swiped the samples of Surgilube she'd left out to help insert the probe. (FYI, it smells too much like a hospital to be useful in a romantic context, unless you're playing doctor and patient). I asked her why they use porn when it doesn't seem to work so well at getting women aroused. I was told there's no alternative and that even women who register disgust on the subjective questionnaire tend to show a vaginal response on the read-out.
But when I saw my charts I was disappointed by how insignificant all the clusters of lines seemed. There weren't huge peaks, as I was told some of the other women had produced. It seemed like my arousal had in fact dropped when the porn was being shown, and been highest at the beginning, when I was sitting around looking at the Monet picture and the wires and thinking about whether wearing lots of eyeliner on that particular day had bumped my femininity quotient from a four to a six.
"What are those?" I asked, intrigued by the sharp lines that jutted almost to the edge of the page. "That," she said scoldingly, "is where you moved."
Visit #4: The Outtake
The nurse checked my vitals, drew some blood and we bantered about the austerity of the sex study room. "They should at least have a candle in here," she said. After I'd had the blood taken and the nurse and I had discussed design possibilities for the room, the tester came back in to ask me if I'd had any side effects. All I'd really noticed was that I felt a little flushed the second time.
She seemed satisfied, but I wasn't. There are worse ways to spend two evenings of one's life than in a university building being paid to watch lousy porn, one's vagina nestled snugly in the hands of science, but still, I felt a little cheated. Emotionally, it was like a "too much, too soon" romance. After all, who else but an over-inquisitive lover would ask so many questions about my sexual history and tendencies? Who else would be so interested in how often my vaginal muscles contracted in a given two-hour period? But one minute I'm being deluged with attention and probes and tests, free to fantasize about being discovered as the most sexual being on earth and recruited into some sexual intelligence agency, or at least being impregnated by aliens; the next I'm standing on the steps with a check in my hand and a stash of smelly Surgilube in my bag.
And from a more detached, clinical perspective, what exactly do they think they're measuring, anyway? I can't help but think that if I'd wanted to I could have thought sexy thoughts at any point and started having sexual responses irrelevant to the drug, porn or situation. Let's face it, female sexual arousal isn't as simple as men's (if it goes up, the drug works, if it doesn't, it doesn't). I wasn't turned on, at least not in the way it appeared I was supposed to be. Being stoically passive in the face of such invasive psychological and physical probing was hard. Being emotionally passive and aroused at the same time proved pretty much impossible. Drug or no drug, it was only when I started eroticizing the clinical setting that I felt anything like arousal. More power to the drug companies for trying to find something that will help sexually dysfunctional women, but what it is they're learning from this process, surreally replete as it is with supple Monet haystacks, informative videos on feline science and European pornography, doesn't seem like anything that's going to coax the female orgasm out of its scientific hinterland, far from the medicine cabinets of America. |
 |
