At the Base of the Lightening Rod

Uncovering the mysteries of female sexuality puts Queen’s researcher on the fast track to scientific star status

By Janice Kennedy, Canwest News Service March 7, 2009

Searching online recently for a used piano, Meredith Chivers found what looked like a good prospect, e-mailed the seller and was taken aback by his response. Meredith Chivers? he asked. That Meredith Chivers?

The man had seen the Jan. 25 cover story of The New York Times Magazine. Titled “What Do Women Want?” it featured extensive coverage of the groundbreaking work being done by sex researcher Meredith Chivers, a scientist who is carving out an international reputation as an expert in the field of female sexuality. And yes. The piano buyer was that Meredith Chivers.

Chivers, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., laughs as she recounts the tales of people’s reactions to her line of work. Travelling by plane to international conferences on sexuality, she used to share that information in conversations with curious seatmates.

“But it was like opening a Pandora’s box. Now I just tell people I study cognitive science. They go, ‘Ooh, sounds really interesting,’ and that’s the end of it.”

It wouldn’t be, if they knew who she really was. The fact is Chivers, 36, is on the fast track to international star status—at least, from a scientific perspective—in female sexuality studies, a fairly uncrowded field despite Freud’s famously articulated bafflement more than 80 years ago.

What do women want? Chivers and a small group of other female researchers around the world are finally reconsidering the question, suggesting possible answers. Their work is attracting attention, and sometimes controversy, wherever it appears, and Chivers has become one of the field’s go-to experts.

“It’s been weird,” says Chivers. “To have this kind of recognition so young is odd, I think.”

Research into female sexuality, she says, “is a lightning rod. It attracts all kinds of attention from all kinds of different spheres. And I’ve been getting results that are completely counterintuitive.”

Small wonder she finds herself at the base of the lightning rod. The Ottawa native, who is attractive and personable and nothing at all like the “science geek” she often calls herself, is newly installed at Queen’s, where in April she will assume the prestigious position of Queen’s National Scholar.

Her resume features master’s and doctoral degrees from Chicago’s Northwestern University, research and clinical experience in Chicago and at Toronto’s renowned Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and an eye-popping array of academic honours and awards. She sits on the editorial boards of three respected journals, including Archives of Sexual Behavior, the world’s leading publication in the field. And her impressive body of published papers stretches back to 1996, just a year after her graduation (with a bachelor of science degree in honours psychology) from the University of Guelph. Chivers has also spoken and delivered papers across Canada and the United States, in Europe, and as far afield as Egypt.

Even without reference to the content of her work, she is undeniably hot stuff. And the fallout from January’s New York Times Magazine feature has only turned up the heat. “It was overwhelming,” she says. “I had more than 200 e-mails in response to the article.”

Many were from women who wanted to express gratitude to Chivers for her work, which they felt validated their experiences. But many were also from documentary filmmakers, literary agents and publishers, though she is putting them off for the time being.

Married to psychologist Michael Seto (a professor, pedophilia expert and forensic consultant at the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group’s Brockville site), she has a young son at home, 18-month-old Oliver.

“Any extra time I have I want to spend with him. I don’t want to spend it writing books. But I will. I have a couple I want to write.”

Chivers conducts her experiments—testing volunteer subjects’ degrees of arousal to visual and auditory sexual stimuli—in a small, dimly lit room that locks from the inside. If the test subjects are women (she has also studied male sexuality), they are asked to undress from the waist down and insert a wired measuring device resembling a tampon. Then they relax on a reclining chair to watch movies or images on a monitor in front of them.

“People kind of get this Stanley Kubrick idea from A Clockwork Orange,” Chivers says, “but it’s not like that at all.”

The arousal measuring machine is called a plethysmograph, relatively recently adapted for women, though a male version—employing a device like a rubber band—has been around for decades.

Chivers’s subjects record their own conscious reactions by means of a lever or keypad, and the devices record physiological reactions by measuring the increase in genital blood flow (or, for men, the girth of the penis).

Thanks to the volunteer subjects she has tested over the past decade, and the data she has pored over scrupulously, she has come up with some interesting hypotheses.

In Chicago, she worked with Northwestern University professor Michael Bailey, former chairman of the psychology department, looking, among other things, at the question of bisexuality and co-authoring a paper on arousal patterns in bisexual men. The findings sparked controversy, since they were presented in media reports to suggest that bisexual men were really homosexual. (Proclaimed the 2005 New York Times headline, “Straight, Gay or Lying.”)

Chivers, who has grown wary of the media, says the reports were reductionistic and sensationalist. Sexual orientation, she says, is a complex motivational force that consists of far more than a collection of arousal responses. But she does think there is far more true bisexuality among women, where “there’s a lot more blurring of the lines.” In fact, Chivers believes that exclusively lesbian women may be fairly rare, and that many lesbians still find themselves attracted to men as well as women.

Such observations are what have been grabbing the spotlight for her.

Bailey, who was Chivers’s mentor during her graduate and postgraduate studies, calls her “a bold thinker—not constrained by what others thought.”

For instance, she believes that, contrary to cultural stereotype, women generally are aroused by any portrayal of sexual activity—heterosexual, homosexual, even non-human (she has shown images of mating apes)—no matter what their orientation, even though they don’t always admit to it. Men, on the other hand, tend to be aroused by images that address their specific orientation.

But she refines that further. While previous research had suggested there were no differences in arousal patterns between lesbian and heterosexual women, Chivers discovered that there were. When sexual activity involving couples was portrayed, arousal patterns were similar. But when solitary sexual activity was shown—individuals masturbating, for instance—lesbian women responded more to images of individual women than to the images of individual men.

From this, Chivers draws the preliminary conclusion that, as the level of portrayed sexual activity increases, it trumps personal orientation. Furthermore, it might suggest that lesbian women, to some degree, have a response pattern more typical of men, whose arousal patterns reflect their orientation.

“My hope in doing this work,” she says, “is that I can educate women about their sexuality, and that I can figure out some of the tougher questions.”

She has various lines of research she’s pursuing at the moment. Among them are studies analyzing the conscious and unconscious disconnect she’s observed in women’s arousal responses, sexuality in postpartum women and in cancer survivors, and a question so immense it might intimidate less scientific minds.

She wants to understand nothing less than “what it is that makes people sexual.”

“I never felt uncomfortable talking about sex,” Chivers cheerfully admits. She recalls the favour she did for male classmates at her Catholic high school in Trenton, Ont., where her military father was posted. The guys were desperate for information, so she drew them diagrams of the female anatomy, specifically the location of the clitoris.

In a Catholic school? “Yeah,” she laughs. “But it’s even worse. It was during religion class.”

During an undergraduate course in human sexuality at the University of Guelph, she had to conduct an hour-long seminar on female sexual problems.

“I’ve never been a really comfortable public speaker, but I felt really good about what I was doing.

“Afterward, I remember thinking, ‘If I could do this for the rest of my life, I’d be a pretty happy person’.”