What Do Women Want?

What Do Women Want? Plot Summary

Introduction

Throughout history, women's sexuality has been one of the most misunderstood and deliberately misrepresented aspects of human experience. From ancient civilizations that simultaneously celebrated and feared female desire, to Victorian-era suppressions that claimed women were naturally chaste, our understanding of women's sexual nature has been clouded by cultural assumptions, religious doctrines, and pseudoscientific theories. These misconceptions have not simply been academic errors; they have shaped social structures, justified gender inequalities, and affected the intimate lives of countless people across centuries. This exploration brings together groundbreaking research from neuroscience, primatology, psychology, and cultural history to challenge our long-held assumptions about female sexuality. By examining evidence from laboratory studies measuring physical arousal patterns, investigating the sexual behaviors of our primate relatives, and tracing how cultural forces have shaped our understanding of desire, we uncover surprising truths. The findings suggest that women's sexuality is far more powerful, responsive, and complex than conventional wisdom has allowed. For anyone seeking to understand the gap between cultural myths and biological realities, this journey through the history of female desire offers revelations that are both scientifically rigorous and personally illuminating.

Chapter 1: Ancient and Medieval Views: The Dual Legacy of Female Sexuality

In the ancient world, attitudes toward female sexuality embodied a profound contradiction that would echo through millennia. Biblical texts from classical times reveal remarkably diverse perspectives. The Song of Songs celebrates female passion with lines like "Passion as relentless as Sheol, the flash of it a flash of fire," while elsewhere in Exodus, women's sexual rights were explicitly acknowledged: "He must not neglect the rights of the first wife to food, clothing, and sexual intimacy." These acknowledgments of female desire existed alongside warnings about women's dangerous sexuality. Greek and Roman medical authorities held surprising views about female pleasure. Galen of Pergamum, physician to the Roman emperor and a towering figure in ancient medicine, proclaimed that female orgasm was necessary for conception. According to his teachings, which would dominate scientific thought for fifteen centuries, a woman's "certain tremor" was essential for reproduction. Similarly, Ovid's Tiresias, who experienced life as both male and female, famously declared that women experienced nine times more sexual pleasure than men. Yet this partial acceptance of female desire coexisted with profound fear. Eve's position as first sinner cast women as "the Devil's gateway" according to early Christian theologian Tertullian. In Greek mythology, Pandora with her "shameless mind and deceitful nature" paralleled Eve as a dangerous temptress. God's warnings in Leviticus about menstrual "fountains" codified the belief that women's bodies were sources of spiritual contamination. Fear of female carnality led to Medieval beliefs that lust-drunk witches could leave men "smooth," devoid of their genitals. This dual legacy—acknowledging women's sexual capacity while simultaneously fearing and controlling it—established patterns that would persist for centuries. Before the Enlightenment, Western societies balanced these contradictions by strictly confining acceptable female sexuality within marriage. Even England's early Protestant clergy, while accepting marital sex as natural, prescribed precisely three conjugal relations per month, with a week off for menstruation. This ancient ambivalence toward female desire—recognizing its power while seeking to contain it—would evolve into much more restrictive attitudes as Western civilization entered the modern era.

Chapter 2: Victorian Constraints: The Cultural Suppression of Women's Desire (1800-1900)

The Victorian era marked a dramatic shift in Western attitudes toward female sexuality—from acknowledgment of desire, however constrained, to its outright denial. This transformation had multiple origins. First came scientific developments in the 1600s regarding reproduction. As scientists began understanding the role of the ovum in conception, Galen's ancient insistence that female orgasm was necessary for pregnancy slowly lost credibility. If women could conceive without pleasure, their desire became increasingly irrelevant to reproductive discussions. By the early nineteenth century, nascent feminist campaigns and evangelical Christian movements converged around a new vision of feminine morality. American prison reformer Eliza Farnham proclaimed that "the purity of woman is the everlasting barrier against which the tides of man's sensual nature surge." Educator Emma Willard insisted women must "orbit around the Holy Centre of perfection" to keep men "in their proper course." This rhetoric both reflected and fueled a transformation in how female sexuality was perceived—the innately pious had replaced the fundamentally carnal. These cultural shifts were embedded in personal experience. Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing to her husband about ministers' sexual lapses, confessed: "What terrible temptations lie in the way of your sex—till now I never realized it—for tho I did love you with an almost insane love before I married you I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could be tempted in that way." Meanwhile, renowned British gynecologist William Acton declared that "the majority of women, happily for society, are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind." The Industrial Revolution intensified these trends by placing new value on male work and professional ambition. As men's economic opportunities expanded, their sexual drives needed to be redirected toward productive labor. Victorian society assigned women the primary responsibility for maintaining sexual restraint. Through modesty, moral authority, and supposed natural frigidity, women were expected to tame male passion while embodying an ideal of desirelessness themselves. This reframing of female sexuality as naturally minimal or absent represented a profound break with earlier understandings. While previous eras feared women's desire but acknowledged its existence, Victorian culture constructed an entirely new narrative: respectable women simply did not experience sexual passion at all. This denial would cast a long shadow over subsequent generations, creating patterns of sexual repression and misunderstanding that continue to influence our thinking today.

Chapter 3: The Scientific Revolution: From Freud to Modern Sexology (1900-1970)

The early twentieth century brought the first sustained scientific examination of female sexuality, though often with deeply problematic assumptions. Sigmund Freud, whose candid investigations of the erotic broke Victorian taboos, paradoxically reinforced certain constraints on female desire. While acknowledging women's sexuality, he divided it into "mature" vaginal orgasms versus "immature" clitoral ones, creating a hierarchy that pathologized women's most reliable path to pleasure. His writing contained contradictory views—in some sections asserting women have "weaker sexual instinct" while elsewhere acknowledging powerful female desire. The 1920s saw Marie Bonaparte, a French psychoanalyst and follower of Freud, take extraordinary measures to achieve the elusive vaginal orgasm. Tormented by her inability to climax through intercourse alone, she enlisted physicians to measure the distance between the clitoris and vaginal opening in numerous women. When she determined her own three-centimeter gap exceeded the 2.5-centimeter threshold she'd established for "success," she underwent multiple surgeries to relocate her clitoris closer to her vagina. The operations failed, leading her to consider herself "frigid" despite her evident sexual motivation. Alfred Kinsey's groundbreaking research in the 1940s and 50s began to challenge these psychoanalytic theories with empirical data. His interviews with thousands of American women revealed patterns of desire and behavior that contradicted Victorian and Freudian assumptions. However, his work proved so controversial that when he shifted from studying male sexuality to publishing "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in 1953, his research funds were promptly revoked. Society remained deeply uncomfortable with scientific explorations of women's desire. The 1960s brought William Masters and Virginia Johnson's revolutionary laboratory studies, where they observed and recorded hundreds of subjects having sex. Their work further dismantled Freud's orgasm theories, documenting that women's climaxes originated primarily from the clitoris. Yet even as these researchers made strides in understanding physical responses, they focused more on documenting behavior than exploring the feelings and motivations underlying desire. By the late 1960s, popular culture still reinforced restrictive views. The bestselling "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex" delivered the pronouncement that "Before a woman can have sexual intercourse with a man she must have social intercourse with him"—maintaining the Victorian notion that women require emotional connection before physical desire. Despite scientific advances, the cultural narrative that women were naturally less sexual than men persisted, with research continually interpreted through this lens. When the AIDS crisis redirected sexology's focus in the 1980s, many fundamental questions about female desire remained unanswered, awaiting a new generation of researchers.

Chapter 4: Evolutionary Psychology's Sexual Fable: Nature vs. Nurture Debates

In the late twentieth century, evolutionary psychology emerged as a powerful voice in explaining gender differences in sexuality. This field applied Darwinian principles to human psychology, attempting to explain our behaviors as adaptations that enhanced our ancestors' reproductive success. When it came to sexuality, evolutionary psychologists like David Buss proposed a compelling narrative: men are hardwired to seek multiple partners to maximize genetic legacy, while women are naturally selective, seeking committed partners who will provide resources for offspring. This perspective rests heavily on what scientists call "parental investment theory." Because women invest more biologically in reproduction—limited eggs versus abundant sperm, nine months of pregnancy, breastfeeding—evolutionary psychologists argue they evolved to be choosier about mates. Men, with minimal required investment, supposedly evolved to seek quantity over quality in sexual partners. This theory points to cross-cultural evidence: from Zambia to America, societies value chastity in women and financial prospects in men, supposedly confirming these as natural, evolved preferences. The narrative gained tremendous cultural traction, appearing in countless popular books and articles. "The Female Brain," a bestselling work, opens with the assertion that "The girl brain is a machine built for connection" while the boy brain is built for "frenzies" of lust. These ideas resonated with religious conservatives who had long taught similar gender differences, creating an unlikely alliance between cutting-edge evolutionary science and traditional religious teachings about gender roles. However, this evolutionary account faces significant challenges. The theory's foundation is precarious at best. Does the fact that female modesty is valued across cultures prove anything about inherent biology, or might it simply reflect the global span of male-dominated societies? Laboratory evidence from researchers like Meredith Chivers suggests a stark contradiction between the restrained sexuality evolutionary psychology attributes to women and their actual physiological responses, which show remarkably non-specific arousal patterns. What if observed gender differences stem not from genes but from social conditioning? Further undermining these claims, the neuroscience frequently cited to support them is far less precise than popularly portrayed. Brain imaging technology cannot reliably identify the minute neural regions that govern complex emotions like desire. When pop psychology books claim that "the hippocampus lit up" during certain activities, they offer about as much specificity as a traffic reporter saying "there's heavy traffic somewhere in northern New Jersey." Additionally, experience constantly reshapes neural systems, making it nearly impossible to determine which differences are innate versus learned. This evolutionary narrative functions more as a conservative fable than established science—inadvertently preserving a sexual status quo by labeling current gender patterns as natural and inevitable. The story soothes our social anxieties by suggesting that observed differences between men and women are simply biology at work, not the products of cultural conditioning that might be questioned or changed.

Chapter 5: Primate Parallels: What Animal Studies Reveal About Female Sexuality

While human sexuality debates raged in academic journals, researchers observing our closest animal relatives were making discoveries that challenged fundamental assumptions about female desire. Kim Wallen, studying rhesus monkeys at Emory University's Yerkes research center, found that female monkeys were far from passive recipients of male advances—they were the sexual aggressors. In the natural habitats of these primates, used as human stand-ins for early space exploration, females control sexual interactions, initiate most copulations, and dismiss males once their utility has waned. This contradicted decades of scientific assumptions. "Females were passive. That was the theory in the middle seventies. That was the wisdom," Wallen recalled. "The prevailing model was that female hormones affected female pheromones—affected the female's smell, her attractivity to the male. The male initiated all sexual behavior." What science had effectively erased was female desire. Wallen discovered that earlier research settings had skewed results—small laboratory cages artificially increased male initiation by forcing proximity. In more natural environments, female monkeys revealed themselves as enthusiastic sexual pursuers. Even more surprisingly, Wallen found that female rhesus monkeys display a preference for novelty in sexual partners. "When it comes to males, females have a bias toward novelty," he noted. In the wild, adult males lurk at the edges of female-run domains, invited in for breeding and dismissed when females lose interest—typically after about three years. When asked whether this pattern might apply to humans, Wallen suggested: "I feel confident that because of social conventions and imperatives, women frequently don't act on or even recognize the intensity of motivation that monkeys obey." James Pfaus, a neuroscientist at Concordia University, discovered similar patterns in female rats. Earlier researchers had focused on the rat female's characteristic immobility during copulation (called lordosis), interpreting this as passivity. Yet closer observation revealed that females actively solicit males through specific hops, darts, and prancings. More remarkably, if their cage allowed for it, female rats deliberately slipped away from males during mating, prolonging the process to receive more stimulation. Martha McClintock documented that by controlling the pace of mating, females could substantially raise their odds of pregnancy. Significantly, these animal studies revealed that reproduction is not what motivates individual animal behavior. The rat does not think, "I want to have a baby." Rather, pleasure drives the behavior that evolution has designed to perpetuate the species. The gratification of sex has to be powerful enough to outweigh considerable risks—the terror of getting killed while getting laid. This evidence suggests female animals are naturally inclined toward sexual variety and initiative—a far cry from the passive, monogamous stereotype applied to women. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist at UC Davis, proposed that female promiscuity in many primate species evolved as protection against infanticide—by mating with multiple males, females created paternity confusion that prevented males from killing offspring that might not be theirs. Her research on female orgasm further challenged traditional views, suggesting that women's capacity for multiple orgasms and the sometimes lengthy stimulation required for climax weren't evolutionary flaws but adaptations encouraging multiple partners and extended copulation, increasing reproductive success through partner variety. These animal studies collectively suggest that the evolutionary psychology narrative gets female sexuality precisely backward. Rather than being naturally monogamous and selective, our closest animal relatives show female patterns of sexual assertiveness, variety-seeking, and pleasure-driven behavior that more closely resemble stereotypical male sexuality than Victorian ideals of feminine restraint.

Chapter 6: The Monogamy Paradox: How Long-term Relationships Affect Desire

The decline of sexual desire in long-term relationships represents one of the most consistent findings in modern sex research—and one of the most troubling paradoxes for conventional wisdom about female sexuality. Contrary to the popular belief that women are naturally suited for monogamy and emotional bonding, research suggests that women's desire may actually fade faster than men's in committed relationships. This phenomenon has become so commonplace that clinicians have developed an entire vocabulary and treatment approach around it. Rosemary Basson, a physician and professor at the University of British Columbia, created an influential circular model of female sexual response that has been widely adopted by the psychiatric profession. Her model portrays women's desire as inherently responsive rather than spontaneous, suggesting that women enter sexual encounters primarily for emotional intimacy rather than from physical urges. In her diagram, "desire" appears late in the cycle, after "arousal" has been established through partner consideration and emotional connection. This model implicitly suggests that women's lower desire in long-term relationships is simply their natural state. However, other researchers challenge this paradigm. Lori Brotto, Basson's colleague who served on the American Psychiatric Association's sexuality committee, noted: "Sometimes I wonder whether it isn't so much about libido as it is about boredom." When treating middle-aged women with diminished desire, she found that relationship duration, not hormonal factors, was the primary issue. As Australian psychiatrist Lorraine Dennerstein put it more bluntly: "The sexual feelings of a new relationship can easily override hormonal factors." Marta Meana, a psychologist specializing in female sexuality, suggests that monogamy itself contradicts a core element of female desire. Her research indicates that women's arousal depends significantly on feeling desired—on being the object of someone's overwhelming longing. Within committed relationships, the sense of being chosen, selected, and powerfully wanted inevitably diminishes. "Within the bounds of fidelity," Meana observed, "the heat of being desired grew more and more remote, not just because the woman's partner lost a level of interest, but, more centrally, because the woman felt that her partner was trapped." This theory receives indirect support from neurological studies. Jim Pfaus, a neuroscientist who studies desire pathways in the brain, found that novel stimuli trigger dopamine release—the neurotransmitter associated with wanting and motivation. Familiarity, by contrast, can lead to habituation. This biological mechanism may help explain why many women report intensified arousal with new partners or in novel situations, even as they value the emotional security of committed relationships. Therapists working with couples facing desire discrepancies report limited success in rekindling passion. Meana was forthright about the challenge: "Therapists who claimed to restore lust on a regular basis, to instill desire in a high percentage of their patients, weren't judging their outcomes in any rigorous way, were deluding themselves, deceiving everyone." Despite endless advice about date nights, communication exercises, and housework sharing, desire often remains elusive. As one therapist recounted to Meana: "We tell men to water this little bonsai of women's desire, we tell them the bonsai has to be treated just so—and guess what?" The monogamy paradox represents a painful collision between cultural ideals and biological realities. Monogamy remains a treasured social value, defining our romantic aspirations and family structures. Yet the evidence suggests that female sexuality may be particularly ill-suited to this arrangement—not because women value sex less than men, but because they may require more novelty, surprise, and the thrill of being urgently desired to maintain their arousal over time. This contradiction leaves many couples struggling to reconcile their commitment to partnership with the waning of desire that partnership often brings.

Chapter 7: Modern Research: Dismantling Myths About Female Arousal Patterns

Contemporary research has dramatically reshaped our understanding of female sexual response, challenging centuries of assumptions about women's arousal patterns. Meredith Chivers, a sexologist at Queen's University, conducted groundbreaking studies using vaginal photoplethysmography—a device that measures genital blood flow—while female subjects viewed various erotic stimuli. Her results revealed unexpected patterns that contradicted conventional wisdom about female sexuality. First, women showed remarkably non-specific arousal patterns. While men's physical responses closely matched their stated preferences (heterosexual men responding primarily to women, gay men to men), women's bodies responded to a much wider range of stimuli. Heterosexual women showed significant physical arousal when viewing women with women, men with men, and even bonobos (a species of ape) mating—scenarios they reported finding unappealing. This suggested a fundamental disconnect between women's conscious experience of desire and their physiological responses. This gap between subjective and objective arousal proved consistently larger in women than men. When reporting their feelings via keypad while watching erotic videos, women's self-reported arousal often diverged significantly from their measured genital response. This disconnect persisted across numerous studies and different types of stimuli. Chivers proposed this might reflect women's less obvious genital architecture, making physical arousal less noticeable, or perhaps indicated cultural conditioning that taught women to suppress awareness of their sexual responses. Supporting this cultural interpretation, Terri Fisher at Ohio State University demonstrated how social expectations influence women's sexual self-reporting. Using a fake polygraph setup, Fisher found that women connected to the "lie detector" reported masturbation rates and numbers of sexual partners similar to or exceeding men's. Women who believed their answers would be seen by others reported much lower numbers. Men's answers remained consistent regardless of conditions, suggesting women routinely downplay their sexuality when they fear judgment. Another significant finding came from studies of sexual response to relationship contexts. When Chivers played audio narratives describing sexual encounters with strangers, close friends, or long-term partners, women's bodies responded most strongly to scenarios featuring strangers—even while they reported preferring familiar partners. This contradicted the widespread belief that emotional intimacy and safety are primary drivers of female arousal. Instead, the erotic appeared to thrive on novelty and the unknown. Research also challenged the notion that women are less visual in their sexuality than men. Kim Wallen and Heather Rupp used eye-tracking technology to measure how long subjects gazed at erotic images. Women looked just as long as men at sexual imagery, contradicting the stereotype that visual stimuli primarily affect male arousal. Marta Meana's eye-tracking studies revealed that heterosexual women spent equal time looking at the female figures in erotic images as at the males—suggesting women's arousal may be partially linked to identifying with the desired female figure. Collectively, this research depicts female sexuality as far more responsive, visually oriented, and novelty-seeking than conventional wisdom suggests. The evidence points to a fundamental paradox: women's bodies show capacity for robust and diverse sexual response, while cultural forces simultaneously teach women to disconnect from, deny, or fail to recognize their own arousal. This disconnect between physical capability and conscious experience may help explain why women report sexual problems at higher rates than men despite showing equal or greater physiological responsiveness to erotic stimuli.

Summary

The scientific exploration of female desire reveals a profound and recurring pattern throughout history: the gap between women's sexual capacity and society's willingness to acknowledge it. From ancient civilizations that recognized yet feared female arousal, through Victorian denial of its existence, to modern research documenting its remarkable strength and flexibility, one consistency emerges—female sexuality has been systematically misunderstood and misrepresented. The biological evidence now suggests women possess an extraordinarily responsive sexual system capable of diverse and powerful arousal, yet cultural conditioning has taught many women to disconnect from their own bodies' signals. This historical journey offers crucial insights for our understanding of sexuality today. First, we must recognize how thoroughly cultural assumptions shape even our most intimate experiences—many women have learned to interpret their bodies through lenses crafted by religious dogma, Victorian propriety, and evolutionary psychology's conservative fable. Second, relationships may need to accommodate a more complex understanding of desire than our romantic ideals suggest—the tension between security and passion affects women as much as, if not more than, men. Finally, true sexual empowerment requires dismantling the narrative that women are naturally less sexual than men. The evidence points instead to a powerful female sexuality that has been systematically constrained rather than biologically limited. By recognizing these truths, we open the possibility for more authentic understanding of desire across genders and throughout relationships.

About Author

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Daniel Bergner

Daniel Bergner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of two previous books of nonfiction, IN THE LAND OF MAGIC SOLDIERS: A STORY OF WHITE AND BLACK IN WEST AFRICA, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and GOD OF THE RODEO: THE QUEST FOR REDEMPTION IN LOUISIANA’S ANGOLA PRISON, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.Bergner’s writing has also appeared in Granta, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Talk, the New York Times Book Review, and on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

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