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    What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
    What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
    What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire
    Audiobook6 hours

    What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire

    Written by Daniel Bergner

    Narrated by Charles Pasternak

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    When it comes to sex, common wisdom holds that men roam while women crave closeness and commitment. But in this provocative, headline-making book, Daniel Bergner turns everything we thought we knew about women's arousal and desire inside out. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with renowned behavioral scientists, sexologists, psychologists, and everyday women, he forces us to reconsider long-held notions about female sexuality.

    This bold and captivating journey into the world of female desire explores answers to such thought-provoking questions as: Are women perhaps the less monogamous sex? What effect do intimacy and emotional connection really have on lust? What is the role of narcissism—the desire to be desired—in female sexuality? Are political gains for women ("No means no") detrimental in the bedroom? And is the hunt for a "female Viagra" anything but a search for the cure for monogamy?

    Bergner goes behind the scenes of some of the most groundbreaking experiments on sexuality today and confronts us with controversial, sometimes uncomfortable findings. Incendiary, profoundly insightful, and brilliantly illuminating, What Do Women Want? will change the conversation about women and sex, and is sure to spark dynamic discussion for years to come.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 12, 2013
    ISBN9780062309648
    Author

    Daniel Bergner

    Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of five previous books of award-winning nonfiction: the New York Times bestselling Sing for Your Life, What Do Women Want?, The Other Side of Desire, In the Land of Magic Soldiers, and God of the Rodeo. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Talk, and the New York Times Book Review.

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    Reviews for What Do Women Want?

    3.5/5

    67 ratings6 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Women and sex, without the lies.
    • 3/5
      I’m very far from being a master of the art, but if properly performed, there can be much erotic power in making one’s mate lose herself in a frenzy of unsurpassable pleasure via oral sex.

      As your sexual partner, he [or she] has a ‘control’ that is [I assume] consensual; and [again I assume] you're more than happy with the experience that's orgasmic for you and enjoyable for him, even though he may be keeping his pants on.

      I believe it's notably better than the seven-second animalistic speed hump, which is the equivalent of the guy masterbating inside his mate, with the latter receiving little or no sexual satisfaction.

      [Similarly, gals may get off from the erotic power when going down on their guys, not to mention the additional power from her potentially clenched teeth.]

      The whole thing can be fantastic for both parties.
    • 3/5
      Excellent content. Not thrilled with the delivery. To be fair, it was written by a journalist, so I shouldn't have expected it to be written like other works of non-fiction. Highly recommend if you are a complete novice to the realm of female sexuality. I'd skip it if you are more familiar with the topic.
    • 4/5
      3.5 stars because I enjoyed reading it, but not sure about the science.
    • 5/5
      An absolutely fascinating look at what women's sexuality means. From fantasy lives to the science of a possible female viagra to society's fear of women that are not sexually repressed. A recommended read for anyone interested in sexuality.
    • 4/5
      Relatively short book; the NYT feature has a lot of the highlights, though the details were also interesting. Bergner sets out to suggest that many Western ideas about women’s sexuality are mistaken—at least the official ones about women not wanting sex/sex outside of a monogamous relationship as much as men do. The unofficial ones, in which women are dangerously out of control unless heavily repressed, could be reinforced by the science he discusses, though there’s nothing here about “out of control.” Evolutionary stories of male promiscuity and female pickiness aren’t consistent with the evidence from our animal relations or from non-self-reported measures of female desire. At least when women aren’t afraid of male violence (a very very big when that he doesn’t spend much time on), women seem plenty lustful—at least when it comes to strangers/new relationships. It’s only in longterm exclusive relationships that women’s desire seems to flag, and Bergner spends a chunk of the book on pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic attempts to fix this within monogamy. Long-term intimacy, he suggests, may kill desire for many women; drugs or specific behavioral interventions may sometimes bring the spice back. One of the most striking parts of the book comes when he discusses the fears expressed by pharmaceutical researchers that their drug would be too effective, making women wantonly/indiscriminately desire sex. It’s hilarious, except for how 44% of US parents won’t vaccinate their daughters against HPV.As others have noted, Bergner seems relatively untroubled by a project of associating women with greater/more “animal” desire than men, even though he repeatedly acknowledges the social stigma (and more) that women expressing sexual desire face. He also discusses research on women’s rape fantasies as fantasies and their relationship to the idea of desireability as central to women’s desire; researchers are very nervous about how to present this, and he has an extended discussion with one about the extent to which culture/misogyny affects the content of fantasies. I don’t know how much cross-cultural research there is on this, but comparative studies would seem to be relevant.Key pieces of research include: when faced with a variety of images of sex and nudity, including animals having sex, men who identify as straight react most strongly to the heterosexual/lesbian scenes and not much to the gay male scenes, and vice versa for gay men; by contrast, women who identify as straight and lesbian both reacted to everything with physical signs of arousal (genital engorgement). (Self-identified bisexuals apparently weren’t part of the study.) The exception: women weren’t turned on by a naked, physically fit man whose penis was visibly flaccid and thus not signalling desire. However, both men and women self-reported reactions consistent with their reported sexuality—so women said they were only turned on by a small number of the things they saw. Bergner notes but does not give much attention to the question of what this means. Are women disconnected from their own physical reactions? Or is desire something different than engorged genitals? Another study, on which Bergner ended the book, showed how a very simple manipulation could change what we often think is basic in male-female relationships—that men are less picky. Speed dating studies showed that heterosexual women were more selective than heterosexual men in choosing candidates for follow-up dates. But all the studies had a confounding variable: in all of them, women sat in place while the men rotated. When a researcher changed that setup, so the women rotated—and therefore had the chance to perceive themselves as the ones making the “move”—men were choosier and women were less selective. Given the weight of culture, that’s a pretty astonishing result from one intervention.