‘What Do Women Want?’

Elaine Blair in The New York Times:

Bergner’s previous book, “The Other Side of Desire,” is a thoughtful study of unusual sexual inclinations — fetishism, sadism, attraction to children or amputees. In his new book, “What Do Women Want?,” which appears to have grown out of his earlier research, Bergner turns to what you might say is the largest group of sexual deviants: women, whose strange sexual parts and desires never seem quite as mainstream as men’s. Squeezed into these 200 pages are interviews with psychologists, psychiatrists and primatologists who have been “puzzling out the ways of eros in women”; a capsule history of ideas about female sexuality from biblical times to the present; the story of the so-far elusive hunt for a Viagra-type aphrodisiac for women; a discussion of the different types of female orgasm; and the personal accounts of a dozen or so ordinary women who talk about their sex lives and fantasies. The experiments and data Bergner writes about vary widely and don’t all point in the same direction, but he sets this tour of contemporary sex research against one particular shibboleth: the notion that women are naturally less libidinous than men, “hard-wired” to want babies and emotional connection but not necessarily sex itself. Bergner, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, blames evolutionary psychologists for spreading a contemporary version of this old idea. He assembles a group of scientists from different fields who talk about how earlier sexist bias has obscured the existence, strength and significance of female sex drive in animal reproduction.

More here.