Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
Cindy M. Meston, David M. Buss
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0805088342
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An unparalleled exploration of the mysteries underlying women’s sexuality that rivals the culture-shifting Kinsey Report, from two of America’s leading research psychologists
Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When University of Texas at Austin clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them.
Through the voices of real women, Meston and Buss reveal the motivations that guide women’s sexual decisions and explain the deep-seated psychology and biology that often unwittingly drive women’s desires—sometimes in pursuit of health or pleasure, or sometimes for darker, disturbing reasons that a woman may not fully recognize. Drawing on more than a thousand intensive interviews conducted solely for the book, as well as their pioneering research on physiological response and evolutionary emotions, Why Women Have Sex uncovers an amazingly complex and nuanced portrait of female sexuality. They delve into the use of sex as a defensive tactic against a mate’s infidelity (protection), as a ploy to boost self-confidence (status), as a barter for gifts or household chores (resource acquisition), or as a cure for a migraine headache (medication).
Why Women Have Sex stands as the richest and deepest psychological understanding of female sexuality yet achieved and promises to inform every woman’s (and her partner’s) awareness of her relationship to sex and her sexuality.
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of corn that tasted of menstrual blood. The “Chill Out” Effect [Sex] is a stress reliever, and let’s face it, most of the time men don’t care why, they’re just happy to help along. —predominantly heterosexual woman, age 22 Everyone knows how feeling angry or anxious can change how we experience things. Negative thoughts can occupy, even take over, our minds and prevent us from noticing pleasant things in the immediate environment. Sometimes, as we’ve seen, in sexual situations
evolutionary psychology, is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of several books, including The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion. Their jointly authored article “Why Humans Have Sex” garnered international attention when it was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
above, and oxytocin being the most prominent. Oxytocin release has been associated with emotional bonding and might explain why some women experience an intense feeling of connectedness with their partners following orgasm. While orgasm can lead to feelings of attachment or bonding in women, emotional attachment is certainly not necessary for women to experience sexual pleasure or orgasm: There have been times when I wasn’t emotionally connected to the person I had sex with but I did it because
together of two does not simply mean physically, but also mentally and emotionally. Sex is a way of fulfilling all of these aspects at once. —heterosexual woman, age 23 Indeed, feelings of connectedness trigger a sense of peacefulness and relationship security that is not unlike the emotional experience of love. Feelings of both love and bonding ward off feelings of loneliness and depression, and they can make a person feel that he or she is part of a team, or one of two halves of a
protection. —heterosexual woman, age 58 The key issue is not whether women and men differ in their enjoyment of sex, nor whether the sexes differ in their interest in having sex (let alone in consuming meat!). The mystery is why women sometimes seem to hold such a commanding position in the economics of sex. The Golden Egg The most plausible evolutionary answer to the mystery of women’s greater power in the sexual arena—why women’s sexuality is so valuable and seemingly scarce