Ask An Academic: Why Women Have Sex
Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 5:41PM 
In 2007, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, both psychology professors at the University of Texas at Austin, published a joint research paper on human sexuality titled “Why Humans Have Sex.” The answers of their study’s female participants—love, revenge, boredom, etc.—so interested Meston and Buss that they decided to conduct additional research, this time dedicated to women’s sexuality specifically. In the book “Why Women Have Sex,” there’s still plenty of love, revenge, and boredom, but they’re presented as pieces of a puzzle that we’re only now starting to assemble.
What are the basics of female sexuality?
Meston: Women’s sexuality is more complex than men’s. For example, women are more contextual than men—they are more easily distracted from sexual cues by what is going on in their environment—and this necessarily means that sexual desire is more multifaceted in women. Also, women are less connected with their genital cues than are men—when a man has an erection he generally feels sexually aroused and wants to have sex. Not so with women. Genital cues are often not noticed and, even when they are, they don’t necessarily make women want to have sex. That isn’t to say that men are so simple they have sex simply because they get an erection, but it does mean that women are, quite frankly, more complicated.
Is this why there’s been an increase in the number of studies dedicated to women’s sexuality in recent years?
Meston: When Viagra hit the market, in 1998, many drug companies began the race to discover the first “pink Viagra” for women. In 1998, I had one of three laboratories in the world with the ability to study both the psychological and physiological sexual responses of women. By 2000, there were dozens of labs popping up and millions and millions of dollars going into drug research on women’s sexuality. This necessarily fostered a lot of research into basic female sexual anatomy and physiology. Up until that point, it was assumed that men and women were very similar—physiologically speaking. What the research told us was that you could not simply apply a male template to understanding women’s sexuality. read on at The New Yorker
"Why Women Have Sex" on Amazon.
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