Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)

Cindy M. Meston · David M. Buss

Sep 2009 · Sold by Macmillan

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

I had to get this book after being forced to defend what little I knew from reviews about the authors' research methodology to an angry crowd of women on forum who were dismissing this work as misogynist, hateful garbage. I found the reaction to be almost like an extra chapter to the book, a case study in these-ideas-bother-me-so-much-you'd-better-shut-up-now. I'm not completely new to some of these psychological ideas but I am new to the particularly female hostility they can apparently generate. I've heard all my life about how men are so simple sexually compared to women. Like dogs compared to higher-functioning women who have the difficult job of selecting which dog to move the species forward with. I've seen this model espoused over and over among the other general complaints about men. Now some science comes along to partly validate this belief and it's instantly found to be politically incorrect and offensive by some. What a minefield. I'm happy that Meston and Buss are charging in anyway even though I generally prefer harder sciences. I like the bit in Robin Baker's epilogue to Sperm Wars where he admits that these new attempts by psychobiology and evolutionary psychology to explain our behavior may only end up being half-right like Freud and Jung were.

I read this book thinking I might get some kind of an insight into female sexuality. This book is good. But it's filled with nothing but stories and scientific data that confirms most of what I already know. It definitely does not heighten my opinion on women. The material just confirms the fact that women are as dirty if NOT worse then men. They just don't admit it, and when they do it is always anonymous. It is a good read if you know nothing about women. But if you are intimately familiar with them or their sexual habits and desires. It does nothing but confirm and shed more negative light on the female mind. Guy's a warning..... Don't read this book if you can't take the hardcore honest, blunt, and frankly dirty truth about your lady. She IS IN HERE! They all are.

I loved it works 😍 turn me on YASS

About the author

Cindy M. Meston is one of the world's leading researchers on women's sexuality and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory, a cutting-edge lab on women's sexual experience. David M. Buss, one of the founders of the field of 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.