Why does your desire vanish the moment you feel safest in a relationship? Does monogamy secretly sabotage female lust? What if everything you’ve been taught about women and sex is not just wrong, but a comforting fairy tale we’ve all agreed to believe? What Do Women Want? will fundamentally rewrite your understanding of female sexuality.
These are the questions that grabbed me by the throat when I first picked up Daniel Bergner’s groundbreaking book What Do Women Want?, and they haven’t let go since.
If you’ve ever lain awake at night wondering why you don’t want your partner anymore—or why your partner doesn’t want you—What Do Women Want? won’t just answer your questions.
Table of Contents
Introduction
What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner was published in 2013 by Ecco/HarperCollins. Bergner is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of several previous nonfiction works, including The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing and God of the Rodeo, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
His credentials as a journalist who delves into the most uncomfortable corners of human desire are impeccable.
This book falls squarely into the genre of narrative science journalism—it’s not a dry academic text but a riveting journey through laboratories, monkey compounds, and the intimate confessions of everyday women.
Bergner spent seven years embedded with the scientists who are revolutionizing our understanding of female eros, and the result is nothing short of explosive.
The central thesis? Female desire is not the demure, relationship-dependent, emotionally-driven force that our culture—and even much of science—has insisted it is. Instead, women’s sexuality is inherently wild, omnivorous, visually-driven, and profoundly threatened by the very monogamy we’ve been told it naturally craves.
As Bergner writes in his introduction, this book will teach you:
“That women’s desire—its inherent range and innate power—is an underestimated and constrained force, even in our times, when all can seem so sexually inundated, so far beyond restriction. That despite the notions our culture continues to imbue, this force is not, for the most part, sparked or sustained by emotional intimacy and safety… And that one of our most comforting assumptions, soothing perhaps above all to men but clung to by both sexes, that female eros is much better made for monogamy than the male libido, is scarcely more than a fairy tale.”
Background: The Gathering Critical Mass of Female Scientists
Before Bergner’s book, the field of sexology was overwhelmingly male. As he notes, even at the time of his research, women made up less than a third of the membership in the International Academy of Sex Research.
The study of female desire had been neglected, distorted, or viewed through a male lens that couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see what was actually there.
What makes this book revolutionary is that it chronicles what Bergner calls a “gathering critical mass” of female scientists who decided to stop accepting the conventional wisdom and start looking at the evidence.
These women—Meredith Chivers, Marta Meana, Lisa Diamond, Terri Fisher, and others—were joined by male researchers like Kim Wallen and Jim Pfaus, who had their own revelations about female sexuality by watching monkeys and rats.
The book arrives at a crucial cultural moment.
According to Nielsen data cited by Bergner, in the years leading up to publication, the percentage of online porn users who were female had jumped from one in four to one in three. Something was shifting, and science was finally catching up.
What Do Women Want? Summary
Let me walk you through what I learned from this book, chapter by chapter, argument by argument. I’m going to give you the full picture because these insights are too important to leave buried in academic journals.
The Plethysmograph Revelation: Women’s Bodies Tell a Different Story
The book opens with Meredith Chivers, a psychology professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
Chivers is described as a scientist who “hoped to peer into the workings of the psyche, to see somehow past the consequences of culture, of nurture, of all that is learned, and to apprehend a piece of women’s primal and essential selves.”
Her tool was the plethysmograph—a miniature bulb and light sensor placed inside the vagina that measures blood flow, which indirectly gauges vaginal wetness.
Women sat in a dimly lit lab, watched an array of pornography, and their bodies told a story their minds denied.
What happened? Women—both straight and lesbian—became physically aroused by everything. As Bergner reports:
“Sitting on the leatherette chair, Chivers’s subjects, straight and lesbian, were turned on right away by all of it, including the copulating apes. To stare at the data amassed by the plethysmograph was to confront a vision of anarchic arousal.”
The keypad contradicted the plethysmograph completely. Straight women said they were much less aroused by images of women together than their genitals declared.
Lesbian women reported low arousal during male-male sex even as their bodies surged with blood. The female libido, at the physiological level, looked omnivorous.
But it gets more fascinating. When Chivers used audio narratives instead of videos, she found something even more striking about what truly ignites women:
“Genital blood throbbed when the tapes described X-rated episodes with female friends—but the throbbing for female strangers was twice as powerful. The broad-chested male friends were deadening; with them, vaginal pulse almost flatlined. The male strangers stirred eight times more blood.”
This didn’t fit with the societal assumption that female sexuality thrives on emotional connection, on established intimacy, on feelings of safety. Instead, the erotic ran best on something raw.
The Lie Detector Test: What Women Won’t Admit
Bergner then introduces Terri Fisher at Ohio State University, who ran a brilliant experiment.
She asked female and male undergraduates about masturbation and porn use under three conditions: with a fellow student potentially watching, with guaranteed anonymity, or while hooked up to a fake polygraph machine.
The results were stunning:
“The male replies were about the same under each of the three conditions, but for the females the circumstances were crucial. Many of the women in the first group… said they’d never masturbated, never checked out anything X-rated.
The women who were told they would have strict confidentiality answered yes a lot more. And the women who thought they were wired to a lie detector replied almost identically to the men.”
When Fisher used the same three conditions to ask about sexual partners, women connected to the fake polygraph reported numbers 70 percent higher than the first group—and higher than the men.
Fisher told Bergner emphatically: “Being a human who is sexual, who is allowed to be sexual, is a freedom accorded by society much more readily to males than to females.”
The Sexual Fable of Evolutionary Science
This is where Bergner really takes aim at one of our culture’s most cherished belief systems.
Evolutionary psychology, particularly “parental investment theory,” has permeated our consciousness with the idea that men are programmed to spread their seed while women are designed to be choosy, to seek long-term providers, to be the naturally less lustful sex.
Bergner dismantles this with precision. The theory goes like this: men have limitless sperm and minimal reproductive investment, so they’re wired to be promiscuous.
Women have limited eggs and massive investment through pregnancy and breastfeeding, so they’re wired to be selective and relationship-oriented.
But Bergner points out the logical flaws:
“Does the fact that women are expected to be the more demure gender in Lusaka and New York, in Kabul and Kandahar and Karachi and Kansas City, prove anything about our erotic hardwiring?
Might the shared value placed on female modesty speak less to absolutes of biology than to the world’s span of male-dominated cultures and historic suspicion and fear of female sexuality?”
He also eviscerates pop psychology bestsellers like The Female Brain, which claims women need to be “comfortable, warm, and cozy” for satisfying sex and must “trust who she is with.”
Bergner notes how these messages parallel fundamentalist Christian teachings, where women’s “five major needs” in marriage are topped by “affection” and “conversation” while male needs are led by “sexual fulfillment.”
Monkeys and Rats: What Animals Teach Us About Female Lust
Bergner takes us to Emory University’s Yerkes Research Center, where Kim Wallen has spent decades watching rhesus monkeys. What he discovered was revolutionary—and had been ignored by science for generations.
“Females were passive. That was the theory in the middle seventies. That was the wisdom… The prevailing model was that female hormones affected female pheromones—affected the female’s smell, her attractivity to the male. The male initiated all sexual behavior.”
What Wallen actually observed was the opposite. Female rhesus monkeys are the sexual aggressors.
They stalk males, lip their ears, kiss their bellies, tap the ground in what Bergner calls “the rhesus equivalent of unbuckling a man’s belt.” And here’s the crucial detail. When Wallen looked at why science had missed this, he found a revealing pattern in past experiments:
“In the smallest cages there was the most sex, in the largest ones there was the least, and the in-between ones had an in-between amount.”
In cramped cages, proximity meant males appeared to initiate. In larger, more natural settings, the truth emerged: without female initiation, sex didn’t happen.
And after sex, Wallen observed: “She has sex, and when he goes into his post-ejaculatory snooze, what does she do? She immediately gets up and goes off and finds another.”
Then there’s Jim Pfaus at Concordia University, studying rats. Pfaus showed Bergner a video of a female rat who, after having her clitoris stroked with a tiny brush, bites the researcher’s sleeve and pulls her hand back into the cage—over and over and over.
Female rats, Pfaus explains, also prefer novelty. They do more “hopping and darting” to score with new mates and “dip their spines deeper, so the new male has an easier time thrusting in.”
Pfaus railed against evolutionary psychology’s “shtick” and asked the uncomfortable question:
“Why do we have Pandora’s box—why have we boxed in women’s sexuality? Why do we keep women’s desire relatively repressed? We men are afraid that if we open the box, open her control, we’re opening ourselves to being cuckolded. We’re afraid of what’s inside.”
Narcissism: The Engine of Female Desire
Marta Meana, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, makes perhaps the book’s most provocative argument.
Using an eye-tracker that measures where women look when viewing erotic images, she discovered that heterosexual women looked equally at both genders—specifically at the faces of men (the expressions of desire) and at women’s bodies (the flesh that was desired).
Meana’s conclusion? “Being desired is the orgasm”—it’s both what women crave and what sparks their craving. Narcissism, she stressed, “and she used the word not in damning judgment but in plain description—was at the core of women’s sexual psyches.”
This explains why the thrill of being wanted—truly, desperately wanted—is so central to female fantasy. It also explains why monogamy kills desire:
“Within the bounds of fidelity, the heat of being desired grew more and more remote, not just because the woman’s partner lost a level of interest, but, more centrally, because the woman felt that her partner was trapped, that a choice—the lust-impelled selection of her—was no longer being made.”
The Dark Fantasy of the Alley
One of the most uncomfortable sections of the book deals with rape fantasies. Bergner reports research by Jenny Bivona and Joseph Critelli showing that between 30 and 60 percent of women acknowledge taking pleasure in rape fantasies. The true numbers, they argue, are probably higher.
Meana created controversy by describing an emblematic scene of female lust: a woman pinned and ravished against an alley wall by someone overcome with uncontrollable desire for her.
She received hatred, was told she was “part of the machinery that puts women down,” but also received gratitude from “high-powered women” who felt they could never voice such fantasies without shame.
Chivers, too, was haunted by evidence that women’s genitals respond to rape scenarios.
She and colleagues developed a theory about prehistoric women needing to lubricate automatically as protection against injury, but Bergner notes this theory is “elaborate, precarious.”
Chivers ultimately told Bergner:
“I walk a fine line, politically and personally, talking frankly about rape. I would never, never want to deliver the message to anyone that they have the right to take away a woman’s autonomy over her own body. Arousal is not consent.”
The Monogamy Problem
Bergner introduces us to Rosemary Basson, whose circular diagram of female desire—depicting it as slow, deliberate, almost non-existent without emotional safety—was being enshrined in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual even as the evidence contradicted it.
Her model teaches that “desire follows arousal” and that partners need to create “appropriate contexts” and show “respect.”
Meanwhile, Lori Brotto, a colleague who served on the DSM committee, acknowledged the fundamental problem:
“And unless you’re talking about lifelong HSDD [hypoactive sexual desire disorder], which is rare, the impact of relationship duration is something that comes up constantly.”
Brotto confessed to Bergner: “There is an element of sadness when I think about the women I see, when I think about the couples I know, when I think about myself personally.”
Meana was blunter about the couples therapy industry:
“This is big business—the books, the workshops. You could write a book full of promises every year, and every year you could have a bestseller.”
She recalled a therapist whose patient’s wife had said that if he’d just help around the house, she’d want him in bed.
The therapist had him scouring pots and taking kids to school. But the sex didn’t follow. Meana summarized the grim joke: “We tell men to water this little bonsai of women’s desire, we tell them the bonsai has to be treated just so—and guess what?”
The book includes the story of Alison, whose husband Thomas coached youth basketball.
Her desire for him had died, replaced by a sense of being trapped, until one day she saw another mother flirting with him at a game—and suddenly, seeing him through a stranger’s eyes, her wanting reignited.
Then there’s Passie and Nelson, a couple in their late fifties who had been married for decades.
Their solution to desire’s death? They began attending clothing-optional lifestyle events at hotels, where Passie would “play with” other men and Nelson with other women. Passie told Bergner: “Nelson is my husband. I love him. He is the father of my children. When I say I love him, I mean it.”
Their story is both hopeful and unsettling—a reminder that the solutions to monogamy’s eros-killing effects might require radical departures from convention.
The Pharmaceutical Quest: A Drug for Monogamy
Bergner documents the pharmaceutical industry’s desperate search for a “female Viagra.” The market is worth over four billion dollars a year in America alone, and the primary target is clear: “the race was for a drug to cure monogamy.”
He chronicles the failures: Intrinsa and Libigel (testosterone patches and gels that couldn’t outperform placebos), Flibanserin (which didn’t do enough good to get past the FDA), and Bremelanotide (which worked spectacularly but caused severe nausea and blood pressure spikes).
Bergner also reveals something startling about the FDA approval process. Andrew Goldstein, a prominent gynecologist involved in Flibanserin’s trials, told him:
“When you’re going to the FDA with this kind of drug, there’s the sense that you want your effects to be good but not too good. There was a lot of discussion about it by the experts in the room, the need to show that you’re not turning women into nymphomaniacs. There’s a bias, a bias against—a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman. There’s this idea of societal breakdown.”
The most promising developments came from Adriaan Tuiten, a Dutch researcher who founded Emotional Brain and developed Lybrido and Lybridos.
His approach was more sophisticated than previous attempts, using genetic screening and finger-length ratios (indicators of prenatal testosterone exposure) to determine which women might benefit, and carefully timing doses of testosterone with drugs that temporarily suppress serotonin.
Bergner traces Tuiten’s obsession with timing back to a devastating personal experience: his girlfriend of many years left him, twice, and both times attributed her decision to her menstrual cycle returning after going off birth control.
Tuiten became convinced that biochemistry, not psychology, had destroyed his relationship. As Bergner writes:
“His girlfriend and her sister had got it wrong, he thought. The psychological hadn’t dictated the hormonal. Rather, biochemistry had determined the trajectory of lust and love; it had destroyed everything.”
The book ends with a study by psychologists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick that revealed something astonishing about speed dating.
When women were the ones who moved from table to table—acting as the pursuers rather than the pursued—they became just as indiscriminate in their choices as men.
When the rules were adjusted, a new reality leaped into sight.
What Do Women Want? Analysis: A Courageous, Necessary, and Deeply Uncomfortable Book
What Do Women Want? is a groundbreaking work of science journalism that accomplishes something rare: it takes the most intimate, personal questions and shows how they connect to vast cultural forces and biological realities.
The New York Times called it “a new perspective on the wilds of female desire… which will surprise many and fascinate all,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Bergner’s greatest achievement is his ability to humanize science.
He doesn’t just report findings; he takes you into the labs, shows you the researchers’ faces, lets you hear their voices, and makes you feel the weight of what they’re discovering.
When Chivers says of the barriers surrounding female sexuality, “Those barriers are a testament to the power of the drive itself. It’s a pretty incredible testament.
Because the drive must be so strong to override all of that,” you feel the force of her revelation.
The book effectively supports its arguments through multiple lines of evidence: laboratory experiments, animal studies, historical analysis, and deeply personal interviews with women. This triangulation makes the conclusions hard to dismiss.
The pattern across species—from rats to monkeys to humans—is remarkably consistent: female desire is powerful, novelty-seeking, and easily dampened by familiarity.
Bergner’s critique of evolutionary psychology is particularly devastating. He shows how easily we embrace the “science” that soothes us while ignoring the primate research that unsettles us.
As he notes, “We embraced the science that soothed us, the science we wanted to hear.”
The book also serves as a powerful feminist text, though not in the way feminism has traditionally approached sexuality. It argues that denying the wildness of female desire—insisting on women’s natural modesty, relationship-orientation, and lower libido—is itself a form of control.
As one woman told Meana, expressing gratitude for her work: “I could not say what you said without feeling shamed, as though my eroticism made me a willing participant in a patriarchal system.”
Strengths: What Makes This Book Essential Reading
1. The storytelling is masterful. Bergner doesn’t just present data; he creates scenes.
The image of Deidrah the monkey kissing Oppenheimer’s belly, of Shanti masturbating in an fMRI machine while researchers exclaim “popcorn brain,” of Passie watching the zebra-hat woman at the clothing-optional pool—these aren’t just illustrations; they’re unforgettable windows into the science.
2. The book refuses easy answers. Bergner doesn’t pretend to have solutions. He presents the evidence, lets the scientists and women speak, and allows the contradictions to stand.
Chivers’ research shows women aroused by everything; her later studies show category-specific arousal to erect penises. The complexity is the point.
3. The voices of everyday women are treated with respect and seriousness. Isabel, Rebecca, Ndulu, Wendy, Calla, Susan, Sophie, Passie—their stories are rendered with novelistic detail and deep empathy. Bergner never judges, never simplifies.
4. The critique of cultural narratives is relentless and convincing. From Victorian purity ideals to modern self-help books, from evolutionary psychology to fundamentalist Christianity, Bergner shows how the taming of female desire has been a cross-cultural project spanning millennia.
5. The science is accessible without being dumbed down. When Bergner explains dopamine, serotonin, and opioids—the “molecular embodiment of desire”—he makes the biochemistry clear but never oversimplifies.
Weaknesses: Where the Book Falls Short
1. The absence of a clear framework for understanding conflicting evidence. While Bergner presents contradictory findings (Chivers’ later study showing category-specific arousal, the debate over G-spots), he doesn’t always help readers synthesize these contradictions.
The question of how to reconcile women’s “omnivorous” arousal with their stated preferences remains unresolved.
2. The book could be seen as anti-monogamy polemic rather than balanced investigation. Bergner’s sympathies clearly lie with the view that monogamy is unnatural and damaging to female desire.
While the evidence he presents supports this, the book would be stronger if it gave more space to women who maintain desire in long-term relationships without extreme measures.
The story of Sophie and Paul, who kept their sexual connection strong through candor and mutual admiration, is the exception rather than the rule in the narrative.
3. The pharmaceutical sections, while fascinating, sometimes feel tangential. The story of Tuiten’s broken heart is compelling, but the detailed chronicle of drug development occasionally pulls focus from the book’s central thesis about female desire.
4. The historical chapter on female sexuality from antiquity to Victorianism, while valuable, feels compressed and incomplete. Bergner acknowledges the limitations: “The history of sexuality, and perhaps above all the history of women’s sexuality, is a discipline of shards.”
But the overview of 2,000-plus years in a single chapter inevitably feels rushed.
Comparison with Similar Works
What Do Women Want? sits alongside several important books in the sexology and feminist literature canon:
Emily Nagoski’s Come as You Are (2015) covers similar territory with a more self-help orientation, less investigative journalism, and greater focus on practical application.
Nagoski is more explicitly sex-positive and less polemical.
Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn (2010) similarly challenges evolutionary psychology’s standard narrative about monogamy, but focuses more on prehistoric human societies and less on female desire specifically.
Wednesday Martin’s Untrue (2018) follows directly in Bergner’s footsteps, exploring female infidelity and desire with a similar blend of science journalism and personal narrative.
Bergner’s book is distinguished by its depth of original reporting—seven years of conversations with scientists and subjects—and its literary quality. It’s not just informative; it’s absorbing.
Conclusion: Who Should Read This Book?
What Do Women Want? is essential reading for several audiences:
Women who feel broken because their desire doesn’t match the cultural script—women who’ve lost interest in their partners, who have fantasies they’re ashamed of, who wonder what’s wrong with them. This book offers not just reassurance but liberation.
Men who want to understand why their female partners’ desire has faded, and who are willing to hear uncomfortable truths rather than comfortable lies. This book won’t give you simple techniques to “fix” things, but it might help you understand what’s actually happening.
Therapists, counselors, and educators who work with couples and individuals on sexual issues. The critique of “desire follows arousal” and other therapeutic commonplaces is pointed and important.
Anyone interested in gender, feminism, or the science of human behavior. The book raises profound questions about nature, nurture, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Bergner ends the book with a hint of possibility: the speed-dating study that showed women becoming as indiscriminately desiring as men when placed in the pursuer role. Social structure matters. Culture matters.
The question hanging over everything is: what would female desire look like if we stopped constraining it? This book doesn’t answer that question, but it makes it impossible to ignore.
