Why women have sex.

Because, dude, have you ever tried it? It's, like, amazing.

It's difficult to expand that to book-length, though, so instead we get this kind of bloviation.

"We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women's sexual psychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak," said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.
No, I think you wanted to focus on women because:

A) The reader is assumed to be either a heterosexual man interested in unlocking the secrets to those mysterious creatures, or a functionally asexual woman interested in navel-gazing pop-psych

and

B) It goes without saying that all men need is a warm hole and thirty seconds, right? There's no need to do any research to confirm something that's obvious, duhh.

(I'm fascinated by how many men I know who've told me this, then gone into months-long girlfriend dramas where they expressed very subtle gradations of "I'm still attracted to her, right, but it's a different kind of attracted and there's someone new in my life now and I don't know if I would just hurt her at this point..." So much for warm holes.)

It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.
Humans engage in an incredibly common but societally meaningful activity for multiple reasons, stop the presses.

I'm going to write a book, "Why Women Have Lunch." Hunger is the obvious reason, but as my highly scientific survey reveals, women may also have lunch to socialize, to take a break from work, or even simply out of habit. Some women want the opportunity to try a new food, and others may want warm food on a cold day. Wow, women sure are complicated!

There is also evidence that sexual arousal is more complicated for women than for men, the authors report.
A study from Meston's lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man's penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman's physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don't work as well in women, the authors said.
It's a two-way street, though; the man can see his wiener and go "oh, I guess I'm turned on now," whereas it's harder for a woman to know exactly how her vagina's reading to a photoplesmograph or however they're measuring it.

And Viagra doesn't work in women not because they're nebulously "complicated," but because they don't have wieners. I'm pretty sure you can have a raging little clitoral erection and still not be ready for sex if the rest of your system isn't up for it. It's analogous to saying "application of lubricant to the penis failed to ready the man for sex--men sure are complicated!"

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though men and women may not consciously think about their choices that way, the authors said. If the goal of a man is to spread his genes, he would need to look for signs of fertility in a woman, which are historically associated with physical cues, Buss said.
"The adaptive problem that women have had to solve is not simply picking a man who is fertile but a man who perhaps will invest in her, a man who won't inflict costs on her, a man who might have good genes that could be conveyed to her children," he said.
Oh God, "evolutionary psychology," my favorite fucking thing ever. My question this time around is, why is it subtle? Why would something so key to our fitness be subconscious? When I have a basic survival need--when I'm thirsty or cold or have an injury--I know it. The evolved desires for things like shelter and companionship are anything but subtle. Why would mate selection be the only one that's a wacky subliminal drive hidden even from ourselves?

And it's not like I select mates at seeming random and don't know why I felt that way until some smarty-pants psychologist comes and tells me. I like men who are intelligent, respectful, physically strong, have high sex drives, and share my geeky/kinky subculture--is there any mystery there? These are attributes that make them a better partner, not necessarily a better sperm-donor/investor, and I'm quite consciously aware of that.

(There are also some arbitrary ones, like my tendency to fall for blond guys or for Native American guys, but I don't see what these have to do with fertility or fatherhood either. More likely they're based on past experiences with men who were intelligent/etc. and also happened to look like that.)

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain.
I would've loved to be a participant in that study. (Which makes me wonder about self-selection of subjects, actually.)

A 26-year-old heterosexual woman wrote, "When I was single, I had sex for my own personal pleasure. Now that I am married, I have sex to please my husband. My own pleasure doesn't seem as important as his. I believe he feels the same way."
By "the same way," does she mean "the corresponding way," that he in turn values her pleasure more, or literally the same way, that they're both just doing it to get him off? Because the one doesn't fit the "women are so cooooomplicated" paradigm, and the other is a serious problem and shouldn't be looked at as the normal way of the world.



I'm sort of interested in buying this book, but I think it lacks context without a matched set, so I'll wait until "Why Men Have Sex" comes out. Should be soon, right?