Author Daniel Berger reveals surprising findings on women’s sexuality in ‘What Do Women Want?’ - NYPOST.com
It’s everything you wanted to know about sex but didn’t know to ask.
In the new book “What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire” (Ecco), author Daniel Bergner upends long-standing myths about women and sex — everything from the nature of attraction and pursuit to the prevalence of taboo fantasies to monogamy itself.
“Women are supposed to be the standard’s more natural allies, caretakers, defenders,” Bergner writes, “their sexual beings more suited, biologically, to faithfulness.”
The long-standing thinking holds that men are more promiscuous by nature because they’re biologically programmed to spread their seed, while the risks of pregnancy and child-rearing cause women to be more selective.
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“We hold tight to the fairy tale,” he writes. “We hold on with the help of evolutionary psychology, a discipline whose central sexual theory comparing women and men — a theory that is thinly supported — permeates our consciousness and calms our fears.”
It’s telling that, in our post-“50 Shades of Grey” era, some of these findings surprised even the field’s leading researchers. Here are some of the most unexpected ones:
Domination
The results of 10 separate studies so rattled sexologist Marta Meana that she was initially hesitant to talk about them: Between 30 and 60 percent of women reported frequently having what’s been termed “rape fantasies,” and many of the women who described their own daydreams were also disturbed. “If I truly believed in women’s equality with men,” said one, “then I’d have to have sex and imagine sex that reflected that — no domination, no rape fantasies. One result was that I married a nice liberal man who shared my convictions on how sex should be. Seven years later we divorced.”
Most experts believe that the number of women who have so-called rape fantasies is actually much higher, but the notion and nomenclature is so taboo few are willing to admit to it. One theory holds that the fantasies actually dial into female narcissism, the notion that one is so unbelievably desirable that a man — whether a professor or family friend or stranger — is so overcome with longing that he loses control. After Meana’s findings were reported in a magazine, she was deluged with e-mails from women, some accusing her of promoting and excusing rape, others expressing gratitude for finally breaking the discussion open. She was booked on “Oprah” and was relieved to see a wholesome, middle-aged woman talking about her own version of the fantasy.
“There were lots of messages from high-powered women thanking me for allowing a discussion of elements of sexuality that don’t fall neatly into an ideological box,” Meana says in the book. “One woman, in the art world in New York, told me, ‘I could not say what you said without feeling shamed, as though my eroticism made me a willing participant in a patriarchal system.’ ”