Book of the week: What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner

(Ecco, $26)

Warning: The research that this book lays out “threatens to disrupt all the modern stereotypes of female sexuality,” said Amanda Hess in Slate.com. No matter how much power women wield today in public life, in the bedroom they’re still presumed to want sex less than men do, to be far more inclined to monogamy, and to value emotional connection more than physical pleasure. But in a “fascinating survey” that mines cultural history, evolutionary psychology, and current sex research, journalist Daniel Bergner has reduced those ideas to rubble. A woman’s sex drive is limited not by biology, he tells us, but by social taboos.

What Do Women Want? “will surely be one of the summer’s hottest reads,” said Lizzie Crocker in TheDailyBeast.com. Bergner’s close study of female sexuality can at times be “more than a little voyeuristic,” but his research proves compelling. Female rhesus monkeys, we learn, often assume the role of sexual aggressors. Female rats not only mount males when they’re impatient but also seek clitoral stimulation from researchers studying them. Females of our own species generally deny being so lusty, but studies suggest they’re dissembling. One university researcher had heterosexual women view a variety of pornographic video clips while wearing sensors that measured genital arousal. Though participants generally denied being turned on by images of gay sex, bonobo sex, and sex between strangers, the sensors showed otherwise. And Bergner “seems to be on to something when he comes to the conclusion that women crave sexual novelty—and that they struggle with monogamy just as much as their male counterparts.”

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But in trying to address big questions, Bergner focuses too narrowly on biology, said Virginia Vitzthum in Elle. He thinks that primal urges should determine what women want, forgetting that psychology and culture inevitably shape desire. And are we women really “on board with the idea, which Bergner unmistakably implies, that to have more ‘masculine’ sex is progress—that we’ll be happier if we all embrace stranger-sex and exult in the hunt?” In the real world of relationships, such “expert’’ opinion is not very useful. After all, it’s absurd to think there could be a single answer to the question “What do women want?” Merely asking it distracts “from the only two questions that really matter in sex: ‘What do I want, and what do you want?’”