Why do women have sex?
As a man, I can honestly answer that the reasons why women have sex are not as important to me as is the agreeable fact that they do, but to Prof. Cindy Meston, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas, the answer to that question was a huge gap in her area of study.
Meston, who completed her BA, MA and PhD at UBC, has spent her entire career studying human sexuality. The when, where and how of sex had been catalogued exhaustively, most famously in the Kinsey reports on human sexual behaviour. But of people’s motivations to have sex, Meston knew little.
She approached a colleague, Prof. David Buss, an expert in evolutionary psychology, and suggested they do a clinical study. They interviewed women on their reasons for having sex, and the paper they published in a scientific journal caused a furore.
"The media went wild," Meston said, "and people wanted to know a lot more."
Their study was featured in a cover story of The New York Times Magazine. They had so many requests for interviews that a book was the next logical step.
They did a more comprehensive two-year study, interviewing more a thousand women, and the result, released last month, was Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between). It is a bestseller in the U.S., and Meston has been on Dr. Phil and Rachael Ray to talk about it (and was about to sit down for an interview with CBS after we had finished talking).
She and Buss, she said, had identified 237 different reasons why women had sex.
"We certainly believed there would be a diverse number of reasons for sexual motivation, but it was even more diverse than we expected. These reasons ranged from the very altruistic, specifically because you wanted to make your partner feel good; to the mundane, where women said they had sex because they were bored; or to the medicinal, where they said they had sex to get rid of a headache or back pain or menstrual cramps, or to keep warm, or to lose weight, or to get exercise; to the kind of more vengeful reasons.
"There was lots of revenge sex to get back at their partner, by having sex with their [partner's] best friend, for example." (An extreme example of revenge sex: Women who told Meston they had sex to pass on a sexually transmitted disease to a man they felt had wronged them.)
"There were women who had sex for adventure, or for competition, where groups of women would pick out the best-looking guy at bar or the most desirable guy, and they would compete to see who could get him in bed."
(I hate that when that happens to me. I feel so used.)
There were women who had sex out of duty, just to get it over with, and women who had sex to "mate-poach" — that is, to hook someone else’s fish out of the genetic pool. Some had sex as a form of "mate-guarding" — agreeing to sex so their partner wouldn’t go looking elsewhere. A surprising number of women admitted to having sex as barter . . . for drugs, wealth, a job, even dinner.
Some women, presumably because prayer didn’t quite do it for them, told Meston they had sex to get closer to God. Some told her they did it out of loneliness — which energized some women, Meston said, while making others only lonelier. Some women said they wanted sex "to have another notch on their belt," she said, a reason that contradicted the gender stereotype of women investing more emotional currency in sex than men.
Some had sex to get over a man.
"One women told me the best way to get over a guy was to get under another one."
The number one reason that led to sex was physical attraction, Meston said, but the biggest motivation for doing it, she said, was pleasure.
I
n other words, Meston was saying, women, in this regard, were just like men.
So, I asked, did she think men knew instinctively why women wanted sex?
On the other end of the phone, there was the sound of laughing.
- Pete McMartin, CanWest News Service, TheProvince.com
Source: http://www.theprovince.com/life/different+reasons+women+have/2158608/story.html?cid=megadrop_story
