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 237 Reasons Why Women Have Sex
Jed Diamond, Ph.D.

Contact: Jed@MenAlive.com Web: www.MenAlive.com

What makes a woman want to have sex? Is it physical attraction?
Love? Loneliness? Jealousy? Boredom? Painful menstrual cramps?
Are there really 237 reasons why women have sex? Could there be
more?

Many women interviewed were having sex purely because they

wanted the experience.

It turns out that woman have sex for all of these reasons and more,
and that their choices are not arbitrary; there may be evolutionary
explanations at work.

Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss, both professors at the

University of Texas at Austin, decided that the topic of "why women
have sex" deserved a book of its own. They've woven scientific
research together with a slew of women's voices in their new
collaborative work, Why Women Have Sex published September 29
by Times Books.

"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.

The authors conducted a study from June 2006 to April 2009 that
asked women whether they had ever had sex for one of 237 reasons,
all of which had emerged in a previous study. About 1,000 women
contributed their perspectives.

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.

Research findings

Purposely made partner jealous?

31 percent women vs. 17 percent men have tried to evoke jealousy in
a partner.
Had sex out of sense of duty?
84 percent wives vs. 64 percent husbands usually or always comply
when a spouse wants sex but they don't.
Partner choice for casual sex?
63 percent of women prefer to have casual sex with a friend vs. 37
percent who prefer sex with a stranger.
Steal someone else's mate?
38 percent of women say they've "poached" someone for a short
fling.

Buss said he found it surprising how dramatically and variably sexual

experience seemed to influence women's feelings of self-esteem.

"Some sexual experiences that women in our study reported just had
devastating effects and long-lasting negative effects on their feelings
of self-worth," he said. "But then for others, their sexual experiences
provided the soaring height of euphoria and made them feel alive and
vibrant."

What Thrills Women?

The first question asked is: what thrills women? Or, as the book puts
it: "Why do the faces of Antonio Banderas and George Clooney
excite so many women?"

We are, apparently, scrabbling around for what biologists call

"genetic benefits" and "resource benefits". Genetic benefits are the
genes that produce healthy children. Resource benefits are the things
that help us protect our healthy children, which is why women
sometimes like men with big houses. Jane Eyre, I think, can be read
as a love letter to a big house.
"When a woman is sexually attracted to a man because he smells
good, she doesn't know why she is sexually attracted to that man,"
says Buss. "She doesn't know that he might have a MHC gene
complex complimentary to hers, or that he smells good because he
has symmetrical features."

So Why Women Have Sex is partly a primer for decoding personal

ads. Tall, symmetrical face, cartoonish V-shaped body? As writer
Tanya Gold says of the research, “I have good genes for your brats. I
have resource benefits for your brats. I knew this already; that is how
Bill Clinton got sex, despite his astonishing resemblance to a moving
potato. It also explains why Vladimir Putin has become a sex god and
poses topless with his fishing rod.”

Why Women Marry Accountants

“Then I learn why women marry accountants,” says Gold. “It's a

trade-off. ‘Clooneyish’ men tend to be unfaithful, because men have
a different genetic agenda from women – they want to impregnate
lots of healthy women.” Meston and Buss call them "risk-taking,
womanizing “bad boys”. So, women might use sex to bag a less
dazzling but more faithful mate. He will have fewer genetic benefits
but more resource benefits that he will make available, because he
will not run away. This explains why women marry accountants.
Accountants stick around – and sometimes they have tiny little feet!

And so to the main reason women have sex. The idol of "women do it
for love, and men for joy" lies broken on the rug like a mutilated sex
toy: it's orgasm, orgasm, orgasm. "A lot of women in our studies said
they just wanted sex for the pure physical pleasure," Meston says.
Meston and Buss garnish this revelation with so much amazing detail
that I am distracted. I can't concentrate. Did you know that the World
Health Organisation has a Women's Orgasm Committee? That "the
G-spot" is named after the German physician Ernst Gräfenberg? That
there are 26 definitions of orgasm?

Women and Love

And so, to the second most important reason why women have sex –
love. "Romantic love," Meston and Buss write, "is the topic of more
than 1,000 songs sold on iTunes." And, if people don't have love,
terrible things can happen, in literature and life: "Cleopatra poisoned
herself with a snake and Ophelia went mad and drowned." Women
say they use sex to express love and to get it, and to try to keep it.

Love: an insurance policy

And what is love? Love is apparently a form of "long-term

commitment insurance" that ensures your mate is less likely to leave
you, should your legs fall off or your ovaries fall out. Take that,
Danielle Steele – you may think you live in 2009 but your genes are
still in the stone age, with only chest hair between you and a bloody
death. We also get data which confirms that, due to the chemicals
your brain produces – dopamine, norepinephrine and
phenylethylamine – you are, when you are in love, technically what I
have always suspected you to be – mad as Stalin.

Meston said some 20-somethings defied the gender stereotypes that

women should be more chaste than men and not sleep around as
much.

"Many of the women were having sex purely because they wanted
the experience, they wanted the adventure, they wanted to see what
it was like to be with men of different ethnicities," she said. "Some
women said they wanted more notches on the belt. They simply
wanted to get rid of their virginity."

Some women have sex to make money, and not just in the
conventional manner of prostitution. A woman from California who
goes by "Natalie Dylan" garnered national attention this year with her
campaign to sell her virginity and said in January that her top bid of
$3.8 million came from a 39-year-old Australian.

There are more factors that influence a woman's sex drive than a
man's, the authors said, and the factors that make men attractive to
women -- personality, sense of humor, self-confidence, status -- are
less important considerations for men when they are choosing
women.

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.

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.

In this context, women must also be more selective, because wrong

choices can lead much higher costs than for men: pregnancy and
child-rearing.

In studies, women have consistently shown preferences for men with

symmetrical bodies, a subtle mark of genetic fitness and status, the
book said. In fact, simply by smelling T-shirts that men had worn for
two nights, women judged the odors of symmetrical men to be the
most attractive, and the asymmetrical men's odors the least
attractive, in one study.

Still, symmetry isn't everything, Meston and Buss said. They pointed
to singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett as someone with other positive
attributes, such as musical talent and personality, who has clearly
done well with women despite asymmetrical features.

"Women are evaluating men on multiple attributes," Buss said.

Kissing also turns out to be more important for women than for men
in some respects: In one study, 53 percent of men said they would
have sex without kissing, but only 15 percent of women said they
would even consider sex without smooching first, the book said. For
women, kissing is "an emotional litmus test," the authors wrote.
The medicinal value of sex also comes into play for some women, the
book said. Sex can help a woman relax and sleep better, and it can
ease the pain of menstrual cramps and headaches -- and some
survey participants cited these as reasons they've had sex.

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women

were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain. Though Meston has not
studied the phenomenon in men, she said she would expect sex to
have the same effects of reducing headaches and other pain.

The authors collected stories from 1,006 women from 46 states, eight
Canadian provinces, three European countries and Australia, New
Zealand, Israel and China. Participants came from a variety of ethnic
and religious -- as well as non-religious -- backgrounds and
socioeconomic statuses. About 80 percent of the women said they
were in a relationship at the time, and 93 percent said they were
predominantly or exclusively heterosexual.

The book also explores how women's perception of sex may change
over time, according to whom they're with and whether they are
married.

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."

For more information on the book Why Women Have Sex and the
work of Dr. David Buss and Cindy Meston, go to:

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/

Article information from Tanya Gold, The Guardian

Posted on September 29, 2009, Printed on October 2, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142952/

Also, By Elizabeth Landau

CNN, September 30, 2009

Contact: Jed@MenAlive.com Web: www.MenAlive.com