Why Women Have Sex

Why do women have sex? Is it purely for pleasure or the desire to reproduce? In their ground-breaking book, clinical psychologist Cindy Meston and evolutionary psychologist David Buss investigate the underlying sexual desires of women and identify 237 distinct motivations for sex. Drawing on more than a thousand intensive interviews conducted solely for the book, as well as their pioneering research on physiological response and evolutionary emotions, Meston and Buss give us a remarkably complex and nuanced portrait of female sexuality. They explore the use of sex as a defensive tactic against a man's infidelity (protection), as a ploy to boost self-confidence (status), as a barter for gifts (resource acquisition), or even as a cure for a headache (medication).Why Women Have Sex explores the deep-seated psychology and biology of female sexuality, and promises to inform every woman's - and her partner's - awareness of her relationship to sex and her own sexuality.

The most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled, A fascinating and often extraordinary exploration of the psychology and biology of sexual behaviour, A readable, brutal analysis of how your brain chooses partners for you, Why Women Have Sex is a fascinating tour of what psychology and biology can tell us about women's sexual motivation. Meston and Buss are first-rate scientists and skilled writers who actually answer the question that everyone was afraid to ask, Why Women Have Sex is an endlessly well informed and irresistibly readable book...the most fascinating and illuminating look at female sexuality since Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female

Cindy Meston is one of the world's leading researchers on women's sexuality and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory. David Buss, one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of several books, including The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion.