New Book: “Why Women Have Sex”

By Amanda Pendolino on September 30th, 2009

Damn it, I was totally going to write the chick lit version of this book. According to CNN, Why Women Have Sex by psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss hit shelves yesterday, exploring all the reasons that women jump in the sack. Some of the winners: Physical attraction, love, duty, loneliness, jealousy, boredom, an ego boost and even killer cramps. And then of course there’s money, like in the case of Natalie Dylan, who famously auctioned off her virginity earlier this year.

The authors have combined scientific research together with real women’s voices in the book, including a study conducted from June 2006 to April 2009 that asked women whether they had ever had sex for one of 237 reasons. About 1,000 women contributed their perspectives.

“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.

Buss was surprised at the dramatic and varied effects that sex has on 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.”

Of course, we all know that Why Men Have Sex could fit on a flashcard: Because they feel like having sex.