What Do Women Want

What if everything you’ve been told about women’s desire—its quietness, its tenderness, its dependence on romance—was wrong? In What Do Women Want?, journalist Daniel Bergner takes you into labs, clinics, and the private lives of women to uncover a truth that unsettles conventional wisdom: women’s sexuality is far stronger, more restless, and sometimes more aggressive than culture dares to admit. It’s not defined by safety or emotional connection alone; it’s driven by curiosity, visual stimuli, and hunger for novelty and being desired.

Bergner’s reporting lives at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and intimate storytelling. The scientists he follows — Meredith Chivers, Marta Meana, Kim Wallen, Jim Pfaus, and others — have spent their careers measuring and mapping lust in monkeys, humans, and even brain scans. Their findings reveal that female arousal doesn’t align neatly with love or emotional safety. It can surge in response to forbidden, unfamiliar, or even disturbing scenes. Alongside these studies, Bergner weaves stories of real women—Isabel, Ndulu, Wendy, Alison, and others—each grappling with the mysteries of their own desire, from failing marriages to the fantasies that both empower and disturb them.

Breaking the Myths of Modesty

Through kinetic writing and conversations with daring scientists, Bergner dismantles the myth that women are innately modest, relational creatures. Researcher Meredith Chivers, for instance, uses a vaginal plethysmograph—a tube that measures blood flow in the vagina—to uncover that women’s bodies respond to everything from heterosexual and lesbian porn to coupling among bonobos, even when their minds insist otherwise. The contradiction between what women say and what their bodies reveal throws into question whether our cultural definition of femininity has suppressed an older, animal instinct for lust and variety.

This unseen arousal pattern stands against the long history of evolutionary psychology that claims women value emotional bonds while men crave sex. Bergner asks: if our science says the opposite, why do we cling so tightly to that comfortable narrative? (As he notes, Victorian ideas of female purity still echo in modern evolutionary theories, which often mistake social repression for biological nature.)

The Scientists Rewriting Desire

The book follows several researchers, each exploring desire from a unique angle. Chivers focuses on physiological truths, challenging assumptions about women’s passivity. Kim Wallen observes rhesus monkeys and finds that females—once thought passive—initiate sex, control its rhythm, and seek new partners more eagerly than males. Jim Pfaus looks inside rodent brains to trace the chemistry of dopamine, serotonin, and opioids, revealing that lust and love run through primal circuits shared across species. And Marta Meana, a psychologist in Las Vegas, argues that at the heart of women’s desire lies not empathy or safety but narcissism—a yearning to be wanted, to feel the gaze of another ignite one’s own.

This science exposes erotic contradictions that defy any easy moral category. Female lust can be tender or violent, self-directed or submissive, caring or carnal. It is about power and being seen as much as about connection. Bergner’s interviews make clear that when women are freed from judgment, fantasy often veers toward intensity: domination, multiple partners, stranger sex, even scenarios of danger. What frightens society most—female aggression and appetite—turns out to be deeply human.

Love, Monogamy, and the Trouble of Safety

Throughout the book, Bergner returns to one central tension: how desire behaves inside long-term love. Clinical psychologist Rosemary Basson claims that women’s libido builds slowly through affection and safety—the hopeful model that dominates therapeutic culture today. Yet, as Bergner shows through both data and women’s lives, the opposite often holds true. Safety can strangle lust. Emotional merging, far from amplifying attraction, can extinguish the spark that distance and surprise sustain. Real women like Alison or Isabel find themselves devoted to kind, loving men yet haunted by the vivid energy of desire that once pulsed for someone else.

This isn’t cynicism—it’s realism about human eroticism. For a species that evolved on novelty, the familiarity of love may paradoxically breed monotony. When Bergner describes female monkeys who change mates every few years, or couples who schedule “sex nights” to sustain intimacy, he paints a biological and cultural paradox: monogamy stabilizes life but weakens lust.

Science, Culture, and the Refusal to Look Away

At heart, Bergner’s book is a cultural investigation—why have we feared female sexuality for centuries, and what happens when science exposes that fear as projection? Western history, from Eve to Freud to Victorian morality, has made women’s desire suspect or secondary. Sexologists like Chivers and Meana face backlash because they peer into what society would rather leave shadowed. Even today, female scientists studying arousal meet ridicule and funding shortages, a modern echo of old puritan anxieties.

Through surprising cross-species parallels, bold clinical insights, and intimate confessions, Bergner invites you to see desire not as gendered decency but as a primal force—one we distort at great cost. The science suggests that women’s lust, when stripped of taboo, is as varied and volatile as men’s—if not more so. What do women want? Not what centuries of polite society have told you, he argues, but everything.

Meredith Chivers’s lab at Queen’s University is ground zero for the paradox of female arousal. She uses a vaginal plethysmograph—a small, light-sensitive device—to measure blood flow and detect what women’s bodies do when their minds might deny it. Her studies show that women’s genitals swell in response to nearly all sexual stimuli: heterosexual, homosexual, and even animal sex. Yet when asked how aroused they felt, most women reported indifference. This clash between physiology and consciousness revealed something revolutionary: women’s desire is far less categorical than men’s and far more mysterious to itself.

The Body Doesn't Lie

While men’s physiological responses map neatly to their sexual orientation, women’s do not. Chivers found that heterosexual women’s pulse amplitude rose almost as much during lesbian porn as during straight porn, and sometimes even during gay male scenes. Meanwhile, lesbian participants also responded to a broad range of stimuli. The conclusion was unsettling: women’s bodies are wired to experience arousal beyond conscious preference or identity. Social conditioning and self-censorship may dampen awareness, but deep inside the body, desire fires indiscriminately.

Culture's Muffled Libido

When psychologist Terri Fisher tested honesty about sexual behavior, she found an equally strong distortion. Women underreported masturbation and number of partners unless hooked up to a fake lie detector; when they believed they couldn’t hide, their responses matched men’s. This suggests that women consciously suppress recognition of their own lust—not because of biology but because of cultural punishment. (Simone de Beauvoir, too, wrote that femininity often means learning to distrust one’s own body.) Together, these experiments hint that repression, not nature, quieted women’s sexual self-expression.

When Science Meets Story

Bergner complements the lab with vivid personal accounts like Rebecca’s: a divorced music teacher who hires a female escort to fulfill a long-repressed fantasy of sleeping with a woman. Her experience mirrors Chivers’s findings—curiosity, arousal, and variety surge despite social morals or labels. Rebecca calls it “the pregnancy of wanting,” a radiant metaphor for how easily desire can be gestated and awakened by new stimuli. Her words echo the biological evidence: female arousal is omnivorous, always ready to expand.

Chivers and Fisher’s research cracked the polite façade of female modesty. It forced psychology to confront the possibility that women are not less sexual than men but less permitted. Their work, controversial even today, reframes the question from “What awakens desire?” to “What muzzles it?”—a question that underlies every story in Bergner’s book.

To understand whether culture or nature muffles female desire, Bergner turns to the animal kingdom. At Emory University, psychologist Kim Wallen watches rhesus monkeys and finds a surprise: the females—not the males—are the sexual aggressors. During ovulation, they stalk and mount males, control the pacing of sex, and switch partners frequently. Female rhesus behavior shatters centuries of scientific bias that assumed males drive mating. In fact, when reproduction is observed in natural environments (not confined cages), female initiative dominates.

When Females Take the Lead

Deidrah, one of Wallen’s test monkeys, exemplifies this rebellion. She kisses, taps, and pursues Oppenheimer, her partner, until sex occurs. When he naps post-orgasm, she moves on to another. This pursuit isn’t about reproduction; it’s about pleasure and novelty. Similar dynamics exist among langurs, capuchins, and bonobos, where females initiate and vary partners to enhance reproductive success and pleasure. Evolution, it seems, never wrote modesty into the female manual—it was culture that did.

Wallen noticed that when females were caged in tight spaces, scientists once took male dominance at face value. But in natural social structures, female agency reigns. The problem wasn’t biology—it was a narrowing of perspective. (In a sense, early evolutionary psychology repeated the same blindness.)

The Neuroscience of Pleasure

Jim Pfaus, a neurobiologist studying rats, picks up where Wallen leaves off. He reveals that even rodent females exhibit complex erotic agency. Female rats initiate, control pacing, and escape briefly during copulation to increase pleasure—behaviors that optimize conception through extended stimulation. In other words, sex feels good because it sustains the species. Pfaus maps this process deep in the brain: dopamine fuels desire, serotonin tempers impulse, and opioids deliver climaxing bliss. The balance between these substances determines the rhythm between craving and satisfaction.

Flooding the female brain with serotonin (as happens with antidepressants) dampens dopamine’s thrill, reducing sexual motivation—a phenomenon human women often report. Conversely, stimulating the dopamine system amplifies wanting, sometimes dangerously. These biological patterns underpin the paradox Bergner traces: society suppresses what biology designed to be vivid, varied, and unruly.

By blending ethology and neuroscience, Bergner argues that female desire isn’t a quiet accompaniment to men’s lust—it’s the original symphony. In rhesus monkeys, rats, and humans alike, the libido is powerfully self-directed, exploratory, and pleasure-driven. When you see that, moral traditions about purity or passive modesty start to look less like science and more like fear.

Psychologist Marta Meana adds a psychologically daring perspective: the core of women’s desire is narcissism—not selfishness, but the deep need to feel desired. Watching a Cirque du Soleil performance full of lush female bodies, she notes that women in the audience respond erotically to the women on stage because they imagine themselves as the desired. “Being desired,” she says, “is the orgasm.” Desire is less about connection and more about reflection—seeing oneself as irresistible in another’s eyes.

The Case of Isabel

Meana’s theory comes alive through Isabel, a Manhattan lawyer torn between two men. With Eric, a kind, devoted partner, sexual spark fades into comfort. With her ex, Michael—a commanding older man—lust burns because she feels displayed, possessed, and powerfully seen. Dressing for him is both degradation and empowerment. Under his gaze, her body feels sculpted to form. The craving isn’t just physical; it’s existential—the desire to be an object of uncontrollable wanting. With Eric, she’s safe but invisible. With Michael, she’s dangerous but alive.

Desire in the Gaze

In Meana’s lab, women’s eyes confirm this dynamic. Using eye-tracking devices, she shows that female subjects look equally at men’s faces and women’s bodies during erotic scenes. They’re drawn to signs of male desire and to the women who provoke it. Female arousal stems from identifying with both—the desiring subject and the desired object. This dual pull explains why empathy alone doesn’t create passion. As Meana notes, a partner who gently asks “Is this okay?” may express love, but the lack of hunger kills erotic charge. Desire, paradoxically, feeds on distance and risk, not safety.

Meana’s interpretation—rooted in Freud and Melanie Klein’s ideas of infant attachment—anchors female sexuality in the earliest experience of being adored by the mother, then desiring that adoration back. This interplay of seeing and being seen later reignites in erotic life. To be wanted is to momentarily recreate that primal flood of significance. Meana’s insight reframes lust as both vulnerable and self-exalting—a mirror where identity and desire blur.

Some of the book’s most striking pages explore what’s long been taboo: the prevalence of women’s fantasies of force, domination, and transgression. In Chapter Six, “The Alley,” Bergner compiles confessions from dozens of women—lawyers, artists, mothers—who admit to dreaming of being overpowered, ravished, or watched. Researchers Jenny Bivona and Joseph Critelli found that 30–60% of women report such imaginings. These scenarios, disturbing yet frequent, reveal how fantasy unlocks desire’s paradoxes rather than reproduces literal violence.

Why the Forbidden Excites

There are several explanations. One is psychological release: in fantasy, guilt is lifted. Sex becomes something done to you, not by you, allowing pleasure without blame. Another is neurochemical—fear overlaps with arousal. Experiments by psychologist Cindy Meston show that thrills raise adrenaline, which heightens attraction; terror and lust share circuitry. And for some, the erotic appeal lies in what Meana calls “the alley”—the feeling of being wanted so desperately that a lover breaks every restraint. Fantasy fabricates danger to feel irreplaceable, to be devoured by need.

Power Across Lines of Race and Shame

In one of Bergner’s most haunting portraits, a woman named Ndulu imagines violent scenarios with white men—fantasies both erotic and painful, shaped by a lifetime of colorism and beauty hierarchies. Growing up in West Africa and Europe, she internalized that whiteness equaled desirability. Her erotic imagination becomes a battlefield where domination and worth intertwine. After a charged encounter with a waiter, her fantasy consumes her—proof that desire often grows from the very wounds society inflicts.

Meana resists the term “rape fantasy,” preferring “fantasy of surrender,” since in imagination, control still belongs to the dreamer. But critics accused her of promoting misogyny. Meana and Chivers stood firm: fantasy is not consent, and desire is not morality. As Chivers says, “arousal is not agreement.” The power of these scenes lies in their safety—the ability to flirt with danger without living it.

By uncovering such hidden territory, Bergner normalizes the complexity of female imagination. Desire, he suggests, is not politically correct—it’s primal, layered with fear and glory. Rejecting these fantasies doesn’t protect women; understanding them might.

If single women battle repression, married women battle monotony. In Chapter Seven, “Monogamy,” Bergner questions whether long-term relationships can coexist with lust. Psychiatrist Rosemary Basson draws a circular model of female arousal, proposing that desire grows from emotional closeness rather than spontaneous passion. Her diagram—soon codified into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—recasts lust as secondary, even optional. For many therapists, this model legitimizes diminished passion as normal female functioning.

The Circle vs. the Spark

Basson’s model comforts couples by saying: “Desire follows arousal.” You don’t have to want sex first; you just need to start and hope feelings catch up. Yet for clinicians like Lori Brotto, who lead mindfulness-based therapies, and for the women in Bergner’s stories, the reality is more sorrowful. Many long-term couples rekindle sex through duty but cannot revive spontaneous hunger. As Marta Meana bluntly puts it, intimacy may strengthen love but suffocates lust. Eros, she says, “needs distance to breathe.”

When Familiarity Replaces Fire

Women like Susan and Alison embody this tragedy. They love their husbands deeply yet recoil from touch. Emotional safety, once a foundation, becomes constriction. Like Meana’s couples counseling mantra—“Why should your partner desire you?”—Bergner invites us to see that eroticism thrives on difference, not dependence. One must feel like an other—separate enough to desire and be desired.

Evolutionary biologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy adds another layer: in nature, female promiscuity evolved to protect offspring and diversify genetics. Monogamy, by contrast, cages that instinct. Desire fades not because women are broken, but because they’re constrained by a system that demands constancy over curiosity. Bergner’s portraits of polyamorous lesbians and long-married swingers portray adults quietly rebelling against a structure biology never promised would work. The question shifts from “How to fix low desire?” to “Why should lust stay faithful when life demands it not?”

Late in the book, Bergner chronicles pharmaceutical quests to rekindle women’s libido—testosterone gels like Libigel, serotonin modulators like Flibanserin, and complex hybrids like Lybrido and Lybridos. These pills promise to treat “female sexual dysfunction,” but they reveal deeper anxieties: a culture that pathologizes fading desire while misunderstanding its roots. Gynecologist Andrew Goldstein calls it “the race to cure monogamy.”

When Biology Meets Love

The drugs target neurotransmitters—dopamine for desire, serotonin for restraint—but they can’t simulate what truly fuels longing: novelty, narcissistic recognition, and psychological freedom. Patients like Wendy, a bright, self-aware professional, join clinical trials hoping to “get my freak back.” Yet even when their bodies respond, their relationships often do not. The chemistry of attraction, Bergner shows, can’t be bottled without addressing the emotional architecture that sustains it.

Researcher Adriaan Tuiten’s story is especially poignant. His obsession with the hormonal roots of desire began after losing his long-term lover—her period, and love for him, returned the moment she left. Driven by heartbreak, he invents Lybrido, which combines testosterone with a serotonin-moderating antidepressant to mimic the biochemistry of new romance. But the question lingers: should medicine restore desire, or should society learn to live honestly with its flux?

As Bergner concludes, the real malady isn’t chemical deficiency—it’s our discomfort with transience, change, and the erotic self that grows restless within routine. Pills may raise dopamine, but only curiosity and courage can revive lust’s imaginative spark.

The book ends with a deceptively simple experiment on speed dating by psychologists Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick. Normally, men rotate while women wait—a chivalric norm embedded even in modern rituals. But when researchers reversed the rule and had women rotate, everything changed: women’s selectiveness dropped, and their expressed desire matched men’s. Merely switching social roles altered lust’s behavior. The conclusion was radical—female desire isn’t naturally passive; it’s situationally suppressed.

A Mirror to Evolution

In this brief, luminous coda, Bergner circles back to where he began—with female rhesus monkeys who approach and pursue males. When social structure allows women to move first, instinct resurfaces. The implication is not moral but liberating: what we call “male pursuit” may only be habit, not heritage. Cultural scripts, not chromosomes, have long choreographed courtship.

Bergner closes by reminding us that science, for all its precision, serves imagination. To ask, “What do women want?” is not to find one answer but to honor the unpredictable, wild variety of desire. When women rotate, when they speak, when they look without apology—lust changes shape. And perhaps that is the book’s ultimate revelation: the most revolutionary thing a woman can do with her desire is to act on it first.