Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivation from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
by Cindy Meston & David Buss

* Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When clinical psychologist Cindy Meston and evolutionary psychologist David Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them.* Through the voices of real women, Meston and Buss reveal the motivations that guide women's sexual decisions and explain the deep-seated psychology and biology that often unwittingly drive women's desires sometimes in pursuit of health or pleasure, or sometimes for darker, disturbing reasons that a woman may not fully recognize. * 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, Why Women Have Sex uncovers an amazingly complex and nuanced portrait of female sexuality. They delve into the use of sex as a defensive tactic against a mate's infidelity (protection), as a ploy to boost self-confidence (status), as a barter for gifts or household chores (resource acquisition), or as a cure for a migraine headache (medication).* Why Women Have Sex stands as the richest and deepest psychological understanding of female sexuality yet achieved and promises to inform every woman's (and her partner's) awareness of her relationship to sex and her sexuality.

Reviews

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.
 (Mary Roach, author of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex)

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.
 (Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness)

The most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled.
John Tierney (The New York Times)