Reddit reviews Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivation from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)

PART 2/2 - FINAL

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Finally,

Why Women Have Sex

>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.

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Citing this research, Mark Manson explains this phenomena in his book Models:

>A vivid experience drove this unpredictability home for me a few years ago. I was in a club in Boston approaching a number of women. At the beginning of the night I approached a group of girls who were not very impressed by me. So I stepped up my jokes to try to elicit more of an emotional response out of them. It worked. One of them looked me dead in the eye and said, “You are the creepiest guy in here. Give it up.”
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>Ouch.
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>Not an hour later I was talking to another group of girls in another part of the club. They were enrapt by some story I was telling, laughing at my jokes, beaming smiles. One of the girls took me by the arm and said, “You are the hottest guy, you know you could have any girl in here, right?”
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>Same club. Same night. Same guy. Same sense of humor. Same stories. And chances are, similar girls. Completely opposite responses.

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>The first difficulty in understanding female sexual attraction is that women can become attracted and aroused both physically and/or psychologically. This split between physical and psychological arousal is unique to women as men are sexually aroused and stimulated primarily physically. This split in sources of arousal makes it hard to perform controlled experiments and therefore test different factors that may influence how a woman feels.
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>For instance, you may be able to show 200 women pictures of big burly men and ask them how attracted they are to them. But you aren’t able to control their predisposed belief about physically powerful men, the extent of their desire to be dominated, the sexual mores in which they were raised, their sexual histories with burly men, their emotional states at that very moment, their ovulation cycles, when the last time they had sex was, whether they just had a fight with their boyfriend, etc. And even if you were able to control such things, they’re so fluid and subjective that you can’t measure them.

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>In one experiment, a researcher measured bio-readings of blood flow in women’s vaginas as they watched various film clips. During the film clips, the women were asked to indicate how sexually aroused they were by the clip. Not only did the bio-readings return no discernible patterns of arousal across the film clips (everything from conventional porn, to kink films, to male-on-male homosexual sex, to innocuous nature clips to films of chimpanzees mating), but also the women themselves were often oblivious to their own arousal levels. For example, straight women often completely misjudged their arousal by homosexual sex, and homosexual women were unaware of their arousal by straight sex. And that’s not even to mention the chimps mating.



The primary researcher (a woman) entered the experiment hoping to draw conclusions about what women prefer sexually. Not only did she come to no conclusions, but she lamented in the paper that the experiment only created more questions about female sexuality than it began with.

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> You wrote: IRL I see guys with the personality of a wet bag get plenty of pussy just from their face alone.

So really, this is just your anecdotes of attractive guys getting laid versus my anecdotes of attractive guys not getting laid. There are also non (physically) attractive guys who get laid. A lot of varied experiences for varied people with varied tastes and preferences in short.

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>You wrote: Looks matter for a man, but as the above studies show, it's to a lesser degree.

As a man, I can tell you that looks certainly matter for me. Most of the male friends I've had in the past would have been very quick to agree also. They probably matter to you also.