What Do Women Want

of the research I’ve written about (though what I’ve learned from these papers has been dwarfed by what I’ve taken in through conversations with researchers) and whose footnotes will offer a beginning to anyone who wants to enter the maze of sexual science I’ve lived in for the past eight years.
    I start with Meredith Chivers, whose work is discussed in chapters one, two, and six. (Always scrupulous—at once the bold sexologist and the careful statistician—she asked me to note that the comparison of responses to strangers and close friends in chapter two relies on standard deviations as opposed to absolute values.) Her relevant papers, in order of publication date, are:
    Chivers, M. L., & Timmers, A. D. (2012). The effects of gender and relationship context cues in audio narratives on heterosexual women’s and men’s genital and subjective sexual response. Archives of Sexual Behavior , 41 , 187–197.
    Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., Lalumiére, M. L., Laan, E., & Grimbos, T. (2010). Agreement of genital and subjective measures of sexual arousal in men and women: a meta-analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior , 39 , 5–56.
    Suschinsky, K., Lalumiére, M. L., & Chivers, M. L. (2009). Sex differences in patterns of genital arousal: measurement artifact or true phenomenon? Archives of Sexual Behavior , 38 , 559–573.
    Chivers, M. L., Seto, M. C., & Blanchard, R. (2007). Gender and sexual orientation differences in sexual response to the sexual activities versus the gender of actors in sexual films. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 93 , 1108–1121.
    Chivers, M. L., & Bailey, J. M. (2005). A sex difference in features that elicit genital response. Biological Psychology , 70 , 115–120.
    Chivers, M. L., Rieger, G., Latty, E., & Bailey, J. M. (2004). A sex difference in the specificity of sexual arousal. Psychological Science , 15 , 736–744.
    Studies by Terri Fisher and by Terri Conley appear in chapter two; they are:
    Alexander, M. G., Fisher, T. D. (2003). Truth and consequences: using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality. Journal of Sex Research, 40 , 27–35.
    Fisher, T. D. (in press). Gender roles and pressure to be truthful: the bogus pipeline modifies gender differences in sexual but not non-sexual behavior. Sex Roles .
    Conley, T. D. (2011). Perceived proposer personality characteristics and gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 100 , 309–329.
    Turning to chapter three, for further study of the history of female sexuality since classical times—or, rather, of the way female sexuality has been perceived—the scholarship of Thomas Laqueur may be the best place to begin:
    Laqueur, T. (1990). Making sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    In his exploration of sexual and societal transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Faramerz Dabhoiwala delves into a wide range of cultural factors that contributed to women being viewed, in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, as the less libidinous gender:
    Dabhoiwala, F. (2012). The origins of sex: a history of the first sexual revolution . New York: Oxford University Press.
    Nancy Cott provides an analysis of Victorian perspectives:
    Cott, N. (1978). Passionlessness: an interpretation of Victorian sexual ideology, 1790–1850. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 4, 219–236.
    The work of David Buss is central to evolutionary psychology’s view of human sexuality, and Louann Brizendine offers a popular primer:
    Buss, D. M. (1995). The evolution of desire: strategies of human mating . New York: Basic Books.
    Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: an evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review , 100 , 204–232.
    Brizendine, L. (2006). The female brain . New York: Broadway Books.
    The health education programs quoted in chapter three are from curricula produced by Choosing the Best Publishing of Atlanta, Georgia, and by the Center for Relationship Education of Denver, Colorado. Each organization has recently altered some of its language, but the curricula continue to include declamations like “Men respond sexually by what they see and women respond sexually by what they hear and how they feel about it.”
    Chapter four is devoted primarily to the research of Kim Wallen and Jim Pfaus, and Pfaus in turn