Shocking news just in! Women want sex as much as men! Maybe more so! This revelation may cause civilisation as we know it to implode – or at least, as one of the popular tabloids put it, “strike fear in the heart of every heterosexual male.”

I feel cheated. Here I’ve been, spending the last 72 years at home, politely drinking tea, and thinking that the height of quivering female ecstasy was a chocolate HobNob, or on occasion, multiple HobNobs (What can I say? I’m a hoor for the HobNobs).
Now, along comes Daniel Bergner, and his “explosive” expose of feminine sexuality, What Do Women Want? Adventures In The Science Of Female Desire, to inform me that women actually want and like sex. Well, slap my arse and call me Susan! Actually don’t – call me Anne. And keep going ‘til I say stop!
To be fair, Bergner himself is not at all horrified at this news. Instead he explores sexuality research and examines how female sexuality has been positioned, understood and written about in Western culture.
You’d think that if you were a woman, had sex with women, or were friends with women, at some point you’d have cottoned on to the fact that we have sexual appetites. However there seems to be a huge void between our experiences on an individual level and our collective understanding of women’s sexuality: even women frequently evince a sort of cultural blindness to the very existence of female desire.
Bergner’s book contradicts some cherished notions about women’s sexuality; as a result it’s been causing quite something of a controversy. You’d best sit down, heterosexual males, and be prepared to be startled, alarmed and amazed.
Fact 1: Women sometimes cheat, because, yup, we are no better at monogamy than men; Fact 2: Women are not particularly sexually submissive, except of course, when it’s our turn during role-play; and Fact 3: Women don’t hang around waiting for men to show an interest, only to reject you because, ugh, sex, no thanks.
None of these findings are new, but you don’t need to be a psychologist, an anthropologist, or write a sex column in a popular music and cultural magazine to know that it is bullshit to suggest that women are not interested in having, and enjoying, sex. Open your eyes: the evidence is available every weekend in cities and towns across Ireland as indeed it is throughout most of the world. Millions of people go out on the pull, and lo and behold, some of those people are women. What’s more, women are almost always the instigators of a successful pick-up. Blokes don’t pull – we
pull you.
A number of years back, two scientists, Tim Perper and David Givens, spent many hundreds of hours in bars watching people flirt. They found that almost all of the time, women make the first, albeit subtle, move. This is generally a glance in the direction of the man she finds most attractive – an invitation to come over and say hello. Men can and do try to attract women’s attention, but unless she’s given you the glance, you’re likely to be regarded as a pest rather than a potential sexual partner.
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying human mating rituals, believes that women are more socially adept than men, which can mean that blokes often miss the come-hither signal. Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Either way, what you need to look out for is the “five-part-flirt.”
If a woman is keen, her body language will signal it. She will catch a man’s eye, move her head slightly to the side, raise her eyebrows fractionally, look down, and then away. If a man is interested – and not too drunk or shy to notice – he will respond. The assumption is that these signals are hardwired into us. In which context, it wouldn’t matter if you were in Belfast or Beijing, Denver or Dublin. Most sexual interactions begin with the ladies giving the gents the five-part-flirt.
Bergner’s book is contentious because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which tells us that men’s needs are sexual, whereas women’s are connected with love and romance – as if women only have sex if we think it will eventually lead to marriage, mortgages and children (except on those occasions where you bamboozle us with charm, lies and alcohol).
Rather than a source of tried-and-tested facts, conventional wisdom tends to reflect cultural biases and beliefs, often in the face of contradictory evidence. These can be relatively harmless, such as the stereotype of Germans as efficient or the French as great lovers. On occasion, however, conventional wisdom can be dangerous or insulting. Take racial profiling for example, or the idea that Irish people are all feckless drunks.
In a similar way, the conventional wisdom regarding sex can shape how we believe men and women should act. This can have pernicious consequences if people go against stereotype, such as “slut-shaming”; or annoying ones, such as a lonely night in bed with nothing but a good book, and chocolate biscuits, for company.
Given our cultural belief that women are less interested in sex than men, it’s no surprise that another recent study found that people lie about their sexual pasts. This won’t be news to most of us, but it is nice to have scientific confirmation.
The study, led by Dr. Terri Fisher of Ohio State University, asked 293 college students between the ages of 18 and 25 about their sex lives. Some students were hooked up to lie detectors, and although the machines weren’t actually working, the students thought they were. The men attached to the lie detectors reported fewer sexual partners than men who weren’t, while the women hooked up to the machines reported more partners than other women – and even more sexual partners than men attached to the lie detector. Conventional wisdom tells us good girls don’t sleep around, but apparently they do – and sometimes at a greater rate than men.
Interestingly, the stereotype of women being sexually passive is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. For thousands of years it was believed that women were more carnal than men, and this sexually excitable nature was seen as indicative of women’s moral and intellectual inferiority.
Why this changed is rather complicated but social historians have traced it to the complementary influences of Victorian ‘idealism’ in England and evangelical Protestantism in the United States during the 19th century. By arguing that we were not that sexual after all, women could claim some sort of moral and intellectual equality with men.
Nowadays, our attachment to the notion that women are less interested in sex than men has more to do with social control than with facts. It makes women the gate-keepers of sex, or the temptress seducing otherwise blameless men. A woman who has multiple partners is seen as a fool, a slut or suffering from some emotional or pathological problem.
If it took a book, a newspaper article or this column to teach you that, by and large, women like sex very much indeed, then I’m afraid I have more news that will strike fear into the hearts of heterosexual males – dudes, you’ve obviously being doing it wrong.