Do women want what they say they want?

What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner has brought science to bear on the perennial question. And the answer from this book is that what women want is not just sex but sex outside the confines of monogamy. You know the received wisdom about women needing relationship security and emotional commitment before they feel right about having intercourse? It’s all hokum, apparently. What women want when it comes to sex is, it seems, at odds not just with societal expectations but with what they — we — say they want. Actually, do you mind if I talk about women as ‘they’ in what follows? You’ll see why.

A book by a man about women’s darkest sexual desires — redeemed from filth by a grounding in sexologists’ (ha!) latest findings — has to be the stuff of publishers’ fantasies. You wonder how Daniel Bergner, a writer on the New York Times magazine, explained his assignment to his male friends: lots of interviews with mostly women sexologists about what turns women on, plus conversations with actual women about their sexual fantasies. Tough, huh?

The main experiment on which his conclusions rest seems pretty convincing. Bergner’s favourite sexologist asked a group of women, gay and straight, to watch an array of pornography in a dimly lit room, with a plethysmograph placed inside them, a device to measure the flow of blood to the vagina, to find what images they respond to. The images were varied: women and men, men and men, women and women and, ahem, a male bonobo ape with a female. The women were turned on pretty well by the lot, including the apes. Which was, of course, at odds with what they said they liked.

That discrepancy between what women find arousing and what they feel they ought to be attracted by runs throughout the book.