The ques­tion ‘What does a woman want?’ was, accord­ing to Freud, “The great ques­tion that has never been answered”. One per­son try­ing to answer this ques­tion, how­ever, is Mered­ith Chivers—a psy­chol­o­gist spe­cial­is­ing in sex­ual behav­iour whose work was exten­sively dis­cussed in The New York Times ear­lier this year.

The arti­cle, focus­ing on female sex­u­al­ity, is eye-opening in many ways, espe­cially in show­ing the gulf between male and female sexuality.

The men, on aver­age, responded gen­i­tally in what Chivers terms “cat­e­gory spe­cific” ways. […] The men’s minds and gen­i­tals were in agreement.

All was dif­fer­ent with the women. No mat­ter what their self-proclaimed sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift gen­i­tal arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. […] With the women, espe­cially the straight women, mind and gen­i­tals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.

via Green Oasis