What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (19 page)
Read What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire Online
Authors: Daniel Bergner
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Sociology, #Science
Finally, about speed dating:
Finkel, E. J., & Eastwick, P. W. (2009). Arbitrary social norms influence sex differences in romantic selectivity.
Psychological Science
,
20
, 1290–1295.
W
ithout the voices of the many women who spoke with me, in confidence, about their erotic lives, I could not have written this book. My gratitude goes to those whose stories I’ve told and to all the others whose thoughts have informed my thinking. Equally, I am indebted to the patient teaching of an array of scientists and clinicians. Beyond those noted within the book, Kelly Allers, Monica Day, Ann D’Ercole, Leonard DeRogatis, Muriel Dimen, Katherine Frank, Irwin Goldstein, Bat Sheva Marcus, Margaret Nichols, Adam Safron, Michael Sand, and Claire Yang were especially generous with their time and perspective.
I have been immensely fortunate to have Suzanne Gluck as my agent throughout my writing life—my thanks go to her and to William Morris Endeavor’s Eve Attermann, Raffaella De Angelis, Tracy Fisher, and Alicia Gordon.
Lee Boudreaux, my nimble and inexhaustible editor, has been a wonderful guide. And Dan Halpern, along with Tina Andreadis, Tamara Arellano, Rachel Elinsky, Mark Ferguson, Erin Gorham, Georgia Maas, Karen Maine, Michael McKenzie, Allison Saltzman, Benjamin Tomek, and Craig Young have made me tremendously thankful to have Ecco/HarperCollins as my publisher.
Ilena Silverman, my thoughtful editor at the
New York Times Magazine
, gave this book its start, and Hanna Rosin and Slate’s Double X assisted with a blog early on.
My friends Samantha Gillison, John Gulla, William Hogeland, George Packer, Ayesha Pande, Roland Kelts, Elizabeth Rubin, Laura Secor, Anne Sikora, and Tom Watson were always there to contribute counsel, lend humor, and infuse endurance.
My father continues to be true north for me—no words of thanks can capture my feelings.
Nancy Northup, the mother of my children and my former wife, offered faith for many years and, furthermore, does the kind of political and legal advocacy that makes this book’s psychological and intellectual explorations possible.
And my children, Natalie and Miles, who are no longer children, are the minds to which I must measure up and the heartbeat that sustains me.
DANIEL BERGNER is a contributing
writer for the
New York Times Magazine
and the
author of three previous books of nonfiction:
The Other
Side of Desire; In the Land of Magic Soldiers,
a
Los Angeles Times
Best Book of the Year and winner of an Overseas
Press Club Award and a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of
Reportage; and
God of the Rodeo,
a
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year. Bergner’s
writing has also appeared in
Granta, Harper’s Magazine,
Mother Jones, Talk,
and the
New York
Times Book Review
; on the op-ed page of the
New
York Times;
and in
The Norton Reader: An
Anthology of Nonfiction.
He lives in Brooklyn.
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Fiction
Moments of Favor
Nonfiction
Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing
In the Land of Magic Soldiers:
A Story of White and Black in West Africa
God of the Rodeo:
The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana’s Angola Prison
In order to protect the privacy of the
women whose sexual lives and personal relationships are described in this book,
I have changed names and some minor identifying details. This does not apply to
the scientists I’ve written about or to Shanti Owen, who appears in chapter
eight.
Parts of this book originally appeared in
different form in the
New York Times Magazine.
WHAT DO WOMEN
WANT?
Copyright © 2013 by Daniel Bergner. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required
fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access
and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be
reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored
in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form
or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter
invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ISBN 978-0-06-190608-4
Epub Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062249081
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