“I feel like a pioneer at the edge of a giant forest,” Chivers said, describing her ambition to understand the workings of women’s arousal and desire. “There’s a path leading in, but it isn’t much.” She sees herself, she explained, as part of an emerging “critical mass” of female sexologists starting to make their way into those woods. These researchers and clinicians are consumed by the sexual problem Sigmund Freud posed to one of his female disciples almost a century ago: “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?”

Her study raises some fascinating questions about how much of our desire is unconscious. Or maybe we just don't want to admit that strange things turn us on for cultural reasons? Another researcher concludes that women seem to want a paradox: We want to be 'thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered', as well as a 'caveman and caring'. Basically, we want 'Denzel Washington'. 

Too much to ask for an Internet dating profile? Lately I've been settling for 'financially solvent, with own hair and teeth...'