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The Untold Story of Female Desire: Breaking Free from Sexual Mythology
In a world where women's sexuality has been tightly controlled for millennia, Wednesday Martin's "Untrue" arrives like a thunderclap, challenging everything we thought we knew about female desire. This provocative bestseller has become Beyonce's bedside reading and sparked heated debates across social media platforms. Time Magazine called it "the most important book about women's sexuality since the Hite Report," while conservative commentators have labeled it dangerous to traditional values. The book's central thesis-that women may be naturally inclined toward sexual variety rather than monogamy-has resonated with countless readers who've privately wondered if something was wrong with them for wanting more than society says they should.
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Shattering the Myth of the Naturally Monogamous Woman
For centuries, we've been told that men are naturally promiscuous while women are naturally monogamous-that men stray while women stay. This narrative has been reinforced by evolutionary psychologists, religious institutions, and popular culture. But what if this fundamental assumption is completely wrong?
Recent research reveals a startling reality: women are closing the "infidelity gap." Studies show women under 45 are now cheating at nearly equal rates to men, with some indicating women aged 18-29 are actually reporting more affairs than their male peers. A 2017 study found women are 40% more likely to cheat on their husbands than they were in 1990, while male infidelity rates have remained unchanged.
These statistics challenge our deepest cultural assumptions. When researchers like Dr. Meredith Chivers properly measure female desire, they find women report sexual desire levels identical to men's. Her groundbreaking work reveals straight women are just as turned on by the idea of sex with strangers as men are, contradicting the notion that women need emotional intimacy for arousal.
Perhaps most surprisingly, researcher Marta Meana discovered that familiarity often dampens female desire more severely than male desire. "We have plenty of data telling us that long-term relationships are tough on desire, and particularly on female desire," she explains. A 2017 study of over 11,000 British adults confirmed that women living with partners were twice as likely as cohabiting men to lose interest in sex. The institutionalization of roles and predictability of marriage can be especially challenging for women's sexuality.
Meana's research on "female erotic self-focus" reveals another overlooked aspect of women's sexuality: women often derive arousal from their own sexiness. When asked "Would you want to sleep with you?" women enthusiastically affirmed while men didn't understand the question. "There's this wonderful autonomy in female sexuality that we've completely overlooked," Meana notes.
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The "Infidelity Workaround" and Female Sexual Strategy
Alicia Walker's groundbreaking research on women using Ashley Madison (a dating site for married people seeking affairs) revealed surprising patterns that challenged long-held assumptions about female sexuality. These "otherwise unremarkable" women - teachers, executives, healthcare workers, and stay-at-home mothers - weren't seeking emotional connection or new relationships. Instead, they methodically sought sexual satisfaction while maintaining their primary partnerships. After years of sexual deprivation in marriages with mismatched libidos or sexually disinterested partners, they had reached breaking points. As one participant explained, "I tried very hard to just ride it out. I held out as long as I could. Once I gave in, I wondered what took me so long."
These women approached affairs with unsentimental efficiency, developing sophisticated vetting systems to assess potential partners. They screened for sexual compatibility through detailed conversations about preferences, expectations, and boundaries. Many required recent STD tests and insisted on safe sex practices. They avoided emotionally needy men, explicitly seeking purely physical relationships with clear parameters. When partners became clingy, demanded more time, or the excitement faded, they ended affairs without regret and methodically found new partners.
Most chose not to divorce for complex reasons: they genuinely loved their husbands despite sexual incompatibility, didn't want to disrupt their children's stable home lives, or feared severe financial consequences. Some cited concerns about retirement security or healthcare coverage. Their "infidelity workaround" allowed them to preserve their marriages while meeting sexual needs, though they constantly navigated risks of discovery, potential community shame, and possible online harassment if exposed.
Walker's research documented how these women maintained strict compartmentalization between their marriages and affairs. They created detailed cover stories, used separate phones and email accounts, and never mixed their regular lives with their extramarital activities. Many reported feeling more satisfied in their marriages once their sexual needs were met elsewhere, describing themselves as more patient and less resentful toward their spouses.
These findings fundamentally challenge conventional beliefs that women have affairs primarily for emotional connection rather than sexual gratification. The research suggests women may actually struggle more with sexual monogamy than men do - a radical reversal of everything society has traditionally taught about gender and sexuality. This hints at how female sexual desire may be more complex and demanding than previously acknowledged, requiring a reevaluation of assumptions about gender differences in sexual needs and monogamy.
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The Invisible Chains: How Culture Constrains Female Sexuality
When we examine why women don't act on their desires more freely, we find a complex web of constraints that have nothing to do with "natural" female inclinations. Consider Sarah, a financial manager in her early forties who regretted not consummating her affair with Paul. Though their connection had quickly escalated from emails to texts to a hotel meeting, she couldn't cross the final line despite feeling she "deserved to follow through."
Sarah's restraint stemmed from both internal guilt and external constraints-fear of "blowing things up" with her husband, potential humiliation in her community, and the economic reality that divorce would mean significant financial sacrifices for her and her children. She had unconsciously calculated these "life-history trade-offs" and decided against the affair.
These constraints are asymmetrical across genders. Research suggests men are more likely to divorce wives who cheat than vice versa, reflecting our culture's enduring sexual double standard. This asymmetry dates back centuries-in Plymouth Colony, adultery was a capital crime with particularly severe consequences for married women. A woman like Mary Mendame faced whipping and public humiliation for infidelity in 1639, while a married man having relations with an unmarried woman would face only the lesser charge of fornication.
For modern women, the economic consequences of divorce amplify these concerns. Women experience a 20% average income drop post-divorce (triple the poverty rate of men), and their assets are valued at 90% less than married peers. These financial realities reinforce what looks more like compulsory monogamy than freely chosen sexual exclusivity.
Cultural context also plays a crucial role. If Sarah had been born in another generation, her choices might have been different. In the early 1960s, women in affluent suburbs had affairs that rivaled Cheever stories. Pamela Druckerman's interviews with these women, now in assisted living in Florida, reveal a sexual culture where affairs were commonplace. Unlike today's shame-filled narratives, these women felt little guilt, considering their affairs "exciting" and "thrilling." The cultural context-from JFK's example to their rabbi's permission-created an environment where affairs were accepted facts of life.
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The Agricultural Revolution: When Women Became Property
The constraints on women's sexual freedom today trace back to a pivotal historical shift. Around 10-12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers began domesticating plants, leading to the agricultural revolution. While traditionally portrayed as progress, this shift fundamentally reorganized relations between sexes, planting three linked beliefs: women as men's property, women belonging in the home, and women being naturally monogamous.
Unlike foraging societies where women contributed significantly to subsistence and maintained sexual autonomy, farming made women more sedentary, increased fertility, and shortened birth intervals. This created greater dependence on men. Evidence suggests our early ancestors lived in cooperative breeding arrangements with multiple mating partners and strong female kinship networks that protected women's interests.
Men's physical advantages in plough farming created a rigid gender division where men worked outside in primary production while women were relegated to indoor domestic work. This division birthed enduring beliefs about women's "natural" place being in the home. As women lost economic power, their value shifted-dowries replaced bride wealth, female infanticide emerged in some cultures, and virginity became monetized.
By 2000 BCE, gender segregation kept high-status women secluded, marking them as valuable property while ensuring sexual control. Female monogamy-coerced and institutionalized-became the foundation of patrilineal inheritance systems where resources passed from father to son. Men's ability to trust women's fidelity became society's highest-stakes gamble.
The plough's impact on gender attitudes persists remarkably across time and space. A 2013 Harvard-UCLA study revealed that societies with historical plough agriculture continue to show lower female participation in politics and workforce, plus more gender-biased attitudes. These effects persist across generations, religions, income levels, and even after migration thousands of miles away. The researchers compiled data from multiple global sources, finding that areas with plough-positive crops overwhelmingly agreed that men deserve jobs more and make better leaders.
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Evolutionary Evidence: What Our Bodies Tell Us About Female Sexuality
Darwin established a binary view of sexuality: ardent, competitive males versus coy, passive females. This perspective was reinforced by Victorian physicians like William Acton, who claimed "the majority of women are not very much troubled with sexual feeling." In 1948, Angus Bateman's influential fruit fly experiments provided supposed scientific validation for female sexual passivity, suggesting males benefit from multiple matings while females don't.
However, primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy revolutionized our understanding of female sexuality while studying Hanuman langurs in India. She observed females leaving their troops to mate with outside males, contradicting Bateman's assertion that "sexually adventurous females were not supposed to exist." Hrdy discovered that invading males would kill infants they hadn't fathered, forcing females to resume estrus sooner. In response, female langurs developed a strategic countermeasure: mating with multiple males to confuse paternity and protect their offspring.
Despite facing ridicule from colleagues, Hrdy's work opened the floodgates for research showing females across species mate strategically and often with multiple partners to decrease infanticide risk, improve genetic quality, hedge against infertility, recruit protectors, and trade sex for resources.
Our anatomy provides further evidence. Women evolved a forward-facing, richly innervated clitoris that serves no purpose beyond pleasure. Unlike men's genitalia, which serve multiple biological functions, the clitoris exists solely for sensation. Women can experience multiple orgasms without requiring a refractory period, though female orgasm proves more elusive in practice, typically taking 10-20 minutes compared to men's 2.5-8 minutes.
This unpredictable, cumulative nature of female orgasm may have evolved to encourage multiple mating-our very anatomy suggesting we're designed for sexual exploration rather than monogamy. Evidence from other primates shows female orgasm predates humans, appearing in chimps and macaques with similar physiological responses and facial expressions.
Our cervix evolved not as a barrier but as a sophisticated filter for assessing multiple types of sperm simultaneously, while male anatomy (from testicle size to penis shape) evolved for sperm competition-all suggesting females have long mated with multiple partners.
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The Himba Challenge: A Culture Where Female Infidelity Is Normal
The Himba people of northern Namibia provide a fascinating counterpoint to Western assumptions about female sexuality. A remarkable feature of Himba culture is their relatively open attitude toward infidelity or "extra-pair partnerships," particularly notable because female infidelity is widespread and socially acknowledged. This pastoral society, living in the arid regions of northern Namibia, has developed cultural practices that challenge fundamental Western assumptions about marriage, fidelity, and female sexuality.
Anthropologist Brooke Scelza's groundbreaking research among the Himba revealed surprising patterns that defied conventional evolutionary psychology. Her research discovered that Himba women who engage in affairs actually improve their circumstances in measurable ways. The data was striking: nearly 32% of Himba women had at least one "omoka" birth (conceived during an extramarital affair), with the highest reported extra-pair paternity rate of any small-scale society-almost 18% of all marital births. These numbers far exceed rates documented in other traditional societies, where extra-pair paternity typically ranges from 1-10%.
This cultural tolerance stems from specific ecological and social factors unique to Himba society. Unlike many traditional cultures, the Himba have few heritable resources, and fathers invest minimally in children's upbringing. Children contribute economically to the household from a young age through activities like herding and gathering, reducing the importance of paternal investment. Additionally, men don't pay high bride-prices, and property isn't passed down strictly through the male line. For women, strong matrilineal kinship networks provide substantial autonomy and economic security, creating a social safety net independent of marriage bonds.
Most remarkably, Scelza's research revealed a striking pattern: "omoka" children appeared only in arranged marriages-not a single woman in a love match had an extra-pair child. When forced into marriages they didn't choose, often to much older men selected by their families, Himba women exercise agency through affairs, bearing children with preferred partners who are typically younger and more physically attractive. These women achieve greater reproductive success, with significantly more children surviving to age five than women in love matches. The survival rate difference was particularly pronounced in harsh environmental conditions, suggesting that having multiple partners provided additional resources and support networks crucial for child survival.
This strategic female choice fundamentally challenges Darwin-Bateman assumptions about female sexual reticence and passive mate choice. The Himba case presents an intriguing paradox: women who exercise unconstrained choice by marrying men they select themselves and remaining monogamous actually have lower reproductive success than those who subvert arranged marriages through affairs. This pattern suggests that female sexuality and mate choice strategies are far more complex and adaptable than traditional evolutionary models have assumed, shaped by specific ecological and social contexts rather than universal biological constraints.
The Himba example also demonstrates how women can exercise reproductive agency even within seemingly restrictive social systems, using extra-pair relationships as a strategy to optimize their reproductive success while maintaining access to the social and economic benefits of their arranged marriages. This sophisticated balancing of social constraints and individual choice reveals the complexity of human mating strategies and the importance of considering cultural context in understanding human sexuality.
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Our Bonobo Heritage: Rethinking Female Pleasure and Power
Bonobos, sharing nearly 99% of our DNA, offer revolutionary insights into primate sexuality. Found only in the Congo Basin and a handful of zoos, these slim, long-necked relatives look remarkably human with their parted hair and bipedal walking. Recent research confirms they're our closest living relative genetically.
What distinguishes bonobos most dramatically is their sexual behavior. They engage in constant sexual activity with partners of both sexes throughout the day. When primatologist Amy Parish first showed footage of bonobo sexual practices to colleagues in 1991, the room fell silent as they witnessed primates having sex "more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine."
Female bonobos particularly enjoy "G-to-G contact" (genito-genital rubbing), pressing and grinding their vulvas together for pleasure approximately every two hours, often ignoring male advances to do so. Their enlarged, externalized clitorises become engorged during these encounters, and they vocalize their pleasure.
Most remarkably, bonobos completely upend our assumptions about primate social structures. Despite being a male philopatric species (where males stay in their birth groups while females disperse), bonobos are female-dominant. Parish documented that females eat first, receive more grooming, and most shockingly, regularly commit violence against males. Records showed that of twenty-five serious injuries among bonobos, twenty-four were inflicted on males by females.
This female dominance emerges from their unique coalition-building through sex. Unrelated females bond through frequent genital-to-genital contact, creating powerful alliances that keep males in check. When males challenge females, multiple females band together to assert dominance.
The bonobo model suggests provocative possibilities: what if human female sexuality evolved to be pleasure-focused, non-monogamous, and socially strategic rather than passive and pair-bonded? What if women's sexual fantasies, boredom in long partnerships, and extramarital desires reflect not dysfunction but our bonobo heritage-suppressed not by our nature but by cultural constraints?
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Reimagining Relationships: Beyond Monogamy
Tim had been a life coach for the narrator, helping her and her husband rearrange their relationship along more equitable lines. At a meeting, Tim reveals something surprising: "My wife has two husbands." He shares how he met Lily at work in his late twenties, drawn to her confidence and independence. After marrying, Lily told Tim he should pursue his dreams, whether that meant biking across the country or having relationships with others, as long as it didn't endanger their marriage.
Years later, when Lily fell deeply in love with another man, Tim chose compassion over control, telling her to continue the relationship and figure out what it meant for their marriage. Eventually, Lily's boyfriend Rick moved into their second home, becoming their caretaker, chef, and an "uncle" to their twins. For over 25 years, their unconventional arrangement has worked, with clear rules about no secrets and not siphoning time, energy or money from the family.
The most important lesson Lily taught Tim was that "marriage is not being each other's property. Not in any way, shape, or form." Though Tim believes openness is right for them, he doesn't criticize monogamy or try to convert others.
Carrie Jenkins, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, challenges monogamy norms through her work and lifestyle. Despite her conventional appearance and academic credentials, she faces vicious backlash for living polyamorously with both a husband and boyfriend. Jenkins sees this arrangement as requiring deliberate kindness and empathy-allowing partners to do things that might hurt you while remaining sensitive to everyone's needs.
On optimistic days, Jenkins sees the extreme reactions against polyamory as an "extinction burst"-the dramatic death throes of deep-seated prejudices-though she acknowledges how deeply entrenched the status quo remains.
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Sexual Fluidity: The Spectrum of Female Desire
Dr. Lisa Diamond's groundbreaking research on "female sexual fluidity" reveals that women's sexuality can morph over time in response to circumstances, opportunities, and context rather than remaining fixed. Her two-decade longitudinal study shows that intense female friendships, destigmatized environments, or different life stages can all influence sexual expression.
Diamond emphasizes that while sexual orientation is real, it's not as deterministic as we think. Even women who identify as exclusively lesbian show variation in attractions, with very few being "gold star lesbians." One participant who had only been with women for twenty years began dating a man after her marriage ended, noting, "I think I'll end up with a woman again, but maybe I just needed a change."
Diamond initially thought fluidity was primarily female, but her recent study of 179 men revealed that straight men sometimes masturbate to male imagery while gay men occasionally fantasize about women. She believes younger generations of men may show more fluidity as social restrictions loosen.
Female sexual fluidity manifests widely across cultures, from Lesotho's "motsoalle" relationships to Suriname's "mati" institution. Studies confirm its prevalence-43% of self-identified heterosexual women in one study had "made out" with another woman, while 47% in another reported same-sex attraction.
This fluidity is increasingly visible in contemporary culture. At Skirt Club, an exclusive women-only "play party" founded by Genevieve LeJeune, women who identify as "bi but in a committed straight relationship" or simply "curious" create spaces for female pleasure without male interference. These high-end, femme-y affairs replace the "yucky plastic mattresses and grabby guys" of typical sex parties with well-dressed, successful women in chic lingerie.
Throughout both Skirt Club events in Manhattan and Los Angeles, women build coalitions through pleasure-networking, sharing experiences, and creating connections through sexual exploration, remarkably similar to the female bonding behaviors Parish had documented in bonobos.
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The Future of Female Sexuality: Choice Without Judgment
After examining female infidelity through multiple lenses-evolutionary biology, primatology, sociology, and cultural criticism-what conclusions can we draw about women's "natural" sexuality?
The common belief that men cheat for sex while women cheat for emotional connection is challenged by research showing both genders often want the same things from affairs. Couples therapist Tammy Nelson confirms that "men and women basically want the same things when they're having an affair. They want sex and connection." Studies show women cheat for excitement (35%) and sexual dissatisfaction (22.5%), with women in sexually incompatible marriages 2.9 times more likely to cheat.
Some women have affairs because financial independence gives them sexual autonomy, while others live in cultures where monogamy isn't valued. Genetic compatibility may also drive infidelity, as studies show women are attracted to men with different major histocompatibility complexes.
Ultimately, female sexuality includes aspects that are "assertive, pleasure centered, and selfish"-women step out for the same reasons men do when circumstances allow: "there can be no autonomy without the autonomy to choose, without coercion or constraint, or in spite of it, who our lovers will be."
A woman's decision about monogamy depends entirely on her context: desires, risk tolerance, agreements with partners, social support, resources, and culture. Female "promiscuity" has been an adaptive strategy throughout evolutionary history, and as feminist primatologists suggest, we still don't know what breeding systems women might choose if truly free to do so.
Perhaps the most radical conclusion is that there is no single "natural" state for female sexuality. Women's desires and choices have always been shaped by their circumstances, from the agricultural revolution that made women property to the economic realities that still constrain women's choices today. What remains constant is women's resilience and creativity in finding ways to express their sexuality despite these constraints.
As we move toward a more equitable future, the question isn't whether women are "naturally" monogamous or non-monogamous-it's whether women will finally have the freedom to choose for themselves, without judgment or punishment, how to express their complex and varied desires.
