Everything we thought we knew about female sexual desire is being overturned. Following from experiments, what we think turns us on and what actually excites us are two different things. Bergner's latest book is "What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire" (goo.gl/D7rnvH). Read more at BigThink.com: bigthink.com/videos/daniel-bergner-on-what-turns-women-on Follow Big Think here: YouTube: goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom Twitter: twitter.com/bigthink Transcript - Let’s talk about a particularly provocative set of experiments that Meredith Chivers has done. This is fascinating Canadian research I’ve spent so much time with. So several years ago when I first got interested in her work and I kind of stumbled into her lab. I was working on a different unrelated project at the time. When I stumbled into her lab I found her showing an array of pornography – so men with women, women with women, men alone, women alone, and even bonobos having sex to self-identified straight women, gay women, straight men, gay men. And measuring both their physical response that is vaginal or response in terms of erection for men and then their subjective response via keypad. How turned on do I say I am. And finding something fascinating which was that the male response was pretty predictable. The straight men actually did mostly just get turned on to men with women or women with women. Gay men equally predictable. The women were very unpredictable and kind of anarchic in at least their physical response. Again there was this big dichotomy. The women were saying I’m turned on by what I “should be turned on” by straight women, by, you know, men with women or to a certain degree I suppose men with men and gay women by images of women, et cetera. But their bodies were saying something completely different and their bodies were saying they were turned on by all of it. And perhaps most strikingly you might think those bonobos having sex would at least reach something animalistic in men. No the men showed zero response subjectively or physically. But the women did show this physical response to the image of bonobos having sex. So a lot of interesting things about this, probably too many to name but one for sure is that the idea of women’s sexuality as somehow more controlled needs to be put aside if we’re going to do any serious searching about Eros in women. And too this idea that women are somehow less visual, less immediate in their sexuality than men. Again you need to put that aside if we’re going to do any serious looking at truths about women’s sexuality. Read Full Transcript Here: goo.gl/3TUox1.

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