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In university, I once overheard a couple of female friends talking about guys. One was trying to get the other to set her up with somebody. There was the usual question: ‘Well, what kind of guy are you looking for?� My one friend hemmed and hawed for a minute, and then said, ‘Oh, who am I kidding? I just need to get fucked.�

It was an eye-opening moment for me (granted, I was a pretty clueless 19-year old.) On one level, it was liberating to realize that women could be driven by the same imperious desires as men. On another level, it was kind of terrifying. And I think most men, if they’re honest, would admit to some ambivalence about female sexuality. We’re uneasily aware that there’s this powerful force out there that affects our lives in all sorts of ways, for good and ill, but we can’t even begin to understand it.

If there’s one consolation here, it’s that women themselves don’t understand it either. Or so says Daniel Bergner in this poppy but fascinating little book. In one of the more prurient experiments he summarizes, female subjects were shown a range of porn—gay, straight, animal, whatever—while hooked up to vaginal sensors that measured their state of arousal. When the women were asked which scenes turned them on, their answers wildly diverged from what the sensors were indicating (‘Nope, sorry, that bit with the monkeys didn’t do anything for me.�) Whereas, when men were shown the same clips, their reported reactions closely matched the sensor readings. So what’s going on here? Why do women apparently misconstrue what their own bodies are telling them? The sexologists don’t rightly know. It could be an effect of sociocultural repression. It could be some kind of psychosomatic disconnect between loins and brains. Or maybe women just don’t like having scientists mucking around in their lady bits.

My guess is that this book will make a lot of female readers feel a little better about themselves, a little less weird and ashamed. On the other hand, it’s going to freak out some male readers, especially those in long-term relationships. There’s emerging evidence that, contrary to popular belief, monogamy may be even harder on women than it is on men. Not that monogamy is necessarily wrong � just that its costs are very high and, for many women, simply intolerable. In that respect, What Do Women Want? is a surprisingly melancholy book. There are threads of sadness and desperation running through it. It’s a vivid reminder, in case you needed it, that life is tough, even for the luckiest among us.

Here’s my own two-bit theory, cobbled together out of Freud and failure: you’re never going to be satisfied � not for long, and probably only in retrospect. A Korean proverb goes: get married and you’ll regret it, stay single and you’ll regret it. Sounds about right. What Plato called ‘the pursuit of the whole� takes place down here, in the realm of the incomplete, among the half-assed. Frustration is the norm.

As I see it, this isn’t an invitation to cynicism. It’s an invitation to acceptance. In the ordinary course of things, there’s no mingling of souls. There’s Chinese takeout and perfunctory sex. And that’s still pretty good, isn’t it?