what do women want?

It’s no real secret what women want although by the apparent lack of satisfaction a lot of women express in finding a mate, you would think its the biggest secret in the world??? Women have different needs in finding a partner at different stages/ages in their lives. Of course every woman is different and therefore each has individual values in finding a partner for the whole life. Astrology can shine light in both these areas – firstly by identifying stages/ages in a woman’s mating preferences. Also secondly identifying a woman’s individual values/preferences during her whole life.

“What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.” Dave Barry

Over the coming weeks I would like to explore this subject more thoroughly.  When I researched this subject I found that the Examiner featured a post called ‘What women want in 2009′ by Josette Compton in which she interviewed women between the ages of 25 to 33 about what they wanted in a man.  This is a good expose of individual women’s preferences.

“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.”Mark Twain

Apparently Daniel Bergner‘s new book, “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing” explores the erotic component of this question, which most men think is the only subject of this article.  Of course the erotic side of what women want is a factor for some more than others.  You can see a great interview with Daniel by Charlie Rose.  I found some interesting reading in a New York Times article written by him promoting his book called ‘What Do Women Want?’ some quotes of which I have listed below:

“Men and women, women and men; it will never work.” Erica Jong

When she peers into the giant forest, Chivers told me, she considers the possibility that along with what she called a “rudderless” system of reflexive physiological arousal, women’s system of desire, the cognitive domain of lust, is more receptive than aggressive. “One of the things I think about,” she said, “is the dyad formed by men and women. Certainly women are very sexual and have the capacity to be even more sexual than men, but one possibility is that instead of it being a go-out-there-and-get-it kind of sexuality, it’s more of a reactive process. If you have this dyad, and one part is pumped full of testosterone, is more interested in risk taking, is probably more aggressive, you’ve got a very strong motivational force. It wouldn’t make sense to have another similar force. You need something complementary. And I’ve often thought that there is something really powerful for women’s sexuality about being desired. That receptivity element. At some point I’d love to do a study that would look at that.”

“Marriage is for women the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.” Bertrand Russell

Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.

The critical part played by being desired, Julia Heiman observed, is an emerging theme in the current study of female sexuality. Three or four decades ago, with the sense of sexual independence brought by the birth-control pill and the women’s liberation movement, she said, the predominant cultural and sexological assumption was that female lust was fueled from within, that it didn’t depend on another’s initiation. One reason for the shift in perspective, she speculated, is a depth of insight gathered, in recent times, through a booming of qualitative research in sexology, an embrace of analyses built on personal, detailed interviews or on clinical experience, an approach that has gained attention as a way to counter the field’s infatuation with statistical surveys and laboratory measurements.

“The people I’m furious with are the Women‘s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.” Anita Loos

And sometimes Chivers talked as if the actual forest wasn’t visible at all, as if its complexities were an indication less of inherent intricacy than of societal efforts to regulate female eros, of cultural constraints that have left women’s lust dampened, distorted, inaccessible to understanding. “So many cultures have quite strict codes governing female sexuality,” she said. “If that sexuality is relatively passive, then why so many rules to control it? Why is it so frightening?” There was the implication, in her words, that she might never illuminate her subject because she could not even see it, that the data she and her colleagues collect might be deceptive, might represent only the creations of culture, and that her interpretations might be leading away from underlying truth. There was the intimation that, at its core, women’s sexuality might not be passive at all. There was the chance that the long history of fear might have buried the nature of women’s lust too deeply to unearth, to view.

How imp0rtant is the erotic in what you want as a women?  Would love to get your feedback in the comments below.

Now here is a clever ad that appears to show what women want – its very funny with its twist!  Enjoy…

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