What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire Quotes

“The seeking of a lover to embody these words; the pining for a love that
will be unconditional; the search for a union that is absolute; the sense that
our partners should give us what we were given--or what we believe we
should have been given--by our parents; the craving for reassurance--tell me
I’m special, tell me I’m beautiful, tell me I’m smart, tell me I’m successful, tell me
you love me, tell me it’s forever, no matter what, till death do us part--these were
scarcely more than a child’s cries. Yet most us could not bear to give up on
these longings. Most of us could not stand to relinquish the yearning for
someone to be our fulfillment, our affirmation, because to turn away from
such hope would be to acknowledge that we are, inescapably, navigating
our lives alone, supported by love if we are lucky but, finally, on our own. pp. 144-45.”
― Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire

“Men are animals. On matters of eros, we accept this as a kind of psychological axiom. Men are tamed by society, kept, for the most part, between boundaries, yet the subduing isn’t so complete as to hide their natural state, which announces itself in endless ways—through pornography, through promiscuity, through the infinity of gazes directed at infinite passing bodies of desire—and which is affirmed by countless lessons of popular science: that men’s minds are easily commandeered by the lower, less advanced neural regions of the brain; that men are programmed by evolutionary forces to be pitched inescapably into lust by the sight of certain physical qualities or proportions, like the .7 waist-to-hip ratio in women that seems to inflame heterosexual males all over the globe, from America to Guinea-Bissau; that men are mandated, again by the dictates of evolution, to increase the odds that their genes will survive in perpetuity and hence that they are compelled to spread their seed, to crave as many .7’s as possible. But”
― Daniel Bergner, What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire