Natalie Dylan is the pseudonym of a 22-year-old student from San Diego, California, who rose to fame in September 2008, when she announced on the Howard Stern Show that she would auction off her virginity online, and that the act would be consummated at the Moonlite BunnyRanch in Nevada.

What makes a woman want to have sex? Is it physical attraction? Love? Loneliness? Jealousy? Boredom? Painful menstrual cramps?


Many women interviewed were having sex purely because they wanted the experience.

It turns out that woman have sex for all of these reasons and more, and that their choices are not arbitrary; there may be evolutionary explanations at work.

Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss, both professors at the University of Texas at Austin, decided that the topic of "why women have sex" deserved a book of its own. They've woven scientific research together with a slew of women's voices in their new collaborative work, "Why Women Have Sex," published September 29 by Times Books.


"We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women's sexual psychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak," said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.

The authors conducted a study from June 2006 to April 2009 that asked women whether they had ever had sex for one of 237 reasons, all of which had emerged in a previous study. About 1,000 women contributed their perspectives.

Motivation

A recent women's studies graduate from Sacramento State, Dylan planned to use the money to finance a Master's degree in family and marriage therapy.
Dylan was inspired by her sister Avia, 23, who financed her own degree course working as a prostitute in the Moonlite Bunnyranch[4] for just three weeks and earning several thousand dollars. She was 19 then.[1] However, Dylan asserts that "sister definitely didn't pressure [her] into doing this."[4]
In an interview she stated "I feel empowered because I am being pro-choice with my body."[5] In a blog post, she described her motivation as follows:
“ Deflowering is historically oppressive—early European marriages began with a dowry, in which a father would sell his virginal daughter to the man whose family could offer the most agricultural wealth. Dads were basically their daughters’ pimps.
When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine, after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity into something that allows me to gain power and opportunity from men. I took the ancient notion that a woman’s virginity is priceless and used it as a vehicle for capitalism.[6]
”

Process

Dylan retained the right to choose the winner of the auction regardless of who is the highest bidder.[5] She also admitted that she's still concerned about the prospect of spending a night with a stranger. As such, and according to plan, she has been getting to know the men who are bidding and having email conversations with them.[1]
Dennis Hof, the owner of the brothel, is to receive half of the winning bid.[3]

Response

According to Dylan, more than 10,000 bidders have contacted her with an offer:
“
I've had such a range of messages, from weirdos who say they love me, to those who get really graphically sexual about what they want to do to me.
I'm also getting lots of polite requests from rich businessmen.
I get some men who are obviously looking for a girlfriend but I try and make it clear that this is a one-night-only offer.
”
In September, bids of up to $243,000 were reported. Since then, she appeared in a number of media, including The Tyra Banks Show on September 30, 2008, and had her story covered by several mainstream media by January 2009. With the increasing interest, the highest bid had reached, as of January 15, 2009, $3.7 million,[8] offered by a 39 year old Australian real-estate businessman. The purchaser has since had to back out, due to his wife's dissatisfaction, and Dylan has launched a new campaign to sell her virginity.



Criticism

Since she launched the auction, Dylan has faced a steady stream of criticism from women and allegations from men over the validity of her virginity claims.[9] She said she is prepared to undergo a medical hymen examination to prove her chastity and has already passed two lie detector tests.[1] She also said "I am a sexual person and I've had sexual encounters - both casual and with a boyfriend. But I've abstained from sexual intercourse."

Some religious legal groups are objecting to the sexual sale, saying they are concerned that its influence may reach beyond the borders of Nevada, where prostitution is legal. However, according to specialists, there is no basis for the federal government to stop the auction. "It's a First Amendment issue. You can advertise goods or services that are illegal where they're advertised but legal where they're performed."


Value of virginity

While the Bunny Ranch website describes Dylan's virginity as a "priceless and rare commodity", some find that its rarity may be debatable.[8] Still, several thousand bidders have come forth to "put a price tag on Dylan's purity",[8] which even despite the historically recent decrease of virginity's value as a virtue in the western culture, is a demonstration of the influence of demand in the price of a scarce commodity.
Dylan herself reveals she is shocked "that men will pay so much for someone's virginity, which isn't even prized so highly anymore", and proposes her explanation for the success of the auction so far: "I think it's become some kind of competition between all these men."
In September 2008, a German sex auction site reported that a student named Alina Percea had auctioned off her virginity for €6,650. In 2004, Rosie Reid, a lesbian 18 year old student in England sold her virginity online for £8,400.

It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.

Buss said he found it surprising how dramatically and variably sexual experience seemed to influence women's feelings of self-esteem.

"Some sexual experiences that women in our study reported just had devastating effects and long-lasting negative effects on their feelings of self-worth," he said. "But then for others, their sexual experiences provided the soaring height of euphoria and made them feel alive and vibrant."

Meston said some 20-somethings defied the gender stereotypes that women should be more chaste than men and not sleep around as much.

"Many of the women were having sex purely because they wanted the experience, they wanted the adventure, they wanted to see what it was like to be with men of different ethnicities," she said. "Some women said they wanted more notches on the belt. They simply wanted to get rid of their virginity."

Some women have sex to make money, and not just in the conventional manner of prostitution. A woman from California who goes by "Natalie Dylan" garnered national attention this year with her campaign to sell her virginity and said in January that her top bid of $3.8 million came from a 39-year-old Australian.

There are more factors that influence a woman's sex drive than a man's, the authors said, and the factors that make men attractive to women -- personality, sense of humor, self-confidence, status -- are less important considerations for men when they are choosing women.

There is also evidence that sexual arousal is more complicated for women than for men, the authors report.

A study from Meston's lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man's penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman's physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don't work as well in women, the authors said.

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though men and women may not consciously think about their choices that way, the authors said. If the goal of a man is to spread his genes, he would need to look for signs of fertility in a woman, which are historically associated with physical cues, Buss said.

"The adaptive problem that women have had to solve is not simply picking a man who is fertile but a man who perhaps will invest in her, a man who won't inflict costs on her, a man who might have good genes that could be conveyed to her children," he said.

In this context, women must also be more selective, because wrong choices can lead much higher costs than for men: pregnancy and child-rearing.

In studies, women have consistently shown preferences for men with symmetrical bodies, a subtle mark of genetic fitness and status, the book said. In fact, simply by smelling T-shirts that men had worn for two nights, women judged the odors of symmetrical men to be the most attractive, and the asymmetrical men's odors the least attractive, in one study.

Still, symmetry isn't everything, Meston and Buss said. They pointed to singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett as someone with other positive attributes, such as musical talent and personality, who has clearly done well with women despite asymmetrical features.

"Women are evaluating men on multiple attributes," Buss said.

Kissing also turns out to be more important for women than for men in some respects: In one study, 53 percent of men said they would have sex without kissing, but only 15 percent of women said they would even consider sex without smooching first, the book said. For women, kissing is "an emotional litmus test," the authors wrote.

The medicinal value of sex also comes into play for some women, the book said. Sex can help a woman relax and sleep better, and it can ease the pain of menstrual cramps and headaches -- and some survey participants cited these as reasons they've had sex.

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain. Though Meston has not studied the phenomenon in men, she said she would expect sex to have the same effects of reducing headaches and other pain.

The authors collected stories from 1,006 women from 46 states, eight Canadian provinces, three European countries and Australia, New Zealand, Israel and China. Participants came from a variety of ethnic and religious -- as well as non-religious -- backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. About 80 percent of the women said they were in a relationship at the time, and 93 percent said they were predominantly or exclusively heterosexual.


The book also explores how women's perception of sex may change over time, according to whom they're with and whether they are married.

A 26-year-old heterosexual woman wrote, "When I was single, I had sex for my own personal pleasure. Now that I am married, I have sex to please my husband. My own pleasure doesn't seem as important as his. I believe he feels the same way."

It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.

Buss said he found it surprising how dramatically and variably sexual experience seemed to influence women's feelings of self-esteem.

"Some sexual experiences that women in our study reported just had devastating effects and long-lasting negative effects on their feelings of self-worth," he said. "But then for others, their sexual experiences provided the soaring height of euphoria and made them feel alive and vibrant."

Meston said some 20-somethings defied the gender stereotypes that women should be more chaste than men and not sleep around as much.

"Many of the women were having sex purely because they wanted the experience, they wanted the adventure, they wanted to see what it was like to be with men of different ethnicities," she said. "Some women said they wanted more notches on the belt. They simply wanted to get rid of their virginity."

Some women have sex to make money, and not just in the conventional manner of prostitution. A woman from California who goes by "Natalie Dylan" garnered national attention this year with her campaign to sell her virginity and said in January that her top bid of $3.8 million came from a 39-year-old Australian.

There are more factors that influence a woman's sex drive than a man's, the authors said, and the factors that make men attractive to women -- personality, sense of humor, self-confidence, status -- are less important considerations for men when they are choosing women.

There is also evidence that sexual arousal is more complicated for women than for men, the authors report.

A study from Meston's lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man's penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman's physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don't work as well in women, the authors said.

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though men and women may not consciously think about their choices that way, the authors said. If the goal of a man is to spread his genes, he would need to look for signs of fertility in a woman, which are historically associated with physical cues, Buss said.

"The adaptive problem that women have had to solve is not simply picking a man who is fertile but a man who perhaps will invest in her, a man who won't inflict costs on her, a man who might have good genes that could be conveyed to her children," he said.

In this context, women must also be more selective, because wrong choices can lead much higher costs than for men: pregnancy and child-rearing.

In studies, women have consistently shown preferences for men with symmetrical bodies, a subtle mark of genetic fitness and status, the book said. In fact, simply by smelling T-shirts that men had worn for two nights, women judged the odors of symmetrical men to be the most attractive, and the asymmetrical men's odors the least attractive, in one study.

Still, symmetry isn't everything, Meston and Buss said. They pointed to singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett as someone with other positive attributes, such as musical talent and personality, who has clearly done well with women despite asymmetrical features.

"Women are evaluating men on multiple attributes," Buss said.

Kissing also turns out to be more important for women than for men in some respects: In one study, 53 percent of men said they would have sex without kissing, but only 15 percent of women said they would even consider sex without smooching first, the book said. For women, kissing is "an emotional litmus test," the authors wrote.

The medicinal value of sex also comes into play for some women, the book said. Sex can help a woman relax and sleep better, and it can ease the pain of menstrual cramps and headaches -- and some survey participants cited these as reasons they've had sex.

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain. Though Meston has not studied the phenomenon in men, she said she would expect sex to have the same effects of reducing headaches and other pain.

The authors collected stories from 1,006 women from 46 states, eight Canadian provinces, three European countries and Australia, New Zealand, Israel and China. Participants came from a variety of ethnic and religious -- as well as non-religious -- backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. About 80 percent of the women said they were in a relationship at the time, and 93 percent said they were predominantly or exclusively heterosexual.


The book also explores how women's perception of sex may change over time, according to whom they're with and whether they are married.

A 26-year-old heterosexual woman wrote, "When I was single, I had sex for my own personal pleasure. Now that I am married, I have sex to please my husband. My own pleasure doesn't seem as important as his. I believe he feels the same way."