Book Review: Dual Sexual Strategy in Females — Is the Mysterious Nature of Women Explained?:
Abstract
Evolutionary Psychology www.epjournal.net – 2009. 7(2): 160-163 ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Book Review Dual Sexual Strategy in Females – Is the Mysterious Nature of Women Explained? A review of Randy Thornhill and Steven W. Gangestad, The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality. Oxford University Press, New York, 2008, 411 pp., US$49.95 ISBN 978-0-19-534099 (softcover). Boguslaw Pawlowski, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Wroclaw (PL) and Institute of Anthropology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PL), Email: bogus@antropo.uni.wroc.pl. Human female sexuality has been quite a hot topic during the last 50 years and in their “Abridged history of the study of woman’s sexuality” at the start of The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality, the authors distinguish three waves of research on this topic. Although some of the ideas presented in this book are already known, it seems to me that this work is complete; it synthesizes many different strands of research and places human sexuality in a broad context of reproductive biology. Thornhill and Gangestad’s book could be the manifesto of a new forth wave. There has been continuous and growing scientific interest in female sexuality and our knowledge has continued to expand since theoretical works on human and non-human primate female sexuality started to