Understanding Women’s Estrus and Extended Sexuality

Abstract

Abstract Women are sexually active throughout their ovarian cycles and yet sex can lead to conception only a modest proportion of the cycle. Hence, whereas some of the time, women’s sex is conceptive, at other timepoints, it is nonconceptive. Most mammalian females, by contrast, are sexually active only when sex can lead to conception. Women’s nonconceptive sexual proceptivity and receptivity evolved for functions other than conception itself. Form follows function. The dual sexuality framework, then, proposes that women’s sexuality during phases of the cycle when conception is possible differs from their sexuality during phases when conception is not possible. This perspective puts theoretical constraints on the ways that conceptive and nonconceptive sexuality can be understood. Within these constraints, multiple, contrasting psychological designs are possible. Research that assesses alternative possible psychological designs promises to enhance our understanding of human mating in ways that extend far beyond the domain of women’s phase-specific sexuality.