When it comes to sex, women want one thing more than anything else and that is to be wanted. "Being desired is the real orgasm," insists sex therapist Dr. Marta Meana.

A professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Meana has been studying women and sexual desire for 20 years. She told Oprah Winfrey on a recent "Oprah" show that while moments of pleasure are great, it's the anticipation and buildup to those moments that really excite women. "I'm not knocking orgasms," she says. "But being desired is extremely arousing for women. The reason for that is that being desired means that a man doesn't just want to have sex. He wants to have sex with you."

And that is every woman's goal. When she seeks out a man, that is her aim: to be desired. "If you look at how women behave and what we spend our time and energy and lots of money on, it's on desire-creating behaviors rather than on trying to get sex," Meana told Oprah.

This notion is confirmed by one of women's most common sexual fantasies: to be dominated by a desirable man. "They throw caution to the wind, and they're going to take a chance that you're going to be okay with it," she says to Oprah. "They don't have to ask you if it's okay." This isn't about violence or force. The fantasy works only if the woman is attracted to the dominating man. "When women talk about domination, what they're trying to communicate is 'I was so wanted by someone I wanted,'" Meana explains to Oprah.

But men should realize--if they haven't figured it out already--that women are complicated. They want different things at different times. And sometimes they just want to have sex. Or not have sex. "Bad sex happens to good couples all the time. No sex happens to good couples," she tells Oprah. "A lot of good relationships don't have good sex [because]...we're tired, it's the end of the day. You put the kids to bed, you've done all of the things that you had to do and you don't feel like it."

When the passion starts to fizzle, as it most assuredly will, Meana says not to worry. It can be fixed. "Passion is dependent on novelty, discovery, desire," she tells Oprah. "What happens in relationships is we fall into these old patterns, and we start thinking we've figured everything out about each other, and we really haven't."

--From the Editors at Netscape