The female libido is a tricky thing, and that's not just my opinion, it's science.

Last weekend's cover story in my beloved New York Times Magazine (fie on those that herald the end of print) broke down the weird research that female sexologists are doing while trying to figure out just what turns women on.

Writer Daniel Bergman started off with talking about yet another groundbreaking Canadian, Queens University psych prof Meredith Chivers, who's been monitoring the private parts of willing men and women: hooking volunteers up to a scary-sounding machine called a plethysmograph, she unspools various sexy scenes and notes when the guys get hard, when the girls get wet, and whether that matches up with what they told her their turn-ons were. For men, the answer is yes: gay guys like naked guys, straight guys like naked chicks, and neither one was into monkey sex (like, scenes of actual simian intercourse). For women, though, the results were all over the place: straight women were into lesbian scenes but not a naked guy with a soft schlong; lesbians were into hetero couplings; and almost all the women juiced up for guy-on-guy porn and the humping bonobos.

The higher a woman's sex drive, the greater her attraction is to both sexes. One biological explanation for women's wide range of stimuli is that foreplay is a modern concept—female bodies react easily to sexual signs to make caveman quickies less ouchy. The sexologists—all of whom call themselves feminists—often found their own findings controversial, like the idea that women's libidos are highly narcissistic, the flames of our desire fanned by the very act being desired.

Which brings up the eternal nature versus nature debate: does attracting attention with a revealing outfit make us feel sexy because we actually feel sexy, or because we've been fed a narrow definition of sexy our entire lives? It's probably impossible to say, though the piece unearths some interesting tidbits. Sit still and read it, you attention-deficit internet addict. I'm going to concentrate on developing a skill identified in one Rutgers University study, where some very lucky women were able to think themselves to orgasm.