The Desire to be Desired:

"As Psychology Today reports recently, “Most women, for instance, have a strong wish to feel sexually desired. Men also like to be desired, of course. But among the women I see in my office, it’s often much more of a “thing.”

Many women say they don’t feel any spontaneous desire for sex unless it’s stimulated by someone desiring them. As sex therapists, we would say their desire is purely “responsive.” Many women report that feeling desired is what turns them on the most."

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Rat Foreplay:

"The female rat runs in front of the male rat, gets his attention, then darts away. With any luck, he’ll be interested enough to chase after her. He might chase her around the cage for a long time, before she finally lets him have her.

The female rats tend to like to prolong all this running around. And more than one sex researcher has wondered whether the female rats enjoy this strange kind of foreplay more than the actual sex.

Many people have noted that the whole thing looks suspiciously like what sometimes during heterosexual human mating: how women’s sexual desire often seems to be as much for the pleasure of being chased as for what happens afterward."

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"My colleague Esther Perel describes one of her Spanish-speaking clients playing a game she calls “Juego.” To play this game, the first thing is to make yourself a bit unattainable. If your partner responds by pursuing you, then you’ve won the game.

For many men, the hardest thing about playing “Juego” is to realize there’s a game going on in the first place."

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"You think I'm attracted to you and that you can just have me, but you're wrong. You don't have me yet . . . The more persistently you pursue me, the more attractive and irresistible I feel, which makes me move away some more to see if you'll keep coming after me, if I can make you want me even more."

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"There is evidence that for women it is important to 'be desired' . . . and it would not be surprising if a woman found that her ability to both attract and, in the process control the behavior of a male partner was rewarding and indeed arousing."

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"Female desire, according to Meana, is activated when a woman feels overwhelmingly desired, not rationally considered. Female erotic literature, including all those shades of gray, is built on this fantasy."