Sexuality, from an evolutionary perspective, goes something like this: Men are genetically programmed to "spread their seed" and women are programmed to seek an intimacy-driven relationship with that one good man. Or at least that's how Daniel Bergner, author of What Do Women Want, explained it in a recent video he did for Big Think. And to Bergner, these ideas are all wrong.

He want back through the academic papers that first proposed this theory that women are "somewhat better suited to monogamy" and have a sex drive that's a "bit less raw, a bit less animalistic than male libido" — and found these papers had "very little substance to them." They also seemed to have "very circular reasoning" and "very little substantive proof." So how is it we've managed to hold on to these ideas for so long?

"I think we as a culture latched onto them because we're eager to have simple theories to explain who we are, especially when it comes to gender," Bergner said. "But we need to move on now because all the researchers … are really taking us in a different direction."

One example is a study conducted in Canada, where female participants were sat down to either watch porn or listen to erotic scenarios. Their responses were measured in two ways: the first was a woman's self-report of how turned on she was (if at all), and the second was measured by a tiny device called a plethysmograph — "a little tube that measures blood flow in the vagina."

Interestingly, women would report a scenario with a very attractive friend turned them on more than a scenario with a very attractive stranger, but the plethysmograph results suggested otherwise. Bergner cited that what turned women on was a direct contrast to the answers they punched in on a keypad. Of course, that doesn't say everything about female desire. But it does combat the sexual narrative that's been pushed on to women, recognizing they can be just as sexual as men.

Watch Bergner talk more about female sexuality in the video above.