Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free: Summary & Key Insights

The first place we must look, before we can even begin to understand women’s desire, is history — not the sanitized version, but the moral and patriarchal scaffolding that has shaped how we talk about sex for centuries. Across most societies that recorded their sexual codes, from early Western religious texts to Confucian ethics, female sexuality was treated not as an intrinsic part of womanhood but as something to be controlled or contained. The female body was seen as property, its purity as currency. And so, the myths began: that women were naturally virtuous, that fidelity was their moral duty, that chastity was a feminine virtue born of biology rather than culture.

Religious authorities reinforced these myths as a form of social control. Christianity’s veneration of the virgin, paired with its condemnation of lustful women, has tainted Western thought for millennia. In much of world history, the threat of female sexual autonomy meant danger — to lineage, property, and male status. It was safer to claim that women didn’t want sex as much. By convincing everyone, including women themselves, of this falsehood, patriarchy ensured the social order remained intact.

Yet beneath that surface, evidence was always accumulating: from ancient poetry to private diaries, women’s voices revealing the tension between desire and duty. Over time, those voices proliferated until modern research could finally listen. By retracing this lineage of repression, we begin to understand how deeply cultural moralism has distorted the image of female sexuality. This isn’t just history — it’s the shadow under which we still live.

Once we look outside our own cultural lens, the story of women’s sexuality transforms entirely. Anthropology offers one of the most powerful correctives to mainstream Western assumptions. In societies ranging from the Mosuo of China, where women traditionally choose lovers freely and nonexclusive relationships are accepted, to the Trobriand Islanders and the Himba of Namibia, female sexual behavior is not uniformly repressed — in fact, in many such cultures, it is celebrated.

These ethnographies reveal striking patterns: women initiating relationships, setting their own sexual terms, and engaging in multiple partnerships. Female desire, instead of being tamed or denied, is permitted to find expression. What Western societies interpret as infidelity, others see as flexibility. This global context demolishes the myth that female monogamy is natural.

What’s fascinating is how dynamic female desire becomes in different social settings. When women have equality, autonomy, and safety, their erotic agency flourishes. When they are embedded in patriarchal systems, their sexuality is constricted and often hidden, sometimes emerging through secrecy or rebellion. Anthropology uncovers the possibility that the suppression we attribute to biology is, in fact, cultural engineering.

And this reframing challenges every moral assumption of the West. If women’s sexual behavior can vary so widely across societies, then biology cannot be destiny. It means our moral narratives are not truths — they’re traditions masquerading as science.