Tuesday, September 23, 2008
News of the Wierd
I hadn't read News of the Weird in months, and while clicking through the recent archives,
I found this item too weird not to comment on.
David Steffen was convicted in Cincinnati in 1983 of murdering a 19-year-old woman and sentenced to death because the jury found that he also raped her, a violation that was an added devastation to her parents. Steffen confessed to the killing but vehemently protested for almost a quarter century that he did not rape her, and, finally, a 2007 DNA test of semen backed him up, disturbing the family even more (and calling Steffen's death sentence into question). In July 2008, the prosecutor learned that the DNA belonged to 55-year-old Kenneth Douglas, who is not a suspect in the murder but who was a morgue assistant in 1982 when the woman's body arrived and, said the prosecutor, had sex with it. Though the statute of limitations likely prevents prosecuting Douglas, the woman's parents seemed somewhat comforted that, after all, their daughter was a virgin. [Cincinnati Enquirer, 8-13-08]
So um... yeah. Aside from the issue of the guy being on death row for 25 years, what's up with the girl's parents? She wasn't 14. She was a grown woman, well out of high school and into the real world. Do parents really believe their 19 y/o daughters are a virgins? Furthermore, why would you want someone to die a virgin? Of course you don't want your daughter to be raped and murdered (as opposed to just murdered?), but why would you want her to have died a virgin? No, sex isn't the greatest thing ever, but it's usually pretty good, and it's at least interesting and different than anything else. There's a reason for the old joke cliche about people having frantic sex when they think the end is near; because everyone enjoys sex on some level, and you'd had to go out without one last go 'round. Odd that parents would be so eager to deny their own daughter that experience, in her all-too-brief life.
Since that was kind of a downer, here are a couple of others just for laughs.
The Panda Chinese Restaurant in York, Pa., was already in trouble in an early June city sanitation inspection, with demerits piling up because of accumulated grease, insects in the seating area and rotting lettuce, according to a York Daily Record report. Then, in the middle of an inspector's visit, he came upon a live snapping turtle in the restaurant's main sink. Said the inspector, "I had to sit down and gather myself before I could speak." The manager said he had seen the turtle outside and had brought it in for safety: "It was wrong that we put it in the sink." [York Daily Record, 6-11-08]
Unrealistic Expectations: Victor Rodriguez, 21, about to be arrested on a domestic assault charge in Bridgeport, Conn., in June, turned to his 9-foot-long pet python and, as police approached, shouted to the snake, "Get them!" (It remained motionless.) [Connecticut Post, 6-17-08]
Labels: sex, weird news
Friday, April 25, 2008
Book Review: G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire
I saw this book referenced while doing some research on sexual issues last semester, and while I didn't have time to read it then, I kept it in mind and eventually tracked it down earlier this year. It's by a female anthropologist who danced in strip clubs to work her way through grad school, and then turned her dancing experience, and the interviews she did with some regular strip club customers, into her doctoral thesis. As the title indicates, the book is chiefly about the men who regularly patronize strip clubs. Why do they visit, what do they get out of it, what makes it worth the expense, what types of clubs do they frequent, what do they think of the dancers, and so on.
The book is not a page turner, and it's not written for a mass audience. It's pretty
clearly a modified thesis, with tons of anthropological and sociological theory, hundreds of references, plentiful endnotes, and all discussion couched in very scientific, scholarly terms. Despite that, it's got a lot of useful info and I benefited from reading it. I would have received the same benefit from reading a good forty page synopsis of it, or simply discussing it with a knowledgeable reader. But since there was no such synopsis to read or reader to synapse, I had to plow through the 344 pages myself.
To the scores!
G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire, by Katherine Frank, 2002
Concept: 8
Presentation: 5
Writing Quality: 5
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 8
Entertainment Value: 3
Rereadability: 4
Overall: 5.5
As you can see, my scores are very bifurcated. I loved the topic and the concept, but wasn't a big fan of the presentation. It's overlong and feels padded in a lot of places by redundant anecdotes and interview quotes, and most of the higher level sociological theory is shoehorned in and extraneous. If Frank had gotten a good editor with an eye to pop culture success, she could have whittled this book down to about 180 pages, pumped up the titillation factor, added more juicy anecdotes from behind the scenes, added more quotes from the Johns she interviewed, and turned this into a really fun book, without sacrificing any of the information. She'd have had to jettison almost all of the cultural anthropology and scholarly material though, and I think she would have refused. Despite landing
some interviews (that one gives a good overview of the book's findings), Frank didn't want to be a celebrity sexologist specializing in strippers. Her goal was a career in academia, not as a sex writer angling for a shot on
Oprah (or at least
Ellen), and since she's now teaching at a private university in Maine, and has recently published a second book on sexual cultural issues, she's probably pleased with her career path.
What I found most interesting about the book was the insight into the mind of the strip club customer. I've never been to a strip club, not even once, and I've never wanted to. I'm a bit more curious now, having read this book, since it overturned a few of my assumptions about such places, but if I went it would be curiosity/research, not prurient desire. (Which is not why the regulars she interviewed went either.) According to Frank's book, strip clubs aren't as seedy as I thought, and they're definitely not all clandestine whorehouses. They're more like video arcades where the machines are flesh and blood females, and you watch more than play. They're not all about sex, and the girls sell personality and conversation as much, or more, than T&A.
According to the book, the main priority for most of the strippers are table dances. The clubs have a main stage or two, and the girls are scheduled so they all have to take a turn dancing up front, but they make their real money doing private dances. Tables dances in the clubs Frank worked in, lap dances at some other clubs (local regulations vary enormously from city to city and within cities, in terms of how much nudity, contact, alcohol, etc, is allowed), and girls make better profits per song with individuals than they do up on stage in front of everyone; movie scenes of guys throwing wads of cash at the feature dancers notwithstanding.
At the time this book was written, the going rate in Atlanta was $10 a dance, with songs lasting about 3 minutes. Men who liked a dancer could pay her to dance, or simply sit and talk, for the same price as a dance. Most of the guys would buy the dancers a drink, or even take them to dinner in the upscale clubs with restaurants, and the dancers obviously did their best to encourage the guys, since they'd prefer to get paid for sitting and talking than stripping. Plus the girls got a cut of the customer's food/drinks tab.
It's not just the dancers who enjoy the private time, since that sort of personal interaction was what all the men interviewed in the book cited as their main interest in strip clubs. They all wanted to talk to the girls, to get to know them, and not just because they hope to fuck them, as I would have expected. Most of the men are married, and few of them hit on the girls or try to arrange hook ups, at least as far as Frank describes it.
Many of the men I interviewed who considered themselves to be regular customers of particular clubs referred to their relationships with the dancers they visited as primarily that of "friends." These men pointed out that they knew significant details about the dancers' lives: where the women lived, whether they had a boyfriend or partner, the names of their children, their history, and so on. These men also claimed that these relationships were symbiotic and pleasurable, highlighting their platonic aspects and stressing that they returned for the conversation, the friendship, and the atmosphere of the club rather than out of an prurient interest in the dancers. (Pg. 180.)
Frank asked good questions and got good quotes from the men, but she did very little analysis of what they didn't say, and provided no insight into whether or not they were being honest. I was skeptical about a lot of it. Just because they told the smart college student stripper that they thought of the girls as "friends" doesn't mean they weren't quite willing to screw her/them, if given the opportunity. Men constantly tell women they're happy just being friends... when friendship is the only option. Meanwhile, that "friend" guy is just hanging around, waiting for her to break up with her boyfriend, or need a shoulder to cry on, etc.
All the men Frank interviews talk about wanting to get to know the girls, and wanting to be friendly and social, but none of them seem to object when the dresses and bras and panties start to come off.
Even with that allowed for, keep in mind that all the interview subjects are regular customers, so they're not the whole demographic of strip club visitors. Plenty of guys come in occasionally just to look at the goods, bachelor parties aren't there for conversation and dinner, and men who weren't interested in talking to the strippers certainly weren't going to agree to meet Frank outside of the club for an interview. Frank gives no demographic info on how representative the men she interviewed were of the total club visitors, so there's no telling if 75% of 5% of the men there are "regulars" who like to chat with the girls.
The thing that the customers all realize, to some limited degree, is that the girls know what they want, and are working to give it to them. If a guy's paying you $10 a song to sit and chat, of course you're going to let him talk about whatever he wants to talk about, and you're going to tell him what he wants to hear. The girls are there to make money, and it's not easy work. They've got long shifts, they're on their feet in high heels the whole time (except when some guy pays them to sit and chat and drink), and out of their take they've got to pay a % to the club, tip the bouncers and bartenders and DJ, etc.
If they don't sell a lot of dances they might as well be waiting tables at some neighborhood pub. Of course they're going to do what they can to sell dances, or better yet, sell their personality. They're basically in-person phone sex operators, except that the conversations are seldom about sex. The goal is the same though; to keep the other person talking for as long as they can afford to talk. The stripper has a bit of an easier job, since she can show off the goods to keep the guy interested, and she's getting paid right then and there. (Slightly OT, but phone sex or psychics or counselors have a trickier task with that; and they have guidelines for how long to keep their calls. If they're too short there's not enough $ coming in, but if they go too long, people often refuse to pay when they get a $500 phone bill.)
Given that financial reality, the strippers become very skilled at reading the interest of the men, and will do whatever it takes to keep the conversation going. Tease and titillate if that seems desired, laugh at his jokes and feign interest in his stories, make fake revelations when the guy asks for greater intimacy, and show your tits or pussy if he's losing interest in words. Whatever it takes.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the basic truths of human psychology hold true in strip club customers too. Everyone wants to be special and everyone is the hero of their own story. Every guy wants to think his questions and comments and interests are unique and unlike the other guys'. Frank runs through a whole long list of things men say, or ask, or request, and makes clear that the best way to please virtually any guy in conversation is to act like you've never heard that particular comment before.
The tricky part is that that customers want intimacy, but they want authenticity as well. If the guy knows the girl is just telling him what he wants to hear, the illusion is shattered. So the trick is to be flattering and interested and make him feel special, without overdoing it. Since the customers aren't so naive as to forget that they're paying by the minute, the clever stripper plays it cool. This can require honesty, or lies. Frank says that she usually danced under her real name, going by Kate in most clubs (if the name wasn't already taken by another girl), and that she often had to make up a fake name when a guy asked to hear her real name, since they never believed she was using her real name as a stage name. She also wore her wedding ring while working, and was honest about her profession when she told guys she was a grad student researching strip club customers. Some guys believed these revelations, and other guys thought they were just trappings of her trade, and that she was playing on fantasies for hot librarians, or married women, etc. Hence the appearance of authenticity was more important than the actuality.
Another good way to get men interested was to play innocent. Strippers with years of experience would sometimes wear unprofessional clothing they couldn't easily remove, or act like they were frightened to take off their bras or panties, or freeze up during the music. This usually brought them a line of eager customers, since the men were eager to see someone new and fresh and unsure of herself, instead of the polished product the other women presented. Lots of the interview subjects talked about how they liked to go to low end clubs to talk to the poorer, less attractive strippers and hear their hard luck stories. The men felt special if they could help a woman who (appeared to) need it.
Often the illusions are mutual; the men tell stories about their lives that match those the dancers tell, or both sides collaborate on a tale; talking about the Hawaiian vacations they'll go on (together) or the trips to Europe or whatever. When the customer is married and could never get away and wouldn't dare if he could, and the dancer has no inclination to go with him anyway. And both parties realize this, on some level, but the fun is in the verbal dance.
The book didn't draw any major conclusions, and it wasn't very reader friendly, but there was some interesting info in it, and I liked it since it fell into my area of research/interest/expertise. I doubt many other laypeople would care enough to wade through the academic presentation, though, so I'm not really recommending it.
Labels: book review, psychology, sex
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Helicopter Parents
Amusing story about a Houston TV station that did some actual reporting, busting the head of a local degree mill in the act of trying to trade sex for a high school diploma.
The woman getting in Jordan's passenger seat is a parent who's been trying to get her 18 year daughter enrolled in Jordan's school.
"She hadn't passed the TAKS test and she hasn't got all her credits, that's the reason we are going to that school," the mother told us.
A fee to the school and some course work can get students a diploma without passing the required state test at Parkway Christian School, where the Web site boasts, "a program based on Christian character, morals, values and integrity."
...
Jordan: "For the uh, enrollment fee and stuff like that, maybe you and I can do something, you think?"
Mother: "Yeah, what, I mean what, what, you gonna wipe out all the fees?"
Jordan: "All the enrollment fees."
Mother: "All the enrollment fees?"
Jordan: "Three hundred dollars."
Mother: "So you gonna wipe everything if me and you get together?"
Jordan: "The enrollment fee, yeah."
Mother: "Ok."
Jordan: "If you and I get together."
Mother: "What you mean? I mean, what?
Jordan: "Excuse me and I don't mean to be so blunt but I am talking about f------ you."
Mother: "You talking about what?"
Jordan: "F------ you."
...
Jordan: "For the $300 I would expect maybe we could get together several times, you think?"
Mother: "Several times, whatcha mean several times?"
Jordan: "Well I don't know, you might like whatcha getting."
I think the
helicopter parents are getting out of hand. It used to be they'd just yell at teachers for not giving little Bobby or Suzie an A, or swoop in to do their little dear's laundry or solve their other problems. I can see helping your kid with their homework or giving them moral support, but honestly, if there's sex required, I think the kid should have to take care of that themselves.
I also enjoyed the awkwardness of the guy's segue from innuendo to honestly saying what he wanted. That's always a tricky moment in a M/F relationship; one partner (usually the man) knows what he wants and wants to be sure the woman knows too, but how to slip it into the conversation? You don't want to be too crude or blunt, but you don't want to just hint at things and never get to the point. I don't think Principal Jordan's technique here is exactly one to emulate, but he's not the only man to stumble over this kind of interpersonal subtlety.
Labels: education, sex
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
It's not just in Texas...
Turns out some Christian legislators managed to get one of those mythical "abstinence only" sex ed programs passed in Florida, too. With predictable results:
ORLANDO, Fla. -- A recent survey that found some Florida teens believe drinking a cap of bleach will prevent HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew will stop pregnancy has prompted lawmakers to push for an overhaul of sex education in the state.
The survey showed that Florida teens also believe that smoking marijuana will prevent a person from getting pregnant. State lawmakers said the myths are spreading because of Florida's abstinence-only sex education, Local 6 reported.
Abstinence-only sex ed is perhaps the most perfect example of fail currently in existence. The kids in such programs have just as much sex, and since they don't know anything they have unprotected sex, leading to higher pregnancy rates, higher STD rates, and folklore/witchcraft type beliefs like those cited in this article.
Unlike some (even more) cynical types, I don't think the adults who initiate these programs are actively evil (not in thought, though they clearly are in deed). Their aim isn't actually to destroy the lives of children. They're just profoundly misguided in theory, and divorced from the reality that results from their actions. How the adults who push these programs manage to forget their own childhoods, when the majority of playground and private friend talk from about 9-14 revolved entirely around sex, is the real mystery to me. You can legislate beliefs extrapolated from Bronze Age theologies into the modern world, but you can't legislate puberty. Humans always have and always will become fascinated by sex when they reach a certain age, and withholding factual information will only drive their curiosity underground; to rumors, urban legends, and experimentation.
Labels: sex, stupidity
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
High Priced Hookers
I was too busy with RL stuff I'm not going to blog about, and and semi-RL computer work I'm also not going to blog about, to think about blogging over the weekend. Sadly, I don't have a great deal to say today either, but the unfolding story of the Governor of New York's prostitution scandal is worth a comment.
The
story in a nutshell is that Elliot Spitzer, the current governor of New York, has a long history of using high priced call girls, a fact he had to admit to once news broke of a federal investigation into his behavior. He's not resigned yet, but it seems almost certain he will, since America remains a basically puritanical nation, in thought if not deed, and sex scandals are always guaranteed to incite a media frenzy.
Should he resign? Probably; he'll never get any governing done with this cloud hanging over his head, and it displays poor judgment on his part. Like most thinking adults, I don't think prostitution should be illegal, and don't really care if someone engages in it. That said, the fact remains that it is illegal, and Spitzer was sworn to uphold the laws of the nation. Furthermore, it's idiotic for a high powered, elected official to do this sort of thing if only because it opens up such potential for blackmail and extortion. (On the other hand, now that it's out in the open, that potential is gone, so why should he resign now?)
The more interesting aspects of this are how the prosecution came about, and how the scandalous details of the case are being leaked to the media. Lots of
legal bloggers have
been weighing in, and making some interesting points.
Federal law enforcement doesn't get involved in individual cases of prostitution. They certainly don't engage in wire taps and monitor bank funds transfers of the small scale Spitzer was doing to pay for the whores. (The man's a multi, multi-millionare. No matter how crazy it sounds to most of us to pay $1000+ for an hour of sex, it was pennies to him.) And they say they're going to prosecute him under the Mann Act, an archaic, 100 year old, almost-forgotten law that bans interstate travel for immoral purposes. So his crime was wanting such high class poontang they had to ship it in from other states? If he'd just settled for local talent, it wouldn't have been a crime? Absurd.
Why would the feds care? Well, given the the fact that the Bush Administration's legal branch is hopelessly politicized and partisan, has a history of politically motivated prosecutions and firings, and given that Spitzer made his career as a
crusading, white collar/rich people prosecuting liberal attorney general, and has
viciously and personally feuded with some prominent Republican party members, there are quite a few dots to connect.
I don't think anyone's suggesting the feds engaged in an outright frame up, but they somehow got word that Spitzer was involved with whores, and found a way to make a federal case out of something they would never have touched if he hadn't been a prominent Democratic politician. Consider that every news story about this is filled with anonymously leaked info from the government prosecutors, all of it salacious and scandalous, none of it illegal or pertaining to the actual legal case, and all of it intended to make Spitzer look bad and end his career. That's clearly not an accident. There's not much of a legal case against the guy, but there doesn't have to be; there just needs to be big sex scandal to bring him down.
That issue aside, can anyone understand high priced prostitution? I don't get it. I've never paid for sex (at least not directly), and don't see the attraction. The whole point of sex for me is being intimate with a woman I care about and know and have some level of relationship with. It's the chance to interact with another person (a woman, in my case) in an intimate, personal way that is unlike any other sort of social interaction. Sure, there's physical pleasure and ego gratification and such, but sex is not just interactive masturbation. It's a whole different level of human interaction.
Prostitution, on the other hand, is just sex. You know the woman (or man, in some cases) isn't enjoying it, doesn't really give a shit about you, and is only there as part of a financial transaction. For some people that's the whole point and the whole thrill. I don't understand that POV, but I can acknowledge that it exists. Why do most men hire whores, though? I can understand if if the guy's so ugly or anti-social or desperate that he can't get a real woman, but why do men who aren't that bad off do it? Aging, married men, such as Spitzer, I can understand. Men have
a very strong biological drive to have sex with young, attractive women, an evolutionary trait that's not highly compatible with long term monogamy. Some men resist the urge forever, but most men give into the temptation now and then, whether by banging one of their daughter's friends, or hiring a whore, or for the truly skilled, keeping a young mistress.
What about single men, though? Especially rich, powerful ones, who can easily get a girlfriend if they put their minds to it? Why do they go to strip clubs, or pay for whores? I can understand why rock stars and athletes and other male celebs bang groupies; they get an orgasm, get their ego stroked by a woman desiring them, and there aren't all the complicating attachments of a real relationship. I don't want that myself, but I can empathize enough to kind of put myself into their shoes. How does that work with a whore, though? It's not free, so there's no ego satisfaction of the "I'm so hot girls will throw themselves at me." nature. It's just sex, and not even really sex, since it's all an act for her. (This is true for quite a bit of consensual sex, on the part of women bored by their inept lovers, but that's another issue for another blog post.) It's vaginally-assisted masturbation, and the guy is paying quite a bit for the privilege.
Which brings me back to the initial issue. Why pay for it? What's the attraction for a single guy, in this age of infinite free porn online? I'm not making any promises, but I guess I'll have to try it out sometime when I'm single and have the resources, just to see what it's like. I've never had one night stand type anonymous sex, so maybe it's really all of that and I've been missing out with my years of getting to know and like and sometimes love women, before going to bed with them?
Labels: politics, prostitution, sex
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
G-Spot Hunt Goes On
With all the posting I've been doing about human psychology and how it relates to sexuality, I felt compelled to mention
this news item about some new research on the ever-elusive G-spot. As always, it's by a male researcher.
After more than half a century of debate and bedroom exploration, a row about the location of the fabled G spot may be settled at last, the British weekly New Scientist says.
The answer, according to Italian researcher Emmanuele Jannini, is that, yes, the G spot does exist, but only among those women who are lucky enough to possess it, New Scientist reports. Jannini, of the University of L'Aquila, used ultrasound to scan a key vaginal area among nine women who claimed to experience vaginal orgasms and 11 who said they didn't.
The target was an area of tissue on the front vaginal wall located behind the urethra. Tissue was notably thicker in this space among the first group of women compared with the second, the scans revealed.
Jannini, who reports the research in full in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, says the evidence is clear: "Women without any visible evidence of a G spot cannot have a vaginal orgasm."
"For the first time, it is possible to determine by a simple, rapid and inexpensive method if a woman has a G spot or not," he believes.
Some experts question whether what Jannini calls the G spot is a distinct structure or the internal part of the clitoris, whose size is highly variable. Others say more work is needed to confirm Jannini's belief that the G spot is missing in women who don't experience vaginal orgasm. The G spot could be there in all women, but with differing degrees of sensitivity, they believe.
So, what exactly has this clarified? All women may or may not have it, to varying degrees, and it may or may not be part of the clitoris. I've also got to point out that this study is useless on methodological grounds, unless there were testing controls not hinted at in the brief news item summation. If the examiners/scientists knew which women said they could or could not, then the physiological examination would have tester bias. Like all studies, this one needs to be done double blind, though that's obviously going to be tricky when you're researching something like this, where you need a special type of volunteer
At any rate, it's odd that they report the tissue in the "spot" is thicker amongst the women who said they can have vaginal orgasms; if the G spot were part of the clitoris you'd think that thinner tissue there would enable more transmission of sensations, or something like that. I'm also wondering where the connection between the G spot and vaginal orgasm was established; the article makes it sound like the researcher takes that as a fact, but there's nothing approaching 100% correlation in real world studies of this.
If you want to read more about the G-spot, and how could you not, there's a fairly
informative page on Wikipedia, though they don't get into how to find it. The
About.com page does, and it was the first return on my "finding the g spot" search, so you might start by looking there. So to speak.
And you might as well read about the much-debated issue of female ejaculation, since it's a related topic. One of
the About.com pages on female sexuality treats that juicy subject as an extension of G-spot stimulation, but experts are still arguing the issue. Early sex research (as related in the book
I recently reviewed on the subject) by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson conclusively "proved" that it was a myth and that women did not ejaculate when they orgasmed. That remained the official position until later researchers provided female test subjects who could routinely ejaculate upon orgasm, and it's now taken for granted that some women can do it all the time. However, they still don't know what causes it or what the ejaculate is.
It's basically urine, and it comes out of the urethra, but it has some enzymes and proteins that differ from usual pee samples. So yeah, basically she's peeing on you (or you're peeing on him/her/it), but it's like, special super love pee. So treat it with reverence; you worked hard to earn it.
Labels: sex
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Book Review: Disorders of Desire
Apparently, the goal in writing about human psychology and behavior these days is to work "desire" into your book's title. While
The Evolution of Desire was only slightly misnomered, this book's title,
Disorders of Desire, is entirely misleading. It sounds like a book about pathologies of sex, perhaps including sex addiction, nymphomania, rape, child molestation, and so forth. That's why I checked it out, when I was researching a paper on hypersexuality.
Unfortunately for my purposes, this book is actually a fairly dry, scholarly, and comprehensive history of... sex research and sex researchers in the US since the 1940s. (When Kinsey created the field with his groundbreaking work.) The book has chapters on Kinsey's studies, Masters and Johnson's work in later decades, medical issues with sex, sexual politics, sex therapy techniques, transsexualism, etc. The book was useless for my research paper, but it had some interesting information in its own right, so I read the good bits and kept it around until I had time to write a review.
To the scores:
Disorders of Desire, by Janice M. Irvine, 2005.
Concept: 7 (Misleading title: 3)
Presentation: 6
Writing Quality: 7
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7
Entertainment Value: 5
Rereadability: 5
Overall: 7
I enjoyed the book, but it's not something written for a mass audience. You'll find this one in the collection of therapists, sex researchers, and college libraries. It's not overly technical or academic in the presentation, but it's not pop cultural either, and if you aren't interested in the subject you'll never make it through. Nor want to. It is informative and well-researched though, so I found it of value. But I'm used to (at this point) reading scholarly/academic works, and this is a field I'm interested in. If you're not and you're not, then your mileage will almost certainly vary.
This isn't the type of book that draws sweeping, societal conclusions. It's not trying to do so. The overall impression, however, is of how much progress society has made in this area since the early-mid twentieth century. Before Kinsey's work in the 1940s, there essentially was no sexual research, much less therapy. Anyone with desires or interests outside of the heteronormative, marriage-centric area was a pervert. There wasn't any acceptance of homosexuality or fetishism or anything we take as commonplace today, and there was no acknowledgement of sexual problems even within marriage. Subjects like a "healthy sex life" that are today the subject of numerous bestsellers and Oprah show segments weren't imagined, much less discussed in public forums.
Alfred C. Kinsey got the ball rolling with his studies of male and female sexual behavior in the 1940s. His work couldn't have come about without societal changes in the previous decades, but thanks to World War I and the ongoing decline of rural life, those were present. More Americans than ever before lived in the relative anonymity of big cities, more women were working, and just as cultural conservatives feared, sexual immorality was on the rise. The book notes that female smoking was seen as a horrible development when it grew in popularity in the 1920s. Some cultural moralist is quoted from that time, saying, "Virtually all the male vices will be feminine vices, too." You gotta admit he pretty well called that one, eh?
Kinsey wasn't the first sex researcher; the book cites some others who carried out similar research in the early 1900s. What Kinsey did was apply a rigorous, scientific discipline to the field, and he conducted an amazing number interviews, thus giving him large enough sample sizes to give credence to his conclusions. Kinsey was a professor of zoology at Indiana University, who specialized in gall wasps. He had no formal training in human sexuality (not that there was any such training to receive at that point), and had to invent and pioneer most of the techniques and questions he used in his lengthy interviews. Kinsey describes his methods in detail in his books, so check into those if you want the full story. In brief, his usual interview required 2-3 hours, and covered 300-500 questions. He felt this level of depth got past the individual's ability whitewash their sexual history. Kinsey wasn't the only one carrying out these interviews, of course. He had hundreds of assistants, and they were rigorously selected (and entirely male WASPs) and formally trained, to ensure high quality, non-judgmental interviews.
He published his male results first, and they stirred up quite a bit of controversy, but that was nothing compared to the female results published some years later. The men in power and setting national policy could accept that most men masturbated constantly, cheated on their wives, frequented prostitutes, and so forth, since after all, they knew it was true. They were far less sanguine about seeing scientific validity given to the fact that most women engaged in premarital sex, that more than a quarter cheated on their husbands, that they fantasized about other men during sex, etc. Information about the ubiquity of sex play amongst children, and the high frequency of homosexual activity amongst adult males was not too welcome either.
A key to his research, and the factor that earned him so much criticism and antipathy during his life and since his death, was his scientific, "value-free" approach. He did not make value judgments or criticize the sex or fantasy lives of his subjects, nor did he present his research with moral arguments. He just compiled statistics on how frequency of sex, how many people had extramarital affairs, premarital sex, homosexual experiences, frequented prostitutes, and so forth. The results of his research were (and still are) infuriating to cultural conservatives, who don't want sex to be a legitimate subject for discussion, and they especially don't want people to know how much deviancy actually exists in society. So they attack societal changes, find things to blame our perceived cultural decline, and do all they can to vilify Kinsey, or anyone else who reproduces his work and reaffirms his conclusions.
This is not just a recent phenomena. As the book quotes Kinsey at the time:
There was some organized opposition, chiefly from a particular medical group. There were attempts by the medical association in one city to bring suit on the ground that we were practicing medicine without a license, police interference in two or three cities, investigation by a sheriff in one rural area, and attempts to persuade the University's Administration to stop the study, or to prevent the publication of the results, or to dismiss the senior author from his university connection, or to establish a censorship over all publications emanating from the study... In one city, a school board, whose president was a physician, dismissed a high school teacher because he had cooperated in getting histories outside of the school but in the same city. There were other threats of legal action, threats of police investigation, and threats of censorship, and for some years there was criticism from scientific colleagues. It has been interesting to observe how far the ancient traditions and social customs influence even persons who are trained as scientists.
Kinsey was almost entirely apolitical, but he could not ignore the results of his studies, which showed that most people engaged in numerous activities that were illegal under the moral codes of the time. He was therefore a harsh critic of the "sexual psychopath" laws that were on the books at the time in many states.
After Kinsey came Masters and Johnson, male and female doctors who built on Kinsey's work with more laboratory study. It had become more acceptable by the 1960s to study sexual activity, not just interview people about it, so things that Kinsey had do in secret (observe and film hetero and homosexual couples, measure body parts, etc) could be done, if not openly, at least without as much secrecy and risk of career suicide. The time of women's liberation was coming about, and sex research showing that women had their own goals and desires, and that these were frequently not being met, was ripe for the times. The presentation of it was still quite tricky, though. The first edition of
Human Sexual Response was published in 1966, and was described as "an almost impenetrable thicket of Latinate medicalese." This was not an accident, as Masters explained:
Every effort was made to make this book as pedantic and obtuse as possible and, may I say in all modesty, I think we succeeded admirably. Although we were specifically writing a textbook for the biological and behavioral professions, we were all aware that aware that the text would be dissected paragraph by paragraph by others, and that if one line, or even a suggestion of "pornography" could be established in any context, we would have had to ace a holocaust.
Despite this, the first printing sold out in 3 days, and the book was soon #2 on the NYT bestseller list. "Once again, it was obvious that there was a vast market for sexual information."
One of the oddest aspects of M&J is that they were both quite conservative. They researched sex, they watched and filmed hundreds of volunteers having sex, they broke ground in the precise descriptions and definitions of human sexual response, but they were culturally Neanderthal. They frequently argued the fact that sex was "natural" and a beautiful and equal activity, enjoyable by both men and women. Yet their definition of "natural" was almost exclusively "married heterosexual" and they would up on the wrong side of the fence, scientific truth, and historical consequence decades later, with their responses to the early years of the AIDS crisis.
In 1988, seven years after AIDS was first diagnosed in the US, M&J published an alarmist tract that claimed vastly higher HIV infection rates than any official study had found, warned of massive HIV outbreaks, recommended mandatory pre-marital testing for AIDS, and went against all established scientific evidence in claiming that HIV could be spread through casual contact, such as from saliva and toilet seats. The reaction from other researchers and public health officials was almost uniformly savage, and when M&J did their usual defensive lock down and refused to release their raw survey data, their conclusions were largely disregarded... except by cultural conservatives, who used them for their own demagogic ends.
The book covers a great deal more ground, including Humanism in sexuality (basically rich hippies fucking like mad, under the guise of sexual research), the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement, the general failure of sex researchers and professionals to get in front of the ball when the AIDS crisis began (epitomized by M&J's craziness), the controversial misandry revealed by The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, early research into female ejaculation and the reality (or not) of the G-spot, and much more. I'm going absurdly long on all my book reviews/discussions though, so I'll refrain from going any deeper into this one. Seek it out at your library if you're curious, or have a college student/professor of your acquaintance order it from their library if you can't find it in your city/county system. If you're interested in the history of sex research, it's an excellent survey of the field.
Labels: book review, sex
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The Evolution of Desire, Chapter 11
The second to last chapter is a juicy one, primarily for the extensive coverage of issues surrounding the female orgasm. See my extensive coverage of all the chapters of
this interesting book here.
Chapter Eleven: Women's Hidden Sexual StrategiesThis intriguingly-titled chapter is not one of those "Ten Secrets of Seduction That Really Work" Cosmo articles. It's deeper, but less practical, than that. As Buss overdramatically states about women:
Hidden within their bodies, concealed within their minds, reside bewildering intricacies of sexuality that cry out for understanding. Some strategies remain secret for an excellent evolutionary reason--they cannot be implemented successfully if their true design is revealed.
Whoa! It's like, they're there, but they're not there if you look for them! Like the
Vaginaberg Uncertainty Principle! Or perhaps not.
At any rate, there are four aspects of the human female that seem mysterious, in genetic, evolutionary terms. What function do they serve? Why have they persisted for millions of years of evolution, when they are not obviously (to Buss, at least) explained by physical function? 1) Female orgasm, 2) women having affairs, 3) are female sexual strategies linked to their menstrual cycle, and 4) can men detect when women are ovulating? Okay, that last one doesn't seem to have much to do with women's sexual secret, it's more about men wanting to have sex even more than usual at some special time of the month. Don’t complain to me though, it's not my list. I'm just reviewing this thing.
Let's start, unlike virtually every romantic encounter in the history of our species, with the female orgasm.
Is Female Sexual Orgasm an Adaptation? Buss is very honest and unscientific in this chapter, and he repeatedly allows his male interests and confusions to the fore. How's this for a quote rich in personal angst, "Women's sexual orgasm has puzzled, frightened, delighted, disturbed and mystified men for centuries." Why is the physical function of a woman's orgasm is so amazing to so many male doctors? Buss includes several quotes from women describing the sensation of an orgasm; they've got all of those "waves of pleasure" and "uncontrollable contractions" and such, but um... so? That's what men feel too, it's just that the male orgasm is much easier to instigate and so easily quantified by ejaculation. I guess it's the lack of a clear, obvious, undeniable feature, such as ejaculation, that makes the female orgasm seem so mysterious? That and the fact that most women fake a lot more of them than they actually experience.
Surveys have returned very different numbers on that issue, to no one's surprise. Buss cites one "fairly typical study," which says 15% of women always had an orgasm from intercourse, 48% usually, 19% sometimes, 11% occasionally, and 7% never. He says other studies came up with equivalent numbers, which surprises me, since every woman I've talked to about this issue has been in the 11% camp, or 19% at best. I'd add that one was in the 7% before me, but that would sound like bragging, even if I admitted that I only moved her up to the 19% range. At best.
In one of the biggest failings in the entire book, the obvious follow up question is not addressed. Why weren't the women asked how often they faked their orgasm? Why wasn't that same question put to the husbands/bfs of those women? In my experience, from talking to a fair number of women about this topic, they all admitted to faking almost every time, and they all said their BFs at the time were utterly convinced by their acting. So while I think these 15/48/19/11/7 figures are exponentially high, I'd bet most guys would be like, "Wow, that's funny. Every woman I've ever been with has been in the 15% group. I guess I'm just that good."
I agree with Buss that there's a huge mystery about female orgasm, but we disagree on what the mystery is. I think the mystery is how men can continue to believe she's not faking that display of moaning and panting, when it comes after 5 minutes of fellatio-centered foreplay, and maybe 3 minutes of desperate thrusting. I'm not exactly volunteering for this, but I think every relationship would be much improved by one mandatory session with a strap on, shortly after sexual intercourse commences. The woman could hump away at the guy for a few minutes, then grunt some, take the Lord's name in vain a few times, and ask, "Was it good for you?"
When the man stammered out an incredulous, "Um... not really." the woman could say, "Well, keep that in mind next time you're on top." What the man chose to do with that bit of insight would be up to him, but at least he'd have received one hard lesson in reality, upon which to base (or not) his future behavior and beliefs.
You could object and say that men don't enjoy butt sex, and make analogies to prison, etc, but you'd be full of shit. Literally as well as metaphorically. Plenty of men do, not just gay men, and prison rape isn't comparable, since, duh, it's rape. No one's suggesting female sexual response from rape be weighted evenly with orgasm frequency from consensual intercourse in the context of a loving relationship. After all, I sincerely doubt many women are polite enough to fake orgasm for the benefit of their rapist, though you never know; old habits might die hard.
Buss isn't as proactive in his suggestions, and after his absurd survey figures, he moves into the evolution discussion.
One leading theory is that unlike the obvious function of the male orgasm, the female doesn't actually have a purpose. It's not necessary for conception, and in fact female orgasm is like the male nipple; functionless, but still there because it's essential in the other gender. Steven J. Gould is quoted on this one. Gould said that males and females are not separate entities, but, "...are variants upon a single ground plan, elaborated later in embryology." Points in his argument:
- There's no compelling evidence that non-human female primates experience orgasm during intercourse, although they do have the capacity for orgasm from clitoral stimulation.
- Female orgasm is unnecessary for conception.
- Female orgasm is highly variable between women, and even in the same woman depending on her partner.
- Female orgasm is entirely unknown in some cultures.
There's a quote of a ethnographic survey to back that last one up. :
In most societies for which there are data, it is reported that men take the initiative, and without extended foreplay, proceed vigorously toward climax without much regard for achieving synchrony with the woman's orgasm. Again and again, there are reports that coitus is primarily complete in terms of the man's passions and pleasures, with scant attention paid to the woman's response. If women do experience orgasm, they do so passively.
Fortunately, men in America in this day and age have moved far beyond that style of sex. Right, ladies?
Buss presents this argument, then immediately undermines it by citing more recent medical data that indicates that female stumptail macaque monkeys do appear to achieve orgasm during intercourse. He also cites some anthropological studies of other tribal cultures in which women insist upon longer duration of intercourse, and seem to require that the man satisfy them before he is finished. So the question is still open to discussion, apparently.
Five Possible Functions of Female Orgasm Various popular hypotheses to suggest why women have orgasms, in evolutionary, biological terms.
- The hedonic hypothesis. Orgasm makes sex more fun, so women are therefore more likely to engage in it, leading to more reproduction.
- The Mr. Right hypothesis suggests that orgasm serves as a mate selection device. A man who shows he is sensitive to her needs is advertising his suitability as a mate. Amusingly, this one has received some empirical support by large-scale surveys, but not as proposed. Instead, it seems that women might be more likely to cheat when they're not getting orgasms from their husband. The causality is in question though; do happier marriages lead to more orgasms and less cheating, or vice versa?
- The paternity confidence hypothesis says that women display orgasm to their partner to make him feel he's keeping her satisfied and that she's not straying. Given how men feel about infidelity, this seems a reasonable theory. It also ties in nicely with the fact that most women fake orgasm; it's not just a sop to fragile male ego. Well, it is, but fragile male ego in this case stems directly from male biological worries about
- The paternity confusion hypothesis makes no sense to me. It states that women have orgasms to give them incentive to have sex with more men, thus making many men unsure if the baby might be theirs, and thus making them more likely to assist her and less likely to kill the baby that might be their son/daughter. Huh? This seems to go opposite to all else we know about women not wanting to suggest infidelity, so it seems like a bullshit theory to me, and according to Buss, the female anthropologist who originally suggested it has backed away from it in more recent work. I guess he included it since five is more than four?
- The sperm retention hypothesis states that the cervix dips lower when women have orgasms, thus making fertilization more likely. Possible, but dubious, given that humans have no problem reproducing when there's no female orgasm involved.
In other interesting female orgasm news; female Japanese macaque monkeys are more orgasmic with higher ranking males, regardless of the duration of intercourse. This was especially true when low ranking females mated with high ranking males. Seems to mesh with human studies, in which women find sex more enjoyable with more desirable men. It's almost as if our mental state and psychology ties into our sexual enjoyment? Wow, what won't science prove next.
Physical attraction matters too; women married to more physically attractive men (as determined by outsider observers) reported more orgasmic sex lives. Again, the direction of causality is in question, though. More attractive men might be better lovers, either from confidence or greater experience.
Buss' ultimate summation is that the Mr. Right theory is most likely, but in an odd way. Women are more orgasmic when they're cheating, they're more likely to cheat when they are ovulating, and they tend to cheat with men who are more attractive than their husbands. It's therefore suggested that female orgasm probably originated as a by-product, as Gould suggests. But it's been modified by evolution to determine with who, and when, women conceive.
He ends the section by finally getting to the question I was waiting for. What about male adaptations to female orgasm? If the female orgasm is such a potent aspect of conception, why haven't men evolved better ability to trigger it, more ability to withhold their own orgasm until the female's hits, the ability to ejaculate just after a female orgasm (the best time for conception), and a better ability to detect fake orgasms? As Buss says, there's "no evidence for these hypothesized co-evolved adaptations." Further study is needed, obviously.
Why Do Women Have Affairs? It's obvious why men do, genetically speaking. And men do it more often, but women do it too, even though there's no obvious genetic reason for it. Why?
Nearly all men have sexual fantasies about someone other than their current partner, but women aren't far behind; upwards of 80% report this, in most studies, and around 34% of women's erotic daydreams feature someone other than their partner. This matters too; all men frequently fantasize about other women, but cheaters and non-cheaters are nearly identical in their fantasy frequency. However, women who fantasize about other men are much more likely to cheat (53% of cheating women vs. 30% of non-cheaters). Again, there's the causation vexation; do women who are unsatisfied fantasize about another man since that's what they want, or do women who fantasize about another man talk themselves into cheating?
The biological issue remains as well. Men who cheat have a clear opportunity to increase their reproduction rate. Women can only have one baby at a time, so it's not a question of more for them, but of with whom. Also, women incur substantial risks through infidelity. As previous chapters discussed, men rate their partner's infidelity as the single most upsetting thing she can do. Women who cheat risk their marriages, their male support, their reputations, their future value on the dating market, contracting STDs, and more. All of which makes the question more pertinent. Why do women cheat, when there is so much risk and seemingly so little possible gain?
The
good genes hypothesis is one commonly argued. It's worth the risk of being caught cheating by a husband in order to be impregnated by a man with superior genetics. Low status women are able to cheat on their husbands by mating with higher status men they could not hope to marry, and studies, as well as your usual
Maury Show paternity test, indicate that they often do. Extensive studies into paternity are not often conducted, since most people simply do not want to know, but the few tests that have gone on and been published indicate a cuckoldry rate of around 10%, worldwide. A large study in Monterey, Mexico found 12% of children were not their father's. Buss mentions a colleague who, while researching breast cancer and genetics in the US, found a 10% cuckoldry rate. So yes, about 10% of the people reading this have a cheating mother, and an unknown father. Be interesting if, in the future as genetic mapping becomes more common, it becomes routine for people to find out for certain if they really are the product of their mom and dad. The whole world will become one big Maury Show!
Buss concludes this section with several pages of survey results, mostly concerning women's hypothetical interest in cheating, or their hypothetical benefits from it. Most involve boredom, or a way to get more sexual pleasure or boost their self esteem. Women who aren't happy with their partner are more likely to cheat, which seems to tie into the "testing their value on the dating market" or "searching for a new partner" theories. Common sense, really.
He gets to some answers about why women cheat later in the chapter. But first...
Do Women's Menstrual Cycles Influence Sexual Strategies? Yes. Studies of women with regular 28-day cycles show their desire increasing steadily until ovulation, on the 14th day, and then decreasing as they approached menstruation. This despite the fact that other studies show that women don't consciously know when they're ovulating.
Another study had women fill out questionnaires about their sexual desires and appetites. The women were much more likely to experience sexual fantasies, especially about other men, when ovulating. Much more interestingly, another study had women rate the type of male face they were most attracted to at different times during their cycle. On average, more masculine, rugged faces were rated highest during ovulation, and more feminine, boy band type faces were rated highest during non-fertile times of the month.
The logic of this is not that ovulating women want to fuck lumberjacks, (well, they do, but there's more to it than that) but that high levels of testosterone yield masculine features, and that only boys who are very healthy during adolescence can produce such high testosterone, thus showing, like a peacock's tail, that they're genetically very fit. So, when women want to get pregnant they want manly men, but they want less macho men for long term partners, probably since experience or instinct tells them that very macho men make poor mates since they cheat constantly. "Women judge the less masculine faces, preferred during their least fertile days of the month, as a signal of cooperativeness, honesty, and good parenting qualities."
Buss seems to be stretching the conclusion here a bit, and other studies have not replicated the same degree of preference for girly men during low fertile times of the month. However, numerous studies have found that women prefer more masculine faces while ovulating.
Can Men Detect When Women Ovulate? Apparently not. Many studies have searched for evidence of that, and most theorists expect that men should have evolved this ability, but there's no evidence for it. This is especially odd when humans are compared to other animals and primates, since most of those animals only mate when the females are ovulating, and in most cases it's very obvious when the females are in season.
Scientists are still studying it though, and there have been some positive results. Men seem to find female body odor more intriguing when the woman is ovulating, as judged by men sniffing the t-shirts study subjects had worn during different times of the month. Women's skin color changes slightly when they're ovulating as well, since the skin becomes "vascularized, more suffused with blood in a way that corresponds to what men subjectively experience as a woman appearing to 'glow.'"
Women behave differently too; observations and studies of women in singles bars demonstrates that they are more forward, touch men more often, wear more revealing clothing, etc, when they are ovulating. This runs us into the causation issue again, since maybe men can tell women are ovulating, or maybe women just feel "sexier" then, so behave in ways that men notice. It also appears that men become more protective and guarding of their mates when they're ovulating, though the evidence for this is largely anecdotal.
Buss theorizes that we'll know far more about this in a decade, since many studies are underway on the issue. Scientists are looking for more indirect evidence; do men become more sexually insistent when their partners are ovulating? Do women who are cheating become especially good at deceiving or avoiding their mates? Do men feel more loving at that time? Do men feel less loving or more insecure when she's not ovulating? All good topics for study, and one can sense Buss planning a new edition to his book every few years from here on out.
Next time, the final chapter. Mysteries of Human Mating.
Labels: sex, the evolution of desire
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Book Review: The Evolution of Desire, Chapter Four
The endless review/summation continues.
Chapters One and Two here.
Chapter three.
Chapter Four: Casual SexChapter four begins with a citation of the well-known study on male vs. female attitudes towards casual sex. The scenario as presented is this: an attractive stranger of the opposite gender approaches you and says they've noticed you around, they think you're hot, and they want to go off and have sex with you right now. When given this hypothetical, 75% of men say they would accede enthusiastically, and 100% of women say they would not, and would in fact be insulted or incredulous at the proposal. This, in a nut
sackshell, defines the essential difference between men and women when it comes to casual sex.
Buss points out that for all the attention given it in popular entertainment, casual sex is much less studied or researched than sex in married life, or in long term relationships. Men lie and overstate their totals, women lie and understate their totals, and the answers of most research subjects can't be entirely trusted; after all, married people aren't going to talk freely about their casual sexapades in front of their spouse, or to doctors who are interacting with them both. So less is known about casual mating habits than about marriage, and it's less understood. It's obvious why men would want to engage in it, both from an the POV of evolution and enjoyment, but why do women? Some women do, perhaps even all women do at some time, and there's a long history of women doing it, or else men wouldn't have evolved with the genes and the urge to keep asking for it. Humans have an instinctive fear of snakes because people who didn't got bitten and died. Humans don't have a desire to eat grass or bark or rocks because people who did didn't live to pass on their genes. Non-adaptive behaviors do not persist, yet the male urge for casual sex, and the female inclination to occasionally give into male requests, is still around. Why?
It doesn't answer the question, but it's an interesting point I'd never heard before. Men have huge nuts. Relative to body weight, the average male human's testicles take up .079% of body weight. Buss compares humans to other primates, and gorillas' are only .018%, and orangutans are just 0.48% of their body weights. Male humans wouldn't have the capacity to produce so much sperm on a daily basis if it hadn't come in handy at times. By that logic it follow that apes that have more sex, with more partners, should have larger nuts. And in fact, that's what researchers (Good job, huh? Weighing monkey nuts?) have found. Chimpanzees, which are highly promiscuous, have nuts that weigh .269% of their body weight; over three times more massive than those of a man.
In another interesting study, this one involving a much lower chance of poo being flung, researchers counted the sperm in human ejaculate when men were with their wives 100% of the time, and then when they were together only 5% of the time. (I assume this study controlled for frequency of non-wife-assisted ejaculation, but it's not made clear in the text.) The men who were apart from their wives produced almost double the sperm count in their ejaculations, exactly what you would expect if that load was meant to outcompete another man's offering, in the race to fertilize a ready egg.
Lust. Lust, the desire for sex with a wide variety of partners, is not a random feature, or a bug. It's an evolutionary-perfected trait that serves us very well in our effort to perpetuate our genes. Men want to have sex with lots of different women because our ancestors who did that had more kids, and spread their genes more widely. Men, on the whole, desire more sexual partners than women, and do what they can to obtain them. When asked, the average man says he'd like to have six sexual partners in the next year. The average woman says she wants just one. (This question seems too vague to me. I'd rather have one partner I really enjoyed being with and loved than six I didn't, but if I didn't give a shit about any of them I'd rather have twelve than six. Not that I particularly want even one sexual partner I don't care about. Which is why the question is too vague.)
The adjacent side of the die to the "Would you have sex with a stranger?" question is the "How likely would you be to agree to sex with someone you've known for _______ long if you're attracted to them?" Answers vary for women, with the odds increasing with longer familiarity, but for men they spike to nearly 100% almost immediately after "complete stranger." Again, there's a sound evolutionary reason for this. The more quickly a man can inseminate a woman, the sooner he can get moving and find another woman to inseminate. From a biological standpoint, a man gains nothing by taking time to decide he wants to have sex with a willing female.
Men also lower their standards for short term liaisons. While men are quite picky about potential wives, they're much less choosy when it comes to casual sex partners. The acceptable range of partners scales up in every way; attractiveness, race, age, and all the personality characteristics that men find important or essential when theorizing about a potential wife. Even things like promiscuity flip around; men are quite eager to engage in casual sex with a promiscuous woman who they would never consider marrying. Commitment reverses as well; men do not want to enter into a relationship with a woman who isn't interested in commitment, but men positively adore that in a casual sex partner. The extreme case of this is a married woman; men are quite happy to have casual sex with someone else's wife, but do not want to consider a relationship with a woman who isn't available to them exclusively.
The Coolidge Effect. This truism is named after a famous joke that apparently has some historical reality. The story goes that US President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were being given a tour of some new government farms. When passing the chicken coop Mrs. Coolidge saw a rooster and hen copulating, and asked how often the rooster performed that duty. When told it was dozens of times a day, she said, "Tell that to Mr. Coolidge." When the president came along a bit later the rancher did so. The president asked, "All with the same hen?" The rancher said no, that there were dozens of hens, to which the president replied, "Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."
The tendency of males to be more aroused by multiple females than the same female has been documented many times, in many types of animals. Rats, rams, cattle, and sheep all show the same effect.
In a typical study, a cow is placed in a bull pen, and after copulation the cow is replaced with another cow. The bull's sexual response continues unabated with each new cow, but diminishes quickly when the same cow is left in the pen. Males continue to become aroused to the point of ejaculation in response to novel females, and the response to the eight, the tenth, or the twelfth female is nearly as strong as the response to the first.
The animals can't be fooled; if they cover the cow, or disguise her scent, or lead her out and bring her back in, the bull's arousal is much less pronounced than it is to a new female. This is not just a bull trait either; it's been bserved in humans all across the world, and is backed up by the frequency of sexual activity in couples. The frequency of sexual activity, no matter how regular or infrequent it was initially, decreases to about 50% of that initial level after a year of marriage. Polygamous men report the same thing; if they sleep with one wife several days in a row she becomes gradually less interesting and attractive, and the other wife seems far more attractive. Yet the same phenomena occurs in reverse after the man is with that wife for several days.
This does not seem to be the case for women, though Buss doesn't cite any studies on the subject. He does list infidelity rates, and summarizes various studies (all of which are problematic in method or accuracy) into infidelity, most of which show that men cheat at about twice the rate as do women.
Sexual Fantasies. Men have a lot more of them, unsurprisingly. They differ in content too; men's far more often feature sex with strangers, or multiple partners. 43% of women say they never switch partners during a sexual fantasy; only 18% of men agree. Fantasies about group sex occur in 33% of men but only 18% of women. As Buss sums it up, "Numbers and novelty are key ingredients of men's fantasy lives."
Men and women focus on different things during their fantasies, too. Men tend to be visual; they imagine how good their partner(s) look. Around 81% of men focus on visual images in their fantasies, compared to only 43% of women. Male fantasies tend to be largely devoid of plot or logic or other entanglements. Men seldom fantasize about their sexual partner. Women's sexual fantasies usually involve their partner. 41% of women but only 16% of men report focusing most heavily on the personal and emotional characteristics of their fantasy partner. 57% of women but only19% of men focus on emotional feelings in their fantasies. As one woman reported.
"I usually think about the guy I am with. Sometimes I realize that the feelings will overwhelm me, envelop me, sweep me away." Women emphasize tenderness, romance, and personal involvement in their sexual fantasies. Women pay more attention to the way their partners respond to them than to visual images of the partner.
Perceptions of Attractiveness. As anyone who's glanced over
my old Hot or Not page already knows, men rate women much more highly than women rate men. And men aren't even consistent in their scores. Their ratings go up as the night gets later. In a study of men and women in a singles bar, the men gave the women an average score of 5.5 at 9pm, and 6.5 near the midnight closing time. Women's ratings of men went up as well, but they were lower all along; 5.0 at 9, 5.5 at midnight. Buss suggests that perhaps the "beer goggles" effect is more about a diminishing time window for successful hooking up, rather than simply alcohol impairing a man's judgment.
Sexual Variations. The habits of homosexuals are very useful to study on their own, and to extrapolate to shed light on male and female heterosexual behavior. Male homosexual behavior is unconstrained by female dictates of romance, involvement, and commitment. Lesbian behavior is unconstrained by male dictates and demands. So what do gays do? About what straights would, if they had their druthers. Gay men have a lot of casual sex while lesbians fall into long term romantic relationships. One study found that 94% of male homosexuals had more than 15 partners. Only 15% of lesbians did. A Kinsey study in San Francisco in the 1980s found that almost half of the male homosexuals had been with more than 500 different sex partners. As Buss dryly remarks, "This evidence suggests that when men are unconstrained by the courtship and commitment requirements typically imposed by women, they freely satisfy their desires for casual sex with a variety of partners." Religious conservatives like to pretend that gays are uniquely immoral, but the authors of the studies Buss cites conclude something different; that gay men simply demonstrate the type of sex heterosexual men would have, if women were agreeable to it.
Prostitution is another point to consider. Prostitution occurs in nearly every society every studied, and the customers are always overwhelmingly male. Kinsey found that 69% of American men had been to a prostitute, and that for 15% of men, a whore was their regular sexual outlet. The figures for women were so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Buss states that prostitution is not a direct result of any biological need, but is rather an accommodation between two drives; that of men to obtain additional sexual gratification, and of some women to earn money providing it.
Incest is another demonstration of this. Girls are two to three times more likely to be victims of incest, and in all cases men are far more likely to be the perpetrators. There's a genetic component as well, one step-daughters would do well to watch out for. Father-stepdaughter incest makes up 50-75% of all reported cases. Buss doesn't control for what % of households are made up of fathers with stepdaughters vs. families (incestuous or otherwise) of fathers with their own daughters, but I'd think there must be far, far more natural daughters than stepdaughters, which makes the fact that stepdaughters are molested in at least half of cases of incest even more striking. (There may also be a higher likelihood of such cases being reported, since the victimized daughter doesn't feel the same bonds of love and loyalty to Steve that she does to Daddy?)
The Hidden Side of Women's Short-Term Sexuality. Why do women engage in casual sex? Why do women cheat? Psychological and individual reasons can easily be imagined, but since the whole point of Buss' book is to explain things in biological, genetic terms, there must be some adaptive benefits to women who cheat or engage in casual sex, or the tendency would not exist. The potential reproductive benefits to men are obvious, but what do women get out of it?
Buss speculates on several possibilities. First up: prostitution for survival. Imagine a famine, or cold spell, or failure of crops. Men could hunt or fight and take food; how could women get it? They could exchange sex for it. This tendency continues today not just in actual prostitution, but in more casual exchanges. Men get sex and women get presents. A man who keeps a mistress is the most obvious case study, but countless dating relationships work in similar, if less formalized, fashion. Buss cites a study into temporary mating practices, and lists the four habits men engaged in that attracted women.
...spending a lot of money on them from the beginning, giving them gifts from the beginning, having an extravagant life style, and being generous with their resources. Women judge these attributes to be only mildly desirable in husbands but quite desirable in casual sex partners.
Affairs also provide an opportunity to evaluate potential husbands in ways they can not evaluate them in a non-sexual relationship. Women's standards for selecting sexual partners do not differ greatly from their selections for husbands. As Buss describes it, women still want men who are kind, romantic, understanding, exciting, stable, healthy, humorous, and generous with their resources. The same physical traits are sought as well, and women want men who are tall, athletic, and attractive. Unlike men, women do not regard promiscuity or unavailability as desirable traits in a sexual partner. A married or otherwise occupied man is not what most women want in a partner, since he is unavailable, his resources are otherwise diverted, and by trysting with her, he is demonstrating that he can not be trusted to remain faithful in a long term relationship.
According to Buss, women use casual sexual relationships as auditions for potential long term relationships. He does not address the issues of "groupies," women who queue up to have sex with rap/rock stars, professional athletes, and other celebrities. Perhaps these women are simply indulging their lusts for especially eligible men (whether the men are actually "eligible" or not), or perhaps they are operating on a delusional level; thinking (seriously or otherwise) that they're the one so special that the famous man will give up his philandering ways and settle down with her?
Another use of casual sex for women is to form special friendships with men. Baboons and other primates engage in this practice, with females trading sex for protection, access to resources, and other favors. Unmarried women do the same thing in various primitive tribes, where women can not count on the rule of law or social structure to protect them from marauders. Even married women may do it on the sly, cultivating special friendships to give them protection or assistance when their husband is away.
Casual sex is also useful to keep possible substitutes for a primary mate on hand. Throughout most of human history, and pre-history, men often died in war, hunting accidents, or fights with other men. A woman left without her man and without protection was in great danger. Cultivating special friendships with men other than her mate was a wise habit, since a replacement might be needed on very short order.
Another theory has been called the "sexy son hypothesis." In this scenario, women may find it biologically wise to allow especially attractive men to impregnate them, thus increasing the odds that the resulting children, especially sons, will be very attractive and thus better positioned to spread their genes widely. Evidence for this theory comes from observations that women are more selective about physical details in a casual sex partner than they are in a long term mate.
There is also speculation that the human custom of arranged marriages might have contributed to women's desire to cheat. If a woman was forced to marry for social reasons, often to a less than physically-impressive specimen, she could improve the genetic odds for her children by clandestine casual sex with genetically superior men.
Costs of Casual Sex. There are risks, of course. Men risk disease, acquiring a reputation as a womanizer, and injury or death at the hands of a jealous husband. Buss states that "A significant proportion of murders across cultures occurs because jealous men suspect their mates of infidelity." Women have higher risks of disease and to their reputations, and they risk violence not so much from jealous partners, but from the men themselves. While wives are battered in many marriages, single women or women in short term relationships suffer violence from their mates at much higher rates than do married women. Women also risk unwanted pregnancies, and women who cheat risk the loss of their husband and the resources he's been contributing to the relationship.
That both men and women always have and always will pursue casual sex, despite these many risks, shows that there must be some powerful incentives as well.
Favorable Contexts for Casual Sex. Buss starts off by acknowledging that individuals differ greatly in the amount of casual sex they engage in. Why? One factor he cites is the lack of a contributing father during childhood. "Women whose parents were divorced, for example, are far more promiscuous than women whose families were intact."
Casual sex is more common during different times in life as well. During adolescence, for instance, and also after divorce, when men and women want to assess their value in the dating market. Cultural phenomena can also greatly increase casual sex rates. In times when women greatly outnumber men, such as after or during a war, men become less likely to commit to a long term relationship. The opposite holds true when men outnumber women in a society. Interestingly, in communal societies, casual sex is more common since women are not dependent upon a man for support. Buss cites the Ache Indians of Paraguay for one contemporary example. They evidently pool their resources village-wide, and this has roughly the same effect on fidelity as the strong social welfare states in nations such as Sweden, where casual sex is very common and divorce rates are high.
Casual Sex as a Source of Power The chapter concludes with Buss doing his best to sooth the petty frettings of his readers.
This picture of human nature may be disturbing to many. Women may not be comforted by the ease with which men sometimes hop into bed with near strangers. Men may not be comforted by the knowledge that their wives continue to scan the mating terrain, encourage other men with hints of sexual accessibility, and sometimes cuckold husbands with impunity. Human nature can be alarming.
Coming soon... Chapter Five: Attracting a Partner.
Labels: psychology, sex, the evolution of desire
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Book Review: The Evolution of Desire: Chapter Three
My "review" of
The Evolution of Desire continues. As you've no doubt noticed, this isn't really a review; it's more like a chronological term paper, analyzing and preserving and pretty much ripping out every bit of useful content from the book. Well, not every bit; my review is far shorter (believe it or not) than the book itself, and I'm only touching on maybe 10 or 15% of the points Buss covers. I just found so much of the book fascinating and elucidating that I wanted to go over it slowly and carefully enough to get most of the facts and concepts burned into my brain, and to do that I had to take notes and type it up as I went. And since I did that, I might as well post it here, for those of you thoughtful and psychologically-curious enough to read it.
It occurred to me a few days ago, while going through this book and several others on related subjects, that I could have made a career out of this. Since I grew old enough to appreciate the difference, nothing has ever interested me more in conversation that talking to women about their views on sex, relationships, what they like and don't like in men, etc. I find male psychology so boring and rudimentary, in comparison to women, that I never much care about the inner lives of men, at least not in regards to their sexual desires and hopes and dreams. You've probably all seen
the famous illustration of this. That's obviously an exagerration, but it's not grossly untrue when evaluating the way the genders deal with each other when sex is part of the equation. (And when is it not?) I used to think of that diagram as being drawn from the male POV, but upon reflection, I think it goes both ways. The obvious joke is that women are impossibly complicated, but the converse is true as well. Women wonder why men only seem to have one reaction to stimuli, and curse the fact that the male control panel is so lacking in finer calibration.
Men aren't just stupid animals about everything; I think the psychology of my gender can be quite complicated and interesting in many areas of their psychology; how men seek or flee power and authority, how men relate to authority figures and especially their own fathers, and more, but those aren't really my areas of interest in study. Also, since I'm a man I have a natural insight into and knowledge of the male mind, so many things that would interest or confuse a woman seem common sense to me.
I enjoy the subject area in general though, and as I said, I've lately read a fair number of books on male vs. female psychology and relationships, and I've also read about famous sex researchers (Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, etc.) and psychologists and doctors who studied gender and made breakthrough discoveries. It never occurred to me until recently, but that field is one I could have enjoyed a career in. I can't see going into that at this point, though. I'd enjoy the grad school and doctoral thesis aspect of it, but that would take another 5 or 6 years, cost a fortune, and then what? No one's going to pay me to research and write books about it. I might sell books on it, but I'd have to go into practice to gather the information and learn the field inside and out, and frankly, I don't want to deal with crazy people.
I enjoy studying them, like bugs in a box, but I don't want to put up with their bullshit, and I don't care about helping the sick. I just want to read about their problems and try to figure out what caused them and why, and hear the juicy stories of their madness. Making them better is hard. Well, it's getting easier, but that's because abnormal psych and sexology has become almost entirely pharmacological, and just writing prescriptions isn't any fun. Worse yet, when the lithium or prozac or other mood stabilizers work, the client isn't interesting anymore.
So, no psych career for me, but I do enjoy dabbling in the field with a layman's knowledge, and I enjoy good books on the subject. Thus continues my discussion of this one.
Chapter Three: Men Want Something ElseThis chapter starts off pondering why men are willing to marry. After all, casual sex is a far better solution, genetically. Implant sperm, move on to another woman, repeat. Buss speculates that some of the evolved male willingness to marry and invest many years in just one woman was created as a reciprocal desire by women requiring that of men.
Women's requirements for consenting to sex made it costly for most men to pursue short-term mating strategy exclusively. In the economics of reproductive effort, the costs of not pursuing a permanent mate may have been prohibitively high for most men... A further cost of failing to seek marriage was impairment of the survival and reproductive success of the man's children.
Children without a father must have had much lower survival rates, and biologically speaking, it's useless to get women pregnant if they die before giving birth, or their/your offspring die before reaching reproductive age. Buss also points out that by marriage, men were able to reproduce with much higher quality women, since the higher quality women were able to demand marriage as a prerequisite to sexual activity. This works both ways, though. Lower quality women (by whatever the criteria of the age/culture was, and Buss gets to what men find attractive soon enough) can obtain sex with very high quality men by lowering their relationship requirements. Marrying such a man was much more difficult than bearing his young, since highly-eligible men have marriage standards that exclude most women.
Since men, biologically speaking, want to have numerous children, and since men were largely forced into monogamous relationships, the trick, for the men, was/is to figure which women are more reproductively capable. This is difficult, Buss says, since there are few obvious signs of reproductive capability. It can't be seen in a woman's appearance, her family history, or her social status, and she doesn't even know herself. How can men judge it, then? "Two obvious cues; youth and health."
Youth. A woman's reproductive capacity declines rapidly with age. From puberty to about 20, it increases. After 20 it steadily decreases; it's very low at 40, and by 50 it's generally zero. "Thus, women's capacity for reproduction is compressed into a fraction of their lives."
In the US, men uniformly express a desire for mates who are younger than they are. In surveys on college campuses from 1939-1988, men wanted women who were about 2.5 years younger than them. Men who are 21 prefer, on average, women who are 18.5. This preference is not limited to the US. It's found in surveys of men all over the world, and in all sorts of cultures, from the most modern to the most primitive. Nigerian men at 23.5 prefer women who are 17. Yugoslavian men at 21.5 want 19 year old wives. Most of the surveys cited by Buss are of young men, but he includes some stats about older men, and as you might expect, the older a man gets, his ideal women gets more years younger. Hugh Hefner aside, most men at 40 and 50 don't still want twenty year olds, but men in their 30s want women who are about 5 years younger, and men in their 50s prefer women 10-20 years younger. (Or perhaps that's the youngest they can get, and if not limited by economic or cultural barriers, most 60 y/o men would shack up with teenagers, sultan-style?)
This stated preference is backed up by demographic studies; American men marry women progressively younger than them in second and third marriages. Men are around 3 years older than their first wives, 5 years older than the second, and 8 years older than the third, averaged across men/women of all ages. This isn't a new or American phenomena. Records from Sweden in the 1800s show that men married women an average of 10.6 years younger than them on their second marriages. The age difference is even wider in polygamous cultures, with men choosing (buying) wives two and three decades younger than themselves.
In short, contemporary men prefer young women because they have inherited from their male ancestors a preference that focused intently upon this cue to a woman's reproductive value. This psychologically based preference translates into everyday mating decisions.
Standards of Physical Beauty. Even more than youth, men seek beauty.
Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman's health and youth: features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone -- and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute the ingredients of male standards of female beauty.
I'd never thought of some of those categories, but upon reading them I realized that I did in fact desire them. Malaya did a lot of those things, and the IG has a few habits that I find so charming, and several of them are darts into these bullseyes. She sometimes gives a little skipping hop to get moving towards a desired object, and she makes the most amazingly animated, dancing-eyed, excited faces when she's intrigued by something. I've always been enchanted by those maneuvers, but had never thought why. I just thought they were cute. Now I know that they're hitting me in my evolutionary psychology, as features of behavior that indicate her good health and high reproductive value. Helpful! (Not that there's any consideration, on either of our parts, of reproducing. But that's the whole point of this book; these things attract men and women without our realizing why, and they're just as attractive whether we're looking to have children, or doing all we can to avoid that eventuality.)
As with everything else in the book, there's no moral value attached to these human preferences, and their prevalence is judged population-wide. Individuals may have very different preferences, but as Buss points out, men who prefer gray-haired, wrinkled women might be very happy in their lives with a succession of elderly women, but they're likely to be a genetic dead end. Every man alive today is a descendant of thousands of generations of men who preferred young, healthy women, since the ones who didn't, didn't leave descendants.
Other researchers have surveyed populations across the world and found features that are almost universally considered repugnant. Most of these are cues to ill health, such as a poor complexion, ringworm, facial disfigurement, and filthiness. "Cleanliness and freedom from disease are universally attractive."
It's not just men who feel this way, either. Considering younger women prettier is universal among humans, both male and female.
When men and women rate a series of photographs of women differing in age, judgments of facial attractiveness decline with the increasing age of the woman. The decline in ratings of beauty occurs regardless of the age or sex of the judge. The value that men attach to women's faces, however, declines more rapidly than do women's ratings of other women's faces as the age of the women depicted in the photograph increases, highlight the importance to men of age as a cue to reproductive capacity.
These preferences seem to be inborn too; they are not all learned and conditioned. Various studies with infants have shown that babies from 12-24 months spend more time looking at photos of younger, more attractive (as judged by adults) women than they do of older women. Babies also play longer and more happily with people wearing youthful, attractive masks than those wearing ugly masks, and twelve-month old infants played longer with dolls that were attractive than they did with ugly ones. Preferences cross racial lines as well; whites and Asians agree strongly on which women, of either race, are the more attractive. (Asian girls. *cough*) Consensus has been found among many other racial and ethnic groups as well. (I thought the figures were a bit cherry-picked in this section of the book, since the people surveyed were adults, who might have genetic preferences, but who surely have been conditioned by culture as well.)
Body shape. Male preferences for female body shape differ widely, and seem to be culturally-conditioned. In cultures and times when food is scarce (such as among many modern day bush peoples and ancient Europe during periods of famine), plumper women are the most desired. In cultures where food is over-abundant (such as modern day America and Europe) slimmer women are more desired. From this Buss concludes that men do not have an evolved preference for a particular amount of body fat. Male preferences for breast size and shape vary widely as well, and many cultures have unique physical attributes such as tattoos, elongated necks, piercings, etc, are desired within those cultures, but not elsewhere.
One interesting finding about thinness preferences in modern Western culture is that women
think men want a thinner figure than men actually do. Experiments with adult men and women in the US have repeatedly shown that when presented with images of women of varying thinness, women prefer one of the thinnest models, while men pick a slim model, but one with more meat on her than the women do. "American women erroneously believe that men desire thinner women than is the case. These findings refute the belief that men desire women who are emaciated."
This is definitely true for me. I like a woman to be slim and athletic, but I do not find skinny, bony women attractive. I've never though the Olsen twins, or Nicole Ritchie, or Paris Hilton, or other famous anorexics, were attractive. Admittedly, I thought the whole Jennifer Loves Nougat "
I'm a size 2!" saga was quite amusing, but not because she was fat, but because she was delusional about her dress size. Was she just throwing out tiny numbers she might have fit into a decade earlier at the spur of the moment? Or better yet, was her stylist buying her clothing, ripping out the tags, and sewing in new ones with lower numbers just to feed her vanity?
A more universal preference is the waist-to-hip ratio. Buss explains this by detailing the changes in male and female bodies during puberty. Before puberty, boys and girls have similar body shapes. Afterwards, boys lose fat in their buttocks and thighs, while the release of estrogen causes women to deposit fat in their trunk, particularly the upper thighs and hips.
Healthy, reproductively capable women have a waist-to-hip ratio between 0.67 to 0.80, while healthy men have a ratio in the range of 0.85 to 0.95. Abundant evidence now shows that the waist-to-hip ratio is an accurate indicator of women's reproductive status...
Singh discovered that waist-to-hip ratio is a powerful cue to women's attractiveness. In a dozen studies conducted by Singh, men rated the attractiveness of female figures, which varied in both their waist-to-hip ratio and their total amount of fat. Men find the average figure to be more attractive than a thin or fat figure. Regardless of the total amount of fat, however, men find women with a low waist-to-hip ratio to be the most attractive... Studies with line drawings and with computer-generated photographic images produced the same results. Finally, Singh's analysis of Playboy centerfolds and the winners of beauty contests within the United States over the last thirty years confirmed the invariance of this cue. Although both centerfolds and beauty contest winners got thinner over that period, their waist-to-hip ratio remained exactly the same at 0.70.
Importance of Physical Appearance. Unsurprisingly, men want women to be beautiful. In a survey of 5000 male and female college students in the 1950s, men ranked physical attractiveness at or near the top of their desired characteristics to a far greater extent than did women. Other surveys, conducted at least every decade since the 1930s, have had men and women rank 18 traits in order of preference. Men have always placed beauty at or near the top, and have always put more importance on it than on women do. It's grown more important, too. All during the 1900s, the values assigned to attractiveness increased for both men and women, though men always ranked it much higher on their desired traits.
The values and increases (or not) vary around the world, but in every culture surveyed, men highly value beauty, and always value attractiveness higher than do women. As Mass concludes, "Men's preference for physically attractive mates is a species-wide psychological mechanism that transcends culture."
Men's Status and Women's Beauty. Humans advertise their status with possessions. Gold chains, expensive cars, designer clothing... and trophy wives. Men want a beautiful woman, they are willing to go through terrible trials to obtain one, and will put up with a great deal to keep one. Buss gives an example of a man who wants to divorce his beautiful wife since he's unhappy with her, but is swayed to put it off by friends telling him how good she looks on his arm when they enter a party.
Possessing a beautiful woman enhances a man's status in the eyes of other men, and women. We've all heard the joke, "He must be rich or have a big dick." when an ugly man is seen with a gorgeous woman, and this isn't just vernacular anecdote. When people are surveyed, they judge men, even unattractive men, much more favorably when they are accompanied by beautiful women. Furthermore, men gain more perceived status when judged with a beautiful woman, and lose more perceived status when judged with an ugly one, than women do. This gives men further motivation to find an attractive mate and avoid an unattractive one. In the eyes of others, women are much less boosted by a gorgeous boyfriend, and much less penalized for an ugly one. These trends hold true all over the world. Buss cites surveys his team carried out in China, Poland, Guam, and Germany, as well as the US.
Homosexual Mate Preferences. Buss holds these results as very important:
The issues are whether homosexual men show preferences more or less like those of other men, different in only the sex of the person they desire; whether they show preferences similar to those of women; or whether they have unique preferences unlike the typical preferences of either sex.
Buss points out what Kinsey was the first to demonstrate; there are few pure-homo or heterosexuals. Most people are primarily heterosexual, but substantial percentages of people, men more than women, engage in occasional homosexual acts, often without considering themselves other than heterosexual. (And no, not all of them are white male elected Republicans, though recent news headlines might lead you to think otherwise.)
Buss talks about the biological origin and continuation of homosexuality, which are still a mystery. Theories about kin selection (good to have a gay brother/sister since they'll help with your kids without consuming resources to support their own) and parental manipulation of lesser children to boost the importance of others are considered, and rejected for lack of evidence.
Homosexual mate preferences are less difficult to discern. Homosexual men and women are essentially identical to heterosexuals in their rankings of the attractiveness of men and women, and men of both persuasions place much more importance on the youthfulness of their desired gender than gay or straight women do. Homosexual men are quite similar to heterosexual men in desiring youthful, attractive partners. Lesbians, like straight women, place much less importance on age.
Studying this further, two psychologists sampled thousands of personal ads placed by gay/straight men/women all across the US. Some bullet points derived from the book.
Percent of personal ads stating a preference for an attractive partner:
By lesbians: 18%
By straight women: 19.5%
By gay men: 29%.
By straight men: 48%
Percent of personal ads in which people mention their own physical attractiveness:
By lesbians: 30%
By straight women: 69.5%
By gay men: 53.5%
By straight men: 42.5%
Ads in which a photograph is requested of respondents:
By lesbians: 16%
By straight women: 35%
