• Men are twice as likely as women to positively "evaluate the potential for sexual access" to their friend.
  
• Men are twice as likely as women to be sexually-attracted to their friend.
  
• Men expressed twice as strong a desire to have sex with their friend.

No social relationship remains untouched by mating. Men misread women's smiles in the service of sexual exploitation. Women remain skeptical of men's commitment signals to avoid sexual victimization. Fathers guard their daughters to influence mate choice, and daughters manipulate their fathers to mate with the men they love. Both sexes deploy deceptive signals. Men and women experience great difficulty being "just friends." Same-sex allies sometimes turn into Trojan horses. Mate poachers lurk behind smiling faces. Sometimes, thankfully, we find lifelong love. As individuals, mating permeates much of what we do. As a species, it defines who we are.

Labels: the evolution of desire

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.

1. 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.
   
2. Female orgasm is unnecessary for conception.
   
3. Female orgasm is highly variable between women, and even in the same woman depending on her partner.
   
4. Female orgasm is entirely unknown in some cultures.

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.

1. The hedonic hypothesis. Orgasm makes sex more fun, so women are therefore more likely to engage in it, leading to more reproduction.
   
2. 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?
   
3. 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
   
4. 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?
   
5. 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.

Labels: sex, the evolution of desire

Women marry believing that their husbands will change;
Men marry believing that their wives will not change
They're both wrong.

he divorced the woman who had raised them, married a 23 year old Japanese woman, and started a second family. His behavior was ruthless and not very admirable, perhaps, but his circumstances had changed. From his individual perspective, the value of his second wife lowered precipitously when his children were grown, and the attractiveness of the younger woman increased to accompany his new circumstances.

A woman who frequents singles bars reports that she is sometimes approached by a beer-drinking, T-shirted, baseball-capped, stubble-faced truck drivers or construction workers who ask her to dance. When she declines, the men sometimes get verbally abusive, saying, for example, "What's the matter bitch, I'm not good enough for you?" Although she simply turns her back, that is precisely what she thinks; they are not good enough for her. Her unspoken message is that she can obtain someone better, given her own desirability, and this message infuriates the rebuffed men. Differences between people's perceptions of their value as mates cause conflict.

Men apparently interpret simple friendliness and mere smiling by women as indicating some level of sexual interest, even when women report no such interest... When in doubt, men seem to infer sexual interest... If over evolutionary history even a tiny fraction of these "misperceptions" led to sex, then men would have evolved lower thresholds for inferring women's sexual interest.

When a man loves a woman, and a woman loves a man,
Actually, sometimes a man doesn't love a woman, but…he acts like he does, in order to get some action...

One study found that almost 15% of college women had experienced unwanted sexual intercourse in the context of dating situations. Another study of 347 women found that 63% of all instances of sexual victimization were perpetrated by dates, lovers, husbands, or de facto partners. The most extensive study of rape in marriage found that of nearly a thousand married women, 14% had been raped by their husbands.