The fact that you have to do carefully controlled studies and then look very closely at the data to see a pattern like this (if it even exists) should not be ignored: If human males were primarily attracted to ovulating females and not very interested in non-ovulating females, then that would be easily seen and demonstrated.11
Regardless, timing one hundred seductions so precisely would normally be beyond demanding.12 Even allowing that this remarkable feat could conceivably (sorry!) be pulled off, the chance of producing a hundred children is still only 0.0000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000748.13 To put that number in a little context, a man’s odds of being killed by a meteorite in his lifetime is 0.000004.14
And they say feminists are wishful thinkers.
It’s not quite the case, then, that just outside the padlocked gates of faithfulness stretch endless richly fertile fields in which men can sow their seed. Among various hunter-gatherer societies, whose way of life is supposed to best reflect our ancestral past, the estimated maximum number of children a man can sire is twelve to sixteen: not so different from that of women (which is nine to twelve). This number is bigger in herder-gardener societies, increasing men’s reproductive variance compared with that of women, and the variation is vastly larger in the intensive agricultural societies that enabled a few powerful and wealthy men to acquire massive harems.15 But greater male reproductive variance seems unlikely to have been universal in our evolutionary history, being instead only seen in certain ecological, social, and economic conditions. It’s not very easy to come by data providing good information about men and women’s reproductive variance. However, a study led by University of St. Andrew’s Gillian Brown compiled eighteen relevant data sets from across the globe and cultural spectrum, including both current and historical populations with a variety of mating systems. As one might expect, in polygynous societies (in which a small number of men have multiple wives), men had greater reproductive variance than women (sometimes substantially, in other cases more modestly). But importantly, this wasn’t the case overall in the monogamous societies.16
In short, fathering anywhere remotely close to a hundred babies a year just isn’t something that any old Stone Age Tom, Dick, or Harry could have achieved. (Indeed, a promiscuous man would need to have sex with more than 130 women just to have 90 per cent odds of outdoing the one baby a monogamous man might expect to father in a year.)17 It would require the unusual alignment of conditions that enable a man to set up a well-stocked and expertly managed harem. Harems have “exceptional status”18 in the nonhuman primate world, have of course only ever been available to a very small number of men in human history, and are unknown in hunter-gatherer groups that lack the necessary hierarchies of wealth and power.19 (And, of course, treating women like property has become rather unfashionable in many parts of the world.) As University of Notre Dame anthropologist Augustín Fuentes warns:
The use of unrealistic figures of potential male reproductive success is counterproductive because there is no evidence that in humans or other primates such a dramatic lifetime reproductive skew occurs with any regularity in any population studied. Using such assumptions as a jumping off point, even if hypothetical, lays an unrealistic baseline that can then be used to create a variety of scenarios, all of which are faulty given the erroneous basal assumption.20
Or to put it a little less academically: Best of luck, Evolutionary Psychology Fantasy Man.
Evolutionary Psychologists, by the way, certainly don’t propose that men are only interested in no-strings sex, or that women only ever desire monogamy. One account from this intellectual stable, for instance, argues that both sexes deploy both short- and long-term “strategies,” although to different degrees and geared towards somewhat different partner qualities.21 But for much of our evolutionary history, sexual behaviour driven by “indiscriminate desires that lead to obtaining numerous sex partners in high-volume quantity,” as Schmitt describes the “short-term mating strategy” ascribed to men,22 would not have been a plausible or productive route to reproductive success. This should prepare us for what the evidence—as opposed to stereotypical caricatures—has to say about the sexuality of contemporary Western men and women. In Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male, Wake Forest University psychologist Andrew Smiler observes that “guys who sleep around meet our expectations; guys who are monogamous seem like exceptions.”23 Yet as Smiler goes on to explain, these beliefs are based on an inversion of reality.24
Needless to say, relying solely on what people report about their sexual desires and behaviours isn’t ideal (although ethically preferable, obviously, to spying on them). Men and women tend to manipulate information (like pornography use and masturbation) differently in order to better conform to the sexual double standard.25 In fact, a major headache for sex researchers is that men reliably report a larger mean number of other-sex sexual partners than do women. This is logically impossible, since heterosexual coitus requires the presence of both a woman and a man. This impossible discrepancy seems to be mostly due to men’s inaccurate reporting, and their “greater tendency to report large, ‘round’ numbers of partners.” Once people’s tallies get to about fifteen partners, they tend to answer with “ballpark figures” ending in multiples of five (Let’s see, there was Suzy, Jenny, Malini, Ruth,… call it fifty) and the discrepancy between the mean for men and women is larger in the oldest age groups, for whom memory is presumably most blurred.26 Men’s apparently inflated figures also inflate their variance: but needless to say, sexual selection can only act on the reproductive outcomes of actual sexual experiences, not fabricated ones.
Even when we take these self-reports at face value, the differences between the sexes are of degree, not kind. Certainly, on average men currently report a greater interest in casual sex than do women—at least within the not-very-broad-slice-of-humanity-across-time-and-place that has been surveyed.27 But there isn’t a sharp line dividing the sexes; nor is the Casanova model of male sexuality a good fit for the majority of men. Take the second British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL),28 based on a random sample of more than twelve thousand people ages 16–44.29 Again, a grain of salt is required for these figures: 16-to 17-year-old men report 0.4 more total other-sex sexual partners on average than do women of the same age; 35- to 44-year-old men report 9 more, suggesting that those ballpark figures are becoming increasingly inflated over time. But despite this, the most common number of sexual partners for both women and men over the previous three months, the past year, and even the last five years, was just 1.30 Over their lifetime, the median total number of partners was 6 for men, compared to women’s 4. As these modest numbers suggest, only a small fraction of men reported having had 5 or more partners in the last year: about 5 per cent (compared with about 2 per cent for women).31
Of course, men might want to have sex with many different women, but not be able to realize their preferences. Yet even when men are asked how many sexual partners they’d ideally like, the answers are not vastly different from women’s responses, and show a strong disinclination in men to take up the heroic to-do list required for a sufficiently high turnover of casual sex partners to have decent odds of theoretically outreproducing a monogamous male. The NATSAL survey found that the vast majority of both men and women ideally preferred to be in a sexually exclusive relationship: 80 per cent of men, and 89 per cent of women.32 Within the eldest age bracket of the survey (a still sprightly 35–44 years of age), the gap was even narrower (86 per cent for men and 92 per cent for women). Touchingly, the vast majority of married and cohabiting men were perfectly happy with the idea of sexual exclusivity.33 This rough similarity between the sexes in the theory of monogamy also seems to translate into practice, at least according to self-report. Large-scale representative national surveys find that husbands are only slightly more likely than
are wives to report having extra-marital sex.34 Nor should one feel especially pitying towards single women: while 78 per cent of the single women surveyed in NATSAL ideally wanted to be in a monogamous relationship, so too did 67 per cent of the single men.35 Finally, contrary to what one might expect on the basis of the assumption that men supposedly strive for social status in order to gain reproductive opportunities, men in the highest social class were the most likely to prefer to be married with no other sex partners, and the least likely to want to exclusively devote their sexual energies to casual sex.36
There is, however, an infamous duo of studies that does seem to support the Testosterone Rex view of a stark contrast between the sexual natures of women and men. In these studies, conducted by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, moderately attractive young male and female decoys were positioned around a college campus.37 The decoys were instructed to approach people of the other sex and initiate a conversation by saying: “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive.” This abrupt opener was followed with one of three propositions: “Would you go out with me tonight?” “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” Men and women were equally likely to agree to a date (about 50 per cent). But although 69 per cent of men agreed to visit the woman’s apartment and even more men agreed to go to bed with her, almost no women expressed interest in visiting a strange man’s apartment, and precisely zero consented to sex. Similar studies in Denmark and France likewise found men to be far more likely to report interest in agreeing to an implicit or explicit invitation of casual sex.38
This study is often hailed as a “real” test of sex differences in promiscuous inclinations, as opposed to what people merely say about themselves. Perhaps so, and an actual sexual temptation in human form may well override what men merely think (or prefer to report) they don’t want. However, it’s worth pointing out that the experiment ended shortly after the unsuspecting—and presumably startled—participant made his or her reply. We don’t know, for instance, how many women who agreed to go on a date might have ended up having sex.39 Nor do we know how seriously men took these highly implausible sexual invitations, or whether those who accepted them would have followed through. So far as I can tell, there was no way of distinguishing between a “Yes, sure,” meaning Imagine, such is the power of my sexual magnetism that this entirely sincere woman of robust mental health wishes to take me, a complete stranger, to a secluded place to have sex versus a “Yes, sure,” meaning Very funny, did your friends put you up to this? or This is weird, but I’ll be polite. In fact, in a later paper-and-pencil simulation of the same study (in which participants had the scenario described to them, and were asked to imagine how they would respond) that took away the awkwardness of the situation, men overall were disinclined to accept either sexual invitation.40 Even in a slightly more plausible version of the scenario, in which the proposer claimed to be a fellow student and the offer was preceded by a brief, polite conversation, many men reported that they would be uninterested, on grounds such as “Too forward, kind of weird, [gave] me the sense that they have a screw loose,” and “It takes more than one conversation to get in my pants.”41
A second obvious objection is that what this study is actually primarily showing is women’s lack of interest in being murdered, raped, robbed, or inflaming the interests of a potential stalker. (Indeed, the study authors, and others, make this point.)42 In the paper-and-pencil simulations of the original studies, women often cited the creepy, dangerous, stalker-ish feel of the situation by way of reason for turning down the offer.43
All in all, then, while the “Would you go to bed with me tonight?” findings represent one of the largest sex differences ever observed in psychological research, and it demands explanation, chalking it up to fundamentally different female and male sexual natures may be premature. And recent work by University of Michigan psychologist Terri Conley and colleagues unravelling the factors driving this famous result illustrates a critical point: social realities mean that women and men in these studies are simply not participating in the same experiment. It’s not just that the experiment as experienced by women entails inviting them to put themselves in a situation that, according to years of advice and warnings, is the very epitome of “asking for trouble.”44 Thanks to the sexual double standard, there are two further disincentives for women.
First, a woman accepting an offer of casual sex risks being seen both by herself and others as a “slut,” as Clark and Hatfield point out. Some have dismissed the sexual double standard as a cultural relic in places like the United States. Certainly, attitudes can shift: sometimes remarkably quickly, as I discovered once when visiting the home of a university boyfriend. His father protested strongly against me sleeping in the same bedroom as his son, given our unmarried state. His wife listened respectfully, then suggested that if this was how he felt he had better get the ladder, climb up to the attic, find the camp bed, carry it down the ladder, clean it off, mend the wobbly leg, set it up in the study, find some bed linen and make it up for me. My boyfriend’s father considered this for a moment and then concluded that, upon reflection, one did have to move with the times.
And times have changed, with some paper-and-pencil lab studies (usually with college students) failing to find evidence of the sexual double standard, or only within particular demographic pockets,45 or for less conventional sexual activities.46 But the double standard does emerge when researchers move beyond fictional vignettes and talk to people. An ethnographic study of college students, for example, “reported that the majority of students believed in heterosexual double standards and classified women into dichotomous categories of ‘good’ women or sluts.”47 As the ethnographer summarized the typical attitude of the male students:
Men have the right to experiment sexually for a few years. There are a lot of female sluts out there with whom to so experiment. And once I have gotten this out of my system, I will then look for a good woman for a long-term relationship (or for a wife).48
“Slut” is, of course, a word for which there is no real male equivalent. As Concordia University’s Emer O’Toole observes in her memoir Girls Will Be Girls, this provides a powerful implicit lesson in sexual moralities:
I learned a plethora of words for women who had lots of sexual partners—slag, slapper, slut, floozy, tramp, tart, loose, easy, prozzy, bike, whore—and one for men: gigolo, which always seemed to carry an air of humorous accomplishment somehow.49
Likewise, the closest match reported in a study of students’ linguistic cultures was “hoebuck,”50 a slang term so benign that the first hit that came up in a Google search when I tried it was “Hoebuck Realty.” When “Floozy Homes” becomes a viable name for a real estate business, we’ll know the sexual double standard is really gone. Presumably, when assessing the potential reputational effects of casual sex, perceived cultural norms will weigh more heavily than one’s own, apparently idiosyncratic, views.51 And although relatively progressive university students don’t themselves endorse the sexual double standard (although men reject it less enthusiastically than women), they do think that others do.52
Also easily overlooked is the risk to women from a different kind of sexual double standard: the very distinct possibility of the event not being all that one might hope for. A large-scale study of thousands of female North American college students found that they had only an 11 per cent chance of experiencing an orgasm from a first casual “hookup.” While a policy of politeness requires the observation that orgasms aren’t everything in a sexual encounter, women were six times more likely to enjoy hookup sex if they’d had one.53 Follow-up interviews revealed why it was that women had such slim odds of reaching a climax. Students generally agreed that it was important for a man to be sexually satisfied in any context, and for women to be sexually satisfied in the context of a relationship. However, there was no perceived obligation to provide sexual satisfaction to a woman in hookup sex. Wh
ile many men felt that bringing their girlfriend to orgasm reflected well on their masculinity, they often didn’t feel the same way about hookup partners. One participant quoted by the study authors captured this sense of selfish entitlement particularly neatly:
Another man told us, “I’m all about just making her orgasm,” but when asked if he meant “the general her or like the specific her?” he replied, “Girlfriend her. In a hookup her, I don’t give a shit.”54
What if the strange man on campus inviting you to join him in bed that night was that guy?
From this, we can consider a couple of ideas. The first is that perhaps an updating of gendered norms of chivalry could usefully be made. Assumptions that men will open doors for women and pay for dates by default could be abandoned, and that solicitude and generosity be redirected to the bedroom instead. The second is that some of the gap between the sexes in enthusiasm for casual sex might close if the event left men sexually frustrated the majority of the time, but women almost invariably enjoyed full sexual relief.
Little surprise, in light of all of this, is that when Conley presented student participants with a hypothetical version of the Clark and Hatfield experiment, she found that they perceived the situation to be very different for propositioned women compared with propositioned men. Male proposers were perceived as more dangerous than the female ones,55 and women predicted that they would be perceived more negatively overall, and as more promiscuous, socially inappropriate, and sexually desperate if they were to accept the offer than if they were to refuse.56 For men, by contrast, accepting the offer was perceived to enhance, rather than damage, their reputation. The students also guessed that a male proposer was less likely to be a good lover than a female one, and less likely to provide a positive sexual experience57—apparently quite accurately, at least for North American student populations. These differences all made a difference to the likelihood of accepting the offer, with perceived sexual prowess of the potential partner being particularly key. Importantly, Conley found that this was the case not just for the frankly improbable Clark and Hatfield scenario, but also when it came to real offers of casual sex that participants had received in the past. And when the situation was modified to involve celebrities, or a close friend, rather than a complete stranger—a way of attempting to equalize the danger and pleasure perceived and anticipated by male and female participants—sex differences in interest in accepting the offer disappeared.58
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