Saturday, October 10, 2009

Why women have sex.

Because, dude, have you ever tried it? It's, like, amazing.

It's difficult to expand that to book-length, though, so instead we get this kind of bloviation.

"We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women's sexual psychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak," said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.
No, I think you wanted to focus on women because:

A) The reader is assumed to be either a heterosexual man interested in unlocking the secrets to those mysterious creatures, or a functionally asexual woman interested in navel-gazing pop-psych

and

B) It goes without saying that all men need is a warm hole and thirty seconds, right? There's no need to do any research to confirm something that's obvious, duhh.

(I'm fascinated by how many men I know who've told me this, then gone into months-long girlfriend dramas where they expressed very subtle gradations of "I'm still attracted to her, right, but it's a different kind of attracted and there's someone new in my life now and I don't know if I would just hurt her at this point..." So much for warm holes.)

It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.
Humans engage in an incredibly common but societally meaningful activity for multiple reasons, stop the presses.

I'm going to write a book, "Why Women Have Lunch." Hunger is the obvious reason, but as my highly scientific survey reveals, women may also have lunch to socialize, to take a break from work, or even simply out of habit. Some women want the opportunity to try a new food, and others may want warm food on a cold day. Wow, women sure are complicated!

There is also evidence that sexual arousal is more complicated for women than for men, the authors report.
A study from Meston's lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man's penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman's physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don't work as well in women, the authors said.

It's a two-way street, though; the man can see his wiener and go "oh, I guess I'm turned on now," whereas it's harder for a woman to know exactly how her vagina's reading to a photoplesmograph or however they're measuring it.

And Viagra doesn't work in women not because they're nebulously "complicated," but because they don't have wieners. I'm pretty sure you can have a raging little clitoral erection and still not be ready for sex if the rest of your system isn't up for it. It's analogous to saying "application of lubricant to the penis failed to ready the man for sex--men sure are complicated!"

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though men and women may not consciously think about their choices that way, the authors said. If the goal of a man is to spread his genes, he would need to look for signs of fertility in a woman, which are historically associated with physical cues, Buss said.
"The adaptive problem that women have had to solve is not simply picking a man who is fertile but a man who perhaps will invest in her, a man who won't inflict costs on her, a man who might have good genes that could be conveyed to her children," he said.

Oh God, "evolutionary psychology," my favorite fucking thing ever. My question this time around is, why is it subtle? Why would something so key to our fitness be subconscious? When I have a basic survival need--when I'm thirsty or cold or have an injury--I know it. The evolved desires for things like shelter and companionship are anything but subtle. Why would mate selection be the only one that's a wacky subliminal drive hidden even from ourselves?

And it's not like I select mates at seeming random and don't know why I felt that way until some smarty-pants psychologist comes and tells me. I like men who are intelligent, respectful, physically strong, have high sex drives, and share my geeky/kinky subculture--is there any mystery there? These are attributes that make them a better partner, not necessarily a better sperm-donor/investor, and I'm quite consciously aware of that.

(There are also some arbitrary ones, like my tendency to fall for blond guys or for Native American guys, but I don't see what these have to do with fertility or fatherhood either. More likely they're based on past experiences with men who were intelligent/etc. and also happened to look like that.)

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain.
I would've loved to be a participant in that study. (Which makes me wonder about self-selection of subjects, actually.)

A 26-year-old heterosexual woman wrote, "When I was single, I had sex for my own personal pleasure. Now that I am married, I have sex to please my husband. My own pleasure doesn't seem as important as his. I believe he feels the same way."
By "the same way," does she mean "the corresponding way," that he in turn values her pleasure more, or literally the same way, that they're both just doing it to get him off? Because the one doesn't fit the "women are so cooooomplicated" paradigm, and the other is a serious problem and shouldn't be looked at as the normal way of the world.



I'm sort of interested in buying this book, but I think it lacks context without a matched set, so I'll wait until "Why Men Have Sex" comes out. Should be soon, right?

7 comments:

  1. i really wish you'd write, Why Women Have Lunch. i'm sure cosmo wouldnt get the joke and, hoping to lose weight, buy it by the dozen.

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  2. I especially liked 'Drugs for male erectile dysfunction don't work on women!'

    But you missed one of the really important reasons they didn't allow men into the study:
    C. If they only have data for women, they can pretend that the range of data they have proves women have sex for complicated reasons, rather than proving that people have sex for complicated reasons.

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  3. I'm wondering if a lot of the stereotypes about men are things which are not inherent to men but to the assumed privileges of the patriarchy? For example, if we had centuries or millennia of matriarchy instead, wouldn't we see a lot more women casually screwing whoever they found interesting and attractive and men being discouraged from doing the same?

    (And also, if the advanced societies had been matriarchies, I would expect that condoms and abortifacient drugs, which have existed in some form for centuries, would have become widespread and reliable long before modern times.)

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  4. I'm wondering if a lot of the stereotypes about men are things which are not inherent to men but to the assumed privileges of the patriarchy?
    This. The fact is, men and women behave differently about sex. My suspicion is that it's not all social conditioning, because gay men and gay women also have different sex patterns, but while pondering their deep motivations may get silly, there must be a reason for the differences, right?

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  5. A study from Meston's lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man's penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman's physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don't work as well in women, the authors said.


    Either they're saying that how erect a woman's penis is isn't as closely related to arousal as a man's (which would be interesting to study pre-op transwomen versus cismen, but somehow I doubt this is what they're going for, so BWUH?) or they're trying to say that a woman's erectile disfunction is more difficult to cure (Again: if we're talking transsexuals this might be interesting, but since we're not, what the ever loving mother of fuck?)

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  6. ". I like men who are intelligent, respectful, physically strong, have high sex drives, and share my geeky/kinky subculture--is there any mystery there?"

    The only mystery is what happens if I only fit 4 of the 5 categories? Do I get a B (as in "get to B with you" bwahahahaha c wut i did thar?) or a B- (as in "I get to B with you, but only as friends" bwahahaha cuz friends suck yo, and you're only "just" friends when you could be SO MUCH MORE!)

    I notice "funny" isn't on the list. Can I substitute it for "physically strong"?

    "There are also some arbitrary ones, like my tendency to fall for blond guys or for Native American guys, "

    3/16th Cherokee baby! Qualifying for tribal scholarships! Dun look it though, which is what I'm sure you meant XD Also probably more than half native.

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  7. "By "the same way," does she mean "the corresponding way," that he in turn values her pleasure more, or literally the same way, that they're both just doing it to get him off? Because the one doesn't fit the "women are so cooooomplicated" paradigm, and the other is a serious problem and shouldn't be looked at as the normal way of the world."

    Oh hey look, the former totally explains my personal sex philosophy: I'm here to make sure both partners have a great time, and I can best do that if I spend most of my effort and energy making the experience as wonderful for my partner as I can.

    The latter totally explains the sex philosophies of all those guys who scared me that getting a woman to orgasm was neigh impossible and that they were this complicated beast! Actually what's funny is that I've had a lot of "feminist" and so-called "sex positive" (actually a better description would be "fem-supremacists" and 'female-sex-positive") repeat the same tired crap to me. Somehow I don't know how to please a woman because I'm a *man* and I probably think it's all about shoving things inside other things.

    When I got to throw out the NEWS FLASH: SOMETIMES IT IS, SOMETIMES IT ISN'T, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARRY they accused me of not knowing what the fuck I'm talking about... as I comment on the blog of a woman who's admitted to not enjoying clitoral stimulation.

    Smug, smart, superior... these are things I feel now. Dear women of that particular forum: it turns out I *do* know more about feminism and females than you do despite what your little links tried to prove otherwise. What's weird is I don't actually know all that much about females (I mean I'm decent on anatomy)... but I managed it by not assuming (as you do) that "females" are this homogenous group which have weird universal truths like "all girls prefer reverse cowgirl" or "all girls are sub."

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