Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [20]
I know some of the women reading this book are already thinking that the study isn’t valid because there is a fear factor for women accepting invitations from strangers that men don’t have to worry about. Well, the researchers realized the same thing and conducted a second study. This time, the men and women were contacted by a close personal friend who vouched for the stranger’s character. Then the friends asked one of two questions:
1. Will you go on a date with the stranger?
2. Will you go to bed with the stranger?
Under this scenario, 91 percent of women and 96 percent of men were willing to go on a date—again fairly similar. But only 5 percent of women were willing to sleep with the stranger, while fully half of the men were willing to do precisely that (sight unseen!). All of this is exactly what evolutionary theory would predict. If women are choosier in general, they should be particularly choosy when it comes to a one-night stand.
A whole slew of different statistics confirms this sexual difference between men and women. According to a University of Chicago survey, 54 percent of men think about sex once a day, while only 19 percent of women do, and 40 percent of men masturbate once a week, while only 10 percent of women do. According to another study, 85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old men think about sex every fifty-two seconds (which makes you wonder how men manage to accomplish anything), while women think about it once a day unless they are ovulating, when that number rises to three or four times a day. The numbers vary from study to study, but in every single one men think about sex much more than women do.
Men also show a much stronger desire for sexual variety. In one study, college students were asked how many sexual partners they would like to have over various time intervals. Over the next year, women said they would prefer on average to have one sexual partner, while men wanted six. Over three years, women wanted two sexual partners, compared to ten for men. And over a lifetime, the average woman wanted four or five, while the average man wanted eighteen.
This desire for variety is so extreme in men that it can lead to some bizarre behavior. In 1995, Hugh Grant was dating super-model Elizabeth Hurley, and he still felt the need to solicit oral sex with a prostitute, although his subsequent arrest had no effect on his film career (which suggests that most Hollywood moguls must have an instinctive sympathy for the occasional need to solicit a blow job). There are countless recent examples of men, ranging from Bill Clinton to Eliot Spitzer, taking mind-boggling risks for sexual variety that are almost impossible to explain according to any sort of rational calculation. I think only evolutionary psychology has a satisfying answer, which is that some deep, instinctual drive created by thousands of generations of evolution—in this case, a man’s greater desire for sexual variety—was guiding their behavior. Even the clichéd idea of a man’s midlife crisis is an expression of this evolutionary urge. According to new research, a man suffers from a midlife crisis not because he is getting older but because his wife is. By coming to the end of her reproductive life, she ignites a deep-seated desire in him to attract a younger, reproductively active woman.
Perhaps the best indicator of differences in attitudes toward sex comes from a study of sexual fantasies by Donald Symons and Bruce Ellis, which explored what each sex dreamed about when they were freed from the usual societal constraints. Both men and women reported having and enjoying fantasies about sex, but the content of those fantasies was completely