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different. Men fantasized much more often and were much more explicit and more visual in their fantasies. Women, on the other hand, were more likely to include context and feelings, and they experienced emotional arousal (men’s fantasies turned more on physical arousal). The women’s fantasies were also more likely to contain affection and commitment. Perhaps the starkest difference, though, was in how they imagined their partners in the fantasies. Women were much more likely to include a familiar partner, and when it came to the number of different partners, men left women in the dust. Thirty-seven percent of the men reported that they had fantasized about more than one hundred different people, a threshold achieved by only 8 percent of women. A good proxy of these differences can be found in the kind of erotica that both sexes choose. Pornography—with its explicit visual content and large number of women to choose from—is almost entirely directed at men. Romance novels—with their emphasis on emotional connections and on the relationship between one man and one woman—are almost entirely directed at women.

SEX ON THE BRAIN

It’s not just that men have a much greater willingness to have sex or that they seek a much wider variety of sexual partners. Their minds are also biased to perceive sexual interest from women when there may in fact be none. One of my favorite headlines from The Onion is, “Area Man Going to Go Ahead and Consider That a Date.” Any woman who has had a friendly conversation with a man only to have that man later accuse her of leading him on will know what The Onion is talking about. In a number of studies, men consistently interpreted actions on the part of women (such as smiling) as an indication of sexual interest. You can find this quick trigger interpretation even in mundane encounters. In another study, men and women listened to various taped conversations. Some of them were erotic, but many of them were routine. Although nearly all the participants became aroused during the erotic conversations, some of the men also became aroused during the regular conversations. And not only did they become aroused—their response was stronger than the female response to the erotic conversations. It’s enough to make a woman hesitant to offer up a neutral hello in conversation, for fear of sending men into a sexual frenzy.

With this in mind, women should keep a wary eye on their male friends. Remember the debate from When Harry Met Sally about whether or not men and women could be friends? Well, science has likely found an answer—they can’t. Or at least men can’t. According to the work of evolutionary psychologist April Bleske, men are twice as sexually attracted to their opposite-sex friends as women, and they consider potential sexual encounters with opposite-sex friends as 100 percent more beneficial. They also overestimate how attracted their female friends are to them. Again, this bias makes perfect sense from a Darwinian perspective. The male brain is not designed to maximize accuracy but to maximize mating opportunities. It’s in the man’s evolutionary self-interest to see more sexual interest than may actually be there. The downside is only social embarrassment. The upside is the possibility of another opportunity to pass along his genes. In this case, the male bias is not a design flaw but a distinct advantage. In fact, the more intelligent the man, the more likely he is to exhibit what one researcher has called the “she wants me” bias. In one study, men were asked to predict how women would respond to a personal ad soliciting no-strings-attached sex. The most intelligent men wildly overestimated how interested women would be. Revealing again how women are wired in fundamentally different ways than men, the most intelligent women show a very different sort of bias—they assume that a man will be far more distressed by a partner’s sexual affair than is actually the case.

PROMISCUITY, THY NAME IS MAN . . . AND WOMAN

Of course, these fundamentally different attitudes toward sex set the stage for