The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [134]
Bruce Ellis and Don Symons gave three hundred and seven Californian students a questionnaire about their sexual fantasies. Had their subjects been Arabs or English people, the study would have been easily dismissed by social scientists, because any sex differences that emerged could be attributed to social pressures from a sexist background. But there can be no people on earth or in history so steeped in the politically correct ideology that there are no psychological sex differences as students at a university in California. Any differences that emerged could therefore be regarded as conservative estimates for the species as a whole.
Ellis and Symons found that two things showed no sex differences at all. The first was the students’ attitudes to their fantasies. Guilt, pride and indifference were each as common among men as among women. And both sexes had a clear image of their fantasized partner’s face during the fantasy. On every other measure there were substantial differences between the men and the women. Men had more sexual fantasies and fantasized about more partners. One in three men said they had fantasized about more than one thousand partners in their lives; only eight per cent of the women had fantasized about so many partners. Nearly half the women said they never switched partners during a sexual fantasy; only twelve per cent of the men never switched. Visual images of the partner(s) were more important for the men than touching, the partner’s response or any feelings and emotions. The reverse was true of the women, who were twice as likely to focus on their own responses rather than on the partner. The women overwhelmingly fantasized about sex with a familiar partner.35
These results are not alone. Every other study of sexual fantasy has concluded that, ‘Male sexual fantasies tend to be more ubiquitous, frequent, visual, specifically sexual, promiscuous and active. Female sexual fantasies tend to be more contextual, emotive, intimate and passive.’36
Nor need we rely on such surveys alone. Two industries relentlessly exploit the sexual fantasizing of men and women: pornography and the publishing of romance novels. Pornography is aimed almost entirely at men. It varies little from a standard formula all over the world. ‘Soft porn’ consists of pictures of naked or semi-naked women in provocative positions. Such pictures are arousing to men, whereas pictures of naked (anonymous) men are not especially arousing to women. ‘A propensity to be aroused merely by the sight of males would promote random matings from which a female would have nothing to gain reproductively, and a great deal to lose.’37
‘Hard porn’, which depicts actual acts of sex, is almost invariably about the gratification of male lust by willing, easily aroused, varied, multiple and physically attractive women (or men, in the case of gay porn). It is virtually devoid of context, plot, flirtation, courtship and even much foreplay. There are no encumbering relationships and the coupling duo are usually depicted as strangers. When two scientists showed heterosexual students pornographic films and measured their arousal by them, they found a consistent pattern of the kind common sense would suggest. First, men were more aroused than women. Second, men were aroused more by depictions of group sex than by films of a heterosexual couple, whereas for women it was the other way around. Third, women and men were both aroused by lesbian scenes, but neither were aroused by male homosexual sex (remember, all these students were heterosexual). When watching pornography, men and women are both interested in the women actors. But porn is designed for, marketed