Why Women Have Sex (37 page)

Fifty-five percent of the men, compared with 41 percent of women, lied about their height. Women were somewhat more likely than men to shade the truth about their weight. Overall, an astonishing 81 percent of the sample engaged in some form of deception, be it about physical characteristics, income, habits such as smoking or drinking, or political beliefs.

As sexual conflict theory predicts, however, both sexes are well aware of the risks of deceptive online ads. Indeed, one study found that
86 percent of online daters believe that
others
deceive about their physical appearance, and cite deception as one of the largest disadvantages of online dating.

Despite the frequency of deception, most lies turned out to be modest embellishments. Men exaggerated their true height by only half an inch on average. Women underestimated their weight by roughly 8.5 pounds. Most online daters appear to deceive in ways that are “close enough to steal,” rather than grossly mischaracterize themselves on qualities that would soon be discovered in a face-to-face date. There are always exceptions, though. One man said he was three inches taller and eleven years younger than he actually turned out to be. One woman said that she was thirty-five pounds lighter than her measured weight turned out to be. On the whole, though, the mischaracterizations told by most online daters were slight exaggerations rather than bold-faced lies.

Deception in dating is an equal opportunity tactic—both men and women do it. On qualities that are easily observable, such as height, weight, and attractiveness, people sometimes lie just a little. Outright lies, such as a short man claiming to be six feet tall or a heavyset woman claiming to be 125 pounds, will be easily detected, and the deception will backfire as soon as the two people meet. However, some deceptions are difficult to identify. Qualities such as income or social status are generally tougher to verify, which is why at least some Internet dating sites now contain investigative procedures that independently verify income, education, and other information. Some even check to see whether the person has a criminal history, a fact that some people may “inadvertently” omit from their dating profiles.

Most women seek some kind of emotional connection or emotional involvement with a man before consenting to sex. From an evolutionary perspective, this is emotional wisdom women have inherited from their successful maternal ancestors. A man’s emotional involvement, particularly his genuine love, provides a powerful signal that he will stick with her through thick and thin, through health and sickness. Love provides the best chance that he will devote his commitment, provisions, and
protection to one woman and her children. Men not in love feel freer to flit from woman to woman.

Men are sometimes baffled by women’s desire for emotional involvement and love. Here is how one man expressed it:

You would think saying “I love you” to a woman to thrill and entice her isn’t necessary anymore. But that’s not so. These three words have a toniclike effect. I blurt out a declaration of love whenever I’m in the heat of passion. I’m not always believed, but it adds to the occasion for both of us. It’s not exactly deception on my part, I have to feel
something
for her. And what the hell, it usually seems like the right thing to say at the time.

In fact, studies by the Buss Evolutionary Psychology Lab reveal that emotional deception by men is an astonishingly common tactic for persuading women to have sex with them. In one study, we asked 240 women and 239 men to describe the ways in which they had been deceived by members of the opposite sex. We found that women reported having been deceived by men in the following ways:

•   concealed a serious involvement with another woman (9 percent);

•   lied about how attracted he was to other women (26 percent);

•   concealed emotional feelings for another woman (25 percent);

•   exaggerated his work ambitions (21 percent);

•   exaggerated how kind and understanding he was (42 percent);

•   misled her about how strong his feelings were for her (36 percent);

•   concealed the fact that he was flirting with other women (40 percent);

•   misled her about the depth of his feelings for her in order to get sex (29 percent); and

•   misled her about the level of his long-term commitment to her (28 percent).

These percentages are likely to be underestimates of the actual rates of deception. In another study of 112 men, 71 percent admitted that they had sometimes exaggerated the depth of their feelings for a woman in order to have sex with her.

Many cases of deception from our own study are heart-wrenching:

While in college I went out and drank a lot. There was this one guy who I really liked. He fed me all the lies that we are told to know, but at the time I did not think about that. For example, he told me he was not like other guys and he would call me in the morning and he really was into me. He told me how pretty and smart I was and how lucky he would be if we were together. All I really thought was how much I liked the guy and how much I wanted him to like me. I completely bought into his lies. After a few more drinks we went upstairs and had sex. The next day he did not call me. Then I found out that he told all his friends how easy I was. I felt completely degraded.

—heterosexual woman, age 27

Like this woman, Sandra Hicks found out the hard way. Her husband, Ed Hicks, was by all accounts a good husband. He was handy at fixing things around the house, romantic in his manners, and generally fun to be around. Then one day Sandra Hicks discovered that their tax refund check, which she had been eagerly awaiting, had been diverted to pay off . . . a tax lien from Ed Hicks’s marriage to another woman! In fact, Ed Hicks was married to two different women, neither knowing about the other. And he had been married to at least five other women previously, three times failing to get divorced before tying the knot with the next. After Ed Hicks got caught and jailed, he continued to charm women. He almost succeeded with one woman, until she was warned by three of his previous wives about his deceptive ways: “ ‘I know men,’ said the woman who requested anonymity to protect her privacy. ‘You usually pick up red flags. But him . . . God he talks good.’ ”

Some men are skilled at the art of sexual deception using tactics that play on the emotional heartstrings of women. Oxytocin, as we saw in chapter 3, is a powerful bonding hormone that increases significantly with orgasm in women—more so than in men. If having sex with someone is more likely to increase feelings of emotional attachment in women than in men, women are more vulnerable to the negative consequences of sexual deception. It is no surprise that people who fall prey to emotional
con artists suffer greatly. Often, women who have experienced such deception later find it difficult to trust current or potential sexual partners; they may avoid physical intimacy or become anxious when the prospect of sexual intimacy arises.

Although men sometimes succeed in deceiving women, it would be flat-out wrong to conclude that women are passive dupes in men’s mating games. Women know that men have a powerful desire for casual no-strings sex. Women, in fact, have developed sophisticated means of identifying deceivers. Research shows that women are superior to men at
reading nonverbal signals
such as facial expressions and body movements. They decode facial expressions, evaluate vocal tones to assess sincerity, and gather information about a man’s social reputation and sexual history. Some spend hours discussing specific conversations with their close friends, who help to evaluate a man’s intentions: “He said X, and then I said Y, . . . but did he look you in the eye when he said Z?”

Another key tactic that some women use involves
insisting on a longer courtship
before consenting to sex than men typically desire. In one Buss Lab study, we asked women and men about the likelihood that they would have sex with someone whom they found attractive if they had known the person for varying lengths of time, ranging from one hour to five years. Whereas most men were likely to have sex after just one week, most women preferred a longer wait. Imposing a time delay before having sex allows a woman a greater window of assessment and evaluation, a strategy in part designed to weed out deceivers.

Women also have specialized
emotional defenses
that protect them from being deceived. Research from the Buss Lab shows that women become extremely angry and upset when they discover that men have deceived them about the depth of their feelings in order to have sex. These emotions cause women to etch those deceptive episodes in memory, attend more closely in the future to possible instances of deception, and ultimately avoid future occurrences of deception.

Evolutionary psychologist Martie Haselton discovered yet another defense women have to avoid being emotionally deceived by men: the
commitment skepticism bias
. To understand the commitment skepticism bias, consider a concrete example: On a second date, a man declares to a woman that he is deeply in love with her. Based on this cue, what is the correct inference about the man’s true state of commitment to the woman? There are two possible errors of inference a woman can make. One error would be to infer that he is lying, when in fact he truly loves her. The other error would be to infer that he is telling the truth about his love, when in fact he is practicing the art of deception. Evolutionary logic suggests that being deceived would have been the more costly error to women over human history. Women deceived in these ways would have risked an unwanted or untimely pregnancy; being inseminated by a man with inferior genes; and possibly raising a child without the help of an investing father. So evolution has fashioned a particular psychology in women, according to this theory: a commitment skepticism bias designed to underinfer men’s true level of commitment. The commitment skepticism bias serves an important function. It helps women not to be overly impressed with easy-to-fake signals, such as verbal declarations of depth of feeling. It requires men who are truly committed to display additional commitment cues over a greater length of time. And it causes men who are truly interested in just a “quick shag,” as the British say, to soon tire of the delay and move on to more gullible, exploitable, or sexually accessible targets.

At this point in time, women and men are the end products of the perpetual arms race of deception strategies and deception detection defenses. Some women succeed and deflect deceivers; and some fall victim to men’s deceptive charms.

Most women have sex with the expectation that it will lead to positive outcomes, be it sexual pleasure, love and commitment, gaining revenge, lowering anxiety, or preventing a mate from straying. But sometimes the only positive expectation for a woman having sex is avoiding harm—psychological, physical, or both.

In chapter 6, we explored why women sometimes agree to have sex against their own desires in order to please their partners, to stop them
from nagging, to maintain relationships, because they feel it is their “wifely duty,” or because they do not know how to say no. Undeniably, sex under these conditions could be considered coercive. There is often a fine line between agreeing to have sex in order to keep a persistent partner quiet and being verbally pressured into having sex against one’s will. But some situations are clear-cut. When a woman is forced to choose between having sex or ending the relationship, or is made to feel fearful, guilty, or bad about herself for saying no, or is given alcohol or drugs to lower her inhibitions and “give in,” then sex moves into the realm of coercion. Some women in our study talked about these coercive pressures:

My first physical boyfriend pushed, and pushed and pushed. I had already set boundaries with him and thought he would respect them or not push too far past them. I didn’t know where it was going at first. Later, like a lot of girls, I just couldn’t say no. My [religious] background, which encouraged passivity and kept me naive about sex, was a major factor in this happening to me. Later, a second partner pushed me into sex. He used alcohol as an aid and spiked my drinks . . . without me knowing. Again my [religious] background is an important factor in my inability to say no, naiveté about sexual interactions and also about alcohol (the room was spinning heavily, and I did not know I was drunk or what it meant to be drunk). He also used several made-up stories to get me feeling sorry for him, which was another important factor in my compliance. There are several more circumstances like this where persistence from a partner, emotional games, alcohol, passivity, and difficulties saying no were all important factors in sex. I felt nervous, unsure and confused. I didn’t want to make the other person angry with me. I trusted them not to take advantage of me and remained passive, and when things didn’t go the way I’d trusted them to I didn’t know what to do. There was an element of non-reality to all these encounters and a passive loss of control. These experiences all occurred before age nineteen, after which I got stronger and wiser.