Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (29 page)

No one has repeated the Robbers Cave study with girls, but a wealth of research has compared the sexes on group identity bias, experimental and real. Women are simply less susceptible to these biases than men. Melissa McDonald and her colleagues reviewed the field in 2012, developing the “male warrior hypothesis.” The facts are that men are more xenophobic and ethnocentric than women, more inclined to dehumanize out-groups and use animal words about them, and more willing to make sacrifices to punish them. Across many cultures, men show more social dominance orientation, prefer group-based hierarchy, are more likely to identify with the flag or colors of their group, and are more likely to complete an open-ended statement beginning “I am . . .” with group identity. Men have a lower threshold than women for triggering intergroup conflict and are more likely to order preemptive strikes without provocation in war games. Men, but not women, increase their support for war when primed with an attractive member of the opposite sex. The evidence also supports the “out-group male target hypothesis”: male biases and hostilities get stronger when men’s attention is drawn to out-group males.

McDonald does not give women a pass on these emotions; she situates them in evolutionary context. Given the human past, women, too, should be wary of out-group males but should relate it to sexual vulnerability, so it is not surprising to find an effect of menstrual cycle hormones. Women are more defensive in their thinking during fertile days of their cycle, avoid situations that might put them at risk for sexual assault, and are more likely to see strange men as sexual threats. More specifically, in one study led by Carlos Navarrete, white women expressed more negative opinions of black men when their fertility risk was high. In fact, the monthly curves for racial bias and conception risk were almost identical. This effect applies not just to the black-white divide but
also to other in-group–out-group comparisons, including experimentally fabricated arbitrary groups.

It is increasingly difficult to explain the growing volume of evidence on sex differences in violence, as well as in “groupthink” in conflict situations, without reference to evolutionary theory and biological facts. It is impossible to deny that males show more bias than females. But what was adaptive once is not adaptive now, and if men are not part of the solution, they must be part of the problem.

What about the sex difference in sex? In a short chapter entitled “The Sexual Superiority of the Female,” Montagu wrote that while “social conditioning plays a considerable role . . . there is a profound biological difference between the sexes. . . . The male seems to be in a chronic state of sexual irritation. The woman who in a letter to Kinsey described the race of males as ‘a herd of prancing leering goats’ was not far from the truth.” Montagu understood what makes women prodigiously sexual in their own way: the extreme innervation and sensitivity of the clitoris and its short refractory period enable multiple and prolonged orgasms—men are no match for women there—and extend sexual function late in life. But, he believed, women’s arousal is not continuous and impersonal; it is framed in relationships and works best when a partner, male or female, makes an investment that comes from caring.

Everything we have learned in the decade and a half since Montagu’s last edition confirms these differences. Very few men tell women what they are thinking, and this may be a good thing. Women who “get it” may sympathize (up to a point) or not, but either way they are better off than those who believe men are just like them. Even in post-industrial cultures prominent men often display their intentions by taking trophy wives, using supermodels as “elbow candy,” and having illicit sex with much younger women, even in the public eye. But only occasionally do they
say
something revealing.

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, was believed
to have more power than the secretary of state when a January 19, 1971, article in the
New York Times
noted that “as a 47-year-old divorcé, he makes society news by squiring such glamour girls as Gloria Steinem in New York, Joanna Barnes and Jill St. John in Hollywood, and Barbara Howar in Washington. Power, he has observed, is the great aphrodisiac.” The article depicts him as insecure despite his power; even at his peak he was a short, chubby, plain-looking man. But this did not interfere with his associations with much younger, very gifted, sought-after, beautiful women, then known without irony as “glamour girls.”

Bill Ackman, currently in his late forties, is a handsome billionaire hedge fund manager married to a beautiful woman his own age, with three children, and not known for any untoward behavior with women. Perhaps that’s why he could be frank in answering his own question in a lecture at the Wharton business school a few years ago. “What motivates people to succeed?” He paused. “Sex. People don’t like to admit it but it’s the primal driver. Fundamentally, what drives most human behavior is basically foreplay.” On CNBC a year or so later, anchor Becky Quick, who had read the quote, offered Ackman a chance to explain himself. He replied, “I was just thinking, you know, well, ultimately we’re animals, right? Motivated by basic . . . you know, why are people motivated to succeed? I mean, just think about guys you went to college with.”

If that was true of the guys they went to college with, you don’t even want to think about the guys in college today. In the summer of 2013, the
New York Times
ran a story with a provocative photo of a reclining woman’s bare thigh and the headline “Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too.” Based on months of interviews and authored by Kate Taylor, it was one of many recent writings suggesting that women want casual sex and multiple partners as much as men do.

The article was about the sex scene at an elite university. In a year of impressive work, Taylor had interviewed sixty young women.
She wrote about them generally and in a few cases in particular. I read the article to the end and could only guess that whoever wrote the title hadn’t. It began with a young woman texting her usual hookup guy to ask what he was doing; she ended up having sex with him. “We don’t really like each other in person, sober,” she said, adding that they couldn’t even sit down and have coffee. She said she was too busy succeeding in school and building a high-powered career to have a relationship and emphasized that she didn’t regret any of her one-night stands, describing herself as a true feminist and a strong woman who knows what she wants. She withheld her name, but she still didn’t want the number of men she had slept with printed.

Same game? Another young woman found as a first-year student that nobody seemed to have boyfriends but felt, as she put it, “I can’t just lose my V-card to some random guy.” In the spring she picked a boy she had been dancing with and awarded her card to him. “I’m like, ‘O.K., I could do this now. He’s superhot, I like him, he’s nice.’” Her expectations were very low. But because he let her spend the night and walked her home in the morning, all her friends were “super envious”; she came back with a huge smile on her face because she’d had “such a great first experience.” She stayed on good terms with the boy and during spring break had casual sex with someone else. But she believes boys control the hookup culture: “It’s kind of like a spiral.” She explained that the girls stop anticipating that they will get a boyfriend, “but at the same time, they want to, like, have contact with guys. . . . [They] try not to get attached.”

Same game? Haley, a senior, reminisced about going to frat parties as a freshman: she’d go in and they’d take her down to a dark basement. “There’s girls dancing in the middle, and there’s guys lurking on the sides and then coming and basically pressing their genitals up against you and trying to dance.” These are dance-floor makeouts, or difmos. After one, she knew she was drunk and asked the boy to take her home; he took her to his room instead and had sex with her semiconscious body. She recalled another boy popping
his head into the room: “Yo, did you score?” Eventually she looked back on this episode as rape.

Another girl said she usually ended up giving the boy oral sex, because by the time she got to his room she was sobering up and saw that as her best way out. Another, Kristy, told of making out with a boy in his house when he said, “‘Get down on your knees.’ . . . I was really taken aback, because I was like, no one has ever said that to me before.” The boy said it was fair and, when she balked, he pushed her down. After that, she thought, “‘I’ll just do it.’ . . . I was like, ‘It will be over soon enough.’” Catherine, a senior, looked back on her hookups as a continual source of heartbreak.

I know those boys. I teach them. I have three daughters who had to navigate these rocky shoals in three different colleges, and they say they were able to keep the hookup culture at a distance. I can’t really be sure, of course, but I do know that many do not. The young women in Taylor’s story are not even remotely playing the same game, and if they think they are, they are way out of their league.

The research on this is clear, and transnational. A 2008 study by Anne Campbell was called “The Morning After the Night Before.” A British television station surveyed thousands of people through its website; 998 of the men and 745 of the women who responded were heterosexual and had had a one-night stand. They were asked about their agreement with positive and negative statements about the event. Men were much more likely to report greater sexual satisfaction, well-being, and self-confidence, while women were much more likely to feel that they had been used and had let themselves down. Overall, subtracting negative scores from positive ones, men had more than double the net gain from the experience. As for regret, 23 percent of men but 58 percent of women said they would not repeat it.

Campbell writes of women’s post-tryst distress, “The men had subsequently behaved disrespectfully and dismissively. . . . While not wanting a longer relationship, many women felt a strong sense
of rejection”; they said they’d been “blanked.” Women’s positive remarks had to do with being made to feel sexy and wanted, craving male attention, or satisfying curiosity. One said, “I have a very poor self image and the man I slept with was a conquest. . . . He was very popular with other women and very good-looking. I thought that if I slept with him it would put me on a par with my prettier and more worthy peers. Unfortunately it didn’t work and my self esteem/confidence suffered.”

As for the sex itself, men spoke of “euphoria,” “excitement and lust,” and “blowing off sexual steam.” Some women had fun and felt free, but most said things like

• “Thought it would be one of life’s experiences, but it was nothing like the sex found in movies.”

• “The expectation was better than the reality, the sex was rubbish.”

• “The sex is never particularly satisfying because it is difficult to let go with someone you don’t even know.”

• “Not as good as sex with a partner; they are more into your needs and know your body a lot better.”

Concerns like
Is sex all the person was after?
and
Will the person call or will they dump me?
were expressed by 81 percent of women and 17 percent of men. I can almost hear the men asking,
Dump you from what?

Is there something about Britain or Campbell’s methods that produced these results? Many U.S. studies confirm them with other approaches. Anthropologist John Townsend and his colleagues have studied hookups at Syracuse University for over a decade. In 2011 they reported on 335 male and 365 female students. Men were much more likely to endorse casual sex and women to feel a need for attachment and emotional involvement, but men were only somewhat more likely to have
had
such hookups. This suggests that men are persuading women to have more casual sex than they want while women prevent men from having as much as
they
want.

In 2012, Justin Garcia of the Kinsey Institute and his colleagues reviewed many studies of hookup culture, including patterns like NSA (no strings attached) sex and FWBs (“friends with benefits,” a.k.a. “hookup buddies” or “fuck buddies”), which provide repeat encounters (“booty calls”) with one person. In one study of 832 college students, 50 percent of men and 26 percent of women had positive emotional reactions after hookups, while for negative reactions the percentages were almost exactly reversed. In another, an online survey of more than twelve thousand students from seventeen colleges, 55 percent of first hookups involved oral sex only for the man and 19 percent only for the woman; 31 percent of men and 10 percent of women had orgasms. In a third study of 761 women, more than half reported at least one experience of unwanted sex. About two-thirds of hookups with vaginal intercourse involved condoms; when only oral sex was involved, the percentage was close to zero.

In “Bare Market: Campus Sex Ratios, Romantic Relationships, and Sexual Behavior,” sociologists Jeremy Uecker and Mark Regnerus studied a representative sample of nearly a thousand single, heterosexual women in four-year coed colleges. The percentage of women on campus predicted attitudes and behavior toward the men on the same campus. Where women were plentiful, they were more likely to say that men were untrustworthy and uninterested in commitment. They expected less from men and found it harder to meet the right kinds of men. They were less likely to have gone on traditional dates, to have had a boyfriend, or to be a virgin and more likely to have had sex in the last month, especially if they
didn’t
have a boyfriend.

Little wonder that women on those campuses say they don’t want their percentage to go up any further. By the way, if women wanted casual sex as much as men, wouldn’t they be
more
likely to have it where they are in a minority? They don’t, but where they predominate the market leads them to give up more than they otherwise would. They are competing for men, and the men have more power. Since women now make up about 60 percent of college
students and rising, it seems likely that hookups will rise as well. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health has found a similar effect of sex ratio in high schools, which suggests that the next cohort of college women will be playing the hookup game as they continue to try to please scarce men.