Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (30 page)

I recognize that many women speak well of these experiences and often seek them. Women like sex, and some like casual sex. Among other things, they are protecting themselves from relationships that might distract them from their studies and career pursuits. Celibacy is often not a good choice, especially given peer pressure and boy pressure, not to mention desire. If you want to avoid being seen as a child or a prude by women and you like men enough to want to be on good terms with them, hookups can be stimulating and convenient. One time in ten or so, you may even have an orgasm. A so-called fuck buddy can be a reasonable compromise between loneliness and a complicated romantic involvement. But these encounters and relationships are sexually asymmetrical. Someone is often being used, and it is seldom the boy.

Recall that Nisa, the !Kung woman who was the subject of my late wife Marjorie Shostak’s classic, said, “Women possess something very important, something that enables men to live: their genitals.” Or as anthropologist Donald Symons, whose pioneering book
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
helped start this field of research, said, “Among all peoples it is primarily men who court, woo, proposition, seduce, employ love charms and love magic, give gifts in exchange for sex, and use the services of prostitutes. And only men rape. Everywhere sex is understood to be something females have that males want.” This is an exaggeration but one with a great measure of truth. Women forgot this truth when men convinced them that both sexes have the same interests; this was the sexual revolution of the sixties, which involved a lot more change and disappointment for women than for men, at least in the realm of sex. In view of
persistent myths about this in the ongoing sexual revolution today, let’s look at the evidence for Symons’s pointed claim.

A 2001 overview in the
Personality and Social Psychology Review
by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs combed more than 150 studies to answer the question “Is there a gender difference in sex drive?” Overall in these studies,

Men have been shown to have more frequent and more intense sexual desires than women, as reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex, frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners, masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures.

There were
no
studies with contrary findings—not a single one indicating stronger sexual motivation in women than men. In one typical study, 90 percent of men but only half of women felt sexual desire at least a few times a week. In another, the average young man was sexually aroused several times a day, the typical young woman “a couple of times a week.” In an Australian survey, people who were in a committed relationship,
wanted
to have sex, but were
not
having it were almost exclusively male.

Compared to women, men begin to have sexual intercourse earlier in life (despite later puberty), are less willing to give up sex for any part of life, are more permissive and favorable toward sex, initiate sex much more often in longer relationships, and show more preference for every sexual practice, including, rather astoundingly, cunnilingus. Although men often have physical problems like premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction, hypoactive sexual
desire
, whether by diagnosis or self-report, is overwhelmingly female.

In their classic 1989 study, “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers,” social psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield had confederates who were college men and women of average
attractiveness approach strange but attractive members of the opposite sex on campus and say, “I’ve been noticing you around campus lately and find you very attractive. Would you like to go to bed with me tonight?” Of the men, 75 percent said yes; of the women, 100 percent said no. Some men said things like “Why wait till tonight?” Some women said things that I won’t repeat here.

In 2011, psychologist Terri Conley claimed to have repeated this study; she found that under some conditions, the difference between the sexes was much smaller. However, there was a minor problem with this “replication”: it was purely a paper-and-pencil study. I am sorry, but that is not remotely a repeat of the classic study. Yet the media seized on it as proof that sexual mores have dramatically changed and that women are almost as interested in casual sex as men. The current wish to deny the facts of life is very great.

Suppose we ask what happens when you remove the slight complication of having to deal with another person, whether a stranger, intimate long-term partner, or anything in between. Sex differences in masturbation are consistent and large. Women are much more likely to have never masturbated; women who do masturbate do it much less frequently at all ages than men. In a 2011 summary of meta-analyses and large data sets, psychologists Jennifer Petersen and Janet Shibley Hyde confirmed substantial sex differences in masturbation—even with such blunt (and indeed almost ridiculous, if you are looking at sex differences) measures as whether someone has masturbated in the past
year
—and in pornography use, in the usual direction.

Consider people’s fantasy lives. Here, too, there is no other person present. You can dream up whatever you want, no risk, no compromise, no complications. In one study, Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons gave three hundred male and female students an anonymous questionnaire. Men (32 percent) were four times as likely as women to say they had fantasized about having sex with more than one thousand different people (by
college
age). Men were much more
likely to say that visual images were more important than touching in their fantasies (66 percent versus 39 percent), women twice as likely to say touching (55 percent versus 28 percent). Men were about twice as likely to focus on visual images rather than feelings, women three times as likely to say feelings. And men were almost three times as likely (48 percent versus 17 percent) to agree that in their fantasies, “the situation quickly includes explicitly sexual activity.” These findings have been repeated in many studies.

Of course, sometimes men want men, and women, women, and these relationships are most instructive. Lesbian relationships, compared to those between gay males, are less sexual at every stage by almost every measure; the phrase “lesbian bed death” may be an exaggeration, but we don’t often hear it said about gay men. In many ways—frequency of intercourse, open relationships, sexually transmitted diseases, and the use of sadomasochistic elements in sex—heterosexual couples are intermediate between lesbian and gay male pairings.

These are old findings, and new research holds few surprises. A 2013 study by sociologist Bethany Everett, as well as research in 2010 by epidemiologist Fujie Xu and colleagues, showed that while bisexual people are at the highest risk, the number of lifetime partners and the amount of sexually transmitted disease are higher in exclusively gay than in heterosexual men and lower in exclusively lesbian than in heterosexual women. So when you remove such complex issues as male dominance and women’s oppression or the desire to please in heterosexual relationships,
where the two people involved are of the same sex,
male-female differences are larger, not smaller.

Who pays cash for sex? Almost exclusively men. An estimated one-tenth to one-sixth of U.S. men have paid for sex, half of those while they were involved in other relationships. A few women pay for sex, but it’s not just a simple transaction. Women do not buy much pornography or leer at pictures of naked men. Porn customers are overwhelmingly male, and the main counterpart for women is
romance fiction. In her insightful 2012 article “The Pop Culture of Sex: An Evolutionary Window on the Worlds of Pornography and Romance,” psychologist Catherine Salmon says, “Romance and pornography are both multibillion dollar industries, and their stark contrasts reflect the deep divide at the heart of male and female erotic fantasies.”

After an extended analysis, she concludes, “Pornography is a male fantasy world of short-term mating success while the romance is a female fantasy world of long-term mating success. At their hearts, that is what they are, fantasies that are reflections of the different ancestral problems faced by males and females in the mating domain.” Even the huge hit novel
Fifty Shades of Grey,
sympathetically reviewed by some intelligent women and read by millions, is a romance novel that includes soft-core pornography. It depicts a rich and powerful man deeply in love with a younger woman and very concerned about her welfare and her sexual pleasure. The bondage and discipline he subjects her to (because of his self-described mental illness and after elaborately and solicitously gaining her consent) is mild compared to that in male-directed pornography; she is depicted by the (female) author as not hurt but enraptured, and the one time she is really hurt, she leaves him.

Symons’s remark in his book about what women have and men want implied that heterosexual sex is a scarce resource for which men strive, compete, and pay; he repeated it to a TV interviewer in a singles’ bar, where men are more likely to pay for the drinks and where there is no such thing as a “men’s night”—letting men in for free to attract women as paying customers. Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs summarized the broader evidence about what is clearly a market in another paper, “Sexual Economics.” Most prostitutes are women who overwhelmingly serve male customers, and almost all male prostitutes serve men as well. Women rarely pay for sex, and when they do it often involves the pretense of a romantic tryst; they demand something more than a simple hookup—which
is what men are typically paying for. When the famous actor Charlie Sheen was found to have paid top dollar for sex with one of the so-called Hollywood Madam’s young women, many wondered,
Why would a man who could have his pick of willing women for free pay $1,500 (about $2,500 in today’s dollars) to have one come to his room?
Answer:
He doesn’t pay her to come to his room. He pays her to leave.

Strip clubs overwhelmingly consist of women performing for mainly male customers, although some women attend, often with male dates. There are about four thousand of these clubs in the United States, employing some 400,000 women. The reverse situation, in which men strip for women, represents a very small fraction of these numbers. There are also strip clubs for gay men, but very few for lesbians.

Finally, coercive sex is overwhelmingly male; 99 percent of FBI arrests for rape are of men. It is not obvious that it has to be this way because males have to be aroused to have sex; women could force men or other women to give them oral sex under threat of violence, as men do with both male and female victims, or use dildos or other objects to rape men anally, to humiliate them, as men do to victims of both sexes. Such assaults by women are vanishingly rare. A small percentage of gang rapes of women involve both sexes, and a small percentage is perpetrated by groups of women. Rape occurs in some lesbian relationships, but with nothing resembling its frequency in heterosexual and gay male relationships.

These are sound generalizations, not absolute rules. Some women do want sex as much as any man. Some men want little or none. There is nothing inferior about wanting it and nothing superior about not wanting it—although (despite the substantial minority with hypoactive sexual desire) women certainly have the potential for superior orgasmic capacity. But denial of the facts of human sexual nature as it applies to most men and women can only lead to confusion and, ultimately, to suffering. Male sexuality is
driven.
Men frequently want sex, period, while women tend to prefer it in the
context of a relationship, a physical connection allied to an emotional one. Regardless of what I may privately desire, and regardless of how natural men’s needs may be, I can’t see that those divergent preferences are equally admirable.

To think that all these differences could result merely from cultural arrangements is naïve in the extreme. We now have overwhelming evidence that Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “difference in man and woman”—by which she meant behavioral, psychological, and moral dispositions—is in part grounded in biology. Scientists once reticent in their assertions have become very bold. In 2011 the journal
Frontiers in Endocrinology
brought leading experts together. Psychologist Melissa Hines, for decades a respected researcher on the effects of prenatal hormones on gender, reaffirms their power but allows for two other newly proven influences: direct genetic effects on the brain, and the intrauterine environment. Neurobiologist Margaret McCarthy agrees that genes as well as hormones matter. She adds new evidence for how male and female become different in the hippocampus and amygdala—parts of the emotional brain outside the hypothalamus. Gender psychologists Sheri Berenbaum and Adriene Beltz show how exposure to high levels of prenatal androgens masculinizes later activity and occupational interests, sexual orientation, and some aspects of spatial ability, and they also find that pubertal hormones appear to influence gender identity and perhaps some male-female differences in psychiatric illness.

Neurobiologist Ai-Min Bao and her colleague Dick Swaab reviewed growing evidence for sex differences in the
human
hypothalamus and found that male-to-female transsexuals resemble women in these measures. They believe that male-female differences in cognition, gender identity, sexual orientation, and neuropsychiatric disorders are “programmed into our brain” very early on and, remarkably, that “there is no evidence that one’s postnatal social environment plays a crucial role in gender identity or sexual orientation.” Simon LeVay, who wrote the introduction for the special issue, had an established
reputation as a neuroscientist studying the visual system when he came out to the world after showing that in one hypothalamic area gay men resemble women and differ from heterosexual men. Two decades later, he reconsiders the idea that social experience influences sexual orientation and gender identity, concluding that “little direct evidence supports this notion at present.”