How inclined are men or women towards casual sex? Back in the 1980′s, researchers Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield had confederates approach college students during the day with a sexual proposition: “Would you go to bed with me?”1
The results were stark: most men accepted, and all women refused. This finding has been interpreted to show that men have a greater inclination to casual sex than women, and was marshalled to support certain evolutionary theories of sexuality, such as David Buss’ and David Schmidt’s Sexual Strategies Theory (aka “SST”).
Now, new research examines gender differences in responses to a proposal of casual sex. This post reviews the research, and why I am skeptical of some of the conclusions.
Terri Conley of the University of Michigan devised a series of studies to try to figure out why the gap was so large between men’s and women’s response to the proposal in Clark and Hatfield’s study (which she dubs the “Clark-Hatfield Sexual Proposal,” or “CHSP”). Unable to replicate Clark and Hatfield’s old study due to tighter ethical and legal guidelines, she asked participants to imagine being approached. Conley concluded:
Overall findings suggest that the large gender differences Clark and Hatfield observed in acceptance of the casual sex offer may have more to do with perceived personality characteristics of the female versus male proposers than with gender differences among Clark and Hatfield’s participants and that sexual pleasure figures largely in women’s and men’s decision making about casual sex.
Conley found that women viewed strange men approaching them during the daytime as dangerous, and as unlikely to give them sexual pleasure if sex were to occur. See Thomas’ summary at Yes Means Yes of the different sub-studies.
Here is a table with the participants’ estimated likelihood of accepting a hypothetical CHSP (Clark-Hatfield Sexual Proposal, remember?) rated on a 1-7 scale, by the gender of the proposer:
| Women | Men | Bisexual women | Lesbian women | Gay men | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male proposer | 1.37 | 1.50 | 1.39 | n/a | 2.55 |
| Female proposer | 1.15 | 3.74 | 2.37 | 2.27 | n/a |
Other sexual propositions from celebrities or friends (all cross-gender proposals):
| Johnny Depp | 4.09 |
| Donald Trump | 1.71 |
| Angelina Jolie | 4.16 |
| Roseanne | 1.43 |
| Brad Pitt | 3.63 |
| Carrot Top | 1.30 |
| Jennifer Lopez | 5.18 |
| Female friend | 2.84 |
| Male friend | 1.97 |
Conley had a sample of people who had received a sexual proposal. 73% of men and 40% of women answered “yes” to the proposal.
Conley concluded that the results of the original Clark and Hatfield study were mainly explained by male proposers being judged more negatively than female proposers, rather than by evolved differences in sexual selectivity. Furthermore, she found that anticipated pleasure from casual sex predicted people saying “yes,” and explained away some of the gap between men and women in accepting the offer.
I think the results are fascinating, but I don’t think they contradict the evolutionary SST as much as she says.
The CHSP
The study does convince me that the CHSP isn’t a very naturalistic measure of people’s attitudes towards casual sex:
this finding suggests that the CHSP is an unusual and suspicion-arousing sexual proposal even for people who are clearly open to casual sex encounters in other contexts.
Conley found that male proposers were evaluated negatively by women:
male proposers were perceived (by women) as more dangerous and less likely to provide them sexual satisfaction than women were perceived (by men). Male proposers were perceived (by women) to have lower status and to be less warm than the women proposers were perceived to be (by men).
Most sexual propositions that come out of the blue in the middle of the day are probably not from desirable partners for women, and men are probably unlikely to get such propositions at all. I am a bit more skeptical about some of the other conclusions of the study.
Gender of the proposer vs. gender of the receiver
Conley proposes that Clark and Hatfield weren’t really measuring differences in selectiveness between men and women who received propositions. Instead, she argues:
gender differences in the original Clark and Hatfield study are due more to the gender of the proposer than to the gender of the study participants.
First, Conley is quite correct to point out that male proposers were evaluated more negatively than female proposers. But based on her data, I think she is underselling the importance of the gender of the receiver of proposals, and the possibility that women are more selective than men for casual encounters, as evolutionary psychology predicts.
If you look at the table of results, you can see that across the board, women were less interested in the CHSP from non-celebrities, and they were less interested in real world sexual proposals (73% men saying “yes,” vs. 40% of women). The only exceptions were some of the celebrity studies. Men and women gave the unattractive celebs equally bad ratings, and Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp got similarly good ratings. Yet even within the celebrities, Jennifer Lopez got better ratings than either Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt.
In the study of gay men and lesbian women imagining a CHSP, Conley makes a confusing argument:
the fact that gender differences disappeared when considering a same-sex CHSP does not support the hypothesis that biological factors are responsible for gender differences in the CHSP
Gender differences disappeared when comparing lesbian women to gay men, but that comparison doesn’t make any sense for Conley’s thesis, because the gender of the proposer (the variable Conley keeps emphasizing!) to those groups was different. Instead, we should be comparing the responses of gay men to the responses of heterosexual women (since they both got proposals from men), and the responses of lesbian women to the responses of heterosexual men (since they both got proposals from women).
Gay men (2.55) responded much better to male proposers than heterosexual women (1.37). Heterosexual men (3.74) responded much better to female proposers than lesbian women did (2.27).
Conley’s data seems to show that the gender of the receiver of the proposal is still quite an important factor, and that the difference she found in some of her studies is quite consistent with evolutionary psychology. The sub-studies where she found no difference were based on people’s imagined responses to a small number of celebrities, and may not generalize well.
Conley did find that anticipation of pleasure explained some of women’s tendency to refuse approaches from strange men. Yet lack of pleasure anticipated is not just a characteristic of the proposer, it’s also a characteristic of the receiver. More on that later.
Perception of male proposers
Conley predicted that men in general would be perceived to be less appealing sexual partners:
I predicted that because men are perceived to be more unpleasant casual sexual partners than women, people should be more likely to agree to casual sex with women than with men.
To assess the appeal of sexual proposals, some of her studies were on bisexual, gay, or lesbian samples. Unfortunately, she only asked how people perceived the proposers in the studies on heterosexual people, so even though both heterosexual women and gay men were less likely than straight men to accept the CHSP, we don’t know the reasons for the gay men’s ratings. As for bisexual women, Conley looks to them in study 1d as an arbiter of who is appealing or not:
Bisexual women were significantly more likely to accept an offer from a woman (M = 2.37, SD = 1.41) than from a man (M = 1.39, SD = 0.83), t(95.43) = 4.35, p = .0001, d = 0.89. This finding provides further evidence that gender differences in response to the CHSP can at least partially be attributed to differences in the perception of male versus female proposers.
I would agree… if the bisexual women were “50/50 bisexuals” who were equally attracted to men and women. What if, among women who are attracted to people of both genders, women who lean more towards women tend to identify as bisexual, while women who lean towards men identify as heterosexual? If women who prefer women are more likely to identify as bisexual, then of course they prefer casual sex proposals from women! The study didn’t control for the strength of attraction to men vs. towards women.
The study only shows us why women rejected sexual proposals from men, and their statements about why they rejected the proposals.
Based on a number of findings from the current studies, it appears that the Clark and Hatfield paradigm is a casual sexual proposal that is uniquely repulsive to women being approached for heterosexual encounters, likely because of what it conveys about the male proposer’s sexual capabilities and safety.
Actually, it wasn’t women’s preferences that were most unique, but heterosexual men’s. Everybody was lukewarm or repulsed by the proposal… except heterosexual men (the highest ratings outside straight men were 2.55 for gay men, and 2.37 for bisexual women with women). At 3.74, heterosexual men stick out like a sore thumb.
As Conley points out, it seems like when straight guys imagine someone hitting on them in public, they are thinking of someone like Jennifer Lopez, judging by their response. Why are het guys so idealistic? Perhaps they treat the CHSP like a fantasy, because for them, it is a fantasy that’s never actually happened… whereas everyone else knows that getting hit on by strangers isn’t always fun.
Pleasure theory
Conley is influenced by pleasure theory2, leading her to predict that women might respond worse the CHSP because they anticipate less pleasure:
According to this theory, sexual reproduction is a by-product of sexual pleasure, rather than the
reverse. Pleasure theory asserts that pleasure itself is evolutionarily favored; if humans are having pleasurable encounters, enough instances of vaginal intercourse will occur to ensure the survival of the species. Pleasure theory does not directly speak to the gender differences between women and men in likelihood of responding favorably to a casual sexual proposal.
Sounds sensible to me. A fascinating finding of this study was that people’s responses to sexual proposals was related to how good they thought the proposer would be in bed. Keep in mind that this is a completely hypothetical proposer.
Furthermore, Conley’s mediational analyses showed that some of gender gap in accepting sexual proposals was explained by the anticipated sexual capabilities of the proposer.
Before you go tell all your friends that women turn down sexual proposals because they expect men hitting on them to be bad in bed, keep a few things in mind. Gender still had a bigger weight in predicting acceptance of sexual proposals: perceived sexual capabilities of the proposal was only part of why offers were accepted or refused. Even taking into account the fact that women perceived male proposers to be worse in bed (than men perceived female proposers), women still rejected the offers more.
Furthermore, the predictors Conley looked at (including gender) only explained about 40% of the variance in people’s responses to the proposal3. Some third variable that Conley didn’t measure could predict both anticipation of pleasure, and response to the CHSP. One possibility I’ll put forward is expected attractiveness of the proposer.
All else being equal
Conley draws a provocative conclusion:
When women were considering the less risky (i.e., familiar) proposers, they were just
as likely to agree to the CHSP as men were (after accounting for perceptions of sexual capabilities in the case of the best friend proposing sex to them).
First, I’m not sure that Conley’s claim is actually true (because sexual capability only partially mediated the effect of gender: account for sexual capability wasn’t enough to explain away the entire gender gap). In the celeb studies, Jennifer Lopez beat both Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp. Yes, the unattractive celebs got equal ratings, but that could be due to floor effects: on a 1-7 scale, you can’t rate less than one, which could have removed some of the differences women might feel between an unattractive male celebrity propositioning them, and an unattractive male non-celebrity propositioning them.
Second, even if this claim was true, it’s actually a lot less interesting than it sounds. Yes, women would accept sexual proposals just as much as men, if only they got hit on by Johnny Depp! Wait, what? Poor Johnny Depp can only be in one place at once.
Conley seems to be arguing that “all else being equal” (e.g. perception of danger, pleasure, etc…) men and women would be equally likely to accept a CHSP:
These findings once again suggest that when women are presented with proposers who are equivalent in terms of safety (Gustafson, 1998) and sexual prowess (Abramson & Pinkerton, 2002), they will be equally likely as men to engage in casual sex.
But all else is not equal. Men and women don’t perceive each other to be equally safe and sexually capable. Women are only equally selective as men about casual sexual partners when the men involved satisfy a longer list of criteria.
And of course, Conley didn’t find that women are just as likely to be interested in casual sex as men when they encountered partners of equivalent sexual prowess, but rather perception of sexual prowess. Conley’s language in the above quote makes sexual prowess sound like an objective quality.
Sexual prowess
Yet judgments of “sexual prowess” by one gender are only relative to the needs and expectations of the other gender. “Sexual prowess” with a man isn’t exactly the same skillset as “sexual prowess” with a woman. Conley herself points out that women orgasm only 35% the amount that men do4 How much is that because of men being lousy lovers, and how much is because women are harder to please for various physiological and psychological reasons? We don’t know. Conley failed to account for the base rate of men and women perceiving each other as good lovers.
Conley claims that acceptance of sexual proposals is mainly about the proposer, not the receiver, and that women refuse proposals because they perceive male proposers as unpleasant prospects. Yet women’s perception of men’s sexual prowess is not just a fact about men, it’s also a fact about women, so women’s lower estimate of sexual capabilities in male proposers doesn’t necessarily mean that male proposers are lacking.
It’s easy to understand why women perceive random guys who approach them out of the blue in public to be sexually lacking: such a guy who imposes himself may be blind to the feelings and needs of others. Yet look at the friend hookup sub-study: men rated female proposers 4.75 on sexual capability, while women rated male proposers 4.0. Even when a guy isn’t a stranger approaching them women may just have a higher bar for what constitutes “sexual prowess.”
Pleasure theory, SST, or both?
It is very interesting that perceived sexual capability explains so much of whether people accept sexual propositions or not, and indeed a victory for pleasure theory. Pleasure theory predicts how people will act given what pleases them, but it doesn’t predict what pleases them in the first place, and why. To answer those questions, we need some other theory, like the SST or some other evolutionary theory, perhaps.
There is no contradiction between Conley’s findings about pleasure, and the SST’s hypothesis that women are more selective in short term mating. In fact, Conley’s discovery that women on average perceive men to be worse lovers than men perceive women (even among friends) is consistent with women being more selective. Even if women are equally selective as men about partners they perceive to be good lovers, women are still more selective than men if they perceive less men to be good lovers than vice versa: the only question is whether the selectiveness lies in conscious psychology, non-consciously-accessible psychology, or is driven by physiology.
Actually, some evolutionary theorists see the elusiveness of female orgasm as part and parcel of female selectiveness. David Barash proposed the evaluation hypothesis, that female orgasm help women assess mates and may draw them towards mating more often with higher quality mates:
So maybe a woman’s orgasm isn’t elusive because it is a vestigial by-product, fickle and flaky, sometimes on and sometimes off like a light bulb that isn’t firmly screwed into its evolutionary socket. Maybe, instead, it is designed to be more than a little hard to get, adaptive precisely because it can’t be too readily summoned, so that when it arrives, it means something.
[...]
All these discoveries are consistent with the notion that female orgasm might be a mechanism for “cryptic female sperm choice” by selectively retaining sperm from men who are more genetically desirable or by enhancing the likelihood that a woman will copulate repeatedly with such men, or both.
Women perceiving men as worst lovers than men perceive women, and having a higher bar for what constitutes a good lover, is part and parcel of greater female selectivity.
Of course, the flipside of “greater female selectivity” is “lower male selectivity:” I only use the term “greater female selectivity” out of my perspective as a guy. Nobody has the “default” or “correct” level of selectivity. We shouldn’t just ask why women are “more” selective; we should also ask why men are “less” selective. It’s notable in this study that the men were the least selective about sexual proposals, and the least exacting about the prowess of potential partners.
Conclusion
While the data of this study are very interesting, the analysis could lead people to think that women would engage in casual sex just as much as men… if only men weren’t so lousy! But at least some of the reason that men are perceived to be lacking is because women and men have different expectations.
Of course, that’s not all of the reason: especially in the case of danger, men who approach out of the blue in public may well be more unpleasant than women who do so. Furthermore, it’s possible that on average men are more selfish in bed, or less attentive than women, but we can’t assume that male lousiness completely explains women’s lack of interest in casual sexual proposals, and perception of men as lower in sexual prowess.
I agree with Conley that the CHSP is an unusual and suspicion-inducing scenario. I think she is quite correct to explore the question: how would women behave if they got casual sex proposals in a more favorable circumstance?
A better test of gender differences in propensity for casual sex would be do a more naturalistic study by having people receive actual or hypothetical sexual propositions in an environment where they might expect one, such as a nightclub, or on a date. Unfortunately, this study would be hard to perform in real life.
I would expect women to say “yes” at a rate greater than 0%, as found in the CHSP, certainly. But they would still be down for casual sex less than men. Judging by Conley’s study 4 finding a rate of 40% (vs. men’s 73%), I wouldn’t expect women to say “yes” any more than that.
Actually, I might expect them to say “yes” even less, because Conley merely asked people whether they received at least one proposal. If a woman received 3 proposals and accepted 1, while a man had received 1 proposal and accepted 1, Conley’s study would measure them the same, even though the woman is obviously more selective. The 40% vs. 73% gap does not mean that women accept 40% of casual sex offers, while men accept 73%. It means that 40% of women and 73% of men who have received at least one casual sex offer also accepted it. Yet the proportion of casual sex offers accepted is probably quite lower than the proportion of people who have received and accepted an offer at least once.
In various other domains, such as speed-dating, women are pickier.
Even if you paired women with men who they perceive to have sexual prowess, women would still probably want casual sex less often than men, because there are simply less do-able men to go round. Not every guy can be Johnny Depp, and even if they were, then would women so eagerly jump into bed with him?
Update 7/26: I realized that I had conflated study 2c and study 4. I’ve updated the post to include figures from them both, and to discuss what study 4 actually means. My conclusions are the same.
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
- Clark, R. D., & Hatfield, E. (1989). Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers.Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 2, 39 –55[↩]
- Abramson, P. R., & Pinkerton, S. D. (2002). With pleasure: Thoughts on the nature of human sexuality. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Human Behavior, 23, 167–171.[↩]
- based on the R2values[↩]
- Armstrong, E. A., England, P., & Fogarty, A. C. K. (2010). Sexual practices, learning, and love: Accounting for women’s orgasm and
sexual enjoyment in college hookups and relationships. Manuscript under review.[↩]
Thanks for the post, Hugh.
I will say that while some of this stuff stood out to me when I read Thomas’s piece, your idea about the sexual satisfaction component being relative to sex was something I would have never considered. Well done.
I think my posts of last year where I posted the Social Pathologists links on marital stability and the lifetime partner counts of men and women said something very important that this study was taken to show the opposite of : that men and women as averages have different psychological reactions to sex. I also like how it’s been held up as if it disproves SST, when in fact, dealing with only short term relationships, it does nothing of the kind even if it really did prove that women were just as cool with casual sex as men are.
“Why are het guys so idealistic? Perhaps they treat the CHSP like a fantasy, because for them, it is a fantasy that’s never actually happened… ”
This makes obvious sense.
“There is no contradiction between Conley’s findings about pleasure, and the SST’s hypothesis that women are more selective in short term mating. In fact, Conley’s discovery that women on average perceive men to be worse lovers than men perceive women (even among friends) is consistent with women being more selective. ”
Makes sense; the cultural expectations of women’s sexual competence is quite low and it cannot be very hard to reach it. in fact culturally female sexual competence is probably actively discouraged by slut-shaming.
1. Attractiveness in a man vs. a woman is judged by different criteria. An attractive requires a situation in which he can show off his confident energy whereas an attractive woman can simply be passive.
2. All of society appears to be invested in the idea that women are sexually desirable by default. And that men are sexually undesirable by default. In other words a woman’s body is more sexually pleasurable to men then a man’s body is to women. This socially inflated view of female desirability likely distorts how desirable any one woman is seen compared to any one man. So access to a female body is more valuable to a man then access to a male body is to a woman.
3. Due to the artificially inflated value of female sexuality, women don’t have to be accomplished in bed–only physically attractive–whereas men do have to be accomplished (and generally physically attractive as well.) Demonstrating that a man has the potential to be sexually accomplished–or has traits that appear to correlate with sexual acumen–thus becomes crucial to generating attraction to women. Just approaching them won’t do this.
4. The act of approaching a man may have increased the woman’s attractiveness by indicating a female that is *actively desiring*. Few men have the experience of active desire, so this may have explained their greater rate of enticement. Men approaching women, however, is at best a neutral to women as they are used to being actively desired.
5. The use of vibrators has necessarily altered a woman’s perception of sexual pleasure. This form of stimulation is artificial and artificially intense. This has resulted in women judging men sexually by an impossible ideal of mechanical stimulation and finding men lacking. Now that virtual realty sex is becoming more and more available to men we see the reverse happening: women are failing to live up to an artificial ideal of sexual stimulation. And we also see more men having less sexual interest in women and rating their sexual prowess lower. In the future the negatives of casual sexual encounters–STDS, possible pregnancy, negative emotional entanglements, potential abuse–will likely outweigh the anticipated pleasures for men and we may see as many men declining casual sex as women.
6. Men don’t have a lobbying group constantly bombarding them with messages about how dangerous the opposite sex is to them. This likely leads men to be more confident about spending time alone and vulnerable to the opposite gender.
7. Men don’t have religion telling them that the genitals of the opposite sex are a source of sin and evil and that they loose their ‘purity’ and value–in an irreparable way–through sexual activity with the opposite sex.
“5. The use of vibrators has necessarily altered a woman’s perception of sexual pleasure. This form of stimulation is artificial and artificially intense. This has resulted in women judging men sexually by an impossible ideal of mechanical stimulation and finding men lacking.”
This mirrors the most common criticism of men’s use of pornography. So access to a female body is more valuable to a man then access to a male body is to a woman.
” So access to a female body is more valuable to a man then access to a male body is to a woman.”
Thus the inability in female commenters to understand how being approached is a form of privilege.
Doesn’t this invalidate the rest of the study pretty much? Heck, even a survey of what *has* happened would be more valid. For example asking how many times they’ve take up such offers in the past.
Weird Logic
Why are these people so weird? And I mean this lot that’s trying to disprove the belief that “women have a smaller sexual desire and are more picky”?
They come up with the weirdest logic and rationale. For example conflating pleasure and appetite.
If we’re measuring people’s appetite… And we find out that…
1) one group will take almost anything as long its hygienic and edible
2) the other group refuses any food that’s not caviar, not served in the right plate, or served at the right time
These researchers would have us believe that group 2 is “just as hungry”. I mean come on. Get past all the academese, and this stuff is almost insulting.
Kind of like those other folks who try to say that being approached and asked out isn’t “really privilege” because you have to deal with unwanted attention.
That’s like saying “being rich isn’t really a privilege, because you have to deal with all these hungry people coming and begging you to hire their daughter or asking you to invest in their company… heck, turning down unqualified people isn’t easy…”
I definitely see this coming when sex-replacement technologies for men become pretty good. Heck, in time you’ll be able to click a button and have a steaming -real-life-identical threesome with Angelina Jolie and Megan Fox. What kinds of men will risk the rejection, STDs and emotional issues tied in with hookups after this?
I see men becoming more relationship oriented after this revolution happens. In other words, men will only seek women out for love/relationships and hence have higher criteria.
typhonblue’s comment hit on several points that came to mind while reading this post, specifically #2, #3, #4 and #6. From what I can see, and please forgive if I skimmed and missed some points, this research does not seem to well account for the general slut/whore label that tells women casual sex is bad, even when other variables like physical danger and STDs are controlled for?
However with regards to #5 about vibrators, I’m going to adamently reject that point, because you might as well say “oh well since women can masturbate with their fingers, men can’t hope to compare.” It’s bollocks for a number of reasons. One, most men tend towards stronger stimulation where as women tend towards softer (and both usually attempt to give the other what they themselves prefer, if they don’t have guidance from their partners), so the idea that vibrators are “artificially intense” at a magnitude that men can’t compare is flawed by the notion that women are even desiring the strongest most intense stimulation possible. I won’t even begin to argue that my body is a universal standard, but I can tell you that the highest settings on most of my vibes is not where I aim for; more is NOT always better. But this theory is flawed on a number of other points: it ignores the general fact that sex with other people is fun even without rocket-shooting-to-the-moon-orgasms, and seems to presume that the only pleasure comes out of orgasms? It makes vibrators out to be the evil that scares off men, which, if it’s true that my vibrators are scaring off potential sexual partners, then I’m probably better off without. Women who masturbate regularly are by and large better capable of indicating to their partners how to make sex -more- pleasurable for them, not sitting around yawning while he’s going down on her thinking, “man I really wish he would leave so I could pull out my rabbit.” ..I mean, come on.
Regards the “elusiveness” of female orgasm, I’m really suspicious of this having any sort of evolutionary basis, let alone as a selectivity measure. First it would kind of fail as a useful test, if you have to have sex in order to determine whether this potential partner is a good sexual mate…? Secondly, a lot of the so-called “elusiveness”, I don’t have the research on hand to cite but research has tended to suggest may be culturally produced. If women aren’t exploring their own bodies, then of course orgasms will be harder to come by. Thirdly, sexual prowess is not an innate trait, it’s a learned skill, so I don’t know how that can be attributed to evolutionary selection at all.
Uhm, I think there might have been more, but I’ve since lost track of my own thoughts.
Actually, that is, categorically, not the same.
There is nothing on the human body that is capable of vibrating at a frequency in any way comparable to that of a mechanical vibrator.
Vibrators produce a completely artificial form of stimulation. Now, bad or good is irrelevant, the fact is that it is artificial and it creates a type of orgasm not found in nature. (Unless you’re going to argue that we somehow evolved with vibrators.)
It also imprints on women’s minds what an orgasm *is*… which can mislead them into thinking they’re not having orgasms from other, less intense, forms of stimulation. The widespread use of vibrators may be the causal factor for why female orgasms are considered ‘elusive’.
And I’m not talking about oral sex or stimulation with fingers, I’m just talking about vibrators.
“The widespread use of vibrators may be the causal factor for why female orgasms are considered ‘elusive’. ”
TB, I saw a woman state categorically in an article that circumcision was why women fake orgasms – almost as unnatural as vibrators.
Circumcised males have enough to deal with without the unsubstantiated notion that they’re inherently bad lovers, Jim. I’ve seen similar anecdotes that diminished sensation from circumcision leads to increased duration, which many women find gratifying. (I’m assuming my anti-circ cred here is sufficient to deflect any notion that I’m either justifying or promoting the practice.)
If you have a citation to a study which documents the relative orgasmic tendencies of women with circumcised and uncircumcised partners, though, by all means share.
Ballgame: Here is one:
O’ Hara, K., & O’Hara, J. (1999). The effect of male circumcision on the sexual enjoyment of the female partner. British Journal of Urology International, 83. Supplement 1, 79-84.
I found a copy of it on CIRP: http://www.cirp.org/library/anatomy/ohara/
And here is another – although this seems to be a short resyme, I haven’t been able to locate a copy of the full study: http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/116-1181/595/
Both of those seem to me to be small samples and may have other method weaknesses – I am not a statistican.
I remember I once said to you Ballgame that there always (for a suitable subset of always) exists a study which says the opposite than another study. In keeping with that: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.....683.x/full
It seem to have better methodology than the other two, but I can’t help but wonder how the massive propaganda push in Africa for the positive effects of male circumcision, especially regarding HIV, have incluenced those women.
Tamen, I appreciate the effort you’ve made here, but FTR I don’t find any of those studies definitive. Others may disagree.
Regarding the ‘circ makes it better!’ study, you note:
This is a real issue, and I completely agree with your skepticism about the results of the study because of it.
In the O’Hara ‘circ makes things worse!’ study, participants were “recruited through classified advertisements in magazines and an announcement in an anti-circumcision newletter.” (Emphasis mine.) There is a clear potential for sample bias here; there’s no indication as to how many participants came from each source. The study does provide a plausible explanation as to why some women may prefer uncircumcised men. The other ‘circ makes things worse!’ study had a fairly small sample size and no explanation as to how the participants were recruited (and therefore the potential for sample bias can’t be evaluated). In neither study was there any way to evaluate whether there may have been a sample bias regarding the male partners themselves.
All in all these studies don’t change my opinion that circumcision is a shitty thing to do to a child, and that there isn’t a sound scientific basis to either tarnish or enhance their reps as potential lovers. But good work coming up with the links, though.
Let’s take any further discussion regarding circumcision to an open (or circ-related) thread, please.
“If you have a citation to a study which documents the relative orgasmic tendencies of women with circumcised and uncircumcised partners, though, by all means share.”
As I said, it was anything but that. It was just a very forcefully stated opinion.
“Circumcised males have enough to deal with without the unsubstantiated notion that they’re inherently bad lovers, Jim.”
And gunshot victims have enough to deal with without imprecations that they are getting blood on the carpet.
And since when if a woman fakes orgasm because she for instance she cannot reach it by intercourse does that make the man, the man, a “bad lover”? Since when is her orgasm his responsibility? Oh well, we all know that it’s sexist conventional wisdom and it’s been that way since people started caring about women’s orgasm, at long last, but before they started interrogating chivalrous attitudes.
(I has issues with this comment form obviously. sorry.)
Jim, at times women can be as complicit in the lack of quality in their own sexual encounters as their partners, when they “fake” orgasms. It doesn’t uniformly mean either one is a particularly bad lover– it does uniformly mean that the two of them are not communicating and leading to a less than wholehearted experience. Innocent of maliciousness or otherwise, there are a great number of people that struggle with sexual conflicts and insecurities. Just a current fact of mainstream society.
typhonblue, the idea that women’s orgasms are “elusive”, or even, a myth entirely, has been around a lot longer than the wide-spread acceptance of vibrators. Regardless, I don’t hear complaints that a hand is not the same as vaginal sex, so men should cease masturbating because it’s an “artificial” sensation. I don’t mean to be brisk in my reproach, but without some solid research suggesting that there is a widespread phenomenon of women reprogramming their orgasms to be synced to vibes instead of fingers, tongues, dildos and penises, I don’t buy it one lick. …Er. Pun not intended. (This is also assuming that “real sex” doesn’t involve vibes, which is kind of a silly notion anyway.)
Uhm, also, I’m unconvinced that there is any quantifiable thing as different “types” of orgasms. Outside of Freud’s original ridiculousness of vaginal as mature vs. clitoral as immature, and pseudo-science sex advice articles referencing types to supposedly “more intense, better stronger” orgasms, I’m unfamiliar with any such classification in actual scientific literature.
Welcome, Ari.
Oops, I forgot to link to Barash and Lipton’s chapter on female orgasm. You can see what you think of their full arguments.
Barash and Lipton suggest that female orgasm could have multiple functions. One of the functions could be to evaluate how attentive and committed the male is. Another hypothesis is that it related to the quality of his genes. If the male gets a positive “evaluation” (in any of those ways), then orgasm could encourage the female to continue having sex with him, raising the chance of conception.
I would fully agree that there are cultural factors involved in how easily people orgasm, such as socialization, practice, and the attentiveness of their partner. Do you think that culture is the whole story, though?
To make the “elusiveness” of the female orgasm clear, consider how easily men orgasm from vaginal sex relative to women, on average. Do you think that difference is entirely cultural, or could there be some physiological component?
The conventional wisdom is that men generally seem to orgasm from vaginal sex, while many women seem to need oral/manual stimulation instead, or in addition. If so, women’s bodies are more sexually selective than men’s in producing orgasm. Female orgasm is more elusive, because the requirements for producing it are more stringent.
It’s true that failing to recognize cultural factors in the elusiveness of female orgasm could perpetuate those factors. Unfortunately, it’s also true that failing to recognize hardwired sex differences in ease of orgasm could ensure that women’s more stringent criteria are never fulfilled. Which would be bad.
@Hugh:
That’s only elusive from a procreative-sex standpoint, though. But sure, in the context of a hypothetical evolutionary path, that could make sense.
But from a practical standpoint, the “elusiveness” of female orgasm relative to PIV sex isn’t so important, is it? What is important is more a matter of how elusive it is relative to the skill/precision/effort involved to bring it about by whichever means, and how consistently it can be brought about.
Although even then, for a notable subset of women it does still seem to be elusive, even by that definition (see Clarisse’s experiences with anorgasmia, for example). But for a larger subset of women it is not, I suspect. And in those cases the difficulty is largely cultural, in terms of expectations that orgasm be achieved by specific means that may not actually work for those women, etc.
Ballgame, to be fair to me, you just solicited for cites to studies, you didn’t say they needed to be definitive. It was no big effort – I found every cite on the “Sexual effect of circumcision” article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.....rcumcision). I was pleased to see that what I’ll in a brief megalomaniacally moment will call Tamen’s lemma (because it almost sounds obscene in Norwegian) was in effect (there is “always” a study with an opposite conclusion).
Wait a minute, Tamen, I think I saw that on an office door somewhere (Answers: $1 … Useful Answers: $5 … Useful Answers That Are Actually Correct: $25).
As for ‘Tamen’s Lemma’ … I thought they were hunted to extinction because of their fur?
“Jim, at times women can be as complicit in the lack of quality in their own sexual encounters as their partners, when they “fake” orgasms. It doesn’t uniformly mean either one is a particularly bad lover– it does uniformly mean that the two of them are not communicating and leading to a less than wholehearted experience. Innocent of maliciousness or otherwise, there are a great number of people that struggle with sexual conflicts and insecurities. Just a current fact of mainstream society.”
Well, if you’re going to be civilized about all of this, I suppose there won’t be much to fight about, Ari – especially in light of that humane and reasonable comment.
“But from a practical standpoint, the “elusiveness” of female orgasm relative to PIV sex isn’t so important, is it? ”
Well apparently it is, Cessen, apparently the contractions during orgasm help get the little swimmers further in and increase the chances of fertilization.
“I’ll in a brief megalomaniacally moment will call Tamen’s lemma (because it almost sounds obscene in Norwegian)”
Especially in the context of a derail on circumcision.
“As for ‘Tamen’s Lemma’ … I thought they were hunted to extinction because of their fur?”
BG, that’s actually a pretty creepy image, as well as funny – trying to color match all those little patches would be a real chore. And what’s more, depending on the person, some of that “fur” is coarse and scratchy.
Aside from the fact that every human being has hands so manual stimulation with the hands is hardly ‘artificial’–yes, there actually have been experts who suggest that the amount of pressure the hand can apply can make vaginal sex seem less pleasurable by comparison.
Here are two sources on vaginal vs. clitoral orgasms:
http://www.hitchedmag.com/article.php?id=221
http://community.livejournal.c.....84786.html
The first one is a good description of what I experience. The second one is testimonials from other women.
A lot of the reason why the whole ‘elusive female orgasm’ thing bugs me is that it makes women’s orgasm out to be the holy grail or the goal of sex; men give women orgasms through their actions rather then just their bodies, whereas women give men orgasms not through their actions but just through their bodies.
It is, again, the active male, passive female dichotomy.
Personally, maybe I’m just lucky, but I can use my husband’s body to orgasm without him taking an active role and, to me, that’s really hot. It’s a hard to describe feeling but it’s a hell of a lot more awesome then having an orgasm done to me.
@typhonblue:
I don’t think you are alone. I know at least two women IRL that primarily reach orgasm vaginally. I think there are actually quite a lot of women who are really alienated by the whole “women require clitoral stimulation” thing. And I suspect even more women end up not exploring their bodies fully because of those messages as well (similar to how so many men limit their own exploration to their penis).
There are a lot of nasty prescriptive messages about how people are supposed to (or can) explore and enjoy their bodies. It would be a lot cooler if instead of prescript there was just a large collections of ideas of things to try, with the presumption that different people will like different things.
Cessen said:
If men orgasm consistently from PIV, oral, and manual, and many women only orgasm consistently from 2 out of those three… doesn’t it start to look like the female orgasm is more elusive?
Yes, but if the level of skill/precision/effort to bring female orgasm about is less than what it takes to bring male orgasm about (on average), doesn’t it start to look like female orgasm is more elusive? Even if people limited sex to non-intercourse activities, wouldn’t we still see men orgasming more easily?
There is no reason to privilege the hypothesis that men and women orgasm with equal ease. I’ve noticed that in many discussions of sex differences among liberal/leftist/egalitarian people, there is a bias to assume that men and women are identical (on the relevant dimension) until proven otherwise.
Higher numbers for guys? Women more reluctant. Hmmm…why? Ponder, ponder. Maybe men are curly-tailed pinkish animals with snouts? Or perhaps the men only want one thing. Life is a mystery.
^ Wow. That added nothing to the debate.
Men are pigs. HAR HAR HAR.
~Go forward/back 2000 years~
‘Women only want one thing, isn’t that right Thelonious!’
‘Quite. They are pigs.’
Cyclical trope is cyclical.
PoliticallyRude, if you are going to participate here, please tone down the male-bashing. Thanks.
@Hugh:
It’s anecdotal, and not a large sample size, but two of the three women I’ve been with were quite straight-forward. No more difficult than myself. The other, however, seemed to need millimeter precision, and was quite difficult. So my impression from personal experience is that it just varies from woman to woman.
But yes, indeed, some women’s orgasms do seem to be quite elusive. No disagreement there. And it is totally inappropriate to hold their lovers accountable for that. I’m just hesitant to generalize, especially since some of my experiences have been contrary to that. I think in many cases it is, indeed, that cultural norms (affecting both the women’s behavior and the men’s) are preventing women from getting the stimulation they need. But certainly in other cases, it is simply that the woman is difficult to begin with. It varies. And acknowledging both issues is important, IMO.
PoliticallyRude: I agree. People who all share a single biological trait are all the same. I’m sure there’s a word for that view but I can’t remember it. It’s on the tip of my tongue…
//end sarcasm
I thought that this was a no hostility thread. Attention to such detail is one of the things that impressed me about this blog. PoliticallyRude’s comment is decidedly hostile, and should be treated as such.
As an aside, I have no problem with this comment being ejected, I just wanted to point that out.
sixsides, I rebuked that poster. If they return, I will have much less patience with them.
typhonblue wrote:
“5. The use of vibrators has necessarily altered a woman’s perception of sexual pleasure. This form of stimulation is artificial and artificially intense. This has resulted in women judging men sexually by an impossible ideal of mechanical stimulation and finding men lacking.”
My own experience with vibrators/dildos had led to a totally different find than what typhonblue describes:
Experimenting with my own sexual pleasure, without the pressure of having a guy present, taught me how to achieve orgasms more easily. By passing on this knowledge to my sex partners, I could enjoy sex all the much more. Achieving orgasm isn’t as easy for many of us as it is for guys, and girls/women who don’t experiment on their own may never figure out how to climax more easily.
Well then, regardless of the effect of vibrators (I wasn’t talking about dildos) on your love life I believe you’ll be happy to know that men are getting less and less pleasure out of standard penis in vagina intercourse. Apparently more and more men are faking orgasm or simply not coming to orgasm during sex with their female lovers.
Soon standard PIV sex will be just as unsatisfying to men as it is to women.
This is sort of rambling, so I apologize if I veer off topic, but I thought I would include some random experiences of my own as a pro-sex feminist woman.
I am definitely one of the women who orgasm primarily (and repeatedly) from PIV intercourse. It is not uncommon for me to orgasm a dozen times in one session. Honestly, sometimes I think it’s not fair for the guys I’m with that they only get one.
From my experience with men and women as partners though, the ability to orgasm really does depend on the person, and it changes over time. As years go by my body changes and I like different things and can do different things. We are not static creatures.
I LOVE vibrators on my own – and I masturbate pretty much daily with the highest speed motorized object I can find. I have always been pretty desensitized clitorally – that’s just my genetics – though this doesn’t stop me from loving being licked and stimulated manually.
Despite my love affair with electric toothbrushes and riding lawnmowers, there is really just nothing like a real penis, connected to a real person who I am kissing and laughing with and rolling around with. You can’t make vibrators make those incredible noises, those fabulous faces, or that musky smell, not to mention those G-spot orgasms that make me almost pass out with delight. The real thing is the best, and if I had to pick one or the other I would dump my plastic vibrating phalluses into the middle of the ocean.
I like to say I have a magic vagina – I can orgasm ad infinitum. My sexual exploration has definitely taught me how to have bigger, better and more frequent orgasms. I’ve learned to ejaculate and how to have orgasms that last 30 minutes to an hour. The more I play the more I cum, and the more I can teach my partners AND my girlfriends how to cause female orgasms as well. A lot of my friends have learned how to have frequent and powerful orgasms through penetration. I hold out hope it’s possible for every women. But I also don’t diminish any kind of orgasm, and other non-orgasmic kinds of pleasure. Stressing about how to feel good is oxymoronic.
I also think, as a feminist, it’s my job to be in charge of my own orgasms. This means I’m not a passive participant. I do what feels good, ask for what I want, do a good job on instructing in a sweet and sexy way, and reciprocate everything I get in kind.
It also means I’m selective about my partners, but I shop for eager, friendly, kind and honest people over skilled, smooth, or prowess laden studs. (If you know what you are doing the nice guys are better lovers anyway.) It’s not that I don’t love a good romp with an experienced lover, but I consider my ability to make any man into a Casanova a personal point of pride.
I also believe that the standard for men as good lovers being how fast and effectively can you figure out the complicated and ever changing world of making this particular woman orgasm is sort of BS and sounds incredibly freaking stressful.
I’ve had lovers where we weren’t that orgasmically compatible at first, but they were SO intimate and SO acrobatic and SO sweet that it was awesome, and as we learned how to pleasure each other we had sex that was really unparallelably wicked.
I’ve also had lovers where it was good mechanically, but their eyes were sort of empty and there was no connection or joy between us. That sex can never get better than it is, and ends up sort of being ho hum and eventually nauseating.
I’ve also been with a lot of guys that were difficult to get off. Many of my partners have been surprised to actually orgasm during a blow job with me. Others have struggled with getting and/or maintaining erections for months, years, occasionally, or for their whole life. I’ve had male partners with anorgasmia as well, one had only orgasmed with a woman touching him once during his life.
I remember feeling really ugly and incompetent the first time I had sex with a man and he didn’t orgasm. And how confused and worried and trapped I felt when a partner had trouble keeping it up and just kept trying to have sex with me as if I wouldn’t notice. Neither of us knew how to talk about those things, even though they are pretty normal and I know now they aren’t a reflection on anyone’s virility or sexiness.
Men and women are both taught that if the man doesn’t orgasm during sex either his penis is broken, or her vagina is broken. If a woman doesn’t orgasm – that’s normal. Seems like both extremes cause problems for everyone and end up making us farther apart (isn’t that the opposite point of sex?)
Now I am pretty happy with any sort of body and sexuality function and I don’t think it means something about one of us if I dry up or he loses an erection. I focus on listening and connecting with the person I’m with and I have discovered the best aphrodisiac for everyone involved is communication, humor, and comfort.
Great comment, Harmony. Welcome to the blog.
Harmony, now I know why you have that name. It suits you right down to the ground.
[...] Fischer: Gays Have 500-1000 Sex Partners In a LifetimeDoes Your Range (of Sex Spouses) End in a 0Gender Differences Accepting Casual Sex Proposals (NoH) #header { background:#150A04 [...]
When I discussed this study with friends over email I wrote:
Though the author seems to think her results
significantly undermine “sexual strategies theory,” I think they are
quite consistent with the basic evolutionary story.
Overall, I think the design of her studies is decent. It’s possible
for people to learn from her empirical work, despite the fact that I
think she misinterprets it here and there. – Hey, that leads me to an
interesting thought… if I had done the study, and published the
exact same results but interpreted them differently, would my work
have gained acceptance at this prestigious journal? There’s a good
chance, but I’m really not sure. If only I could do an experiment!
In my opinion, she is uncharitable towards sexual strategies theory
(SST). Her alternative,
To give an example of one of her mistakes, see p. 322. She
acknowledges that women who assumed the proposer was more sexually
faithful, were more likely to agree to casual sex. Then she claims:
“This would seem to contradict SST, which predicts that men desire
women who will be faithful to them so that they will have the greatest
likelihood of propagating their genes. Women may desire a faithful
partner because they believe that his sexual faithfulness will
increase the likelihood that he will provide support for their future
children, but SST still predicts that faithfulness would be relatively
more important to men (who strive to assure that any offspring are
genetically related to them).”
Evolutionary reasoning arguably suggests that men should care more
than women about sexual fidelity in long-term partners, but it clearly
doesn’t imply they would care more about it in short-term partners…
that’s kinda contradicts the definition of casual sex. The fact that
women are more open to casual sex with someone who they perceive as
more faithful merely confirms our view that on average, women prefer
more committed relationships than men. Once again, I acknowledge that
this preference is influenced by social norms. My concern is that the
author misinterprets the SST so that she can argue that her data
contradict it.
Another flaw common in social science research is to mistake lack of a
statistically significant effect, with lack of an effect. The author
says something to the effect of, “SST predicts x, y, z, but I find no
significant effect” but what goes unsaid is that the data do not rule
out fairly large effects. Get a larger sample, then we’ll have more
precise estimates. Even if they support SST, we’ll still have plenty
of room to argue about causality, and mechanisms.
Needless to say, this type of study is not the only way to shed light
on whether gender differences in sex/relationship preferences are
entirely social vs. social and biological in origin. We should also
look at cross-cultural evidence (how consistent are these gender
differences?), cross-species comparisons (in particular, the behavior
of chimps and bonobos), and what happens to people’s preferences when
they are exposed to sex hormones, in particular testosterone. No
study is decisive, but in my mind the combination of different studies
is. Both biology and socialization cause gender differences. Lots of
interesting details are yet to be worked out though.
Indeed, as they say, “absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence.”
Welcome to the blog, Michael Bishop.
Good comment, Michael Bishop. I agree with you that the researcher’s analysis is uncharitable to the SST. It smells like political bias.
Women perceiving men to be less satisfying lovers is also consistent with the SST.
@ Hugh Ristik
Women perceiving men to be less satisfying lovers may be a cultural construct. After all women were seen as more lustful even just a few centuries ago. (And definitely so two millennia ago.)
I remember reading the results of a particular PUA experiment somewhere. Instead of saying “Let’s have sex,” it was something more like “I have a new place nearby, why not come over and see it.” That PUA went from 0% to 11% success rate, where success was immediate sex. Not scientific, but suggestive of the role of plausible deniability and social conditioning in women accepting offers of casual sex.