My own experiences (either things directly happening to me plus observing how other people hook up) plus just talking to friends of both genders.
And generally, that kind of hooking up isn’t popular among women. If it were, we’d have, say, lots of hetero bathhouses around where people can just show up and screw. In reality, you’d have no problem finding men willing to go to such a place, but you’d have to pay the women.
colander I see in post 79 I mangled the quotes a bit such that it’s not obvious which blocks I’m quoting are you, and which are from your cite. Apologies.
Read it again. Both attractiveness and predicted sexual skill figured into the likelihood of the subject accepting the offer. This was true for both men and women.
Not really. The goal of the experiment was to determine the extent to which various factors, including the attractiveness of the proposer and the perceived sexual skill of the proposer, affected the chances that the subjects would agree to a sexual encounter. How does the researcher go about doing that? Easy: simply tweak the survey scenario and survey a whole bunch of people to see what kinds of differences it makes in the responses. This is standard protocol.
Look, dude. Obviously, the results of this study are contrary to what your own expectations lead you to believe and you are kind of struggling to find reasons to cling to your preconceived beliefs. That’s the thing about science, though. Sometimes what you believe turns out to be wrong. Things get a lot easier once you start to acknowledge that possibility.
I am a woman. I am telling you that for me it is a major reason. I also have shown you a study indicating that other women feel the same way. You can choose to accept it or not, but whether or not you do has no bearing on whether or not it actually turns out to be true. (It is.)
Read it again: “The extent to which women and men believed that the proposer would be sexually skilled predicted how likely they would be to engage in casual sex with this individual”.
It’s a laughable claim and I’m not surprised you are not willing to say whether you support it.
Especially since it rather runs counter to what you were saying earlier: that men accept casual sex because they know that they can get off no matter what. Your cite is saying that men will refuse sex if they believe a potential partner has low ability.
No, the author has cherry-picked examples where she suspected men and women would have similar behaviour.
I mean, why no examples of how subjects felt about sex with a relative stranger? It’s quite a glaring omission, I wonder why that was?
Can the condescension.
If you believe I am not acting scientifically, say how. Note that not immediately taking to heart the conclusion of one, dubious, study is not being unscientific. You can find badly-done studies to support any conclusion you like. Your own cite mentions a larger study that came to the opposite conclusion.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore studies but we do have to look at them critically, and this one clearly doesn’t pass muster.
My apologies. The information about both attractiveness and apparent sexual proficiency being influences on men and women’s proposition responses was actually in my first link to the summary of the study’s results, not in the abstract I posted. Nevertheless, it was indeed a result of the study, despite your apparent astonishment.
Not only do I support it, I would go so far as to say that it is trivially obvious. I wouldn’t want to have sex with someone who thinks the Clitoris is a model of Toyota. You wouldn’t want to have sex with someone who thinks a blowjob involves chewing. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Would you mind explaining your objection?
It doesn’t run counter to what I was saying at all. Remember this part of the abstract?
Get it? The women in the study had relatively low estimations of the sexual competency of a men making a proposition for casual sex. By contrast, men assumed a woman making a similar proposition possessed considerable sexual skill. This was shown to be the decisive factor explaining why men were less likely to turn down offers from women than vice versa.
It’s right there, dude. Again: the reason that women turn down casual sex with proposition-y male strangers is that they have very little confidence in the sexual capabilities of same.
Very well. Up till now, your only criticism of this study that I have failed to address is your repeated vehement insistence that somehow, for reasons that you either will not or cannot articulate, you know that the inferences the researcher draws from its results cannot possibly be true. Why you feel this way will perhaps remain an eternal mystery to me, since you haven’t actually been able to articulate any actual methodological or inferential flaws that you believe that the study has. You prefer instead to vaguely imply the existence of some unspecified, ominously-feminist “bias” on the part of the researcher’s choice of thesis. Weaksauce, dude.
Really? That’s funny, because I haven’t seen any cites at all from you yet, badly done or otherwise.
No. The study is a refinement of a previous study which found that men were more receptive to casual heterosexual sex offers than women, but failed to account for the fact that men are far more likely than women to anticipate that accepting such an offer would lead to them experiencing a sexually gratifying encounter. When this discrepancy was eliminated by specifying for both men and women that their propositioner was a person who seemed to them to be adequately sexually skilled, men and women were equally likely to accept the offer. In other words, men and women both enjoy gratifying casual sex encounters to roughly equal extents, but women have lower expectations than men that casual encounters will end up being sexually gratifying for them.
The abstract of the paper makes a very clear claim. If the abstract differs from the body of the paper, well that’s a flaw in the research right there.
The paper makes the claim that perceived sexual ability successfully predicted how likely the men were to accept offers of casual sex (women also, but I’m focusing on men here for the moment).
That’s a very strong claim. It’s a stronger claim than mere correlation. We must see men refusing sex when they otherwise would be inclined just because of a low expectation of sexual ability. And/or the opposite. And that should happen a significant proportion of times. Otherwise the claim is baseless.
But the idea that, for example, a man would refuse sex with an attractive woman because she’s a virgin, and preferentially go for older, more experienced women, flies in the face of all of human history.
Firstly, please stop calling me “dude”. It is coming across as patronizing.
Secondly, I’m pointing out that it was a major flaw in the study that it didn’t include scenarios including strangers; that’s where many of the critical differences would show up. You (and indeed the paper’s author) don’t get to say “well it’s obvious what would happen in that case”.
You miss my point.
You suggested that I was showing bias by rejecting the conclusion of the study you cite.
But even that cite itself rejects the conclusion of a study: the 1989 study.
I actually agree with her that studies can have flawed methodologies. I just disagree about which one is flawed.
Hasn’t it been shown that female animals are just as promiscuous? They can’t spread their seed, but they do open themselves up to greater sperm competition, leading to better offspring fitness. This is the same reason males compete with things like elaborate peacock fans.
But in any case, in humans, psychological, intellectual, and cultural factors are at least as important to behaviors, if not more than, genetic considerations.
No. Monogamy is less common than used to be conventionally thought, but that’s not the same thing as males and females being equally promiscuous.
OK, but put it this way: most people now accept that sexual orientation is largely something you’re born with (or at least, it’s much more nature than nurture).
And many would accept that gender identity is like that too – even though there is a complex interplay between that and culture. That some people grow up feeling they are psychologically the other gender from their body, and that that is largely nature too.
But broad sexual behaviour is treated very differently right now, because it is a sensitive topic. To some, any discussion of average gender differences is necessarily prescriptive.
You are wrong. Saying that it is a predictor of acceptance rate is the same thing as saying that there is a correlation between high sexual competence expectation and high odds of offer accepting. And there is.
What the study points out is that it is not typically the case that men ever have a low expectation of sexual ability on the part of a woman propositioning them. This is what I have been saying to you all along.
Of course it included stranger scenarios. That was the first experiment! Remember this part from the abstract?
See? Stranger scenarios. Result? All other things about the proposers being equal, men tended to think the female stranger propositioning them seemed like a fun date. Women tended to think the male stranger propositioning them seemed like an oblivious tool.
The part of the 1989 study which the researcher rejects is the part where the 1989 researchers didn’t investigate the reason behind the phenomenon of women being less receptive to stranger sex offers. This study did. It found a reason. You’re unhappy with the reason they found, although for the life of me I can’t divine the origin of your discomfort. My condolences about that, but I’m afraid the results still stand.
Something I don’t understand about the men more promiscuous than women theory- unless fewer women than men are engaged in casual sex with a lot more partners than males, the number of promiscuous men and women must be more or less the same ( not including threesomes here ).
There are several reasons why the numbers don’t add up.
Imagine for a moment that 99% of women are promiscuous and only 1% of men are.
Well, inevitably here a lot of women are not going to get as much casual sex as they would like, especially if the promiscuous men know that there are no shortage of willing women and so only sleep with the most attractive ones (promiscuous =/= screw anybody, any time).
To make matters worse, some of the most successful women are in more than one relationship at the same time, and the men in their lives may or may not know about the others, but are faithful regardless. I don’t know if this comes under promiscuity but basically you have one woman playing the field and several men not.
A recent book on the subject seems to indicate that women like sex. Just as much as men.
This study is claiming that expectations of partner skill are predictive of whether men will consent to casual sex.
Now, if that’s true, then it must potentially make a difference. More specifically, one or both of the following must be true:
But I think both are a problem for your point here.
If it’s 1, then that’s pretty obviously contrary to how men have behaved in all human cultures. I don’t think you want to claim that 1 happens.
I would probably agree with 2, but this no longer a mirror of stereotype female behaviour. No one would assert that women screw all attractive men they meet, plus unattractive men, if they sound like they know what they’re doing.
Yes, she repeated the 1989 study for that part, and got the same result. I’m interested in what she added to supposedly find the real reasons for the data.
I don’t know the form of the interviews, as you still haven’t linked the paper, but the rest of the study where she asks about whether participants would sleep with famous celebrities and people of the same gender seem disingenuous at best.
Thank you for your “condolences” but I have no discomfort. It makes no difference to my life what the weighting of factors is in reality.
If you want an example of someone finding certain data uncomfortable, how about when Conley says “Are we really going to believe women do not like sex as much as men?”
Was it like this when they first met?
But you are incorrect. The statistical analysis was done. And although you refuse to believe it, the data showed that situations 1 and 2 did occur.
Full stop.
In fact, they occurred often enough that it was possible to show mathematically that there was, in fact, a correlative relationship between the proposer’s perceived sexual ability and odds of stranger sex offer acceptance. For both men and women, it did make a difference.
Here’s the thing, though. Just asserting that something is “pretty obviously contrary to how men have behaved in all human cultures” is not a cite. It’s not an argument. It’s a belief that you personally happen to hold. I note that you continue to hold it even when your belief is contradicted by observable reality. Mijin, I am afraid that is not a good sign.
I will attempt to explain it again. She added questions designed to assess the propositionee’s perception of sexual competence on the part of the propositioner. She found that when women were assured of sexual competence on the part of their male propositioners, their NSA sex proposition acceptance rate was as high as those of male propositionees being propositioned by females.
In other words, women don’t turn strangers down because they don’t like casual sex that much. They turn you down because they don’t think they will enjoy having it with unvetted randos who go around propositioning women for casual sex.
Please explain to me exactly what it is that you find “disingenuous” about the experimental protocol. Thanks.
The data backs her up.
It doesn’t back you up.
Mijin, please tell me why you think I should believe you over the data.
You’re not listening to me.
I can see what the study purports to show.
You believe that the study tells us something about women in general: that they may be as willing as men to have casual sex and that it is only because of concerns of disappointing sex that holds them back. Fine.
All I am trying to do is do the same thing for men, because the study also makes a claim about the behaviour of men. I can see that you find the implications for men in the wider world as implausible as I do, and that’s why I’m going to keep pressing this.
Before I gather cites let me check you are absolutely sure you want to go there:
Do you think that lack of experience is a significant negative factor, and that men should find such an attribute repellent?
Note: for the study’s conclusion to make any sense at all, it must be a significant negative factor. Otherwise we’re basically saying “Men, like women, only accept offers of casual sex if they think the woman has the requisite skillset. The requisite skillset in this case being having a vagina”.
I’m just going by the abstract, as you still haven’t linked the paper.
And I’ve already said my objection, and you haven’t responded to it. Here it is again:
The closest thing to a stranger in her scenarios were: a famous celebrity and someone of the same gender. These candidates seem to me deliberately chosen to deliver the same answers from men and women.
The researcher must have been aware that one stereotype of female partner selection is that high social status is a significant attractor. So I would expect women to be far more likely to accept the offer of sex from a celebrity than in normal situations.
Therefore to then extrapolate the result out to women in general, in more typical situations is flawed.
Asking about propositions from someone of the same gender is also rather off-topic for trying to draw the kind of conclusion that the author makes.
I just answered this on a related post, but can’t find it.
If the number of men and women are the same, and everyone is hetero (or else abstains), then the averages have to be equal, between men and women.
Let’s take one case: 10 men, 10 women.
9 of the men slept with two woman: one usual partner and one promiscuous woman. The 10th man slept only with the promiscuous woman.
9 of the women slept with only one man. The 10th woman is that promiscuous one.
Men: 9 * 2 + 1 = 19 partnerships, divided by 10 men = 1.9 partners on average
Women: 9 * 1 + 10 = 19 partnerships, divided by 10 women = 1.9 partners on average
The averages have to be the same. Only the distributions can vary. So, talking about “average” in a case like this isn’t helpful. Talking about mode or median would be more informative.
Above, the median for men is 2; the median for women is 1. That says something about the typical man or woman.
Any study reporting different averages for men and women tells us about what people say or think (or about bias in the study), but doesn’t tell us much about reality.
I am pleased to see I am making at least some progress here.
You can press all you like. I will continue to explain things to the best of my ability. Incidentally: one thing I am trying very, very hard to get across to you is that it would be extremely poor form for a scientist to wave away results simply because they seem superficially “implausible”. I absolutely can’t stress this enough.
The study didn’t ask about whether the subjects thought their propositioners seemed sexually experienced. It asked whether they thought the propositioners seemed as if they would be sexually competent.
Such a conclusion would not be inconsistent with the results of the study.
I have corrected you on this already. I will do so again: The study included stranger scenarios. That was, again, the very first experiment that was done. In addition to stranger scenarios, it subsequently investigated other scenarios designed to probe how the responses of the subjects change when their expectation of sexual gratification from the encounters is increased. It is very important that you be able to comprehend this.
It is not flawed at all. In order to investigate the effect of high sexual gratification expectation on the part of propositioned subjects, it is necessary to be able to compare multiple sets of data to each other whose input parameters differ only in respect to the subjects’ projected sexual gratification expectation. This is exactly what was done. In this study, both men and women were asked about their reactions to both stranger scenarios and celebrity scenarios.
In stranger scenarios, men accepted sex propositions significantly more often than women did.
In celebrity scenarios, the acceptance rates of men and women were the same. Do you understand?
That part of the study is meant as a control. Its purpose is to enable the researchers to disentangle how much of the observed difference in the various result sets was genuinely due to the change in independent variable (that is, due only to an increase in the sexual gratification expectation of the respondents) from how much of it can be attributed simply to the fact that, as the early part of the study indicated, both men and women perceive female propositioners to be more sexually competent than male propositioners even when all other aspects of the scenario are identical.
I hope this helps.
If that were true, I doubt that prostitution would be as big as it is, given that there are probably more women than men in the western world.
However, given that sex is extremely enjoyable, women should like doing it as much as men.
Perhaps women do not, on average, find it all that enjoyable to have sex with members of the subsection of the male population that frequents prostitutes.