Discourse trumps truth just about every time. If enough people say it’s true, it’s as good as true if you live/work/exist among them, because discourse also has power. It controls people’s behavior.
If mostly male, presumably said boards are also heavily (if not mostly) socially conservative. Conservatives today are heavily invested in a gender view they call traditional (ie: essentialist), and in backing it up with selective science and arguments to history.
Happily, social conservatives do not yet control the discourse on gender. However, their close associates - economic conservatives - do largely control our understanding of the market system. So in the sense that sexual attraction is a market activity - if not actually tied up with the cash economy - a conservative view prevails: status, resources, power. Not just good things, but the only real things besides biology.
First kimera claimed that men she’s observed on message boards value sexual purity and look down on promiscuous women. It’s fine to make such an observation, although I and others on this particular forum have repeatedly tried to stress that we do not have such beliefs.
Now you’ve added to the list conservatism, traditionalism, essentialism, economic conservatism…are we nazi’s too?
Believe it or not, I subscribe to none of the philosophies you’ve listed.
I’m just making a simple observation and have no axe to grind.
I don’t see where, or how I connected you personally with any of this. I certainly didn’t intend to. (As a rule, I have a tin ear for other people’s feelings, especially online. I’m much more likely to respond to statements at face value, or according my feelings, than theirs.)
Ah, I had assumed we were including The Straight Dope as an example of a “mostly male message board”.
But recall that kimera had originally said “I spend a lot of time on mostly male message boards. I know how much males in our culture value female sexual purity in general and look down on women who openly enjoy sex in ways that males do”.
“Males in our culture” includes me. But the observation is incorrect in my case.
As for whether the observation is true (as a generalisation), I’d say there’s certainly some truth to it, and I’d like to discuss precisely the causes of this, but I’ll save it for a separate post.
I’m not offended. I’m just trying to keep the discussion going without the accusations that can start to creep in.
Women do not seek anonymous sex with males because those who do end up chopped to pieces, wrapped in cellophane and stored in the freezer.
Less gruesomely, the vast gulf between the sex drives of men and women is evident in a large amount of women’s difficulty achieving orgasm at all during their lifetime, the huge differences in masturbation frequency, the aforementioned prostitution reality, and the fact that homosexual males have a LOT sex with many different partners because they are seeking sex with partners who are just as horny as they are. Just the opposite with homosexual women, naturally. The world would be dramatically different if heterosexuals behaved like homosexual men. For one thing the floral, jewelry, and candy industries would collapse over night.
Frankly, having a high sex drive is a huge pain in the balls. It takes up a lot of time I could be spending on more productive activities. Sex in and of itself is also fairly overrated, especially for a woman, so I can’t really blame them. I’m not sure why a woman would ever want to go out with a guy at all really. It’s somewhat surprising the human race isn’t extinct yet.
I believe the following is a valuable contribution in understanding the male perspective, by one Sir Mix-A-Lot:
Women go for males who make them feel secure, guys go for females who have nice tits, nice ass, give good head, etc.
Men are much more visually stimulated than women which explains why men are much more consumers of porn. A man is excited by a photo of a good body while a woman is stimulated by those trashy novels where the man falls in love with the girl he saves. Which drives me more to puking than to orgasm.
I remember when all the equality thing was in full swing and all these theories about the only difference being social conditioning were abundant. Hippies were going to end all that and women were going to start fucking all the guys at the bottom of the totem pole. Except that it never happened. And Jane Fonda, who I do not think anyone would call shy or conditioned by the expectations of others, was going to marry a construction worker. But she didn’t. She married some guy just slightly higher up the ladder.
For every woman who wants anonymous hot monkey sex there are millions who do not. Those women are not representative. Or I would like to see any evidence that they are.
Some people just want to rationalise their own beliefs.
Erotic literature doesn’t get you off – so what? Just because porn is verbal or oral rather than visual (and even then, I’ve always got to wonder why so many ‘less visual’ women are so interested in – and get turned on by – fashion) doesn’t mean it’s somehow less valid. I can’t help but think that some of the women buying 130+ million Harlequin books a year are actually using them for their spank (and sex) banks.
And if you’re under the impression that all women are cumming over the idea of a prince in shining armor or a reformed bad boy with a 401k, then turn to fan fiction, especially slash fiction. Plenty of women readers (and mostly women authors), not much life saving, plenty of hot, dirty guy-on-guy sex.
Did I say “less valid”? No I did not. I do not even know what it means to say a certain type of porn is “less valid”.
My point is that I believe that male and femaly sexuality are very different in their nature and I believe there is plenty of evidence to support that belief.
Which is of course the question- what is the origin of these differences, and are there societies where female and male sexuality is expressed differently?
Let’s look at another example- eating. Today, western women generally want to be thin, and go to great efforts for it. For many women it is one of the primary things they think about. We spend millions of dollars and hundreds of hours on it. And we’ve been able to control the greatest drive of all- hunger. Some women have managed to control their hunger to the point that they voluntarily starve themselves to death.
Why do women want to be so thin? One could make an evolutionary argument for the popularity of thin women. One could argue that women by nature have less of a hunger drive than men. You could say that men need food for hunting and fighting, but women don’t need much to stay around the house. Why? You could say that thin women are more likely to share their resources with their children, leading to longer lived kids. Or you could say you are more likely to see a cancerous mass in a thin woman. Or that a thin woman is easier to rape, so they are more likely to have strong forceful partners.
But of course, this is all BS. For almost all of human history, chubby woman have been preferred. It’s because of our changing material circumstances that we have come to prefer thin women. And yeah, we have managed to warp the most basic drive of all- the drive to eat- because of that.
Our sex drive is warped in the exact same way.
So you guys, can you explain the changes in sexuality in the last 50 years. We no longer have early marriages and premarital sex, multiple partners, co-habitation and delayed childbearing is the norm. What happened? By your argument, this would be because women have been getting less power, since by your definition we are getting less of what you say we want (a single partner who will provide for us and our children)? What’s up?
And yet America is full of fat women. Women who, in spite of their desire to be thin, are, in fact, fat. Which shows the desire to eat is not cultural, it is innate. Even when you try to change it it is very difficult.
Now show me all the women who, in spite of your alleged pressures of society, just cannot control their sexual urges and go out at night in search of sex, willing to pay money for it, risking being arrested and taken to jail. Show me all those women because I just can’t see them in the news.
What this is saying is that not all human psychology can be explained in terms of pre-civilized influences. Not that none of it can be.
(In addition, I’m not necessarily looking back all that far, as the forces I point to would be at work in a polygamous society, which was the norm until relatively recently.)
I do notice in your linked source that
So it seems that some version of the OP is out there already.
I think both sides of the argument here have been making a lot of good, valid points. I have a couple of questions.
The ‘sex drives are innately higher in men’ crowd: I don’t think I’ve seen a response to the physical danger that women who sought out anonymous encounters are in. Yes, men risk a great deal for illicit sex (Bill Clinton, Ted Haggard &c), but they are not, generally, risking themselves physically.
Also, I don’t know if it’s relevant, but, whilst I agree that women are often attracted to men who make them feel secure, or have high status, what about the phenomenon of the ‘cougar’? A very recent phenomenon, to be sure, but a real one. Do you believe that women are not at all interested in physical appearance in their mates? Personally, I think more women are into ‘good-looking’ guys than are willing to say so. There is def. cultural pressure amongst women that admitting you like (or just like to look at) hunky guys is not done.
For the ‘no innate differences’ crowd: what about within marriage, after kids? I don’t think that it can be argued that women after years of child-bearing seem to have less of a desire to have sex than their husbands. Why is this? I’ve certainly seen this in cases where it was only the women’s responsibility to take care of children, but also in more egalitarian families.
I am not saying “higher”. I am saying “different”. Not the same thing. Take a married couple about 50ish and there is a good chance the wife wants more sex than the husband.
Except that is a myth that women would want anonymous sex in the first place. Really, how many women out there want anonymous sex but are afraid of seeking it? It is just not true. If they wanted it they would find a safe way of doing it.
We are talking the rule, not the exception. The fact is that as a rule men and women are different.
Many women lose interest in sex when they become mothers as they focus their affection on their children. As a rule that is much more so with women than with men.
On the other hand you also often see cases of couples where it is the man who is bored with having sex with his wife and seeks variety outside.
That’s the old joke about a couple who seeks therapy for their lack of interest in sex. The woman is advised to repeat to herself “I have no headache, I have no headache…” and the man was advised to repeat to himself “she’s not my wife, she’s not my wife…”.
It baffles me to hear attitudes like Sailor’s, asserting that women have little or no sexual attraction based on physical appearance. Why are there calendars for sale with pictures of muscular men wearing very little, if women have no interest in such pictures? Why do teenage girls line their bedroom walls with pictures of teen idols? Do the Backstreet Boys make them feel secure? Why all these romance novels where a women from a wealthy, straight-laced background falls for a dashing pirate or a handsome rogue? How does that fit with the theory that women are only interest in men who give them a secure place in society?
Having no real data on the topic, I can’t simply jump to that conclusion. In the media there are stereotypes of both cases: husband interested in sex and wife not, or vice versa. One obvious reason why a person’s sexual interest might decline after many years of marriage is boredom. Almost anything gets boring after you’ve done it a few thousand times. Other than that, I can’t say much, having not experienced a lengthy marriage myself.
But it’s also worth noting that in our society, you can’t perform controlled experiments on the sex drives of men vs. women because the amount of material presented to them is different. Even in public spaces (especially in public spaces) there’s a lot more stuff aimed at stimulating men than at stimulating women, and that could certainly explain some differences. It’s also worth noting that in a few situations, our society seems to reverse its attitudes. For instance, when looking at greeting cards in stores, I see a lot more ‘hot guy cards’ than ‘hot girl cards’. Something about that particular social circumstances makes it socially acceptable for women to ogle an attractive man in that particular situation.
Of course men and women have ‘different’ sex drives.
But I would like to hear from the ‘innate’ crowd more explicitly: do you really think women are only attracted to status and security?
Women are not ‘visual’ in the same degree that men are, but that does not mean that desire for women is a purely calculated effort, that does not take the physical into account. Women have sexual desires of the same type as men (lust, if you will) based purely on physical appearance and sexual ‘chemistry’. To deny that is to me bizarre. What women look for in a long term partner is different than what men look for, perhaps. But asserting that ‘lust’ or desire is not at least in the majority of cases built on the same grounds does not make sense to me.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood this focus on ‘status’ though.
Did I say that? No, I did not. I said and say that it does not have the weight in women that it has in men. And I stand by that. I stand by the assertion that women’s and men’s motivations and turn-ons are quite different.
Before the Internet what was the market for male and female porn and nudie magazines and other materials? They were not even in the same league.
I will tell you how it fits. Because what teenage girls are interested in guys who are famous and have succeeded. They could find guys who look just as good and enjoy a good fuck with them but they go for admiring winners who are out of their reach.
I forget what rich and famous guy was being interviewed on some late night show and the host asked him “what does it feel like to know you could have pretty much any woman you like?” and the reply was “Where were they when I was younger and unknown?”
My interpretation is that advertisers know what men and women find stimulating.
This isn’t quite true. While we have so far identified only a very few gene polymorphisms (genetic variants) that are associated with specific, non-pathological behavioral traits in human populations, we do have quite a list (still being added to) of genes that are involved in behavior in a general sense. As I said upthread, there’s persuasive evidence for recent selection on maybe one of these genes. (Note that it is possible to detect selection at a genetic region without having any idea what the function of that region is.)
Have these studies been done across cultures? If not, all they can prove is that women in our culture usually have different sex drives- which nobody is disputing. In our culture women are told from childhood that masturbation is bad, a good woman has few partners, sexual fantasies are dirty, pornography degrades them, etc. I don’t see how anyone could deny that has some effect on our sexuality. The big question now is- how much?
This one’s odd. If there were ever an instance where men were more repressed than women in our culture, it’s masturbation. Nearly all the historical hysteria about the evils and dangers of masturbation was aimed at males.
And today it remains slightly more degrading to men than women. Surely, to a certain part of the male population an image of women masturbating would lower their image due associating them with unrepressed sexuality, but not compared to that same image of a male with regards to women. Way moreso than the equivalent merely naked image.
Way more women today IME talk about vibrators than men talking about pornographic images specifically as wank-aids. (At least, not on message boards.)