Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (15 page)

For countries with populations over 10 million, Britain was number one for casual sex and also number one for STDs (sexually transmitted diseases). This is thought to be due to the decline of religion, the impact of equal rights for women, and the emergence of a culture that has become obsessed with sex, as Britain’s moral pendulum swings in the opposite direction from its Victorian values.

1. United Kingdom
   

2. Germany
   

3. Netherlands
   

4. Czech Republic
   

5. Australia
   

6. United States
   

7. France
   

8. Turkey
   

9. Mexico
   

10. Canada
    

11. Italy
    

12. Poland
    

13. Spain
    

14. Greece
    

15. Portugal
    

When it comes to deciding what a sexual relationship really is and whether a partner has betrayed you, men and women use different definitions. We analyzed six main studies related to this question in an attempt to come up with a definition of “sexual relationship.” This became a hot topic when U.S. president Bill Clinton made his famous statement about Monica Lewinsky: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Legally speaking, he was right, because oral sex was not legally classified as sexual relations, but to the rest of us, he definitely did have a sexual relationship with her. Here’s the collective definition we created that covers men’s and women’s attitudes to what a sexual relationship really is:

From a man’s standpoint, a sexual relationship is anything involving physical activity, from intimate touching to full sex.
For a woman, however, it’s any activity, physical or not, that a partner participates in that establishes an emotional link with the other person. This definition ranges from foreplay, sexual touching, and sensual dancing to secretly meeting for coffee or lunch, intimate e-mails, or Internet chat, even if sex has never taken place. All studies show that men define sexual intimacy as physical sexual activity of any kind, whereas women see it in terms of its emotional, commitment, and relationship connotations. This ties in with what we have stated previously in this book—men can see sex as sex, whereas women see sex as an expression of love.

Almost all researchers have documented that men are more enthusiastic than women in their willingness to have sex without any emotions or feelings. In 1990, anthropologists John Townsend and Gary Levy from Syracuse University studied 382 respondents and found that men decide on the basis of physical attractiveness alone whether they want to have sex with a particular person. They found that women consider a number of factors in making a decision to have sex, including affection, commitment, and resources—“Does he love me?” “Is he interested in a continued relationship with me?” “Is there another woman on the scene?” and “Does he have money or potential?”

In another study, sociobiologists Ellis and Symons found that younger women are more likely to have sex with a man if he indicates he has potential and interest in any offspring she may have already or any she may give birth to. Although older women are less interested in a man’s child-support potential, they still use a man’s resources as a major criterion in deciding whether they would have sex with him.

How long a woman has known a man also affects her decision to have sex with him. For example, the study revealed that most women would consider sex with an attractive man they had known for at least five years, but most did not feel the same motivation if they had known him for only six months. For men, time made no difference—whether he’d known her for five years or five minutes, he was ready to go.

The downsides of casual sex for men are obvious—they could get a reputation as a cheater, contract a nasty disease, be attacked by a jealous husband, lose significant assets in a costly divorce, or be forced to pay support for children they may not have fathered. Women risk getting a reputation as being easy, or a slut, which is attractive to men for short-term sex but is detested in a long-term partner because of paternity issues. A woman who has casual sex also risks becoming a single mother, reducing her market value and imposing hardships, plus rejection by her male partner and loss of his resources. The benefits to men are fairly straightforward in evolutionary terms—reproduction. To achieve this goal, men want to have sex with lots of attractive women. This doesn’t mean a man will do this; it simply means he is driven to
want
to do it. If he has fifty girlfriends, he could produce fifty or more children every year, which makes sense from a species-survival perspective. If a woman has fifty boyfriends, it makes no evolutionary sense—she still can produce only one offspring every year. That means there must have been other reasons our female ancestors participated in casual sex. Some women’s behavior today creates the illusion that women who seek casual sex do it for the same reasons as men. These women get drunk, act aggressively and offensively, swear, pick up men, and have one-night stands. Their actions look the same, but their motives are
very
different.

There are four main reasons why women, past and present, participate in casual-sex relationships:

1. Because of self-esteem issues
   

2. To evaluate men for long-term potential
   

3. To obtain a benefit
   

4. To find better genes
   

Casual sex and affairs allow a woman to test her “market value” and therefore decide how desirable she is as a mate on the current market. In ancestral terms, this information would have been important to know because if she rated herself too low, she’d end up with a mate who would provide fewer resources than she could have attained. If she overrated herself—let’s say she was a seven out of ten but saw herself as a nine out of ten—she might initially attract a man who was also a nine, but when he eventually realized that she was really only a seven (men are not quick at working this out), he’d start looking for a woman who rated as a nine. Women whose partners cheat on them frequently often seek casual sex as a way of boosting their own self-esteem, reestablishing their Mating Rating. (We’ll look at this in more detail in
Chapter 7
.) In other words, these women are getting a second opinion. Sometimes they do it just to get even.

Casual-sex encounters also allow a woman to evaluate a man’s potential as a long-term partner or husband. Women today who have casual sex are not subjected to the same social rejection as women in the past. A casual encounter gives a woman time to test a man for attractiveness, compatibility, resources, generosity, and potential for commitment. In other words, she puts a thermometer in his mouth and checks his temperature. Unlike men, however, before starting a casual relationship, women are concerned about a man’s existing relationships and his promiscuity, which shows that they are also testing his long-term husband potential. Men see a woman’s promiscuity and her existing relationships as more of a positive attribute because they indicate easier, ready access to her, and if she’s married, she won’t demand a commitment from him. This is why when women describe another woman as a slut, she goes up in the opinion of men seeking casual sex.

Looking at the hunter-gatherer societies that still exist in the Amazon, Borneo, and Africa sheds some light on this aspect. Women there demand gifts in exchange for casual sex—food, jewelry, trinkets, seashells, and tobacco—in other words, immediate resources. David Buss found that women want lots of gifts, money, an extravagant lifestyle, and generosity from the beginning of a casual-sex relationship, but women rated these attributes significantly lower if they wanted a husband. They want a potential husband to show kindness, caring, empathy, and understanding first.

In ancestral societies and modern tribal cultures, the offer of casual sex from an unattached female could also get her protection from attack by other males. In tribal societies where food is shared among everyone, women are twice as likely to seek casual relationships because the collective group supplies the main resources. In societies such as Sweden, where the government provides the resources in the form of high social welfare, more couples are unmarried than married and both partners are more likely to participate in casual relationships than in other Western or European countries where welfare benefits are significantly lower.

A possible fourth reason for a woman to have casual sex is to obtain better genes for her children. It makes perfect breeding
sense for a woman to want a man who is generous with his resources but who also has the best possible genes for her offspring. The better the child’s genes, the more likely that child will have a richer, healthier life, attract more and better mates, and be happier. The wife wanted a man who could provide day-to-day care, protection, and resources, but she also wanted another man’s superior genes. Her desire for better genes occurs around the thiteenth to fifteenth day of her menstrual cycle when she is ovulating and her body is demanding the genes that will give her offspring the best chance of survival. It means she wants Hugh Grant at home for most of the month but her body wants Hugh Jackman’s genes once a month.

For most men, a casual-sex encounter or one-night stand can be quickly and easily put out of the mind. Men are driven to procreate, they are fired up with testosterone, and their brains can separate love from sex. For most men, casual sex is just sex, and this is a concept that female brains have difficulty understanding.

All surveys and studies of casual sex show that most men report high levels of satisfaction from it and tend to experience little guilt. Women’s reports about “the morning after,” however, are very different. Most women report a lack of satisfaction, feelings of guilt, and reduced self-esteem. In 2008, a study by Professor Anne Campbell from Durham University asked 1,743 men and women who had experienced a one-night stand to rate their positive and negative feelings the following morning. Unsurprisingly, 80% of men had overall positive feelings, compared with 54% of women. Men also reported greater sexual satisfaction, as well as an increased sense of well-being and self-confidence. Men were more likely than women to want their friends to hear about it.

Feelings of guilt are highest in women over forty, and this is mostly because they have been conditioned by parents with
Victorian values or by religion that sex is dirty, disgusting, or shameful. Studies show that younger women generally do not suffer guilt to the same extent as older women, but young women still report low levels of satisfaction and a degree of self-loathing after casual sex.

In 1991, researchers Patricia Draper and Jay Belsky reported that the presence or absence of the father in the household in which a son is raised strongly determines that child’s sexual strategies when he grows up. They determined that the sons of father-absent households will become cads, whereas those of father-present households will become dads. Father-absent families also showed a dramatic increase in a daughter’s promiscuity and the early onset of menstruation. The conclusion is that these girls decided that men are not reliable for resources and as teenagers and adults were searching for resources by having an increased number of casual flings or affairs.

The number of partners people are likely to have is controlled mainly by the environment in which they live and the restrictions
it imposes on them. Some societies encourage casual sex as a form of bonding or a reward for visitors, as Fletcher Christian and his mutinous crew of
The Bounty
happily discovered when they landed in the Tahitian Islands in 1789. In other societies, such as some Middle Eastern countries, it is customary for women to cover their bodies from head to toe so as not to invite unwanted approaches. In places like India, women who engage in casual sex can be seen as disgracing the family and can die at the hands of other family members in what are known as “honor killings.” In most Western and European countries, however, women are free to choose their own attitudes as to the number of partners they will have in a lifetime.