Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (30 page)

Nocks, Hill, and Gardner showed men and women a series of images of the opposite sex in which varying amounts of skin were exposed. The more skin a woman showed, the higher men rated her as a potential casual sex partner but the lower they rated her as a long-term partner. The tighter-fitting and more revealing the woman’s clothing was, the higher she rated as a short-term sex partner and the lower as a marriage partner.

Women rated men in less dress and more revealing clothing as short-term mates, and fully clothed men rated higher as marriage partners. The lower the cut of a woman’s dress and the more she revealed of her boobs, the less the men could remember—or cared—about anything she said.

The lesson here is that the more skin a woman has covered—especially in erotic areas—the more likely she is to be perceived as a potential long-term partner.

Dr. Buss found that these three tactics work reasonably well in attracting short-term mates (48% effective) but not so well for attracting long-term partners (23% effective). The key to these tactics is that they imply that a man with short-term motives is less likely to be rejected by a woman who acts dumb, helpless, or submissive, and he may easily be able to manipulate her. This explains the history of the “dumb blonde.”

When a woman wants to run down a competitor’s Mating Rating, she criticizes her health and beauty. She could infer that the competitor has fake breasts, has had a face-lift, has a sexually transmittable disease, or sleeps around. Again, these ploys work only because men’s brains are hardwired to seek out health, youth, and fidelity. She would never say that her competitor had a lousy job and didn’t own her own home. When it comes to exaggeration, women lie to men about their age (youth), how many lovers they’ve had (fidelity), and their health (cosmetics, high heels, plastic surgery, and so on).

Because men place such a premium on a woman’s appearance, women not only strive to improve their own appearance, they belittle the physical appearance of their rivals. They denigrate competitors by saying they are fat, ugly, shapeless, or unattractive: “Have you seen her without her makeup?” and “She’s got fake boobs/lips/too much makeup.” You’ll never hear a woman say that a competitor has no ambition or owns a crap car. Criticizing another woman’s faithfulness works only on a man who is looking at a woman as a long-term prospect. If you call a woman a slut, she immediately becomes more attractive to men seeking casual sex.

W
hatever our age, when we are in love, we are teenagers. The new woman wants the thrill of love, romance, adventure, and sexual passion and to be a free, independent person. Her dream is to find a man who loves her and will allow her to do these things. The new man wants what men have always wanted—to be admired, respected, and understood and for his partner to be faithful. And if it wasn’t financially necessary for her to work, he wouldn’t want her to. Feminists usually take the standpoint that men have controlled the world’s resources for thousands of years and controlled women by getting them pregnant, thus preventing them from obtaining their own power and resources. When you study our history, this argument certainly appears to be true—at first. But standing back and looking at the big picture of the
human species raises an important question—why did men evolve with the urge to gather resources, status, and power? The answer is that women evolved as childbearers and wanted mates who had the resources required to feed and protect their children. On a subconscious level, most men know this, which is why they spend their lives in the pursuit of the status and resources to meet females’ requirements. Why else would men everywhere knock themselves out and ruin their health to compete with other men for better jobs, higher status, and bigger salaries? They do it because they understand that if they can beat other men in the status and resource game, they will attract mates of a higher quality. If men didn’t need to mate with women, there would be no urgency to meet the resource criteria set by women. Men would choose a less stressful life and go fishing, drink beer, sleep in, and fart anytime they wanted.

Today women everywhere continue to seek men who have resources or who display the potential to gather resources. Women reject men who have no resources or who have little ambition to attain them. Some people are quick to point out a couple in which the woman is the driver for resources and the man is a laid-back, stay-at-home type, but these couples are the small minority.

Some feminists claim that the main objective of men is to oppress women. The reality is that men compete with other men for power, status, and resources, not with women. Men compete against other men for the available women, and men use women’s criteria preferences as their measurement of success at the resource game. Not only do men die seven years earlier than women in these pursuits, most murders involve men killing other men over matters of the heart.

Imagine if men responded the same way to women’s need to bond and use talk as social glue. Imagine a man saying, “You talk with your friends for hours on the phone—don’t you love me anymore? Don’t you think I’m good enough to talk to?” or “You never take me shoe shopping—you always take Josephine. You only want me for sex!”

Unfortunately, men are vilified because of their natural urges, whereas women are praised for theirs under the flag of being “wonderful communicators.” If all things were equal, men would be praised for being “wonderful procreators.”

Not surprisingly, 76% of men deny that they are thinking about a woman sexually, mainly because they are afraid of criticism from women, being accused of sexual harassment, or because they are being “politically correct.”

Is marriage dead? If you are married, you are now in a minority. Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of Western households, slipped into a minority in 2006 in the United States. The
American Community Survey
, released by the U.S. Census Bureau, found that 49.7%, or 55.2 million, of America’s 111.2 million households were made up of married couples—with and without children—down from more than 52% just five years earlier. With more competition from other ways of living, the proportion of married couples has been shrinking for decades. In 1930, they accounted for about 84% of households. By 1990, the proportion of married couples had declined to about 56%. The survey did not ask about sexual orientation, but its questionnaire was designed to distinguish partners from roommates.

In the United Kingdom, common-law partnerships outnumbered legally married couples in 2008, according to the Office for National Statistics. Between 1998 and 2007 the number of adults registered as married dropped by 8%, and in 2007 less than half of women aged between eighteen and forty-nine
were married, compared with almost 75% of those surveyed in 1979. Three times more women were unmarried in 2007 than in 1979. In 2006, only 236,980 weddings took place in England and Wales, the biggest dip in marriages since 1895. Marriage has been facing more competition than ever, with a growing number of adults spending more of their lives single or living with partners.

Couples decide to live together for many reasons, but given the difficulty of finding an affordable home, practicality can be as important as romance because two people can live together more cheaply than they can live alone. Many couples today also say that cohabiting is like taking a relationship test drive.

Whatever the future brings, loving someone and being loved will always be vital to human survival. A study was conducted over nine years by medical researchers in California of 7,000 men and women. The researchers found that those who lacked contact with friends, relatives, community, group members, lovers, or a spouse were 1.9 to 3.1 times more likely to have died during that period. A similar study in Sweden tracked 17,000 men and women over a six-year period and revealed that those who felt isolated or lonely were four times more likely to have died during that period, regardless of their race, sex, or exercise habits.

One survey in the United Kingdom revealed that 80% of teenagers lose their virginity when they are drunk or feel pressured into having sex and over half are having unprotected sex. The survey of 3,000 school pupils aged fifteen to eighteen found that 39% had sex for the first time when one or the other partner was not equally willing. Almost three in ten lost their virginity for “negative reasons,” such as wanting to please a boyfriend. Furthermore, 51% of girls and 37% of boys had had unprotected sex, and 58% of girls and 39% of boys had slept with someone at least once without using a
condom. These statistics reveal the depth of ignorance that leads many teenagers into having unsafe sex.

Evidence from the studies of children from divorced homes show that children will use the same mate-seeking strategies for their partners as their parents did. Where parents separate, children learn that you cannot depend on a single partner for life. They reach puberty sooner, girls menstruate younger, and teenagers have sex earlier with more partners than their peers whose parents remained together.

“Aren’t you being just a little overcautious?”.

All these factors mean that today’s youth may be more informed in some areas of sex than their parents but have a less responsible attitude toward safety and are more prepared to risk pregnancy, STDs, or AIDS than their parents ever were.

Our past has hardwired us to be attracted to mates with whom we can produce stronger offspring, just as it is for other animal species. This is why you can sometimes find yourself attracted to someone who has none of the criteria on your wish list. Just because you can produce good offspring doesn’t mean you can live happily ever after. This is why a man will use tried and
tested phrases to convince a woman that she’s the only one for him—“I’ve never felt about another woman like this” and “We have a deep spiritual connection.” It is important for a woman to understand that the man who says these things early in a relationship often believes he means them at the time because his body chemicals are pushing him to do or say whatever is needed to get her panties down. Her brain chemicals are convincing her to believe his lines, and her lie detector is usually switched off. Sure, go for the ride and enjoy the fun of early love, but remember that it’s emotionally safer to expect a less permanent outcome than seems to be promised at the time. Unless a man has decided he wants a permanent relationship, a woman is simply the prey and he’s the hunter. Most men enter a new relationship not expecting it to be long term. The man wants a woman to meet his basic needs and keep giving him his chemical rushes. And if his brain stops doing that, he’ll swap, trade, or upgrade her for another model.