Female sexual behavior

Continued study of the female sex drive has led me to the conclusion that the fundamental fact about it is that women are not rational about sex. Indeed they are generally unable to be - they do not recognise the blind-spot in their thinking even if it is pointed out time after time. Women's underlying sex drive is nearly the same as that of men; their physical pleasure does not differ in nature (there is quite enough evidence of that) and though it may be weaker on average the difference can't be overwhelming considering how much women do desire sex. This drive, though, is overlaid by an unconscious mechanism that suppresses it in most cases. It is this mechanism that I consider my particular discovery. It is the existence of that mechanism, too, that tells us why women's sexual desire is so much more mysterious than men's (ignoring fetishes and the like) It is apparent to every man that men and women do differ profoundly; some aspects are so evident they should need no stating - for example, one can not approach a strange woman in public and ask her for sex, which would work with a not inconsiderable portion of men as has been demonstrated by study (see the article following).

This topic, namely understanding why women desire sex, should be of great importance to heterosexual men. I think sex in general is a good thing. I know we like sex, and that many of our problems stem from sex somehow or other. After all, one of the primary reasons men bow down to women and follow feminism is their desire to have women interested in a sexual relationship with them, whether that desire is successful or not. It is equally undeniable that one of the reasons, though no longer the primary one, that men get married is their belief that it will afford regular sex.

Now the most popular explanation of the difference is that women, to have sex, want to be (or feel) 'in love', and a second is that women seek a good provider before desiring sex; this is not inconsistent with the first, given the workings of female emotions. Intelligent men will further recognise that those have evolutionary explanations behind them that I need not repeat.

This article:

http://search.bwh.harvard.edu/concourse/900/articles/BaumeisterSexEcon.pdf

does a good job of illustrating the economic part of this mainstream view. The main point it makes - that sex between men and women is essentially viewed as something women give to men, is an undeniable fact. The merit of the article is in their impressive list of documented examples constituting supporting evidence. The only qualification I must make about it as that it reflects the economist's bias in attributing too much to rational decision-making, whereas I think that the irrationality is fundamental in the case of women. While it is true that women do all the things this article claims they do, I dispute that they generally are conscious of that. Indeed, it must be so: the universality of the principle means it can hardly be due only to cultural influence, and such stark difference clearly can't be explained only by overall desire.

Conventional explanations do do a good job to an extent; for instance in explaining why women have a greater willingness to have sex with wealthy, powerful, or famous men, even in the absence of commitment and where a rational mind would say such commitment is hardly likely. And yet, they fail with many familiar aspects of women's behavior. No theory, naturally, can explain what an individual woman will do in an individual situation, yet that does not make theories useless, for it is possible with a very high degree of certainty to predict what she will not do, and the effects of social changes on sexual matters may be better evaluated.

And here it is necessary to point out the essential difference in my approach: given how much people enjoy sex, the question should be not why people agree to have sex, but why they do not. When we examine the reasons people have for not having sex, we easily see that men normally have conscious reasons for doing so (regardless of soundness), while women's reaction is ultimately based on unconscious impulses, and even if she is conscious of her refusal reasons she might come up with are normally just rationalisation.

The crux of my theory, which includes the two above explanations and gives a further important refinement, can be said in one sentence thus: 'The unwillingness of a women to have sex, where a man would be willing, is a function of her subconscious perception of the benefit to be had by withholding it.'; almost all consensual heterosexual relationships that don't fit into the conventional categories are explained by it. It must be understood that: this process by which women decide is largely unconscious, that the benefits stated are not necessarily financial, and that they are not just obtainable from _that man_ they are considering but from all men perceived to be in the same group. Let me now enumerate the 10 reasons (confirming kinds of evidence) I came up with for believing this hypothesis.

1. Young girls (middle school to high school age, but past puberty) that are sexually active at all often have boyfriends the same age that are not employed and supported by their parents (like all children). Adult women generally would not consider a man that is unemployed and supported by his parents, even if she is.

Explanation: The teenage girl has no realistic prospect of getting a lover the same age that can support her, therefore does not get that benefit by withholding sex. The adult woman does.

2. In confined environments women are more willing to have sex with peers regardless of whether they would be suitable outside.

The known high likelihood of sex is, after all, why prisons and many similar institutions are segregated. The military is not segregated now, and sex happens as much as you could imagine given the restrictions on soldiers. The high rate of pregnancies in the military, especially the Navy, is not solely due to the benefits offered to women that become pregnant as women rarely are willing to have sex to achieve pregnancy when they would not otherwise desire sex with that man - if they were, child support would ruin men much more often than it actually does.

Explanation: The woman at that point has little to no possibility of getting a more suitable man, and therefore she obtains little benefit from withholding sex. She thus will express her sexual desires with the men that are available.

3. Women are sexually looser with travelers and foreigners than they would be with men from home. For white women in the Western world, this interacts with dogma against 'racism' to cause it to also include men of other races.

Explanation: Those men belong to a class that are not likely to commit the same way as domestic men anyway, and therefore deny women the benefits of withholding sex. Men of other races can be perceived to belong to that class, because for almost all of human evolution, men looking that different were foreigners.

4. Conversely, women traveling to another city, or more, to another country, are more likely to have an affair there than to have one at home.

Explanation: The same, essentially. This is further augmented if the women is already married or in a committed relationship at home (see next).

5. Women that are married or in committed relationships, especially after long enough to get over the stage of initial infatuation (a few years), may have affairs with men that would never be considered as partners were they single, such as, most evidently, men that are poor or of a lower social class.

Explanation: Being in a relationship that satisfies, at the moment, a woman's financial demands, as well as being legally or emotionally difficult to escape from, causes a woman not to perceive any benefit by refraining from sex outside it.

6. The previous is especially true for women that are wealthy, and may be true for independently wealthy women that are single.

Explanation: Wealth reduces the incremental benefit obtainable from any sexual relationship.

7. The previous does not usually apply to women working for a living: no matter how much money they are making, they usually concentrate exclusively on men making as much or more.

Explanation: Women tend to compare standards of living in a relative, rather than absolute, manner (Men do this too, to a lesser extent. It's part of status-seeking.), and that working outside the home for wages is evolutionarily unnatural, especially for women. For those reasons, and because work in the capitalist system is generally not dependable, they will not feel a dependable income in the same sense.

8. The availability of prostitution in a society is negatively correlated with men's ability to find normal sexual relationships that are not prostitution.

Explanation: Prostitution increases women's ability to withhold sex and not have the man lose interest, because he can be satisfied that way. Thus, the balance is tipped against men.

9. Women sometimes enter into sexual relationship with teenage boys, despite having access to adult companionship. That the most notorious cases involve school-teachers is a combination of such being more newsworthy, more likely to be discovered, and those women simply having the most access to men in that age range.

Explanation: A combination of 5 and 1 (the male is seen as a member of the group of teenage boys).

10. Women are more attracted, all else equal, to men that are already getting more female attention, and in a relationship with them will put up with poorer treatment than from an equivalent ordinary man.

Explanation: Such a man is going to have adequate sexual satisfaction no matter what, so withholding sex from him will typically avail less. The other part is conventional: that other women's interest signal that man's fitness as a partner.

You may have the reaction that many of these ten are 'obvious'. But I am not discussing how well known they are, I am discussing WHY they are.

So with this I must conclude that I have made a significant contribution (which is original so far as I know) to the knowledge of female sexual behavior. An important question I ask myself is whether the guaranteed income, as proposed by me, would increase women's willingness to have sex. The above enables me to draw the probable conclusion that there will be an effect in that direction among the great majority of women for whom the income would represent a significant share of their overall wealth.

While those ten are sufficient evidence, they do not complete my discussion.

The primary reason for marriages becoming sexless is now evident: the woman sees that she seems to gain by withholding it. The usual explanation, that women just 'lose their libido', is very likely wrong if she has not gone through the menopause; she can after all regain it with another man, and often does. Women do acquire this perception, then, because their husbands do try more to please them if they withhold sex, and if the man tries harder to be nice to her, her unconscious ever more convinced of the need to withhold sex. This of course is why men that have lost a sex life with their wives can not regain it by attempting to please her, and why they should understand to be wary of the phenomenon from the beginning so that it hopefully does not occur at all.

The one thing that is the most striking illustration in my opinion, though I can't find a link to it now but remember reading about, is the very rare phenomenon of a woman after a certain type of brain injury becoming 'sex mad', being apparently unable to resist having sex with every man available and doing so in embarrassing or inappropriate ways, which can be explained as the female suppression mechanism being bypassed in some manner, allowing the underlying sex drive to be fully expressed. The fact that this may result in embarrassing episodes with strangers, etc., which normally do not occur with men, is simply _men's_ greater willingness to have sex with strangers, in this case the afflicted woman.

I'd propose to any woman that complains about her lack of a sex life that she go and ask men for sex directly. They could be any group of men she chose, even, whether strangers of friends, only that they be of reasonable size and not obviously unwilling or unable. I could be confident that one of them would say yes, but almost as confident that the number of women that would take up the offer will be exactly zero - even if (!) they do not have to actually go through with the sex, for the mere knowledge that they could is not acceptable to them.

I will now move on to the policy discussion based on the above points.

The basic framework for doing so is the one used to sum up the Baumeister article I linked to : that is, the 'price' of sex becoming higher or lower. All men should have an interest in making it lower, even if they don't personally need or want more sex from women, because their power hurts men as a whole. So it ought to be one of the more important issues for men, and we ought to look at the ways feminist policy has made it higher, and how we could make it lower.

Let's start with the most obvious measure of cost, which is money. Two obvious parts of the feminist system that raise the price of sex are child support and divorce. If a man gets sex through casual relationships, he is vulnerable to a claim of child support for a child he did not willingly father; if he gets sex through more long-term relationships, he is vulnerable to losing during divorce or similar (to say nothing of the non-financial side!). There can be no reasonable argument against that those raise the average 'price of sex'. The most evident solution to these cases is to abolish the present system. With child support this would be relatively easy, but with divorce complete abolition would require ending legal marriage or reducing it to an essential nullity, which most are probably not willing to do. Solutions short of that could be imagined, but I do not think they can be as stable.

Recall that one of the important reasons for my proposal of a guaranteed income is that I judge it would provide good ground on which to stand in arguing the previous, in that it should be a defence to any accusations that you desire 'abandoned' women and their children to 'starve'. I also must now mention that another such reason is reason #6 in my list: anything that makes women more financially secure lowers their 'price' for sex, because they don't need security as much while they do not need sex less.

All of the other sorts of trouble that a man can get into for his relations with women, such as false accusations, can be classed among non-financial costs of sex; these are quite adequately known, and deserve resolution on their own merits. I do not need to recite any more of them.

A less easy pattern to see is the raised cost of sex due to relaxed social restrictions on acceptable relationships. Women from a lower or middle class origin now have a greater realistic chance of marrying a man higher up, or at least getting into a relationship with him that will make her wealthy (often, but not exclusively, through child support). This obviously makes it more difficult for men of the same background by raising the women's unconscious expectations. The only specific solution here, and only a partial one, is to reduce inequality as a whole, which is naturally attractive to me anyway. Obviously for the reasons already given the basic income and ending child support help.

A further directly financial aspect is prostitution, of course, and though Baumeister partially goes into this the paper doesn't follow it to the logical conclusion that I have. The feminists' efforts to re-legalise prostitution, to reduce restrictions on it, or to make it more socially acceptable and efforts to raise the cost of sex and should be stoutly resisted. If one looks at the whole social picture this should be clear. This is reason #8 on my list: prostitution raises the cost of sex from non-prostitutes. This might seem paradoxical from strict supply and demand, but sex is not a rational market, and few women weigh as a rational economic matter whether to become a prostitute.

The main way that women maintain the 'cost' of sex, though, as discussed in that Baumeister paper, is through their informal social networks and customs. This has always existed and is therefore not a product of feminism especially. One should be reminded that there are two faces to this: raising the expectations of what a woman should get in return for sex, and shaming those women ('sluts' or 'whores') that do not apparently meet such expectations. It is difficult to imagine any reasonable way we could end this, since having civil society necessarily involves networks permanent enough to activate this mechanism. Certainly the media (the feminine side of it) makes it worse, but changing that would likely require government censorship, which we might not want to do even if we had sufficient control to do it.

Turning the question around, I now ask what we can do as men positively to lower the cost of sex. well the first way, and the way most of us have probably figured out already, is through our personal behavior. Don't be willing to give in too much or too easily to women. Do make it clear, preferably before the relationship gets 'serious' as it's easier and safer then, that you will not do so; given women's psychology it's generally better to do this with actions and not words. If you need sexual release now and don't have a willing partner now, do masturbate rather than attempting to get lucky or going to a hooker. And of course, in all respects, advise other men to do the same when you have the chance to. But this approach is clearly limited; it is a personal sacrifice that won't by itself make any difference to society - rather like voting, but a much much bigger burden - and how many men are going to be willing to make such a sacrifice?

So that leaves us with the question of whether men can act collectively to lower the cost, to make sex more freely available. The evidence here doesn't seem promising, as it seems that men unlike women have never been able to cooperate. But have we ever tried? We must remember that for most of history men did succeed in a sort of way at this, through the institution of marriage and the customs surrounding it. It is only recently with feminism that marriage has ceased to serve that purpose at all, and instead done the reverse. For example, a girl's parents will now hardly ever seriously attempt to push her into a marriage she has any misgivings about, even if she became pregnant by him and that is of course tied into other social beliefs about marriage. So it is only now that men have strong incentive to act collectively in this regard. That said, the actual explanation of what we can do is easy: exactly the same as what women do, in reverse. We would try to shame those men that do pay too high a price, which is just an extension of informing and advising other men; and we would try to create REALISTIC (not porn-like fantasies or other scams) expectations that men should be able to obtain sex easily. A tall order, I know, but worth looking at.


This is an essay created by Andrew Usher. Please do not edit it; but only comment in discussion.

This is based on articles posted to Usenet here:

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.men/browse_thread/thread/6ea72b131822205d/513e4db570fc5ba2?lnk=gst&q=the+root+of+sexual+tension

And here:

https://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy/browse_thread/thread/c82a20a38f84d827

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License