In an interview with an unnamed journalist at the bafflingly-organized-to-me Big Think Rutgers anthropologist and “male studies” advocate Lionel Tiger makes a big extrapolation from what I think is a small amount of data… that also drew my attention to an interesting society-wide view of gendered sexuality. First, here’s the snippet that caught my eye.

Lionel Tiger: Overwhelmingly when we look at say sexual want ads in newspapers, it’s decreasing now because of the internet, but when these things first came out women… men would always ask for women who were affectionate, warm, fertile, good looking. Women invariably asked for men who were reliable and to quote, unquote, professional.

Read the quote in context here.

Tiger naturally takes this to mean women just “naturally” want men who will support them while they raise babies. Oddly for a “male studies” advocate he provides no analysis of what men are looking for. His whole point, however, is that the questions reveal innate truths about what men and women instinctively want out of their sex partners. I think that’s over reading it.

My guess instead would be that by asking for affectionate or good looking women or reliable and professional men for hookups (he says he’s specifically talking about want ads for sex) the correspondents were just signaling that they weren’t interested in creeps, cranks, or losers. Call me a rebel, I know. And trivial enough that by itself it wouldn’t be worth a post.

But check this out. The snippet was small enough that you could switch genders without bothering to run the whole thing through Regender.com. But since I had to look up the URL anyway here’s the result

Linda Tiger: Overwhelmingly when we look at say sexual want ads in newspapers, it’s decreasing now because of the internet, but when these things first came out men… women would always ask for men who were affectionate, warm, fertile, good looking. Men invariably asked for women who were reliable and to quote, unquote, professional.

Verify the claim, and read the rest of the regendered version of the interview here.

So. Quick question. What response would you expect to Craigslist “Casual Encounters” ad by a man pitching himself as “fertile?” Or a woman who pitched
herself as “professional?”

It’s not just that those characteristics would be counter to gender stereotypes, they’re actually not generally considered desirable. The connotations of a “fertile” male sex partner tend to veer towards irresponsibility with possible overtones of egocentricity. The connotations of a “professional” woman tend towards either “ball busting” or else avaricious.

When, in fact, most men obviously are fertile (elsewise why all the fuss about contraception?) They’re affectionate too. And the average woman is exactly as reliable and professional as the average man.

And because I get the feeling this all sounds a bit vague I’m just saying that…

1) Contrary to Lionel Tiger (or, say, many pop evolutionary psychologists) I suspect that what passes for innate biology in Craigslist ads and elsewhere is mostly normal people looking for conventional qualities in partners. But!
2) With the limiting factor being that while it would be just as sensible to ask for affectionate natures and good looks in men, or reliable professionalism in women, actually doing would tend to raise more questions about what you were looking for than they’d answer… with the possibility that you’ll attract responses from people who might not be conventional
3) You’re mostly going to see requests that are artificially limited to convention rather than limited by anything “innate” or genetic.