In a Huffington Post, err, post hypothesizing about (white? western?) men's fascination with women's breasts Larry Young and Brian Alexander reference the old sociobiology canard about men. Something about the way they said it made me feel even more skeptical than usual. (Emphasis mine.)
But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. After all, sperm is cheap. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to spread it around. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible, regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.
Source: Huffington Post
Is this true? Are men really not particularly choosy about sex partners? Really?
And even if they are is it really because of biology? Or is it maybe more about
Are that many men completely indifferent about their even casual partner's unplanned, unwanted pregnancies? Enough so that it can be tossed off as a blanket statement about all men? Because under normal circumstances even the most desperately non-choosy men are generally pretty appalled to learn their current or erstwhile partner is "knocked up." (That alone ought to scotch the whole "seed spreading" meme.)
I mention "normal circumstances" because there are circumstances of dislocation such as military or wage-seeking migrant separation where men don't appear to be as choosy, and there are circumstances where shame-driven alienation (religious/social strictures) or fear-driven alienation ("wide stanced" men in homophobic cultures) drive men to be less choosy. But almost by definition those aren't the normal circumstances in which most men live most of their lives.
I mean...
Look, if you lock men, or women, in confined quarters for months at a time they routinely start smearing the walls with their feces. Yet somehow we don't make statements such as "men aren't known for being particularly choosy about where they smear their feces." That's because, actually, under normal circumstances people are actually pretty well known for not smearing their feces.
And speaking of normal circumstances...
Really?
Really?
Men aren't particularly choosy?
Are you kidding me? First of all, if men weren't particularly choosy then Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn't have a circulation rate of three million would it? If men weren't particularly choosy there would be no traditions of partnerless women behind stories or songs about "wallflowers" would there? If men weren't particularly choosy there wouldn't be so much frickin' choosiness expressed in endless comments on various porn and not-so porn websites about how anyone short of utterly flawless doesn't measure up at all. Nor would there be male-to-male putdowns like "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick." Nor would you have other commenters on the right opining that they wouldn't want to have sex with, say, Hillary Clinton, or equally as bad there wouldn't be commenters on the left making similar judgments about, say, Ann Coulter. Nor would there be so very many married women (especially women bloggers) so aching with frustration with their long-term partner's lack of libido that they blog or comment about it.
More importantly, nor would there have been the online post that inspired me to write "The limits of 'no means no'" which was about a woman's observation that the misogynist notion that "women have the power" in sexual relations applies only to those women who are asked!
Clue: in any given year, month, week, or day an enormous number of women are not being asked.
Anyway, I know, I know, it's part of the dominant paradigm to just "know" that men are the "sex class:" reflexively, uncontrollably, and otherwise eternally obliged to seek sex at every opportunity and never to decline it. And, being ingrained in the dominant paradigm it's almost impossible not to bake the assumption into even somewhat skeptical scientific discourse.
But...
But...
Is it true that men are not particularly choosy? Or do we just "know" it's true... so true we don't even bother to check. (Or even so true we outright discard men from the data set if they don't fit the profile?!?!?)
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Are there any statistical
Submitted by Absurdist (not verified) on Fri, 2012-09-28 22:09.Are there any statistical references for what appear to be fairly broad generalizations within the term "normal circumstances?" There are men across a wide band of political stances who, given enough alcohol, would not look askance at either or both Hilary Clinton and Ann Coulter at the same time.
Alcohol consumption is certainly a normal part of a fairly large sampling of men's lives. Particularly those who are in nightclubs at the end of liquor service on Saturday nights, many of whom are, in fact, seeking women to have sex with, lacking specific parameters beyond bipedal hominids in posession of a vagina (or at least usually only one vagina).
Have you read Larry McMurtry's In A Narrow Grave? There's an amusing narrative therein (that I stumbled across in high school while looking for prose interp material) describing the state of affairs circa the era of The Last Picture Show about sexual culture in Archer County (representative of "normal" agrarian America at the time) about, at its inception, how 99 percent of the teen boys in those parts lost their virginity to the same girl. The culture of, well, football in Texas, had those horribly limiting gender roles where boys played football and girls were virginal cheerleaders (except for that one girl with the questionable reputation who fucked that 99 percent of the boys in the county). Apparently it was with some difficulty that the powers that be were able to convince the farmboys to go out for football, because the after-school chores on the farms involved livestock duty. Since none of the cheerleaders in Archer County during that era were putting out in the interest of preserving their reputations and sodomy (aside from the symbolic kind associated with quarterbacks idling suggestively behind centers) was out of the question as well, livestock vagina was at hand, and hormonal teenaged boys were pretty hooked on getting off, the shame of fucking livestock notwithstanding.
In fact, the Biblical proscription and subsequent social ridicule towards bestiality is principally because Levites couldn't get the shepherds to stop fucking their sheep. That particular aberration may be because of that gender segregation thing (after all, the shepherds are out with the flocks all day, with no one else around), but still, that a man who has other options (though clearly he may be lacking patience), would fuck a ewe rather than a human female does not suggest a great deal of selectivity.
I do concede that my example there may be too extreme to quailfy as normal, though.
As for the "wide stance" example, you're mostly right. My perspective: put a gay man and a "wide stance" nominally heterosexual -- or even just "discreet" less shame-driven nominally heterosexual -- man in the same sexualized space. The gay man may just be bored and trolling, but he's more likely to be choosy (depending on his place in the sexual food chain) because on some level, whether he can admit or is even consciously aware of it, he's husband-shopping. The straight guy is less particular because he's usually more interested in the instant gratification.
And I think instant gratification is the key term there. I know that you tend to take that aspect of sexuality out of your thought processes, because that's not how you operate, but I find that instant gratification is a factor more often than you're willing to concede.
Thanks for the thoughtful
Submitted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-09-29 08:56.Thanks for the thoughtful comment, A. The argument that men *evolved* to be "not particularly choosy" because "sperm is cheap" by definition requires aeons of time for such a behavior to be selected for. The advent of readily-consumable alcohol is only millennia old. Now it's *certainly* the case that people's (not just men) judgment suffers under the influence of alcohol -- heck, from a pharmaceutical standpoint the ethanol molecule targets the judgment centers of the brain in much the same way it affects regulation of antidiuretic hormones. But! To say people are less choosy because, hey, alcohol is to implicitly ask what is the baseline and where does it come from? Oh, also? A lot of my observations of promiscuous choosiness come from years of working late shift in a pickup bar in the mid and late 1970s. And while, yes, there definitely are men, and women, who are extraordinarily non-picky by closing time, the majority of even highly promiscuous, highly intoxicated men in a highly permissive and low-risk era were nevertheless perfectly choosey, even at closing time. Still other observably straight and/or bi men were choosey enough to always (as far as I could tell) decline advances from women at closing time. So, finally, if the distribution of choosiness follows a bell-shaped curve even in circumstances of pharmaceutical judgment suppression why pick one end of that curve and say "that's all men?" *That's* what bugs me about the "men aren't particularly choosey." It would be equally irritating if sociobiologists claimed that "men *are* particularly choosey." Because it would just be the other end of the curve. (That sociobiologists *do* pick the other end of the curve for women is just more annoyance. It's picking extremes and calling them representative that chafes.") --fl
Cool. Generalizations suck,
Submitted by Absurdist (not verified) on Mon, 2012-10-08 08:22.Cool. Generalizations suck, even with bell curves.
:-)
Seems to me the sheep are in
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Sat, 2012-09-29 15:32.Seems to me the sheep are in a different category, though -- basically just a very elaborate (and I shouldn't think very sanitary) aid to masturbation. Treating people like that amounts to treating them as interchangeable objects, which seems to me to be qualitatively different from just not being choosy. It's something like the difference between a person who's happy to talk to whoever happens to be next to them on the bus, because they like meeting a variety of people, and someone who insists on talking to whoever's there regardless of whether they want to be talked to or not.
Also true. And ye gods, I
Submitted by Absurdist (not verified) on Mon, 2012-10-08 08:24.Also true. And ye gods, I hate talking to those latter types.
Figleaf, Nice article. You
Submitted by Iconoclast (not verified) on Fri, 2012-10-26 10:32.Figleaf,
Nice article. You wrote in your article what I have been thinking for years. I don't grasp where people assume men would be willing to sleep with any woman who is even moderately attractive. It makes no sense. I know plenty of men who have feelings of nausea when it regards looking at many "sex" symbols in the media. There are plenty of women who have a hard time getting laid.
It seems to be irrelevant to supporters of the "males are more indiscriminate" sexual paradigm. Supporters of this paradigm will continue to believe men at the very least want to be more indiscriminate than women in their selection of sex partners even if evidence is provided that women have more sex than men; they contend it is because women have the power to have more sex, it is not because men do not want to have sex with women at a greater rate than their female counterparts are actually having it. However, when studies show that men have more casual sex partners than women, other proponents of the conventioal paradigm claim that it reflects that men desire more casual sex than women. It seems to me that any fact that challenges this paradigm will only be molded into interpretations that reinforce that men want more sex partners than women.