In comments to Noah Brand's marvelous NSWATM post questioning all assumptions about the transactional model of heterosexual sex, Kaija pointed out that rather than some kind of hypothetical genetic pickiness about who might fertilize her eggs women report two much more prosaic reasons why they tend to avoid "casual sex." The first is concern for personal safety, the other is...

"[T]he assumption of a lower probability of sexual pleasure from casual sex. I suspect that casual sex is much more appealing if you’re pretty sure it’s going to get you off (if you’re horny and looking to hook up in the short term and not looking for Twoo Lurve Everlasting). If there’s a high probability that the hookup is going to result in a woman getting all hot and bothered and then…end of encounter, the female equivalent of “blue balls” (all that blood pressure in the female tissues can be uncomfortable too as well as the psychoological effect of getting 70% of the way up the arousal hill and then stalling), getting yourself off or asking for some assist in getting off…then it just might be too much cost for not much benefit."

She said it here

Ooh, I wonder if this has anything to do with the "women just want to cuddle" and "women need more cuddling after sex" theories. Because I remember reading that over and over in sex manuals from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, but when I began having sex it seemed so intermittently true that I wondered where the idea came from.

One could be that I'd over-interpreted the message and all they really meant was "women don't want to leap out of bed two seconds after orgasm." Which I've never particularly wanted to do either.

Another could be that sex manuals written in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s were necessarily written by men (it was almost always men back then) who were born roughly between 1910s (Albert Ellis, William Masters), 1920s (Alex Comfort) and maybe 1935 (David Reubin). If so then they would have grown up in an society that was barely getting over its century-long medical anxiety about male "semen depletion" as the cause of everything from weak eyesight to tuberculosis. In which case, again, the difference they saw really was a lot about still very real male guilt, anxiety, and aversion after sex. And so the admonition for aftercare of one's partner was more about not jumping up or rolling over immediately after sex and pretending it never happened.

Or... maybe as Kaija said it's that anybody who's gotten wound up but doesn't get that orgasm is going to want to continue contact after her or his partner is satisfied... and stops.

The reason I'm inclined to believe it's the last item is that women who've had an orgasm (or enough of them) are often able to shift gears pretty quickly. On the other hand, even as a teenager I often had difficulty having orgasms (it was easy during intercourse but when I was fertile and psychotically distrustful of condoms intercourse was off the table.) And several of my partners have been the woman version of "premature ejaculators" where they've been able to get to orgasm very quickly -- well before intercourse and sometimes before our clothes were off. And as I mentioned just now, once they're done women seem as ready to switch gears as anyone else. Anyway, the result has often been that when a partner has had an orgasm and I haven't then I've been the one who wants to stay "intimate and comforting" after sex.

I like that last explanation quite a lot. First because it fits my experience, and second because it matches a lot of anecdotal and statistical data.

And since "the end of sex" is almost always defined as "male ejaculation, however long that takes" researchers collecting data are likely to overlook or discard cases where he never ejaculates at all.

Meanwhile, since, especially when the old guys were writing their sex manuals the idea that women had orgasms was still somewhere between inconceivable and intolerable, there wasn't a whole lot of effort... or even conscious thought... put into making sure women had their turn after their partners were done.

Anyway, the upshot might be (might be, I'm proposing a hypothesis, not a conclusion) that the idea that women need more cuddling after sex than men might be because at the time women rarely had completion orgasms when or before their partners did. But that in reality anybody left hanging by their partner is going to at least appear more affectionate, smoochy, and "needing intimacy" even if the don't mind that they're not going to come.

Your thoughts?