Earlier this week I noted the annual return of the 2002 semen withdrawal causes depression in women pseudo-science story, and now another one has popped up. This time it’s Naomi Wolf’s New York Magazine story called “The Porn Myth,” wherein Wolf opines that porn and strippers have robbed men of all interest in sex with real women.

Hugo Schwyzer points out the Wolf article was published in 2004. (First clue? It begins with the line “At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin…” but Dworkin died in 2005.)

Still, Schwyzer uses the opportunity to reassess his initially positive take in light of what he now recognizes as Wolf’s assertions that, despite her opposition to porn, maintaining the husband’s sexual interest is a wifely duty rather than, say, a shared one.

Wolf also evidently takes it as given that women require no similar attention. Perhaps because she thinks women consent sex only to please and/or keep their husbands and not because they might actually enjoy it themselves? This from an article that criticizes the commodification of women via porn?

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On the other hand Hugo also gets into assumptions about men’s alleged proclivities to seek multiple partners. I totally agree with his sentiment that to the extent it’s a problem it’s one men ourselves need to deal with rather than to have it dealt with for us. (By, say, the Wolfian strategy of our partners keeping us guessing with doled-out “mysteries.”)

My issue with that issue is that by all measurements the majority of men don’t seek multiple partners. Painting us all as polygamists by nature when fewer than half of us ever are seems to miss one mark. And, of course, the assumption… well… assumes that women have no similar natural inclination when their lifetime averages aren’t that much different from men’s. In the West, at least, actual percentages vary from study to study but the relative proportion between men and women between studies is fairly close. In fact while minorities of both genders report extra-relationship relationships, the majority of both men and women appear to be lifelong monogamists.

If one were inclined to examine the basis of stereotypes, one might wonder if the perception that men are promiscuous and women aren’t might have something to do with the convention that limits women to saying yes or no and deters them from initiating relationships themselves. A convention which in turn trains men to approach multiple potential partners in order to find the ones who are actually interested. Hmmm, and — what to you know — men keep “little black books” while women wait by the phone. Oh yeah, that couldn’t be social convention, it’s gotta be human nature. Right? Sort of hard to believe.