Category Archives: sex and sexuality
Are Women Culturally Monogamous?
We know that women aren’t destined to be monogamous by nature. Culture affects our sexual psyches.
Polygamist inclinations vary from person to person, but today’s Western women are much more monogamous than our Tahitian or American Indian sisters were before European contact. We are now also much more monogamous in our inclinations than men.
In surveys, men say they would prefer to have 14 partners over a lifetime. Over that same lifetime, women prefer to have only one or two.
A friend suggested that women were lying because they feared seeing themselves as sluts. Yet women admit to five real-life partners. (Here they are certainly underestimating. The real number is likely 8 or 9 for both men and women, given men’s estimate of 12.) But if they’re so worried, why not say they’ve had only 1 or 2 partners?
I was surprised by the low number of “one or two” as the preference, but I doubt women feel the need to go that low just to feel socially acceptable.
Younger women’s preferences may be higher. During the first year of college many willingly experiment with sex – and freely admit to it. But they quickly tire of random sexual contacts. Most drop out of the casual sex scene by sophomore year.
Men, on the other hand, don’t tire of the casual hook up, and want to continue even after college.
When it comes to open marriage or swinging, men are usually more enthusiastic, and more often initiate the idea.
So women seem less interested in casual sex than men. Quite likely because they are more repressed.
I feel that women are more repressed than is healthy. But I’m not sure that limits are all bad, for women or men.
When I read women’s studies literature, women are often advised to have sex more the way men do: have fun without guilt.
Yet men’s studies, which comes from a feminist perspective, often advises men to have sex more the way women do it. Don’t follow the 4 F’s: Find ‘em, Feel ‘em, F- ‘em, and Forget ‘em. Do not use women as a means of gaining a notch on your belt. Have sex in a context of love and care.
What do you think? How would you describe women’s ways and men’s ways of having sex? What are the positives and negatives of each approach? Is one way better than the other? Is there an optimal in-between? Do men and women tend to have different views on this issue?
I’m interested in exploring the matter. I’d like to year your thoughts, too.
Georgia Platts
Sources: Brizendine, Louann. The Male Brain. Crown. 2010, Kimmel, Michael. Guyland. Harper. 2008
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Are Women Naturally Monogamous?
![Gaugin--300x184[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/gaugin-300x1841.jpg)
Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology, was skeptical of evolutionary psychology, which sees women as monogamous and men as polygamous, due to genetics. Let’s take a closer look.
Children have the best shot at surviving if their mothers mate with only one man, who sticks around to provide support and resources. Thus, women prefer men who are older and richer. Moms put a lot into their kids because they have a small number of eggs compared with the millions of sperm that men produce. And all this is genetic, so says evolutionary psychology.
On the other hand, men will have more children (and reproduce their genes) if they are promiscuous because of their large sperm count. Again, the behavior is in the genes.
This premise seems to contradict the prior point that children are more likely to survive if their fathers are around to support them. Maybe more survive than don’t. Or perhaps it’s a survival of the fittest worldview: Babies who can survive without resources improve the gene pool?
The bigger dilemma: How do men manage to enjoy many partners when women are monogamous?
Men also value beauty above all else because attractiveness indicates health and an ability to reproduce. Oddly, supermodels are the most sought-out, yet they’re often so thin that they no longer menstruate. And I hadn’t known that so-called unattractive women were infertile. But never mind.
Returning to Darwin’s concern – and it doesn’t take a genius like him to make this observation – while evolutionary psychology had fit nicely with British middle-class behavior, where women sought resources and men sought beauty, Darwin pointed out that the theory did not fit with the British upper class. There, men were more concerned with wealth than good looks.
Now that Western women are able to make their own money, they have become more concerned with looks than in the past. And men now like to marry women who can earn some money – it’s a plus.
Other cultures don’t fit the theory so well, either.
Gauguin’s infatuation with Tahiti likely came in part from the women’s desire for many sex partners (prior to European influence).
Meanwhile, Europeans who were among the first to arrive in the Americas were shocked by similar behavior among the native women.
In these Tahitian and Native American societies the entire community cared for children, and property passed through women, so men’s resources weren’t an issue. These women weren’t called sluts, either.
Once Europeans transformed the cultures, things quickly turned around.
It appears that social structure and culture trump biology in explaining women’s monogamy.
There is more to discuss, but I’ll leave that for later.
For now I must ask: Are evolutionary psychologists unfamiliar with this information, or do they simply ignore it because the theory so well justifies a status quo in which women are told to stay monogamous, but understand men’s need for many partners, aka the double standard?
After all, it’s in men’s genes – or was that jeans?
Georgia Platts
Sources: Lips, Hilary M. Sex and Gender, 4th Edition. Mayfield. 2001; Eagly and Wood 1999. “The origins of sex differences in human behavior: Evolved dispositions versus social roles.” American Psychologist, 54 (6)
See also: Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography; Fauso-Sterling, Myths of Gender; Hrdy, Mother Nature; Meston and Buss, Why Women Have Sex; Ryan and Jetha, Sex at Dawn
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Eminem Makes Sexism Seem Sexy – And That’s A Problem
“Eminem and Rihanna Collaborate to Address Domestic Violence,” reads one headline.
Really?
The phrase “address domestic violence” rings of efforts to decrease it.
Is that the message of “Love the Way You Lie”?
Rihanna begins:
Just gonna stand there
And watch me burn
But that’s alright
Because I like
The way it hurts
Eminem joins, mouthing these words:
As long as the wrong feels right
It’s like I’m in flight
High of a love
Drunk from the hate
Rihanna’s lines are jarring since she broke up with Chris Brown after a brutal beating. She had said she wanted to be a good role model for girls and young women. These lyrics send a very different message.
Eminem’s words fit his history of domestic brutality. In concerts past he sent an inflated doll resembling his wife into his audiences to be batted around. In 2008 he told Esquire, “I’m a T-shirt guy now. But wifebeaters won’t go out of style, not as long as bitches keep mouthing off.”
Megan Fox plays the sexy battered lead in the music video, where frames shift from abuse to making love, and back again. The video has had nearly 20,000,000 hits on YouTube.
All involved seem to want it both ways. Eminem and Rihanna said they wanted to start a conversation, while Megan Fox donated her salary from the shoot to Sojourn House, which helps abused women.
But the overall effect romanticizes violence against women.
That makes sexism feel sexy.
Unfortunately, that makes both women and men more accepting of it.
Georgia Platts
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Playboy Doesn’t Objectify Women?
The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects. If women weren’t sex objects, there wouldn’t be another generation. It’s the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go ’round. That’s why women wear lipstick and short skirts.
That’s what Hugh Hefner says, anyway.
If this is true, then…
Why do women want to have sex with men? Men aren’t sex objects.
Why do men have sex with women who aren’t sex-objecty?
This doesn’t make sense.
There’s a difference between being sexually attracted to a woman and seeing women as objects that are all about sex and little else.
I don’t feel that I’ve been treated as a sex object by most of the men I’ve dated. And I’ve ended relationships with those who did see women in that way. They’re so annoying!
So I don’t buy it.
Playboy has certainly played a part in objectifying women. Hefner just can’t see it because he thinks we fit naturally into that limited box.
And by the way, women’s bodies are not inherently more sexually alluring than men’s. The male’s buttocks are just as attractive as the female’s. But the camera does not gaze at a man’s derrière as it does a woman’s. So we learn to see women’s bodies differently.
You think men are hard-wired to be drawn to women’s breasts? What about native societies where women walk around topless? And no one cares. The breast fetish isn’t biological. More on that later.
Notions like Hefner’s simply help those who objectify to feel better about it.
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Gay Marriage Protects Marriage
“Mamma, don’t let your daughters grow up to marry gay cowboys.” That’s a take on an old song.
But some of my friends have tried it. Except for the cowboy part.
One of my friends married a man, only to come home early one day to find him in bed with another man.
Another acquaintance, raised in a religious family, married a woman in hopes of living a good Christian life.
They’re all now divorced.
Gays marrying straights does not help the divorce rate.
Gays marrying gays could be a relief to single gals. After my friends’ experiences I became paranoid that a gay man would try to marry me, trying to pass or not be gay, or something. I wished that gays could simply marry who they wanted so I wouldn’t have to deal with that.
Meanwhile, some insist that marriage was meant for procreation.
In that case, everyone from my birth family, except for my brother, would have to get divorced immediately. My father and his wife, whom he married late in life, never had children. My mother and her husband married in their 60’s. I’ve suffered fertility problems, myself. My brother, who sired three children, is the only one who’s safe from these folks.
Please, protect my marriage from these “marriage protection” types!
In 2008 Californians passed the California Marriage Protection Act, aka, Prop 8, which states that only marriage between a man and a woman is legal and recognized.
On Wednesday, August 04, 2010, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the Proposition “unconstitutional under both the due process and equal protection clauses.” The court, therefore, “orders entry of judgment permanently enjoining its enforcement.”
Good.
Gay marriage is good for marriage.
Georgia Platts
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Did Slut-Shaming Kill Phoebe Prince?
Guys aren’t threatened by other guys’ successes with women. When a guy “scores,” men celebrate all around. But women are different. Slut-shaming was not the sole factor in 15-year old Phoebe Prince’s suicide, but it seems to have played a part.
According to Jezebel, Phoebe had been depressed before the bullying began. She missed her absent father, had been self-mutilating, and had attempted suicide after a broken relationship.
But slut-shaming played a role, too. Many girls at South Hadley High began calling Phoebe a slut, a whore, and a cunt because she sought attention from older guys at the school and had been close to, or involved with, some young men who the girls at South Hadley were also interested in.
Why are women threatened by women who are attractive to men, yet men celebrate men who are attractive to women?
While men can actively pursue women, women must take a more indirect course of action. Might the more passive power of feminine beauty cause women to feel less powerful, less secure, and more threatened?
More likely, women and men simply know how they’re supposed to think in this culture. And what they’re supposed to think is that men who get women are studs, but women who do the same are sluts.
The word slut then becomes a handy weapon. It’s pretty sad to use a weapon that has been used to control women, and that could be easily turned on themselves.
While women punish each other for success with the opposite sex, what’s with the high-fives among men?
Women never worry about proving that they are truly women. But men must constantly prove their manhood. Perhaps by flattering the success of high-status men a guy creates a sense of brotherhood with them. They become one of the guys. And in this brotherhood their manhood is assured.
Whatever the reason for the difference between men and women, it is pretty sad that slut-shaming can kindle suicide.
Georgia Platts
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