Category Archives: Sex and Sexuality

Hardcore Porn-etry

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Sex and sexuality are hot button topics. Not surprisingly, they are topics that also draw a lot of powerful sentiments out of people that have something of a long-distance relationship with reality. Opinions for the opposition can range from “porn is degrading for daring to depict women enjoying sex, causal or otherwise, and is a tool of men for oppressing women” to “The idea of porn isn’t inherently offensive, but [porn needs to do more to depict love and caring/it's harmful for children, who need to be protected from its grasp/has some unfavorable side-effects that need to be dealt with/is too commonly used, and I'm running out of clean socks]“.

“Oh yeah; that’s it. You like cuddling, you whore. You love your satisfying and loving relationship, don’t you, you dirty girl?”

Rather than continue on with my normal style of critique, I’ve decided to give it another go in limerick form. I will return to this issue in time, once a certain article comes out from behind a journal’s six-month embargo wall.

Porn, it would seem,

has a reputation unclean.

It seems innocuous at first,

but soon gets much worse,

making our sexuality mean.


“Those who watch porn”,

the activists shout with scorn,

“will soon turn to rape

because of that tape,

and women will be left to mourn”


“While it might hurt your wrists,”

the research insists,

“There’s no connection

between a porn-based erection,

and sex in which someone resists”.


Still feeling the alarm

because porn just must do harm,

“Then the effects are more subtle,”

is the proffered rebuttal

“and leaves men with no sexual charm.


All those men will think,

when they catch some girl’s wink,

that she likes it rough,

and she’ll do all that nasty stuff,

without so much as a blink”


The research is taken aback

by this newly formed attack.

It seems a lot like the last,

as if formulated too fast

and delivered by a similar quack


“It sounds like you’re reaching,

in the service of preaching.

Before you celebrate,

you’d be well-served to demonstrate

that it’s actually the porn doing the teaching


It seems reasonable,

or, at the very least, conceivable,

that porn’s not to blame

and is far more tame

than you feel is believable.


If people can tell the difference between

reality and the porn on a screen,

they are capable of inquiring

about what their partner is desiring,

instead of relying on a fantasy sex scene”


Perhaps there’s some underlying reason

for this open porn-hunting season:

If decided by a cognitive system,

that “porn harms” is the dictum

Other ideas may as well be treason.

Proximately – Not Ultimately – Anonymous

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As part of my recent reading for an upcoming research project, I’ve been poking around some of the literature on cooperation and punishment, specifically second- vs. third-party punishment. Let’s say you have three people: A, B, and X. Person A and B are in a classic Prisoner’s Dilemma; they can each opt to either cooperate or defect and receive payments according to their decisions. In the case of second-party punishment, person A or B can give up some of their payment to reduce the other player’s payment after the choices have been made. For instance, once the game was run, person A could then give up points, with each point they give up reducing the payment of B by 3 points. This is akin to someone flirting with your boyfriend or girlfriend and you then blowing up the offender’s car; sure, it cost you a little cash for the gas, bottle, rag, and lighter, but the losses suffered by the other party are far greater.

Not only does it serve them right, but it’s also a more romantic gesture than flowers.

Third-party punishment involves another person, X, who observes the interaction between A and B. While X is unaffected by the outcome of the interaction itself, they are then given the option to give up some payment of their own to reduce the payment of A or B. Essentially, person X would be Batman swinging in to deliver some street justice, even if X’s parents may not have been murdered in front of their eyes.

Classic economic rationality would predict that no one should ever give up any of their payment to punish another player if the game is a one-shot deal. Paying to punish other players would only ensure that the punisher walks away with less money than they would otherwise have. Of course, we do see punishment in these games from both second- and third-parties when the option is available (though second-parties punish far more than third-parties). The reasons second-party punishment evolved don’t appear terribly mysterious: games like these are rarely one-shot deals in real life, and punishment sends a clear signal that one is not to be shortchanged, encouraging future cooperation and avoiding future losses. The benefits to this in the long-term can overcome the short-term cost of the punishment, for if person A knows person B is unable or unwilling to punish transgressions, person A would be able to continuously take advantage of B. If I know that you won’t waste your time pursuing me for burning your car down – since it won’t bring your car back – there’s nothing to dissuade me from burning it a second or tenth time.

Third-party punishment poses a bit more of a puzzle, which brings us to a paper by Fehr and Fischbacher (2004), who appear to be arguing in favor of group selection (at the very least, they don’t seem to find the idea implausible, despite it being just that). Since third-parties aren’t affected by the behavior of the others directly, there’s less of a reason to get involved. Being Batman might seem glamorous, but I doubt many people would be willing to invest that much time and money – while incurring huge risks to their own life – to anonymously deliver a benefit to a stranger. One of the possible ways third-party punishment could have benefited the punisher, as the authors note, is through reputational benefits: person X punishes person A for behaving unfairly, signaling to others that X is a cooperator and a friend – who also shouldn’t be trifled with – and that kindness would be reciprocated in turn. In an attempt to control for these factors, Fehr and Fischbacer ran some one-shot economic games where all players were anonymous and there was no possibility of reciprocation. The authors seemed to imply that any punishment in these anonymous cases is ultimately driven by something other than reputational self-interest.

“We just had everyone wear one of these. Problem solved”

The real question is do playing these games in an anonymous, one-shot fashion actually control for these factors or remove them from consideration? I doubt that they fully do, and here’s an example why: Alexander and Fisher (2003) surveyed men and women about their sexual history in anonymous and (potentially) non-anonymous conditions. Men reported an average of 3.7 partners in the non-anonymous condition and 4.2 in the anonymous one; women reported averages of 2.6 and 3.4 respectively. So there’s some evidence that the anonymous conditions do help.

However, there was also a third condition where the participants were hooked up to a fake lie detector machine – though ‘real’ lie detector machines don’t actually detect lies – and here the numbers (for women) changed again: 4 for men, 4.4 for women. While men’s answers weren’t particularly different across the three conditions, women’s number of sexual partners rose from 2.6 to 3.4 to 4.4. This difference may not have reached statistical significance, but the pattern is unmistakable.

On paper, she assured us that she found him sexy, and said her decision had nothing to do with his money. Good enough for me.

What I’m getting at is that it should not just be taken for granted that telling someone they’re in an anonymous condition automatically makes people’s psychology behave as if no one is watching, nor does it suggest that moral sentiments could have arisen via group selection (it’s my intuition that truly anonymous one-shot conditions in our evolutionary history were probably rarely encountered, especially as far as punishment was concerned). Consider a few other examples: people don’t enjoy eating fudge in the shape of dog shit, drinking juice that has been in contact with a sterilized cockroach, holding rubber vomit in their mouth, eating soup from a never-used bedpan, or using sugar from a glass labeled “cyanide”, even if they labeled it themselves (Rozin, Millman, & Nemeroff 1986). Even though these people “know” that there’s no real reason to be disgusted by rubber, metal, fudge, or a label, their psychology still (partly) functions as if there was one.

I’ll leave you with one final example of how explicitly “knowing” something (i.e. this survey is anonymous; the sugar really isn’t cyanide) can alter the functioning of your psychology in some cases, to some degree, but not in all cases.

If I tell you you’re supposed to see a dalmatian in the left-hand picture, you’ll quickly see it and never be able to look at that picture again without automatically seeing the dog. If I told you that the squares labeled A and B are actually the same color in the right-hand picture, you’d probably not believe me at first. Then, when you cover up all of that picture except A and B and find out that they actually are the same color you’ll realize why people mistake me for Chris Angel from time to time.Also, when you are looking at the whole picture, you’ll never be able to see A and B as the same color, because that explicit knowledge doesn’t always filter down into other perceptual systems.

References: Alexander, M.G. & Fisher, T.D. (2003). Truth and consequences. Using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality. The Journal of Sex Research, 40, 27-35

Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25, 63-87

Rozin, P., Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 703-712

A Scientific Visit To Palmdale

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During my years as an undergraduate I made a couple of bad choices, one of which was deciding to minor in economics. None of the classes were particularly engaging – which might be the understatement of the century – and the assumptions made by economists were blatantly ill-suited for dealing with people, most notably the assumptions of perfect information and people being rational – whatever rational was supposed to mean. For a field that claims to dabble in human behavior and psychology, you’d think their assumptions about what people are like would be a touch more accurate, but since that would make the math messy, the idea was seemingly scrapped.

So imagine my surprise when I heard some economists had started to figure out that human psychology exists and should probably be taken seriously. Dan Ariely’s books were a breath of fresh air, reinforcing in me the notion that I had wasted my time in all those economics classes when I could have been doing something more worth my while, like taking classes biology. Or masturbating.


“Those classes weren’t interesting, so I had to take matters into my own hands”

Speaking of which, would you lie to a woman about whether you loved her in order to increase the chance that she’d have sex with you? If you’re a man, chances are your answer to that question depends on whether or not you’re currently masturbating (if you are, this blog must either be especially interesting or especially boring. Feel free to let me know which). In fact, your answers to a whole slew of sex related questions will probably depend on whether or not you’re giving yourself the ol’ down-low. Ariely and Loewenstein (2006) decided to examine how answers to these questions change by paying undergraduate males to answer a few questions while doing what they were going to be doing anyway.

Turns out the only thing more dismal than economics are the dating prospects of male math majors

The main purpose of the research was to examine the gap between answers to questions made in an unaroused state versus an aroused one across three categories: (1) how appealing sexual objects or activities were viewed, (2) willingness to engage in morally questionable behavior to have sex, and (3) willingness to engage in unsafe sex when aroused. What do the answers of those 35 male undergrads tell us? They tell us two things: the first is that – unsurprisingly – the answers change when people are horny, relative to when they are not; the second thing is that these answers tend to change substantially.

For the first category of how appealing certain sexual activities and objects are, of the 20 questions asked about, only three failed to become significantly more appealing: sex with a man, sex with the lights on, and spanking a sexual partner (though spanking was rated fairly highly to begin with). In fact, the only question to not see any increase was the one about having sex with the lights on. The five questions that saw the greater overall point increase (out of a total of 100) between the unaroused and aroused states where, in order: Would you find it exciting to have anal sex? (+31), Is just kissing frustrating? (+28), Would it be fun to tie up your sexual partner? (+28), Can you imagine having sex with a 50-year old woman? (+27), and Would you have a threesome with another man? (+25). Other questions included sex with a 12-year old girl (relatively 100% more appealing), sex with a 60-year old woman (about 230% more appealing), and getting sexually excited by an animal (about 170% more appealing, though still quite unappealing overall. It was second from the bottom, right above having sex with another man).

So what about questions of morally questionable behavior? There are only five, so I’ll rank order these in terms of percentage increase from unaroused to aroused: taking a date to a fancy restaurant to make her more likely to have sex (27% more likely); encouraging a date to drink (37% more likely); telling a woman you loved her to make her more likely to have sex (70% more likely); keep trying to have sex after a date says “no” (125% more likely); slipping a woman a drug (420% more likely). Interestingly, that order holds if you rank the behaviors in terms of their overall rated probability in the first place; the more coercive actions are less probable, but see the largest percentage increase.

“Well, the fancy dinner and drinks aren’t working. Is it time to start thinking about outright lying, or just skip right to the drugs?”

Finally, turning to matters of protection, the four questions regarding condoms all fall in the predicted direction: as men get aroused, they rate condoms as interfering with pleasure and spontaneity more, and say they’ll be less likely to use them with new partners or if they think the woman might change her mind when they went to get one.

Of course there are limitations here: these were only a few undergrads jerking it while answering questions. Surely, the first limitation is that the questions were probably a real buzz-kill. A second possible issue is that it’s not entirely clear how these stated preferences would actually translate to behavior in the more social world where men aren’t walking around with erections (most of the time, anyway), behaviors can carry real consequences, and reality differs from fantasy. That said, I’d wager we have every reason to think sexual arousal certainly has an effect on decision making, especially about condom use (since at this point many men probably already have erections in hand) and that one could even expect these effects to increase, depending on the perceived probability of having sex and the attractiveness of the other person.

How the effects of sexual arousal might tend to differ between men and women is certainly a question worth thinking about. I highly doubt we’d observe anything like the same pattern of answers for the questions asked about in the current survey (perhaps excluding the questions about condoms, though I can’t say at the moment). It’s an open-ended question as to whether the same methodology could even be effectively used, and I’d guess that it probably couldn’t be – or at least wouldn’t be nearly as effective.

References: Ariely, D. & Loewenstien G. (2006). The heat of the moment: The effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 87-98

The Case Of The Female Orgasm: Bias In The Critiquing Of Science

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The last post dealt with the moralistic outrage that some people feel towards a trait being labeled an adaptation or a byproduct, but I only skimmed the surface of the issue. Since it’s such an important point, I felt it would only be proper to expand it a bit further.

Because I crave pain and disappointment, I actually read every last comment on both articles. A reoccurring theme seen throughout the comments sections is that many people seem to feel female orgasm is obviously and adaptation and anyone who comes to the opposite conclusion is probably a sexist being mislead by a male-centered society that’s out to demean women. It’s at this point they’ll generally state female orgasm clearly has the function of [making women have more sex, drawing sperm into the reproductive tract, making women lay down to retain more sperm, reinforcing the pair bond, even - are you ready for this one - feeling good. That's right, it evolved for reasons that have nothing to do with reproduction], and why haven’t people figured that out? It’s all because those silly evolutionary psychologists are blinded by current cultural trends and institutions, whereas their critics presumably feel they are not similarly influenced.

“Orgasms feel good, therefore they evolved to feel good. Duh”

In case you’re curious, those possible functions have already all been explored. The only one that seems like it might – and I do stress might – have some traction is the sperm transport hypothesis, though it rests on some questionable data.

These are some pretty strong intuitions people seem to have about whether female orgasm is adaptive based upon very little evidence, if evidence is involved at all. Ironically, people who are so fond of saying, “evolutionary psychologists spin just-so stories” appear completely willing to accept even a possible scenario as clearly true (say, female orgasm encouraged women to have more sex) if it matches their view of how the world should be; female orgasm should be socially important, therefore female orgasm is evolutionarily important (an adaptation).

“If this didn’t have anything to do with reproduction, I’d probably have to stop doing it”

What I feel we do have at this point is the knowledge that people are not overtly hostile to an adaptationist research paradigm in all cases, but will tend to be when it doesn’t come to the right conclusions. For instance, it’d otherwise be odd that people calling the byproduct hypothesis “evolutionary psychology bullshit” are perfectly happy to advance their own evolutionary accounts for female orgasm. You see, where evolutionary psychologists are naive, their critics are informed and knowledgable, having cast off their cultural trappings and viewed the underlying essence of human nature. I’d point out that evolutionary psychologists also proposed many of those other possible functions in the first place, but that would just totally ruin the buzz the critics have going.

Perhaps this whole debate makes more sense were we to view it as people attempting to persuade each other about something, rather than attempting to discover some historical truth. In this case, it could be that female sexual satisfaction is important; in others it could be that rape is bad, that jealousy should be minimized, or that depression has some cognitive benefits, so depressed people should feel better about their depression, thus cheering up and losing that benefit (read respectively as: rape is not an adaptation, humans haven’t evolved for pair-bonding, and depression is adaptive).

Viewing these debates as attempts at persuasion might help explain why the criticisms that come from the upper levels of academia do not seem substantially different than the ones that come from your everyday internet commenter; the foundation of these debates might not be academic in the first place. It may also help to explain why people who even just suggest certain hypotheses are painted as villains and the same tired straw men are pulled out again and again.

You Mad, Bro?

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Moralistic outrage, while infuriating and occasionally dangerous, is often fertile grounds for comedy; not that pre-packaged, bland artificial comedy full of preservatives either, but the organic, flavorful comedy that’s grown right in your own backyard and picked minutes before enjoying. It wasn’t too long ago that a banner reading, “You Mad, Bro?” was displayed at a football game in order to taunt one of the teams. (Story here). It wasn’t long before some people who didn’t understand the connotations of the phrase took it upon themselves to get quite mad, falling right into the lap of the internet troll community.

Could I interest you in a fresh glass of Schadenfreude?

Let’s now turn to an example of silly moralistic outrage as it applies to two things I hold dear: evolutionary theory and female orgasms.

Why do women have orgasms?

I wrote my thesis about a female orgasm, so I happen to know a thing or two about them (I know a thing or two now, anyway; my initial title of Female Orgasm and Other Myths of the Hysterical Woman required a little touching up). There is an on-going debate as to whether or not female orgasm is an adaptation or a byproduct. That debate also happens to involve a fair share of vitriol, with words like “chauvinistic” being thrown around a lot. As you can see from the article and several of the comments, there appears to be a sizable group of people who equate “adaptation” with things like social importance and justification, and “byproduct” with unimportance. (My personal favorite is this one: ”I think this whole article is BS! The writer only continues to denigrate women! Why would a woman be able to orgasm if there was no reason to?”)    

“Stop Denigrating Yourself”

Why does Lloyd (and Dan Savage) seem to suggest that the knowledge that female orgasm isn’t an adaptation might comfort women who experience frustration at an inability to do during sex – or at all – and have wider social implications (despite claiming she doesn’t think people should be deriving social norms from biology – but look, it’s natural that… so we should…)? Perhaps she hopes to make the point that society puts too much pressure on women to orgasm during sex, even though many of them probably won’t – at least not without some manual help – and that pressure makes people feel bad.

As I mentioned previously, no arguments for or against legal rights for homosexuals should turn on the genetic nature of the trait. I don’t think the gay community or their supporters would be comforted at the lack of rights afforded to homosexuals on the grounds that homosexuality isn’t an adaptation, or entirely “in the genes”, and they’d be less distressed if they stopped caring about having them. Similarly, in terms of the social or personal importance of female orgasm, nothing should turn on whether it’s an adaptation or a byproduct.

Strangely, it seems that it does for many people. It might be the case that “adaptation” and “byproduct” have just become placeholders for “genes” and “environment” – that classic false dichotomy – or something similar. For those people, calling a trait an “adaptation” is akin to saying it’s genetically determined and inflexible to environmental influences. This could be a byproduct of the same essentialist state of mind that tells us if we plant an apple seed in a field with pear seeds, it will still grow into an apple tree, not a pear one, or if we paint a lion so it looks like a leopard, it’s still a lion.

That probably also means people are more inclined to think of behaviors they want to encourage – or avoid blame for – as adaptations, and behaviors they want to discourage – or blame others for – as byproducts above and beyond what evidence suggests. As people are generally blind to their own biases, and tend to disagree on matters of morality, the debate about adaptations and byproducts, genes and environment, will continue to thrive and be filled with colorful rhetoric, leaving us to ask “You mad, bro?”

Descartes’ Balls

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As I mentioned in the last post, I think a good deal of opposition, to evolutionary theory in general and evolutionary theory when directed towards psychology specifically, is due to a certain fear of moral exculpation, with other concerns about evidence or method being post-hoc rationalizations for that unease. For some, the human mind is somehow different, escaping either the need for an evolutionary analysis or the ability to be explained by one. There are those, like Rene Descartes, who think that the human mind – or at least parts of it – is not even a physical thing to begin with, but rather some immaterial essence.

With a haircut like that, it’s probably a good idea to downplay physical features.

Today, I’ll talk about this man’s balls.

If Rene was anything like the average man alive today, his balls probably weighed between 40 to 50 grams, accounting for about 0.08% of his total – and very material – body’s mass (Smith, 1984; Dixson, 2009). For the percentage of you who aren’t either still giggling at the thought of balls (which accounts for roughly 100% of the men reading this) or questioning my sexuality, you might be curious why normal people would care about the size of balls in the first place.

To sate that curiosity of balls, there are many more balls to consider, but let’s just stick to two groups: the balls of some of our close evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzee and and gorilla. 

Warning: one of these pictures contains a graphic depiction of huge balls…wait, where are “warnings” supposed to go?

The chimp’s balls weigh in at an impressive 120-150 grams, whereas the gorilla’s come in at a combine 30ish. While the chimp may out-ball the gorilla by 4 or 5 times, that difference is actual an underestimate, as the gorillas are far larger in overall body size. When we adjust for the differences in body size, the gorilla’s balls account for a mere 0.031% of their body weight, whereas the chimp’s balls account for about 0.3% of their body weight. Pound for pound, chimps have about 10 times as much in their sack as gorillas. 

Sure, the TruckNutz may look big, but once you take the mass of the vehicle into account…


So where does all this talk of balls leave us? It helps to know one last fact: the size of the testes, relative to the body, correlates to patterns of mating – not to their ability to kickass, as many men seem to think. When the sperm from more than one male are in contest to fertilize the same egg(s), we, in the creative names department, call it sperm competition. The gorillas, with their tiny ball-to-body size, face almost no sperm competition; they typically mate in a polygynous fashion, where one dominant male has uncontested sexual access to a harem of females. Chimps, on the other hand, live in multi-male/multi-female groups and, while the females are certainly not without preference, they mate in a far more promiscuous fashion.

What about humans? We’re certainly less ballsier than chimps – by about 400% – but definitely ballsier than gorillas – by about 300%, which tells us our species has probably faced some degree of sperm competition over our evolutionary history, milder than chimps but more intense than gorillas. Knowing these facts help guide us towards some potential conclusions about the human mind, bringing us nicely back to Descartes.

Rather than viewing the body and mind as two distinct pieces, the body can help inform us as to the psychology of the species; our bodies (and minds) are kind of like time capsules of evolutionary pressures. Without females historically mating with more than one male within her fertile window, or without males forcing copulation, there would be no potential for sperm competition. Of course, without females desiring to mate with more than one male and/or males desiring to mate irrespective of the female’s wishes, no selection pressure would exist either.

Which reminds me how one of my professors – at the graduate level, no less – was trying to account for sex differences in behavior by simply appealing to body size differences between men and women, rather than differing psychologies. What he appeared to forget is that those body size differences require an explanation in the first place, and that explanation will ultimately returns to differences in psychology. Having the tools available without the will or knowledge to use them isn’t much better than not having the tool at all, and vice versa.         

(For those interested folk who like looking at naked organs, I’m told this is a comparison between a chimp’s balls and brains)

References: Dixson, A.F. (2009). Sexual Selection and the Origins of Human Mating Systems. New York, NY: Oxford University Press 

Smith, R.L. (1984) Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems, New York, NY: Academic Press.

Smoke Detectors With Benefits

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I hate my smoke detector. Right now it’s laying disassembled on the table in my living room because it apparently thought my chicken was a fire hazard. That I’m talking about my smoke detector as having thoughts in the first place is rather odd, but it’s just a metaphor that we all understand, right? It’s not like people ever direct aggression, real or imagined, against tools that aren’t working as you’d prefer.

A man who may or may not understand the proper use of metaphor

From computers, to cars, to imagined supernatural beings, people see agency where none exists – if not directly “see” it, then act as if they do. They will curse them, direct physical aggression towards them, and they will plead with them. Even though most people will tell you they understand begging their car to not run out of gas won’t actually affect how far the car will eventually travel, one can imagine – has perhaps even experienced – the satisfaction some people get from breaking an old, less-than-functional piece of equipment because it was out to make their life miserable (the fax machine from Office Space comes to mind).

Part of what we see going on here is like my smoke detector problem (also known as Error Management Theory). The intended purpose of a smoke detector is to warn someone about an actual fire by using a typical cue that a fire would give off – the smoke. Needless to say, this also makes the smoke detector have the annoying habit of going off when something is cooking/burning – or in my case, having the stove on (my smoke detector is particularly annoying). One way to avoid this irritation would be to make smoke detectors less sensitive so they wouldn’t go off during cooking dinner and all-night bong parties. However, doing so runs the risk of not making it sensitive enough to go off when there’s a real fire, or not going off until it’s too late. This doesn’t mean that the best course of action is to turn up the sensitivity all the way, otherwise it would go off constantly, making the false alarms far too annoying; the key is finding that happy medium.

In the case of inanimate objects being labeled as enemies, part of the issue could be an agency-detection module in our brain getting triggered by an inappropriate stimulus because of the way it’s calibrated: to be more sensitive to potentially important cues in order to avoid missing them. It’s better to just be startled by what you thought was movement than to miss real movement that could mean real harm. In other cases, modules for aggression or negotiation could be triggered by the frustration of one of our goals, like being unable to fax a letter or view pornography quickly enough. While those behaviors might be useful ways of dealing with social creatures, they also get inappropriately recruited for some non-social ones.

Something similar can be seen happening between men and women’s perception of sexual interest. In the case of a smoke detector, both sexes are open to the same cost and benefits of false alarms and real fires; in the world of mating, this isn’t always the case. It would be costlier for men – in terms of reproduction – to miss signals of potentially sexually interested women than the reverse. According to Buss (2003), this would explain why men are far more likely to infer sexual interest in women who are smiling at them or touching them (or talking to them, hanging out with them, sending them nude pictures, being alive, etc).  In case there are any women out there who haven’t figured this out yet, almost all of your guy friends are waiting for you to come around and see things their way, they’re just a bit more patient than the drunk guy at the bar.

“I couldn’t help but noticed I touched your ass while you were dancing. Do you have a phone number?”

Perceptions of attractiveness are another area where the sexes would appear to differ. According to Okcupid – which is a reputable source of scientific data when I find it convenient – women tend to differ in their appraisals of male attractiveness, rating the vast majority of men as being below average in attractiveness. This statistical impossibility could be reflective of the fact that a “wrong” mating choice on the part of a woman is reproductively costlier on average than the wrong choice on the part of men. Or maybe it’s all because of this nasty “culture” going around. Yeah, let’s go with that….

References: Buss, D.M. (2003). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (Revised Edition). New York, NY: Basic Books.