So how often does he have hookup on his mind?
So how often does he have hookup on his mind?
7:45AM GMT two Feb 2014
Fellows, we know, are from Mars, and women are from Venus. Mars, in this metaphor, is a place of carnal obsession and emotional autism; a planet whose inhabitants think about hookup every seven seconds and get in fights all the time. Venus, by comparison, is a warm and hospitable place of social interaction and empathy, but not a superb deal of hook-up. So the popular wisdom has it.
Jon Snow, the Channel four newsreader, is from Mars. “Hookup comes into every evaluation of a woman, there’s no doubt about it,” he said in an interview last week. Every time he meets a woman, he weighs her up as a potential sexual fucking partner, and, he thinks, other fellows do the same. “It’s a natural animal element of sustaining life.”
As a gladfully married man, with many female friends and colleagues, it would perhaps be imprudent of me to comment. But the Mars-and-Venus stereotype, the sexually voracious man and the demure woman, has a strong hold. How accurate is it?
There are evident evolutionary reasons why boys and women would have different approaches when it comes to hook-up; why a man who behaved in a certain way might expect to have lots of descendants, but a woman who behaved the same way would not. Guys and women are similar in many ways, but they are usually different in one: their sexual organs. We should not be astonished if they also have different psychological systems to determine how they use those organs.
Dr Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, puts it simply: “If a man has hookup with one hundred women in a year, he might have one hundred babies. If a woman has hookup with one hundred dudes in a year, she might have one baby and a very sore bottom.” This is due to what is called the “obligate parental investment”: a man’s minimum investment towards a child might be a duo of minutes’ work and a teaspoonful of sperm; a woman’s minimum investment is nine months of pregnancy and a painful and potentially dangerous labour – and that’s before the question of who raises the child is addressed.
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This imbalance means that we should expect fellows to be more motivated to have hookup, says Dr Fleischman, and women to be choosy about their playmate. It’s something we find elsewhere in the animal kingdom – and, intriguingly, when the parental roles are reversed, so are sexual habits. “Masculine sea horses get pregnant, for example. And they tend to be choosy, because they bear the higher cost.”
And it’s not a Just So story, which evolutionary psychology is sometimes accused of. In one review of the literature, “not one probe found that women think about hookup more than boys,” says Dr Fleischman. One trial, published in the Journal of Hookup Research, found that fellows think about hookup – on average – thirty four times a day, compared with women’s Nineteen. Dr Fleischman mentions another that put the figures much lower – about once a day for dudes, once every several days for women – but consistently, the findings are that dudes think about lovemaking more than women do. “Fellows have more intrusive thoughts, too – it’s stiffer for them to disregard thoughts about lovemaking,” she says.
It’s not just thinking about it. Usually, fellows’s sexual activity is limited by how often women will consent to hook-up – but there is a natural experiment that shows what would happen if it was limited by how often boys consent. That natural experiment is, of course, the lifestyles of gay dudes. “If you look at gay guys and women,” says Fleischman, “you’ll see that gay studs have a lot more fucking partners than gay women do.” Having to build up consent from a man is a far lower bar to clear, she says, than gaining consent from a woman.
This could be because of some fundamental difference inbetween gay dudes and straight boys, other than their sexual preference – but it doesn’t seem to be. “If you have two fellows, and they have the same hook-up drive, but one is limited in how much hook-up he has by studs, and the other is limited by women, one is going to have a lot more lovemaking than the other,” says Fleischman, adding with a laugh: “My beau always says, ‘I wish I was gay. It’d be so much lighter’.”
It seems, then, that the “sex-mad man” and “cuddle-hungry woman” stereotypes are broadly accurate.
And so they are – but we should be careful with them. Stereotypes are useful because they often give us good information about groups, says Prof Nicholas Epley, a University of Chicago psychologist and author of Mindwise: How we understand what others think, believe, feel and want. “You’ve learnt that tigers are dangerous,” he says. “You see a tiger, you’d be rightly funked, even tho’ this particular tiger might not attack you. If you see a beaver, you’re not. Your stereotypes of tigers and beavers are working admirably in that situation.”
Our stereotypes of groups of people generally point us in the right direction as well. “We learn things about groups of people. We learn things about conservatives and liberals, and football players and professors, and guys and women,” says Prof Epley, and those things are usually, broadly, right. Those stereotypes are about what separates groups, not what unites them.
“The stereotypes are about the things that make dudes and women evidently different from each other. One is more interdependent, one is more independent. One is more sociable, the other more competitive.” And one is more sexually rapacious than the other.
But focusing on the differences exaggerates those differences. All of the above stereotypes have a degree of truth – but the effect is far less pronounced than we imagine it to be. For example, the probe mentioned above found that fellows think about hook-up thirty four times a day. That’s fairly a lot – about twice every waking hour. But it’s not every seven seconds, as myth has it, and women evidently think about it pretty often themselves. And, as Prof Epley points out, the groups “fellows” and “women” will overlap. Dr Fleischman agrees: “The fellows who think about hook-up the least will think about lovemaking less than the women who think about hook-up the most.”
And, again, it’s not just thinking about it. There are lots of screenplays in which females might seek casual lovemaking, or hookup outside their partnership, “maybe to get better genes than their mate has, or maybe to get status, or maybe to get resources”, says Dr Fleischman. (I should stress that this is not a conscious thing; we’re talking about evolutionarily successful strategies, not deliberate calculation.) It’s obviously difficult to get good statistics on how often people cheat on their spouses, but evidence of human infidelity can be found in another, unexpected place: gorilla testicles.
Masculine gorillas have petite testes, because even tho’ they have large harems of females, those females only mate with one masculine, so there is no “sperm competition”. Chimpanzee females, by contrast, mate with numerous masculines in their group when receptive, and masculines have very large testes, so that they can get more sperm into each female and maximise their chances of being a father. “Human masculines have testes smaller than those of chimps, which leads people to say we’re less promiscuous than chimps, which is true,” says Dr Fleischman – but our testes are much larger than those of a gorilla.
Identically, there are lots of scripts in which it makes evolutionary sense for guys to be less sex-obsessed: “If you’re a smaller masculine, the best strategy might be for you to be a good dad. In general, it’s more adaptive for guys to be motivated for hook-up, and for women to be more coy, but the stereotype is undoubtedly overstated,” Dr Fleischman says.
Jon Snow might be right, to an extent – many dudes most likely do think about hookup with every woman they meet, and most dudes think about lovemaking more than most women. But the difference inbetween the sexes is less than we imagine. If we assume that every man we meet is sex-mad and every woman uninterested, then we’ll get it wrong with embarrassing regularity.
We may think guys are from Mars and women are from Venus, but as Prof Epley puts it: “The truth is more like studs are from Iowa and women are from Illinois.”