I recently ran across an article on the USA Today website which was titled “Men less picky about looks when it comes to casual sex” (which was written by Robert Preidt of HealthDay and based on a study that was published online in the journal Human Nature), and I decided to offer my own thoughts on the article.
My first thought was “Duh!”, since that’s hardly news.
Heck, that’d be like coming across a research study which discovered that water is wet … I’ll pause to give you time to pick your jaw up off of the floor.
Of course we’re less picky … beggars can’t be choosers. And maybe 15% of the guys out there actually have some game, so most guys are beggars in the romance game.
But the article doesn’t stop there.
Nope, it goes on to report that men are much more likely to seek and have casual sex than women.
Think about that one for a moment … men are more likely to have casual sex than are women? With whom exactly are these men having that casual sex with?
For every man having a casual roll in the hay with a woman, there by definition is a woman having a casual roll in the hay with a man.
It’s a zero-sum game
So, how could this study come up with such an illogical finding?
Simple … they relied on self-reports. They asked lots of men and lots of women. And as in any delicate manner, that’s a notoriously inaccurate way of getting to the truth. To learn anything meaningful about sexual behavior, one must watch what people do … not rely on their self-reports.
“…
They then took this at face value despite it being an obvious statistical impossibility
…”
For example, researchers have for many decades known that men tend to overstate their sexual prowess and experience dramatically if asked about it and women tend to understate their sexual prowess and experience dramatically if asked about it.
And that’s what they found here: women reported having less casual sex than men did. They then took this at face value despite it being an obvious statistical impossibility.
This is a common approach to research these days (it enables researchers to come up with “findings” that are consistent with a “women good and men bad” philosophy), but as science goes it isn’t worth much.
The bottom line? It takes two to tango.
Stay tuned,
Mack Doppler
