I ran across an article on the Daily Record (a UK publication) website which was titled “ More women having sex on first date … but they won’t admit it to their friends”. It was written by Craig McQueen and was dated March 19, 2010.
The topic under discussion is the results of a survey on sexual behavior involving 1000 women between the ages of 20 and 40 (commissioned by Bayer Healthcare, this being the 50th anniversary of the oral contraceptive pill). And they focused in particular on how quickly women had sex (first date? second date? third date?), on the number of partners and on the women’s candor or embarrassment in discussing such behavior with others.
I’ll look at the first two aspects in subsequent posts. For this week, I’d like to look at the last aspect: women’s reluctance to admit their level of sexual activity to others, and even to their closest female friends.
As the article puts it:
“Today’s survey shows 48 per cent of women get embarrassed talking about sex. And although they say their friends are the easiest to talk to about their sex lives, seven out of 10 women admit to lying about it.”
One doctor is quoted as observing this seeming paradox:
“What is interesting about these results is that women will be intimate but they won’t talk about the intricacies of intimacy. I think it’s a paradox and one of the theories is that it could, to some extent, be about the ownership of intimacy.”
If you think about it, this really isn’t such a paradox.
If women were reluctant to share details about their sexuality just with their parents, for example, that would make sense. After all, how many people of either gender are open to discussing the full extent of their sex life with their parents?
Very few men or women do that … we get too used to stretching the rules while we’re growing up and then pretending to be holier or more wholesome than we really all. That lets us avoid getting caught, getting grounded, getting a beating, getting other privileges cut or whatever. And that pattern becomes second nature to us.
After all, that is a kid’s job: “To get away with stuff”.
Women also are usually reluctant to let men know just how “easy” they are. Otherwise, what guy would bust his butt wooing a woman if he suspected that he could get what he wanted from her with far less effort?
But women’s reticence in this area when talking with their female friends is a bit more complex. After all, women talk about almost everything else with their female friends. So why not talk about the full extent of their sex lives?
It’s unlikely to be because of having moral standards which are different from those of their female friends, as people pick their friends from people with whom they share attitudes in common. It also won’t be because of any generation gap, as people tend to pick friends who are roughly in their same general age group.
I believe that the answer relates partly to “status”.
First, let’s take a male perspective: which guys tend to be highest in status amongst their buddies? In most groups of male friends that I’ve seen, the guys who seem to have the easiest time getting women into bed tend also to enjoy the most status in their circle of buddies.
For example, if you got a woman into bed but did it by dating her for two years and then marrying her (before she would give it up), there’s not much status to that. True, you’re getting laid but it took a very long time and you had to pay a huge price (half of your future net worth) to get it.
Or if you hired a hooker to sleep with you, there’d not be much status in that either. It’d be a lot quicker than the preceding example and would cost a lot less in the aggregate, but your success here would be a reflection of her being attracted to money … and not necessarily attracted to you specifically.
The other end of that spectrum
At the other end of that spectrum, suppose you met a new girl and an hour later you and she were in bed together? No taking her out on dates, no spending lots of money on her … just straight off to the bedroom for some romping? And suppose that this sort of thing had also happened to you from time to time with other women whom you had just met?
Amongst buddies, that’d demonstrate very high status: the less you have to do in order to get women into bed with you, the more desirable that proves you to be.
Amongst women, however, the dynamic is reversed: the more time, expense and effort that guys will invest in wooing a woman without her having put out for him, the more desirable this proves she must be.
After all, women recognize that guys crave sex and will gravitate to a woman who puts out. So there’s no status as a woman in just “getting laid” … all she has to do to get that is basically just show up and not say “no”.
The status is in how hard guys will work to get her before she puts out (or without her putting out at all). The more hoops that the guy will jump through in the hopes of getting a woman, the hotter she must therefore be.
The “status” dynamic at work
That’s the “status” dynamic at work here. If that’s an accurate understanding of logic and human nature, then you would expect the result to be that men will be likely (in an effort to boost their own status among their male friends) to exaggerate the number of women they’ve had sex with and to understate the amount of time, expense and effort which it took him to get each woman into bed.
Similarly, you would expect the result also to be that women will be likely (in an effort to boost their own status among their female friends) to understate the number of men they have had sex with and to exaggerate the amount of time, expense, effort and number of dates that it took each guy to get her into bed.
And if you look at survey results (whether this survey or most others on similar topics), that is just what you’ll find in each instance: men exaggerate their sexual experiences and women under-report their sexual experiences.
More next week.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
