Dr. David Buss writes a lot about how we have two conflicting relationship drives, one for security and connection and one for variety and novelty. On average, women are more oriented towards security and connection, and men more towards variety and novelty, but we all have elements of both and there will obviously be cases where it is switched around.
He also writes about how the environment shapes which drives are most prominent, giving the example of studies of colleges where there is demographic overweight of either male or female students. In colleges dominated by female students, he sees a tendency towards a hookup culture, as the girls have to compete for male attention, whereas in male dominated colleges the tendency is towards early moving into strictly monogamous relationships, as the males try to courtship and hold on to the few available females.
Neither approach seems ideal, as both forces one party to suppress their innate drives, possibly leading to a feeling of unhappiness for at least one party in the relationship.
It makes me wonder what would be the ideal form of relationship (as in, the one that would optimise for the happiness of both parties), given that we know both drives exists, and they are probably not going away.
Yes, didn't he write that in When Men Behave Badly? I love that book. Have you read Date-o-nomics by Jon Birger? That is the ultimate source for that problem.
I'm so cynical so I see it from the viewpoint of society instead of the individual. And society needs children to survive over generations. So I vote for the high-investment option, despite the the cost it incurs on higher status males.
I was about to reply to Avi making a similar point. I got married at 24 (I'm now 70) and for a long time thought I would have been "better off" if I'd had say 5 more years as a single man and sampled more variety. I also had children sooner than I would have in my fantasy scenario. Over time I came to realize I was much better off marrying a good woman who loved me and who wanted to be a mother than screwing around for however long and likely ending up in a much less desirable situation, possibly having picked up an STD in the meantime. It's been said that men need women to domesticate them, and I think that's true, to the benefit of the men at least as much as their women partners.
I read about it in "The Evolution of Desire", but I am sure it is a common theme across his books. I have not read Date-o-nomic. It sounds interesting, I'll check it out.
I also tend to see things from the viewpoint of what is good for society, and especially kids, but I have few illusions about solutions that incur a cost of unhappiness (for any part) thriving in the long run. I think we need to find solutions that meet all our foundational needs.
Monogamous relationships are the current standard, but it seems we all know that they don't work very well (given their rate of infidelity and divorce). And they clearly suppress and demonize the drive for variety and novelty.
Hookup culture, polyamorous relationships, open relationships and ethical non-monogamy are on the rise, but they seem to tip all the way to the other side, being much too shaky to support the need for security and connection.
Something like the old victorian standard for marriages, where the marriage was sacred and unbreakable (thus ensuring security), but discreet outside affairs and mistresses were tolerated (and often even expected) was one solution. But since this only applied to the male part, it obviously sucked for the wife who had no such freedoms, so not something to recommend. But worth looking at to see how other times and cultures tried to attain a balance.
Maybe something like swinging, where couples are secure together and emotionally monogamous, but occasionally indulge in variety and novelty together is a good balance? The old adage of "Couples that play together, stay together" seems to apply. A possible future where most people find a mate for life and are so deeply connected that they can share and live out all their sexual fantasies together, even if it involves other people, seems like a positive prospect ;)
I really thought a lot about that too. If it weren't for the spectacular failure of the anti-norms for relational and sexual behavior during the last ten years, I would never defend the monogamy norm. I was one of those who questioned it a decade ago, but I must admit that the alternative we are currently seeing is much worse.
As I got old and boring, I'm increasingly leaning toward the hope that sexuality can at least partially be ignored. Polysexuality is not only limited by jealousy. It is a logistics challenge as well. With five kids to care for and a house to build, I would have too little time for affairs even had I wanted to. I think many parents would agree with that. There comes a point when having sex at all becomes a privilege rather than a suboptimal alternative to having the most exciting sex that can be imagined.
Sex will probably always be both a problem and an opportunity in relationships. I think things could be improved a lot if people knew themselves and others better. If we can think consciously about our urges and the probable reasons for them, I think they would become easier to handle.
Having had three kids myself, I can certainly relate to having little time (or energy) for adventurous sex, or even sex at all. But I also think that this is a very unnatural state of affairs.
Looking at child rearing among hunter-gatherers, one of the things that stand out is how little time they actually spend with their children. Not in in the modern sense of shipping them off to an institution obviously, the kids are always around them, but there are just so many more interesting people to interact with in a tribe, other kids of all ages, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc, that the actual time they spend with their parents (after weaning) is pretty minimal (if you are interested in this topic, I can recommend "Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods", by Hewlett et al)
This gives parents a lot of free time to do other activities, which more often than not means sex ;)
As an example, Daniel Everett, the first missionary to learn the Pirahã language, in his book "Don't sleep, there are snakes":
> "The Pirahãs all seem to be intimate friends, no matter what village they come from. Pirahãs talk as though they know every other Pirahã extremely well. I suspect this may be related to their physical connections. Given the lack of stigma attached to and the relative frequency of divorce, promiscuousness associated with dancing and singing, and post- and prepubescent sexual experimentation, it isn't far of the mark to conjecture that many Pirahãs have had sex with a big percentage of other Pirahãs. This alone means that their relationships will be based on an intimacy unfamiliar to larger societies (the community that sleeps together stays together?), Imagine if you'd had sex with a sizeable percentage of the residents of your neighbourhood and that this fact was judged by the entire society as neither good or bad, just a fact about life - like saying you had tasted many kinds of food"
I think that unless we can show the world that it is possible to have a great family life with kids, without having to deeply repress our basic needs (or have them disappear from shear exhaustion), then there is no chance that the next generations will want to procreate. Now that the act of having children is an active choice, it is just not a tradeoff most people are ready to accept.
But if we can show that you can have both a family _and_ the most exciting sex that can be imagined, then I think there is hope.
This is very interesting. And a new book to my reading list.
I haven't read enough about those Amazonian small-scale societies. The little I have read is that such levels of promiscuity has a darker side: Male irrelability in food provision for children. Should we guess they consist of sexually happy and content people? Or should we guess they consist of worried and cunning mothers who are more concerned with provision than pleasure? I guess I will learn more when I read more about them.
>But if we can show that you can have both a family _and_ the most exciting sex that can be imagined, then I think there is hope.
There is only one reason why I disagree: I think that for females, the most exciting sex that can be imagined is not something entirely positive. In the past, I have actively sought out groups of people containing females with strong and openly expressed sexualities. Close to one hundred percent had significant psychological issues. I asked whether there was anyone who didn't. I got a name, but never met her in person.
I have also read all the autobiographical books I have encountered on women with strong sexual desires who follow that sexual desire in real life. Not a single one seemed very happy. Catherine Millet, who wrote "The Sexual Life of Catherine M" seemed neutral, matter-of-factly more or less. But all the others seemed outrightly unhappy.
Those observation have made me grateful for being a female with rather low levels of sexual desire and very high levels of sexual inhibitions. I think that allowed me to shape my life more the way I wanted it, instead of being led to men I might desire sexually, but whom I don't genuinely like.
I think female sexuality is so fundamentally ambivalent that having the most exciting sex possible doesn't make most women happy. What sexually excites us is simply too far away from what we want. Maybe one can say that women are the perpetual obstacles to human sexual and relational bliss. It makes things complicated, but I think it's true.
I have also met plenty of women who were openly expressing their sexuality, but deeply unhappy. But I think we might get the causality mixed up. In our culture, women are expected to act and look like sex objects, while they at the same time get severely shamed for actually being sexual. This is bound to mess anyone up.
Also, drifting from man to man is a sure recipe for feeling lonely and empty (I actually think the end result is the same for men going from girl to girl, but for them there is at least some reward from society seeing them as a success).
I think this is why marriage is a solid mainstay across all human cultures, even the most promiscuous ones.
The few women I have met who both seemed able to fully express their sexuality and also seemed happy and mentally stable, were in long-term relationships with a partner who shared their drive to explore and play.
I think we all need that anchor.
We need both the safety and connection we get from a life partner, and the variety and novelty we get from freely expressing our sexuality. Limiting ourselves to either/or seems to be a recipe for unhappiness.
I wonder how much of this ambivalence is just a consequence of our current culture. In most of our recent agricultural history, having casual sex involved huge risks for women. In a world where women had to rely on a husband to support them, an accidental pregnancy would be most likely be a catastrophic event.
But in pre-agricultural tribal societies, the situation could be very different. You mention the Yanomamö, which are one data point, but one of the most interesting aspects of tribal societies is their variability, especially around sexual customs. When the responsibility of taking care of children (and subsistence in general) is less on the mother and father unit alone, but rather the task of the entire tribe, paternity becomes a lot less important.
A classic example is this quote from a native american Montagnais man, when a Jesuit missionary tries to make him restrict his wife from having sexual relations with other men, by telling him that if he don't, his kids may not be his own:
> "Thou hast no sense. You french people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe"
Yes. It is very interesting how much custums around sexuality varies between human societies. In her book Mother Nature, primatologist Sarah Hrdy explains that polyandry is actually not unheard of in anthropology. In some Amazon rainforest societies where the adult male mortality rate was very high, it actually made sense for women to have two sexual partners instead of one. It worked like a kind of insurance. If one of the potential fathers were lost, there would hopefully be another one. Two men could also provide better than one. However, two was the ideal number in the cases Sarah Hrdy reported about. If the potential fathers were too many, no one tended to feel responsible for the child. Wikipedia has a short article too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partible_paternity
The tragic baseline of all this is that ophans tend to fare very badly in many primitive societies. There was not an entire community to take care of the children. A woman needed to fix her child's insurance arrangements herself.
Actually in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, husbands was not the main source of food. For a hunter to give priority to his own family would be seen as hoarding:
"Father's provisioning used to be viewed as central to forager child survival, but Hawkes et al. point out out that forager men actually share most of their meat with other adults in camp, while members of the hunter's family actually receive a relatively small portion of the meat" - "Hunter-Gathererer Childhoods" page 175
In egalitarian tribes, food is shared across all members. This is a rational choice, as food can rarely be stored and hunting luck may go up and down, so the best place to store surplus when your luck is up is in the stomachs of the other members, so that they can supply you when your luck is down.
The question is what this means for our sexuality. What would (did?) female sexuality look like living in a tribal environment where they did not have to rely on a husband for survival, and having children without one was not the catastrophe it became in agricultural times?
The things I have read are not at all as idyllic. Sarah Hrdy again. She wrote that although meat is in general shared, it is only shared among hunters. Like a kind of insurance system. Hunters who all contribute share the meat that is provided on a certain day. But only hunters are eligible. A woman whose husband dies will not get any meat from such a group, because she never contributes. Hrdy wrote that orphans are often killed in such groups, more or less out of mercy.
One particular group I have actually read about is the Aché of Paraguay. In Ache Life History, Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado reported that child murder was very common: When an adult man died (sometimes also an adult woman), people said he needed company in the next life. They chose a child that no one wanted to provide for to bury alive with him. If someone rose and grabbed the child and promised to take care of it, no child would be sacrificed with the deceased man. If no one volunteered, the child would be killed. 75 percent of the children killed this way were girls.
In general, the Aché reported they resented orphans because they always begged for food from people who didn't want to provide it to them.
Thinking of tribal life as idyllic is probably a mistake. In some senses it may have been, but they also had plenty of challenges and certainly lots of traditions and taboos that would seem horrifying to us today.
But we should also keep in mind that almost all the ethnographic records we have of hunter-gatherers, are from societies pushed by civilization to the most remote or barren locations. We can only conjecture how tribal living would have been when they were able to live in the areas most fertile and rich.
But to follow up on the above quote, hunters were rarely the main source of food for the children:
> "It is grandmothers or older adult women, among the Hadza at least, who provide regular food and care to postweaning children because they collect tubers and other high-caloric food items for their grandchildren" - "Hunter-Gathererer Childhoods" page 176
>We can only conjecture how tribal living would have been when they were able to live in the areas most fertile and rich.
Sadly, I think that one reason why hunter-gatherers appear so equal, is that small groups pushed into marginal lands become equal by necessity: If the land produces no surplus to what is required to keep people alive, there is no room for a kleptocratic class.
There was one whole continent of hunter-gatherers: Australia. Too few anthropologists had the time to study them before things changed. But one who did, Carl Lumholz, described women as the slaves of men. Women provided most of the food, while the men hunted mostly for the sport of it. Women's food provision didn't make the free and powerful. Men dominated them through physical violence. Older men, from about age 30, monopolized younger females from about age 12, and the girls and women themselves had very little say in the matter. Leaving a husband carried the death penalty, if he thought so.
I have yet to hear about any native Australian society where women were free and equal and made their own reproductive decisions.
While there has clearly been many male dominated societies, more egalitarian societies do seem to have been common as well. But the influence of early explorers, predominantly missionaries and traders with Christian values, was quick to introduce western values and expectations of male dominance.
She actually specifically mentions how the male bias of the early explorers have made reports on Australian culture overrepresent the degree of male dominance:
> "one must check for distortions in the ethnography of a group. For example, take men "exchanging" women in Australia. Older men may spend a great deal of time talking about such exchange (as to Hart and Pilling), but older women are also involved; sons are married off by elders as well; and the young people do have ways of refusing if they are dead set against the marriage. Furthermore, marriage is not that big a deal anyway, since divorce is easy, and sexual exclusiveness a foreign concept. To talk of "power" by men over women in such instances, as if it were the power of a Victorian father to consign his daughter for a life of personal servitude to a man she dislikes, is ethnocentric distortion." page 24
The Montagnais had an interesting society. Very worth reading up on. An egalitarian and non-violent society that rejected any authority and hierarchy. Just as a husband didn't own his wife and couldn't tell her to not have lovers, parents wouldn't order their kids around either. One of the biggest challenges for the Jesuits was that the natives wouldn't allow them to use corporal punishment on the children. How was they supposed to teach them Christian values without it? ;)
Partible paternity is a fascinating concept. It was not just about having the support of multiple fathers, it was also about believing that the child was literally composed of the essence of all its fathers. So if a mother wanted the best for her child, she would seek out the men with the characteristics she wanted for her child (good hunter, most funny, great toolmaker...) so they could all contribute to who the child would become. If you like reading anthropology I can recommend "Cultures of Multiple Fathers" which surveys a lot of cultures with belief in partible paternity.
Another example is the Mangala from the South Pacific Ocean, who believed that pregnancy was caused by a woman sleeping continuously with the same man, so parents urged their daughters to sleep with many different men (Human Sexual Behavior, Variations in The Ethnographic Spectrum - Marshall, Donald S).
I guess the main lesson here is that our forefathers only had a very vague understanding of biology and conception, and it sometimes (often?) led to cultural mores around sexuality very different to what we have today.
In Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy stressed the irreliable nature male provision in some societies as a motive for women to be more promiscuousis. She wrote that when men couldn't be counted on as providers for their children, women try more short term and more promiscuous strategies. Since men often acted opportunistically and gave their meat to another woman they hoped to recruit as a new lover, women needed to spread their risks too. Sarah Hrdy wrote that current African American women are much in the same situation: Since many of them can't hope for one man to stick around until his child grows up, they instead work on finding a series of providers since that it better than no provider.
If you've not read Nancy Friday's collections of female sexual fantasies, starting with MY SECRET GARDEN, you should... they are consistent with the "ambivalence" hypothesis. Most guys should read them, too, in my view, because I don't think most guys understand women (https://theredquest.substack.com/p/the-best-books-for-learning-game).
Fear of STIs probably still inhibits a lot of sexual expression and it will be interesting to see where things go when we get effective STI vaccines.
We are already getting effective weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, and if people are more attractive (less fat) we may see more people wanting to have sex with more people.
Your blog is making me seriously disillusioned. How disillusioned should I be? Do you have any idea about how common your views on gender relations are among younger people? Do you know any research about it? Have you made any very approximate estimate of your own?
Respectively: Slightly to moderately disillusioned, somewhat (although not super) common, and I don't know how to estimate the commonness. A fair number of teen guys appear to like Andrew Tate right now, despite him being a clown and a fool, which may indicate that there's something not going right with the mainstream educational views on sex and gender.
There seems to have been a larger seduction-skills scene in the 2006 - 2015 time period, but that mostly seems to have gone away. Whether that makes you more disillusioned or less is up to you.
The free book I wrote about consensual non-monogamy hasn't exactly been a rocket ship, so I suspect that doing CNM hasn't and isn't likely to prove popular in the short term. On the other hand, compared to two or three decades ago, it's much more popular, so the timeframe in question might matter.
>Whether that makes you more disillusioned or less is up to you.
I'm not sure, actually. But I can always find something to get disillusioned with.
I read Freddie DeBoer's book about writing a book and he said it is nigh on impossible to market anything without a literary agent. So maybe you just lack a literary agent.
Do you have any idea about any female counterpart to your movement? If I were on the market, I wouldn't like the prospect of men "gaming" me. Do you know of any corresponding attempts of organizing from females who want dating to be effective from their perspective?
Oh, it's a book that no conventional publisher would touch, ever. It's way too incendiary. Fortunately we live in a world of Substack and Amazon. I've learned a lot from self-published books in this field, however rough many of those books are, and however crazy some of their writers are.
Re: female counterparts, women, particularly on the younger side, tend to have challenges different than guys: for a lot of women, the game is about getting commitment from a higher-status guy. For a lot of guys, it's about getting with a woman at all (a topic explored in more detail at https://theredquest.substack.com/p/game-or-relationship-levels-different-for-men-and-women ... apologies for the bunch of links, but one virtue of having written a lot is the ability to point at that writing, instead of leaving a trail of incomplete, half-baked thoughts).
So the corresponding female issues appear almost everywhere: back in the day, magazines like Cosmo. Today, female dating podcasts, romance novels, etc.
More women appear to be interested in aspects of consensual non-monogamy than were 15 or 20 years ago, which is a change. Women often appear to have a harder time getting guys to do CNM with them than guys do (I've heard a lot of stories along these lines). Lots of guys hear CNM and sex parties and think, "Rad, I get to f**k all the time and this is great." Then they see the reality of what CNM is, and they want to monopolize the girl, and the girl isn't interested in that, and she has problems.
The problem is sorting among those books to get to the well-written and relevant stuff.
I like your links. I mean, now that I'm getting used to being disillusioned. They are unusually well-written. I think I'm starting to see a pattern in them: The only really important difference of opinion I can see between you and a fabulously normal person like me is that you seem to see the possibility of companionship between men and women as non-existent. In your writing, the main point of spending time together for males and females is sensual pleasure. From that follows that every male and female should always be trying to get the most sensual pleasure possible through continual self-improvement and through being prepared to switch partners whenever a better deal is around the corner.
I disagree because I believe companionship is much more important than sex. In fact, I think the most important purpose of sex for modern humans is to enhance companionship. I even have a link about it: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/make-sex-useful-again
If people don't seem very interested in increasing their ability to get laid, it could be because they value companionship even higher.
I think there's a reason not many men are into seduction "gaming". Seduction, almost by definition, means sexual (and emotional) manipulation. A man has to be limited in his capacity for empathy if he can regard seduction and the resulting sex as a legitimate and ethical end in itself. I would even say men who can do that with a clear conscience are on the sociopathic spectrum. Even if the number of male sociopaths is as low as 2%, and I've seen higher numbers, they would be hugely over-represented among men aggressively manipulating women. Add another--what?--5% or 10% or even 25% who have weak empathy, and you get plenty of men who are perfectly happy with a love 'em and leave 'em strategy. A man (or woman) who has any moral sense would not consider manipulation of any other human being for purely selfish ends as an acceptable way to interact with others. That's no less true for sex than any other human interaction. BTW, I gave my daughter Neil Strauss's book "The Game" when she was a teenager precisely because I wanted her to know there were men out there willing to use aggressive manipulation to get girls into bed.
With almost any book, you can tell whether it's well written within a few minutes, and whether it's likely to be useful or interesting within half an hour. "Or interesting" is important because fiction and poetry often isn't "useful." Feedback from readers so far appears to indicate that https://theredquest.substack.com/p/free-book is useful to many of them.
I'd not say sensual pleasure is *it* for me, but it's a big component, and most guys aren't good at making it happen, and have a severe deficit of it in their lives. Most women have a shortage of attractive, high-status men of the sort they'd like to experience sensual and other pleasures with. Red Quest and similar works help to reduce this gap. The burden of performance is most often on the guy. I'd be happy for things to be otherwise but haven't seen any real movement in that direction, ever.
For most men, it's challenging to learn how to competently and consistently unlock women. School ranges from "unhelpful" to "counterproductive" in this regard.
Different people also want different things at different times.
So 95% right makes for a less interesting read, but there's still something I can comment on:
"because it evolved in at least two different species. Human female sexual desire is probably so old, that parts of it evolved in our pre-human ancestors."
OK, yes. But then, why is male sexuality not ambivalent? To explain the difference, one really needs to focus on causes that *separate* the sexes. So how did humans live, as pseudo chimps and as foragers? Males have been traditionally exposed to much greater danger from hunting, fighting, and raiding. Obviously cowardly or anxious males who panicked or fled in the face of danger faced ostracism and punishment from their fellow tribesmen, and this over time this would create selective pressure on males for reduced anxiety and heightened physical bravery. Females faced different pressures; they are physically weaker than males, and highly vulnerable during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Additionally, females were the primary caregivers to their offspring. They needed to connect emotionally with them to understand their needs and persevere through long nights of tears and tantrums without harming their children, and those who didn't notice threats might fail to protect their offspring, resulting in selective pressure in favor of sensitivity for females.
Today the primary psychological sex difference between men and women (approaching 1 full SD) is on Emotionality, a broad trait relating directly to these differences:
"Persons with very high scores on the Emotionality scale experience fear of physical dangers, experience anxiety in response to life's stresses, feel a need for emotional support from others, and feel empathy and sentimental attachments with others. Conversely, persons with very low scores on this scale are not deterred by the prospect of physical harm, feel little worry even in stressful situations, have little need to share their concerns with others, and feel emotionally detached from others."
Unsurprisingly, this has downstream consequences on sexuality, such that (for example) people high in Emotionality are less likely to endorse sexual activity without emotional attachment. (Ashton, M. C.; Lee, K. (2008). "The prediction of Honesty–Humility-related criteria by the HEXACO and Five-Factor Models of personality". Journal of Research in Personality. 42 (5): 1216)
In other words, this post could have just been titled "The Ambivalent Nature of Female," because Emotionality makes the ladies naturally ambivalent about everything. As an adolescent, a girl I knew was always talking about ambivalence as her baseline emotional state. My first fiancee was ambivalent enough that she never became Mrs. Apple Pie. My sense is that men sort of have to learn that ladies who get angry at you want to get close to you, because even though they're angry, they then become anxious about this, and *then* want reassurance *as* they yell at you. In my experience, this is really not common with the menfolk. If some dude is ambivalent about anything, he's prolly going through some serious s*** right now and needs to be left alone. Don't worry about it. Provided that he doesn't successfully commit suicide with a firearm, you'll see him again a week later. You may then ask him about it, and he'll be like, "Yeah, whatever."
I have another, related, text in the pipeline, called "Woman is the most perverted animal on earth". Maybe I should have merged it with this text in order to make it clearer. Because that was what I tried to say: females are perverts. I think human males are perverts too. Compared to all other animals, humans are hyper-perverts, because we can get away with it to a certain extent while more instinct-driven animals can't. Until recently, females could get away with it better than males.
I think male sexuality tends to be more functional than female sexuality. Men enjoy casual sex more. That's a no-brainer. But actually, men seem to function better in committed relationships too. For men a good relationship is strongly positively related to good sex. For women, the two phenomena are much less related. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1247626. That is, a good relation doesn't automatically lead to good sex for women. Women also become less interested in sex the longer a relationship lasts, while men do not lose interest in sex from being in a relationship, at least not young men. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12049023/
60 % right? Not bad! I will strive for that number.
Concerning emotionality, I don't deny that females are more emotional than males. But I don't think there is any particular link between emotionality and sexual inhibition. I can use my current favorite example Aella. I think Aella seem to be rather low in emotionality. Not unlike myself. Still Aella is convinced that everyone wants to have sex with an STI-free backpacker given enough time, while I am equally convinced that every human being, however STI-free, will always gross me out a tiny bit if I don't get a large chunk of time to get used to him.
From my limited experience of people I would almost claim the opposite. I know at least one highly emotional woman who had a rather wild sexual life with different more or less unknown partners in her 20ies. But no, I don't believe in there is a link. Being emotional and being shy/easily disgusted are different things.
> Aella is convinced that everyone wants to have sex...
> every human being... will always gross me out a tiny bit
> ... I know at least one highly emotional woman who had
> a rather wild sexual life
So n = 3? Well if we're interested, we can easily invoke differences in Extraversion and Honesty-Humility, as well as mind-bending quantities of LSD and traumatic childhood experiences experienced by at least a third of the sample. But if you don't mind problems from cherry-picked samples, you might manage to reach n = 5 if you include:
> I dunno, doesn't "Sawed, planed, and sanded thinking" seem closer to 90%?
That motto is far too ambitious, so we dropped it quite a while ago.
Especially "sanded" sounds ridiculously overambitious.
> n=3
I think that in order to find answers, we first need to ask questions. And I think the question "why do people choose not to have sex with people they find attractive" is a question that is very little asked. We have no idea if people who are easily disgusted like casual sex less, for example. As far as I know, no one asked people about their emotional reluctance to have casual sex and made them take a personality test at the same time.
Three anecdotes doesn't make up a study. But three anecdotes is a very small beginning to start formulating the questions for something that could eventually become a study.
And thank you for the links. As a rule I read every book I find by people in the sex trade, so I will get that Maggie McNeil book too.
Dr. David Buss writes a lot about how we have two conflicting relationship drives, one for security and connection and one for variety and novelty. On average, women are more oriented towards security and connection, and men more towards variety and novelty, but we all have elements of both and there will obviously be cases where it is switched around.
He also writes about how the environment shapes which drives are most prominent, giving the example of studies of colleges where there is demographic overweight of either male or female students. In colleges dominated by female students, he sees a tendency towards a hookup culture, as the girls have to compete for male attention, whereas in male dominated colleges the tendency is towards early moving into strictly monogamous relationships, as the males try to courtship and hold on to the few available females.
Neither approach seems ideal, as both forces one party to suppress their innate drives, possibly leading to a feeling of unhappiness for at least one party in the relationship.
It makes me wonder what would be the ideal form of relationship (as in, the one that would optimise for the happiness of both parties), given that we know both drives exists, and they are probably not going away.
Yes, didn't he write that in When Men Behave Badly? I love that book. Have you read Date-o-nomics by Jon Birger? That is the ultimate source for that problem.
I'm so cynical so I see it from the viewpoint of society instead of the individual. And society needs children to survive over generations. So I vote for the high-investment option, despite the the cost it incurs on higher status males.
I was about to reply to Avi making a similar point. I got married at 24 (I'm now 70) and for a long time thought I would have been "better off" if I'd had say 5 more years as a single man and sampled more variety. I also had children sooner than I would have in my fantasy scenario. Over time I came to realize I was much better off marrying a good woman who loved me and who wanted to be a mother than screwing around for however long and likely ending up in a much less desirable situation, possibly having picked up an STD in the meantime. It's been said that men need women to domesticate them, and I think that's true, to the benefit of the men at least as much as their women partners.
Yes, they say that's why homosexual men have a much harder time forming couples and staying together: There is no one there to domesticate them.
I read about it in "The Evolution of Desire", but I am sure it is a common theme across his books. I have not read Date-o-nomic. It sounds interesting, I'll check it out.
I also tend to see things from the viewpoint of what is good for society, and especially kids, but I have few illusions about solutions that incur a cost of unhappiness (for any part) thriving in the long run. I think we need to find solutions that meet all our foundational needs.
Monogamous relationships are the current standard, but it seems we all know that they don't work very well (given their rate of infidelity and divorce). And they clearly suppress and demonize the drive for variety and novelty.
Hookup culture, polyamorous relationships, open relationships and ethical non-monogamy are on the rise, but they seem to tip all the way to the other side, being much too shaky to support the need for security and connection.
Something like the old victorian standard for marriages, where the marriage was sacred and unbreakable (thus ensuring security), but discreet outside affairs and mistresses were tolerated (and often even expected) was one solution. But since this only applied to the male part, it obviously sucked for the wife who had no such freedoms, so not something to recommend. But worth looking at to see how other times and cultures tried to attain a balance.
Maybe something like swinging, where couples are secure together and emotionally monogamous, but occasionally indulge in variety and novelty together is a good balance? The old adage of "Couples that play together, stay together" seems to apply. A possible future where most people find a mate for life and are so deeply connected that they can share and live out all their sexual fantasies together, even if it involves other people, seems like a positive prospect ;)
I really thought a lot about that too. If it weren't for the spectacular failure of the anti-norms for relational and sexual behavior during the last ten years, I would never defend the monogamy norm. I was one of those who questioned it a decade ago, but I must admit that the alternative we are currently seeing is much worse.
As I got old and boring, I'm increasingly leaning toward the hope that sexuality can at least partially be ignored. Polysexuality is not only limited by jealousy. It is a logistics challenge as well. With five kids to care for and a house to build, I would have too little time for affairs even had I wanted to. I think many parents would agree with that. There comes a point when having sex at all becomes a privilege rather than a suboptimal alternative to having the most exciting sex that can be imagined.
Sex will probably always be both a problem and an opportunity in relationships. I think things could be improved a lot if people knew themselves and others better. If we can think consciously about our urges and the probable reasons for them, I think they would become easier to handle.
Having had three kids myself, I can certainly relate to having little time (or energy) for adventurous sex, or even sex at all. But I also think that this is a very unnatural state of affairs.
Looking at child rearing among hunter-gatherers, one of the things that stand out is how little time they actually spend with their children. Not in in the modern sense of shipping them off to an institution obviously, the kids are always around them, but there are just so many more interesting people to interact with in a tribe, other kids of all ages, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc, that the actual time they spend with their parents (after weaning) is pretty minimal (if you are interested in this topic, I can recommend "Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods", by Hewlett et al)
This gives parents a lot of free time to do other activities, which more often than not means sex ;)
As an example, Daniel Everett, the first missionary to learn the Pirahã language, in his book "Don't sleep, there are snakes":
> "The Pirahãs all seem to be intimate friends, no matter what village they come from. Pirahãs talk as though they know every other Pirahã extremely well. I suspect this may be related to their physical connections. Given the lack of stigma attached to and the relative frequency of divorce, promiscuousness associated with dancing and singing, and post- and prepubescent sexual experimentation, it isn't far of the mark to conjecture that many Pirahãs have had sex with a big percentage of other Pirahãs. This alone means that their relationships will be based on an intimacy unfamiliar to larger societies (the community that sleeps together stays together?), Imagine if you'd had sex with a sizeable percentage of the residents of your neighbourhood and that this fact was judged by the entire society as neither good or bad, just a fact about life - like saying you had tasted many kinds of food"
I think that unless we can show the world that it is possible to have a great family life with kids, without having to deeply repress our basic needs (or have them disappear from shear exhaustion), then there is no chance that the next generations will want to procreate. Now that the act of having children is an active choice, it is just not a tradeoff most people are ready to accept.
But if we can show that you can have both a family _and_ the most exciting sex that can be imagined, then I think there is hope.
This is very interesting. And a new book to my reading list.
I haven't read enough about those Amazonian small-scale societies. The little I have read is that such levels of promiscuity has a darker side: Male irrelability in food provision for children. Should we guess they consist of sexually happy and content people? Or should we guess they consist of worried and cunning mothers who are more concerned with provision than pleasure? I guess I will learn more when I read more about them.
>But if we can show that you can have both a family _and_ the most exciting sex that can be imagined, then I think there is hope.
There is only one reason why I disagree: I think that for females, the most exciting sex that can be imagined is not something entirely positive. In the past, I have actively sought out groups of people containing females with strong and openly expressed sexualities. Close to one hundred percent had significant psychological issues. I asked whether there was anyone who didn't. I got a name, but never met her in person.
I have also read all the autobiographical books I have encountered on women with strong sexual desires who follow that sexual desire in real life. Not a single one seemed very happy. Catherine Millet, who wrote "The Sexual Life of Catherine M" seemed neutral, matter-of-factly more or less. But all the others seemed outrightly unhappy.
Those observation have made me grateful for being a female with rather low levels of sexual desire and very high levels of sexual inhibitions. I think that allowed me to shape my life more the way I wanted it, instead of being led to men I might desire sexually, but whom I don't genuinely like.
I think female sexuality is so fundamentally ambivalent that having the most exciting sex possible doesn't make most women happy. What sexually excites us is simply too far away from what we want. Maybe one can say that women are the perpetual obstacles to human sexual and relational bliss. It makes things complicated, but I think it's true.
I have also met plenty of women who were openly expressing their sexuality, but deeply unhappy. But I think we might get the causality mixed up. In our culture, women are expected to act and look like sex objects, while they at the same time get severely shamed for actually being sexual. This is bound to mess anyone up.
Also, drifting from man to man is a sure recipe for feeling lonely and empty (I actually think the end result is the same for men going from girl to girl, but for them there is at least some reward from society seeing them as a success).
I think this is why marriage is a solid mainstay across all human cultures, even the most promiscuous ones.
The few women I have met who both seemed able to fully express their sexuality and also seemed happy and mentally stable, were in long-term relationships with a partner who shared their drive to explore and play.
I think we all need that anchor.
We need both the safety and connection we get from a life partner, and the variety and novelty we get from freely expressing our sexuality. Limiting ourselves to either/or seems to be a recipe for unhappiness.
I wonder how much of this ambivalence is just a consequence of our current culture. In most of our recent agricultural history, having casual sex involved huge risks for women. In a world where women had to rely on a husband to support them, an accidental pregnancy would be most likely be a catastrophic event.
But in pre-agricultural tribal societies, the situation could be very different. You mention the Yanomamö, which are one data point, but one of the most interesting aspects of tribal societies is their variability, especially around sexual customs. When the responsibility of taking care of children (and subsistence in general) is less on the mother and father unit alone, but rather the task of the entire tribe, paternity becomes a lot less important.
A classic example is this quote from a native american Montagnais man, when a Jesuit missionary tries to make him restrict his wife from having sexual relations with other men, by telling him that if he don't, his kids may not be his own:
> "Thou hast no sense. You french people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe"
- https://sexgendersoc.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/4-montagnais-women-and-the-jesuit-program-for-colonization.pdf page 50
Thank you, I will read that.
Yes. It is very interesting how much custums around sexuality varies between human societies. In her book Mother Nature, primatologist Sarah Hrdy explains that polyandry is actually not unheard of in anthropology. In some Amazon rainforest societies where the adult male mortality rate was very high, it actually made sense for women to have two sexual partners instead of one. It worked like a kind of insurance. If one of the potential fathers were lost, there would hopefully be another one. Two men could also provide better than one. However, two was the ideal number in the cases Sarah Hrdy reported about. If the potential fathers were too many, no one tended to feel responsible for the child. Wikipedia has a short article too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partible_paternity
The tragic baseline of all this is that ophans tend to fare very badly in many primitive societies. There was not an entire community to take care of the children. A woman needed to fix her child's insurance arrangements herself.
Actually in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands, husbands was not the main source of food. For a hunter to give priority to his own family would be seen as hoarding:
"Father's provisioning used to be viewed as central to forager child survival, but Hawkes et al. point out out that forager men actually share most of their meat with other adults in camp, while members of the hunter's family actually receive a relatively small portion of the meat" - "Hunter-Gathererer Childhoods" page 175
In egalitarian tribes, food is shared across all members. This is a rational choice, as food can rarely be stored and hunting luck may go up and down, so the best place to store surplus when your luck is up is in the stomachs of the other members, so that they can supply you when your luck is down.
The question is what this means for our sexuality. What would (did?) female sexuality look like living in a tribal environment where they did not have to rely on a husband for survival, and having children without one was not the catastrophe it became in agricultural times?
The things I have read are not at all as idyllic. Sarah Hrdy again. She wrote that although meat is in general shared, it is only shared among hunters. Like a kind of insurance system. Hunters who all contribute share the meat that is provided on a certain day. But only hunters are eligible. A woman whose husband dies will not get any meat from such a group, because she never contributes. Hrdy wrote that orphans are often killed in such groups, more or less out of mercy.
One particular group I have actually read about is the Aché of Paraguay. In Ache Life History, Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado reported that child murder was very common: When an adult man died (sometimes also an adult woman), people said he needed company in the next life. They chose a child that no one wanted to provide for to bury alive with him. If someone rose and grabbed the child and promised to take care of it, no child would be sacrificed with the deceased man. If no one volunteered, the child would be killed. 75 percent of the children killed this way were girls.
In general, the Aché reported they resented orphans because they always begged for food from people who didn't want to provide it to them.
Thinking of tribal life as idyllic is probably a mistake. In some senses it may have been, but they also had plenty of challenges and certainly lots of traditions and taboos that would seem horrifying to us today.
But we should also keep in mind that almost all the ethnographic records we have of hunter-gatherers, are from societies pushed by civilization to the most remote or barren locations. We can only conjecture how tribal living would have been when they were able to live in the areas most fertile and rich.
But to follow up on the above quote, hunters were rarely the main source of food for the children:
> "It is grandmothers or older adult women, among the Hadza at least, who provide regular food and care to postweaning children because they collect tubers and other high-caloric food items for their grandchildren" - "Hunter-Gathererer Childhoods" page 176
>We can only conjecture how tribal living would have been when they were able to live in the areas most fertile and rich.
Sadly, I think that one reason why hunter-gatherers appear so equal, is that small groups pushed into marginal lands become equal by necessity: If the land produces no surplus to what is required to keep people alive, there is no room for a kleptocratic class.
There was one whole continent of hunter-gatherers: Australia. Too few anthropologists had the time to study them before things changed. But one who did, Carl Lumholz, described women as the slaves of men. Women provided most of the food, while the men hunted mostly for the sport of it. Women's food provision didn't make the free and powerful. Men dominated them through physical violence. Older men, from about age 30, monopolized younger females from about age 12, and the girls and women themselves had very little say in the matter. Leaving a husband carried the death penalty, if he thought so.
I have yet to hear about any native Australian society where women were free and equal and made their own reproductive decisions.
While there has clearly been many male dominated societies, more egalitarian societies do seem to have been common as well. But the influence of early explorers, predominantly missionaries and traders with Christian values, was quick to introduce western values and expectations of male dominance.
I can recommend "The Myth of Male Dominance" by Eleanor Leacock, that explores this in depth. You can find the first few chapters online here: https://sexgendersoc.wordpress.com/group-book-project/
She actually specifically mentions how the male bias of the early explorers have made reports on Australian culture overrepresent the degree of male dominance:
> "one must check for distortions in the ethnography of a group. For example, take men "exchanging" women in Australia. Older men may spend a great deal of time talking about such exchange (as to Hart and Pilling), but older women are also involved; sons are married off by elders as well; and the young people do have ways of refusing if they are dead set against the marriage. Furthermore, marriage is not that big a deal anyway, since divorce is easy, and sexual exclusiveness a foreign concept. To talk of "power" by men over women in such instances, as if it were the power of a Victorian father to consign his daughter for a life of personal servitude to a man she dislikes, is ethnocentric distortion." page 24
The Montagnais had an interesting society. Very worth reading up on. An egalitarian and non-violent society that rejected any authority and hierarchy. Just as a husband didn't own his wife and couldn't tell her to not have lovers, parents wouldn't order their kids around either. One of the biggest challenges for the Jesuits was that the natives wouldn't allow them to use corporal punishment on the children. How was they supposed to teach them Christian values without it? ;)
Partible paternity is a fascinating concept. It was not just about having the support of multiple fathers, it was also about believing that the child was literally composed of the essence of all its fathers. So if a mother wanted the best for her child, she would seek out the men with the characteristics she wanted for her child (good hunter, most funny, great toolmaker...) so they could all contribute to who the child would become. If you like reading anthropology I can recommend "Cultures of Multiple Fathers" which surveys a lot of cultures with belief in partible paternity.
Another example is the Mangala from the South Pacific Ocean, who believed that pregnancy was caused by a woman sleeping continuously with the same man, so parents urged their daughters to sleep with many different men (Human Sexual Behavior, Variations in The Ethnographic Spectrum - Marshall, Donald S).
I guess the main lesson here is that our forefathers only had a very vague understanding of biology and conception, and it sometimes (often?) led to cultural mores around sexuality very different to what we have today.
I want to read that multiple fathers book!
In Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy stressed the irreliable nature male provision in some societies as a motive for women to be more promiscuousis. She wrote that when men couldn't be counted on as providers for their children, women try more short term and more promiscuous strategies. Since men often acted opportunistically and gave their meat to another woman they hoped to recruit as a new lover, women needed to spread their risks too. Sarah Hrdy wrote that current African American women are much in the same situation: Since many of them can't hope for one man to stick around until his child grows up, they instead work on finding a series of providers since that it better than no provider.
If you've not read Nancy Friday's collections of female sexual fantasies, starting with MY SECRET GARDEN, you should... they are consistent with the "ambivalence" hypothesis. Most guys should read them, too, in my view, because I don't think most guys understand women (https://theredquest.substack.com/p/the-best-books-for-learning-game).
Fear of STIs probably still inhibits a lot of sexual expression and it will be interesting to see where things go when we get effective STI vaccines.
We are already getting effective weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, and if people are more attractive (less fat) we may see more people wanting to have sex with more people.
Hm, I haven't read that one. I will.
Your blog is making me seriously disillusioned. How disillusioned should I be? Do you have any idea about how common your views on gender relations are among younger people? Do you know any research about it? Have you made any very approximate estimate of your own?
Respectively: Slightly to moderately disillusioned, somewhat (although not super) common, and I don't know how to estimate the commonness. A fair number of teen guys appear to like Andrew Tate right now, despite him being a clown and a fool, which may indicate that there's something not going right with the mainstream educational views on sex and gender.
There seems to have been a larger seduction-skills scene in the 2006 - 2015 time period, but that mostly seems to have gone away. Whether that makes you more disillusioned or less is up to you.
The number of guys who actively study and consciously improve their seduction skills appears to be small, FWIW: https://theredquest.substack.com/p/most-guys-dont-care-much-about-getting-laid-i-hypothesize.
The free book I wrote about consensual non-monogamy hasn't exactly been a rocket ship, so I suspect that doing CNM hasn't and isn't likely to prove popular in the short term. On the other hand, compared to two or three decades ago, it's much more popular, so the timeframe in question might matter.
>Whether that makes you more disillusioned or less is up to you.
I'm not sure, actually. But I can always find something to get disillusioned with.
I read Freddie DeBoer's book about writing a book and he said it is nigh on impossible to market anything without a literary agent. So maybe you just lack a literary agent.
Do you have any idea about any female counterpart to your movement? If I were on the market, I wouldn't like the prospect of men "gaming" me. Do you know of any corresponding attempts of organizing from females who want dating to be effective from their perspective?
Oh, it's a book that no conventional publisher would touch, ever. It's way too incendiary. Fortunately we live in a world of Substack and Amazon. I've learned a lot from self-published books in this field, however rough many of those books are, and however crazy some of their writers are.
Re: female counterparts, women, particularly on the younger side, tend to have challenges different than guys: for a lot of women, the game is about getting commitment from a higher-status guy. For a lot of guys, it's about getting with a woman at all (a topic explored in more detail at https://theredquest.substack.com/p/game-or-relationship-levels-different-for-men-and-women ... apologies for the bunch of links, but one virtue of having written a lot is the ability to point at that writing, instead of leaving a trail of incomplete, half-baked thoughts).
So the corresponding female issues appear almost everywhere: back in the day, magazines like Cosmo. Today, female dating podcasts, romance novels, etc.
More women appear to be interested in aspects of consensual non-monogamy than were 15 or 20 years ago, which is a change. Women often appear to have a harder time getting guys to do CNM with them than guys do (I've heard a lot of stories along these lines). Lots of guys hear CNM and sex parties and think, "Rad, I get to f**k all the time and this is great." Then they see the reality of what CNM is, and they want to monopolize the girl, and the girl isn't interested in that, and she has problems.
The problem is sorting among those books to get to the well-written and relevant stuff.
I like your links. I mean, now that I'm getting used to being disillusioned. They are unusually well-written. I think I'm starting to see a pattern in them: The only really important difference of opinion I can see between you and a fabulously normal person like me is that you seem to see the possibility of companionship between men and women as non-existent. In your writing, the main point of spending time together for males and females is sensual pleasure. From that follows that every male and female should always be trying to get the most sensual pleasure possible through continual self-improvement and through being prepared to switch partners whenever a better deal is around the corner.
I disagree because I believe companionship is much more important than sex. In fact, I think the most important purpose of sex for modern humans is to enhance companionship. I even have a link about it: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/make-sex-useful-again
If people don't seem very interested in increasing their ability to get laid, it could be because they value companionship even higher.
I think there's a reason not many men are into seduction "gaming". Seduction, almost by definition, means sexual (and emotional) manipulation. A man has to be limited in his capacity for empathy if he can regard seduction and the resulting sex as a legitimate and ethical end in itself. I would even say men who can do that with a clear conscience are on the sociopathic spectrum. Even if the number of male sociopaths is as low as 2%, and I've seen higher numbers, they would be hugely over-represented among men aggressively manipulating women. Add another--what?--5% or 10% or even 25% who have weak empathy, and you get plenty of men who are perfectly happy with a love 'em and leave 'em strategy. A man (or woman) who has any moral sense would not consider manipulation of any other human being for purely selfish ends as an acceptable way to interact with others. That's no less true for sex than any other human interaction. BTW, I gave my daughter Neil Strauss's book "The Game" when she was a teenager precisely because I wanted her to know there were men out there willing to use aggressive manipulation to get girls into bed.
With almost any book, you can tell whether it's well written within a few minutes, and whether it's likely to be useful or interesting within half an hour. "Or interesting" is important because fiction and poetry often isn't "useful." Feedback from readers so far appears to indicate that https://theredquest.substack.com/p/free-book is useful to many of them.
I do like companionship with women... but I really like sex, too. The sex makes the companionship better. Couples who swap tend to have better companionship, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/couple-to-couple-dating-mechanics-and-keeping-a-texting-roster-for-sex-clubs
I'd not say sensual pleasure is *it* for me, but it's a big component, and most guys aren't good at making it happen, and have a severe deficit of it in their lives. Most women have a shortage of attractive, high-status men of the sort they'd like to experience sensual and other pleasures with. Red Quest and similar works help to reduce this gap. The burden of performance is most often on the guy. I'd be happy for things to be otherwise but haven't seen any real movement in that direction, ever.
For most men, it's challenging to learn how to competently and consistently unlock women. School ranges from "unhelpful" to "counterproductive" in this regard.
Different people also want different things at different times.
So 95% right makes for a less interesting read, but there's still something I can comment on:
"because it evolved in at least two different species. Human female sexual desire is probably so old, that parts of it evolved in our pre-human ancestors."
OK, yes. But then, why is male sexuality not ambivalent? To explain the difference, one really needs to focus on causes that *separate* the sexes. So how did humans live, as pseudo chimps and as foragers? Males have been traditionally exposed to much greater danger from hunting, fighting, and raiding. Obviously cowardly or anxious males who panicked or fled in the face of danger faced ostracism and punishment from their fellow tribesmen, and this over time this would create selective pressure on males for reduced anxiety and heightened physical bravery. Females faced different pressures; they are physically weaker than males, and highly vulnerable during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Additionally, females were the primary caregivers to their offspring. They needed to connect emotionally with them to understand their needs and persevere through long nights of tears and tantrums without harming their children, and those who didn't notice threats might fail to protect their offspring, resulting in selective pressure in favor of sensitivity for females.
Today the primary psychological sex difference between men and women (approaching 1 full SD) is on Emotionality, a broad trait relating directly to these differences:
http://hexaco.org/scaledescriptions
"Persons with very high scores on the Emotionality scale experience fear of physical dangers, experience anxiety in response to life's stresses, feel a need for emotional support from others, and feel empathy and sentimental attachments with others. Conversely, persons with very low scores on this scale are not deterred by the prospect of physical harm, feel little worry even in stressful situations, have little need to share their concerns with others, and feel emotionally detached from others."
Unsurprisingly, this has downstream consequences on sexuality, such that (for example) people high in Emotionality are less likely to endorse sexual activity without emotional attachment. (Ashton, M. C.; Lee, K. (2008). "The prediction of Honesty–Humility-related criteria by the HEXACO and Five-Factor Models of personality". Journal of Research in Personality. 42 (5): 1216)
In other words, this post could have just been titled "The Ambivalent Nature of Female," because Emotionality makes the ladies naturally ambivalent about everything. As an adolescent, a girl I knew was always talking about ambivalence as her baseline emotional state. My first fiancee was ambivalent enough that she never became Mrs. Apple Pie. My sense is that men sort of have to learn that ladies who get angry at you want to get close to you, because even though they're angry, they then become anxious about this, and *then* want reassurance *as* they yell at you. In my experience, this is really not common with the menfolk. If some dude is ambivalent about anything, he's prolly going through some serious s*** right now and needs to be left alone. Don't worry about it. Provided that he doesn't successfully commit suicide with a firearm, you'll see him again a week later. You may then ask him about it, and he'll be like, "Yeah, whatever."
I have another, related, text in the pipeline, called "Woman is the most perverted animal on earth". Maybe I should have merged it with this text in order to make it clearer. Because that was what I tried to say: females are perverts. I think human males are perverts too. Compared to all other animals, humans are hyper-perverts, because we can get away with it to a certain extent while more instinct-driven animals can't. Until recently, females could get away with it better than males.
I think male sexuality tends to be more functional than female sexuality. Men enjoy casual sex more. That's a no-brainer. But actually, men seem to function better in committed relationships too. For men a good relationship is strongly positively related to good sex. For women, the two phenomena are much less related. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1247626. That is, a good relation doesn't automatically lead to good sex for women. Women also become less interested in sex the longer a relationship lasts, while men do not lose interest in sex from being in a relationship, at least not young men. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12049023/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22268980
40% right and extremely interesting; maybe with a clear definition for "pervert" as high as 60% right
60 % right? Not bad! I will strive for that number.
Concerning emotionality, I don't deny that females are more emotional than males. But I don't think there is any particular link between emotionality and sexual inhibition. I can use my current favorite example Aella. I think Aella seem to be rather low in emotionality. Not unlike myself. Still Aella is convinced that everyone wants to have sex with an STI-free backpacker given enough time, while I am equally convinced that every human being, however STI-free, will always gross me out a tiny bit if I don't get a large chunk of time to get used to him.
From my limited experience of people I would almost claim the opposite. I know at least one highly emotional woman who had a rather wild sexual life with different more or less unknown partners in her 20ies. But no, I don't believe in there is a link. Being emotional and being shy/easily disgusted are different things.
I dunno, doesn't "Sawed, planed, and sanded thinking" seem closer to 90%?
> But no, I don't believe in there is a link. Being emotional and
> being shy/easily disgusted are different things.
Emotionality and Extroversion/Introversion are orthogonal traits. Nonetheless, Disgust sensitivity does correlate modestly with Emotionality. Check here for a typical study on disgust as it relates to personality: https://psyarxiv.com/dymqk/download/?format=pdf Or also here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54e0f3f4e4b093f6b2b491a0/t/54f7044ae4b0aff87aee451f/1425474634118/Tybur+De+Vries+HEXACO+TDDS.pdf
Plus this: Personality and sexuality (this popped up browsing for disgust) at https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-84371-001
And my favorite: Smart teens don't have sex much (or kiss much either) at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X99000610
> Aella is convinced that everyone wants to have sex...
> every human being... will always gross me out a tiny bit
> ... I know at least one highly emotional woman who had
> a rather wild sexual life
So n = 3? Well if we're interested, we can easily invoke differences in Extraversion and Honesty-Humility, as well as mind-bending quantities of LSD and traumatic childhood experiences experienced by at least a third of the sample. But if you don't mind problems from cherry-picked samples, you might manage to reach n = 5 if you include:
* https://becauseimawhore.wordpress.com/
* https://maggiemcneill.com/
> I dunno, doesn't "Sawed, planed, and sanded thinking" seem closer to 90%?
That motto is far too ambitious, so we dropped it quite a while ago.
Especially "sanded" sounds ridiculously overambitious.
> n=3
I think that in order to find answers, we first need to ask questions. And I think the question "why do people choose not to have sex with people they find attractive" is a question that is very little asked. We have no idea if people who are easily disgusted like casual sex less, for example. As far as I know, no one asked people about their emotional reluctance to have casual sex and made them take a personality test at the same time.
Three anecdotes doesn't make up a study. But three anecdotes is a very small beginning to start formulating the questions for something that could eventually become a study.
And thank you for the links. As a rule I read every book I find by people in the sex trade, so I will get that Maggie McNeil book too.