….and is usually released on Sunday nights.
That’s my new super catchy slogan for what is now going to be every Monday episode! That’s right, slightly new format for the show, and you’ll be able to expect it on every Monday now! I’m very excited for the change and I think it will make for a better podcast. Here are the links I talked about on this episode:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/22/fear-lies-at-the-heart-of-opposition-to-political-correctness
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:03 — 37.7MB)
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I say just let long interviews be long. Why split them up at all? I just listened to a two and half hour Smackdown on Infants On Thrones. John Dehlin divides his Mormon Stories podcasts into roughly one hour segments then posts all five (or however many) segments at once—makes the whole interview available no matter how long it is—and he’s had some doozies. I’d rather do that than wait for part two.
So there.
First of all I think a better title for that article would be “Guys, Here’s What It’s Like to Be a Middle to Upper Class Educated Woman” at least in terms of it’s mating advice. The problem is that people who write these types of things are writing from within that bubble, and are expressing the opinion that this is how the women they know want to be treated. I don’t believe this is an accurate portrayal of most women. At least not those you’ll find in bars or nightclubs. The ones you’ll find there predominantly dress provocatively because they want their lady parts to be noticed, They like being complimented on those lady parts. And the guys who don’t go home alone are those who notice, and aren’t afraid to make it clear they notice.
I mean obviously if you’re an intelligent well educated women who’s taken women’s studies courses you’re going to want to be noticed, and respected for your intelligence, and when someone comes up to you and says “nice legs”, you’re going to find that creepy, but that’s not, IMO, the majority of women. At least not the majority you’ll find on the traditional mating scene.
I also think they aren’t terribly concerned with being raped or sexually assaulted, because they haven’t learned that that’s something they need to be terribly concerned with. They haven’t been exposed to, what I think are, the highly inflated, 1 in 4 statistics. If you have been you are naturally going to be more fearful.
I found that dating advice article pretty interesting although very simplistic, but its hard to avoid that when talking generalizations. I’m kind of odd and not very sociable, so I don’t feel this way about the dating experiences I have had. I like getting to know what the average person thinks about these issues though. It’s nice to say we should treat everybody equally because we’re more alike than different, but that doesn’t work in situations like this where our differences are important.
One thing wrong about the article is including autism in the dangerous mental illnesses more common in men. I don’t believe it has been proven anywhere that autistic men are more dangerous than non-autistic ones. They are bad with social cues though so I do agree that dating them is more difficult for the average woman to deal with.
I sympathize with feminist who are concerned that female athletes seem to be under appreciated, but sports were invented to show off male prowess, so they draw on skills that the male body is more impressive at. Making sports co-ed would never work out. At least if you want to see more than a few women playing sports. Maybe if we invent new kinds of sports it would make sense. Otherwise, the best way to address this issue is through encouraging more women and young girls to participate in sports and become fans.
I personally think context matters a lot, and found the joke from Real Time funny. I like that language is malleable, so I don’t get prohibiting the use of certain words. Getting upset with people using a word doesn’t address the problem of why they are using the word in that way.
I’ve only been bothered by political correctness when it doesn’t seem worth the effort. A while ago Dan Savage came to speak at my University and a group of activist on campus tried to block him from coming because he has said trans-phobic things. I don’t know what the exact complaint was but it probably had more to do with his use of language (slurs) but still something about the substance of his statements. Dan has apologized for some of the things he has said and has admitted being wrong. He seems very open to discussion to me. I can understand disliking his snarky tone and disagreeing with him on certain issues, as I don’t agree with him all the time, but trying to block him from speaking makes no sense to me. Especially as he would like to side with trans people and comes to colleges to talk about things largely unrelated to trans issues (sex and relationships of all people).
Some articles on the gender differences and similarities
https://theconversation.com/pitting-boys-vs-girls-at-school-wont-close-the-gender-gap-38345
https://theconversation.com/gender-differences-more-fictions-than-fact-11725
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/32/11673.abstract
Hi Thomas!
Firstly, I like the proposed new format and I think if interviews are in two parts then doing them on consecutive Thursdays would be best (and Patrons can get it earlier).
I enjoyed the episode and thought the article was quite interesting (far better than I had expected given that it was written by Max and Miller!), but I had a few thoughts on some points.
On women having different sexual interests: the article mentions that men and women differ in their sexual receptivity, so men are generally willing to have sex with almost any woman and women are so picky that very few will meet their standards. Here I think personal experiences and anecdotes can be very misleading.
The research that the authors allude to in the piece is most likely the Clarke and Hatfield study (http://www2.hawaii.edu/~elaineh/79.pdf) that is regularly quoted in psychology textbooks and pickup artistry books. The basic outline of the study was that an attractive woman approached men and propositioned them for sex, and then an attractive man approached women and propositioned them for sex. Nearly all the men said yes and I think none of the women said yes.
This is an interesting finding but it’s often misinterpreted as giving evidence for a long-term mating strategy, leading people to talk about women having to consider carrying babies so being more receptive to dating rather than one night stands, etc. But even the authors of the original article point out that this isn’t even the most likely explanation in their conclusion.
This is investigated by Conley (http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/21171789) who generally found that the gender differences in the Clarke and Hatfield study were due to women thinking that the kind of men who propositioned them for sex randomly in the street were (basically) creepy. When they controlled for whether the person appeared sexually capable and ruled out safety concerns, the gender difference disappeared.
On “No differences between men and women”: I know you say you’ve heard people say this and I’m happy enough to accept that it’s more than possible that you have (there are a lot of idiots out there), but I don’t think there’s any reason to think it’s a particularly popular view at all. The view is typically referred to as “blank slatism” and I don’t know anyone in any academic field that holds anything close to it, which seems to be my experience with laymen as well. I’ve even spent a fair amount of time hanging out with what some people would consider “extreme” feminists and the idea that there are no differences would either only be used as an obvious hyperbole or it would be met with criticism and links to scientific research if used literally.
With that said, I think at some point you say that there are large differences between men and women, or that they are “largely different” or something to that effect. I’m not sure if you misspoke but that’s certainly not accepted by scientists. The general consensus at the moment is what’s known as the “gender similarities hypothesis” (http://www.wisebrain.org/papers/GenderSimilarities.pdf) which essentially just says that over all the research we have looking at gender differences (on psychological measures) men and women are extremely more alike than different. The differences that are found are relatively rare and usually small in degree. The problem with the public perception is that for a while scientific research was interested in finding differences because it’s more exciting to report a difference than a similarity, so it gave the false impression that men and women were two completely different creatures, when in reality it seems that the impression is just a result of a selection bias.
I’d also point out that often when people say “men and women are equal”, they aren’t referring to things like physical or mental attributes, and instead are referring to something like their intrinsic value or potential. So if we say men and women are equal so shouldn’t be discriminated against by an employer, the claim isn’t that the male and female applicants for a job will be equally qualified and capable, but rather that they are equal in terms of their worth on the basis of their gender (i.e. their gender shouldn’t weigh into the decision). It can still turn out that men are far superior at some job and the claim that men and women are equal won’t be affected at all.
Also, in my experience I find that a lot of the pushback against people who talk about gender differences is because of the *specific* claims of differences that they make, which people think are wrong rather than them reacting to the uncontroversial claim that some differences exist. So what tends to happen is that someone will say something like: “IMen and women are different because evolution made women prefer the colour pink” and when called out they’ll fall back on the idea that they were simply proposing that some differences exist. If you were interested, there’s an excellent book by Cordelia Fine called “Delusions of Gender” where she goes through and looks at a lot of the research on gender differences in great detail, and she’s so rigorous and balanced that even people who disagree with her conclusions will often commend her fair-handed approach.
On co-ed sports: I’m not sure what the author’s point actually was as I don’t think you linked to it or gave enough clues for me to hunt it down, but if I were to offer a bit of a defence, usually the claim is that there are still some differences but that these differences don’t make it impossible for some women to compete with men. For example, people like Dorothy Kamenshek was considered by many baseball players as one of the greatest athletes of her time (of both men and women) and many men’s teams tried to sign her, and even today women are being signed by men’s teams (http://breakingmuscle.com/interviews/tiffany-brooks-blazing-the-way-for-women-in-mens-pro-baseball).
There is obviously currently a gap between men and women athletes but the point to be made is that at least some of this gap is due to the fact that men and women are treated differently, even by their trainers. The argument goes that if you make sports co-ed (which I don’t think requires getting rid of women’s leagues), then women will improve and the gap will lessen. There’s also a societal attitude issue where it might help make it more acceptable for women to be athletes, as currently there is a lot of stigma against it. Extraordinary athletes like Jessica Ennis have mentioned in interviews that they almost dropped out of their sport during their formative years because as teenagers they had to choose between having a “feminine” body and having a muscular body.
On “Why does every society do it then”: You’ll struggle to argue against a sociological explanation for a behavior by suggesting that it’s a cultural universal. This is because in evolutionary psychology we need more evidence than it simply being a cultural universal for us to conclude that that’s the explanation – in fact, it being a cultural universal is simply the minimum possible evidence we need to not rule out an evolutionary explanation. There are a number of universal behaviors which have no evolutionary basis at all, and there are a number of explanations for why they develop – you’d have to be more specific about which ones you were interested in. Generally they come about through a shared environmental variable (also known as a species-specific constraint) where there is some factor present in all environments that produces the same result.
There’s a good article discussing this problem and more (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ldc/GrayEP.pdf), but as a basic example consider the fact that pretty much all cultures and all people eat hot liquid foods from a bowl-shaped container. Why is this? Why don’t we eat soup on a plate? The answer is that there is a shared environmental constraint; that is, if we did that then the liquid would slide off and burn our laps. There are a number of examples more specific and complex than that in the learning literature, so the idea that a cultural universal is evidence of an evolutionary basis is just not true.
On Bill Maher: just to get this out of the way, I can’t stand the guy but each to their own, I guess. With the clip you played, generally I think most people would agree that it’s probably not offensive in itself. As you say, it’s supposed to be playing the part of the bigot who says something stupid so would technically be an example of “punching up”.
I do want to make one point though: there can still be problems with using slurs even if your intention is good. This applies to jokes as well as I don’t believe jokes are inherently any different to any other kind of speech in terms of the effect it can have on people and society. What this means is that Maher might have good intentions for making fun of bigots, but with comedy what tends to happen is that bigots will misunderstand who is being targeted and instead use it to further their own hatred. This happened with Chris Rock and his “n****” jokes, and the same thing could probably be said for one of the recent Southpark episodes where they tried poking fun at the media reporting of Caitlyn Jenner and now everybody quotes them as they harass her.
For me I think freedom of expression entails deciding where and when we as a society deem acceptable to exercise that freedom, and obviously part of that freedom is in having these discussions where we determine what is and isn’t appropriate. I’ve just personally never been convinced by the “it’s a joke!” defence. If we agree that it’s unacceptable to use the Redskins as a name because it’s a slur, I would think that using “f****” would be unacceptable as well, regardless of whether it’s in a joke or not.
Sorry for the long post, there was a lot I wanted to comment on…
On the level of sexual interest of Men compared to Women I don’t think the authors were just referring to something like the Clarke and Hatfield study. They also mentioned info gained from online dating sites. Data from OK cupid is pretty famous (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/). I’m fairly confident that it is true women are more harsh about evaluating the looks of men than vice versa. Simply on looking at level of attractiveness women see the average man as below average in level of attractiveness. In the grand scheme of things though, it is men who shower attention upon the most attractive women. I think this further shows that men care more about appearance than women do, so the first meeting will establish more precisely how attracted a man is to a woman than vice versa.
Now that I think about it, women are similarly harsh about evaluating their own looks. So like women often compare themselves to celebrities they are probably doing the same with men in the OK cupid findings.
On co-ed sports, wouldn’t keeping women’s leagues around just make them even less popular if all the best female players are playing with the men?
Yeah I didn’t touch on the OKC data because I think it’s pretty misleading. There are generally serious confounds and methodological concerns even when it comes to rigorous academic research, and so when we’re talking about a collation of data from dating sites to reach conclusions about relationships in general I’m not sure how relevant or accurate the data is.
The main problem is obviously that there is a huge selection bias in the sample, as I don’t think it would be too controversial to say that the attitudes, personalities, and behaviors of people on dating sites would differ from the general population. It’d be like trying to find robust claims about marriage by polling people at night clubs – you can get good information on what those specific groups think about the topic or what their own relationships are like, but there are problems generalising that to everyone else.
I also didn’t touch on it because I think the Conley paper contradicts the assertion anyway. The study controlled for the sorts of factors that I mention above and it came away concluding that there was little difference between men and women’s choices.
As for women in sport, maybe it would make it less popular but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing as I don’t think there is inherently as big a gap between men and women in athletics as imagined. If the best could join men’s leagues, as we started training women like men, and removed some more barriers, then I think we’d end up with superior top-level co-ed leagues with a significant percentage of women in them and so if women-only sports became less popular it would simply be because it was of a lower quality, in the same way men-only leagues would as well.
I think the OKC stuff is decent survey data. Interpretations of it can be misleading but I would say their population is as representative as any other survey of its size. The kind of people who volunteer for scientific studies are probably as different from the population as those who sign up for dating sites.
I get that the Conley study shows we have a similar thought process when determining our sexual interest. But I still think its relevant to consider that in normal situations women are more critical/cautious of men who approach them. I thought that was the point the article wanted to make and agree with that. I believe most sex differences are behavioral and a reaction to our environment, so I agree that the biological basis for sex differences is small.
I think funding for women’s sports is a bigger problem in the US. But I’m pretty sure women’s sports are rarely profitable while men’s sports bring in a lot of money. Women’s pro league’s have always had trouble with having enough funding here. The huge disparity between how male and female athletes are paid is because of the difference in popularity. So taking the best women out of the women’s league would make this problem worse. We would have to change how athletes get paid to fix this problem.
I’m not as convinced as you that the physical differences between men and women won’t affect athletic performance too much. At this point professional female athletes in male dominated sports play at the level of high school male athletes. The records from the Olympics show that the disparity in performance between male and female athletes has remained fairly constant over time. Performance does depend on training but capacity in strength and speed differ quite a bit between the sexes. Because the professionals are at the very top in performance there just aren’t that many women who can match the best of men. But this is all because we structure so many sports around strength and speed.
You’re right that volunteers for scientific research tends to differ from the average population as well but generally they don’t differ in vitally important ways. For example, when they study dating or relationship beliefs they often won’t advertise specifically for people interested in talking about dating and relationships – otherwise you’ll skew your data in ways that are representative of people who like discussing their opinions on those topics. With the OKC data, however, you’ll largely get people who have tried traditional dating methods and not had as much success as they’d like, and are now trying online dating – that’s a problem for the generalisations the authors want to make.
I agree that it’s important to consider that women have to be cautious of people who approach them, and I think that’s further emphasised by the Conley study. My point in bringing that up was just to highlight the problems with trying to attribute the difference to evolutionary explanations, when that isn’t necessarily the best answer.
I’m not sure there’s much else I can say on our disagreement about the difference. I just think that as social norms are changing and we’re starting to realise that women athletes don’t need to be coddled, we are seeing vast improvements. In many sports for the younger leagues where there aren’t enough girls to make teams, they get thrown in the boys teams and often they fit in fine (and sometimes even shine). When pushed like that we see the improvements, and so I see no problem with the possibility of co-ed sports.
Great tommentary. Love the catchy slogan, it’s almost as good as the Farnsworth quote Heath and Noah use 😉
I’d just like to add my thoughts to your piece on being a woman.
I wonder how much sports the woman who made the comment about coed sports has played. She should maybe talk to top female athletes before shooting off on things like that. It’s not just body weight that matters, men and women have vastly different hormonal balances in their bodies. I’m not sure how that matters, I’m no scientist, but just look at the Olympic records in things like sprinting or jumping. Why aren’t women’s records identical to men’s records? There might be a few sports where women could compete equally but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are none.
On the other hand the traditional bigoted lines that women are more emotional or bad at math/science are just as ridiculous to me. Women may cry more because of biology or that may just be socialization but there is no way in which they are more emotional. What is it when a group of men scream when a man in tights carries a ball across a line? 😉 or how about when a bunch of men riot when their team loses a championship? Heck I’d even argue the much higher incarceration rate of men points to emotional it and impulsively. Men are also more likely to commit suicide, which I would argue is an emotional act. The women are more emotional line seems to just be a line meant to marginalize women and needs to be retired.
Wow, I strongly disagree with that article about what it’s like to be a woman, and I find it unfortunate that people are so willing to accept it and pass it around. “Mating requires cross sex intersight,” really? Finding a romantic partner, or finding a friend for that matter, requires interpersonal insight. Trying to fit every woman you might approach into this small box of what every woman is like is just as terrible of an idea as assuming every woman is just like you. This article does not represent all women, and it paints a really insulting view of all men – a view that my husband and many of the men in my life don’t fit into at all.
I really enjoyed the article Samir linked about how eager we are to find gender differences and create or enforce them when they don’t exist. As humans, I think one of the strongest evolutionary pulls we have is to fit in with our peers. Even today, to hold different beliefs or have different behaviors from those around you often means you risk being outcast, bullied, harassed, or in extreme cases you risk violence and death. We are a species so strongly affected by culture and the people around us that I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to completely figure out what’s nurture and what’s nature. Here’s a paragraph from the article that demonstrates this problem:
“Go to a sports bar in any major city or college town on game day, and invariably you will run into a crew of gorgeous young women in skin-tight, cutoff referee outfits or school jerseys walking around, selling shot specials or beer buckets. This is how everything, not just liquor, is sold to men—hand tools, shampoo, Doritos, porn, cars. All of them shamelessly use beautiful, scantily clad women with big boobs, tight asses and long legs as the vehicles to deliver their message. And it works.”
Actually, it doesn’t work. One of the first things I learned from my marketing class in college was that sex doesn’t sell. It gets attention, sure, but people are much more likely to forget what product you were advertising and not likely to actually buy it. Just look up “sex sells myth” or something similar and you’ll find many articles and studies refuting it. My husband often expresses frustration at how insulting it is to have media constantly treat him and other men as if they are sex craved and will do anything just for a look at women, and I’ve heard many other men complain about it as well. It doesn’t matter that sex doesn’t actually sell, or that it actively drives away men like my husband, advertisers continue to use it because it’s easy and works well enough. It’s considered part of our culture. It becomes a self-perpetuating idea. Women see themselves more negatively because of it, and men see women more negatively as well.
I also don’t agree that women in general are physically intimidated by men. Sure, on average men are bigger and stronger than women, but the overlap is much much larger than the difference. Should smaller women be more intimidated than larger women? Should small men also be intimidated by large women? I’m a little tall for a woman, and all of the men who have attempted to assault me have been about my size or smaller. Even if they had been bigger, I wasn’t intimidated by their strength, I was intimidated by their intent. In our culture, women are strongly socialized to say yes or carefully deflect in an acceptable way. Because of this, it was very intimidating to have to directly or physically say no to men who were trying to inappropriately touch me without my consent. Today’s episode of the Savage Lovecast actually had an incredible rant about this. A woman got assaulted by a stripper she hired, and was basically calling to find out if she actually got assaulted, and if so what she should do. Dan pointed out how fucked up it is that not only was she trying not to hurt the stripper’s feelings when she told him to stop, not only was she confused about whether or not she was even assaulted, but she also had to call in and ask a man what to do. He wasn’t blaming her at all, because this is the shit our culture teaches us to do.
Finally I was completely taken aback by the idea that men want to have sex with “well over 70%” of the women they see in public. I didn’t think this describes most of the men I know at all. I mean god, at least where I live, I don’t think more than 50% of the people I see in public are even remotely trying to look attractive. I talked to my husband about it, and he was completely disgusted by the idea. Now, maybe my husband is an extreme outlier here, but I don’t know that that’s the case. Again, I think this is something very largely affected by culture. My husband recounted the peer pressure he got as a teenager: One boy would start talking about how hot some girl was, and then encourage everyone else to give their opinion on who was the hottest and who they’d have sex with. My husband would say none of them, because he didn’t know any of the girls and didn’t want to have sex with strangers. He quickly learned to avoid these situations so he wouldn’t start getting bullied for being gay. Meanwhile in my peer group, any girls who were having sex were shamed, and it was considered pretty offensive or slutty to hit on guys in public. I’m not saying our experiences are normal or anything, but it’s pretty typical that boys and girls separate themselves and create their own social groups between the ages of 6 and 15 or so. A lot of development happens during that time, and I think a lot of the differences between the sexes are created or magnified then. Sure, men are probably predisposed to be more aggressive, more sexual than women, but it’s nearly impossible to tell how much is there to start with. Like height differences, I think there is so much of an overlap between the sexes that it doesn’t make sense to make such a big deal about the small average difference.
To back this up with a little science, first there’s the common joke in sex surveys that women say they have had sex with 3-4 men in their lives on average, while men say 6-7 women. Someone is lying here, and it’s probably everyone. As a man it’s accepted, expected even, that you have sex with as many women as you can, while it’s completely opposite as a woman. Meanwhile, more studies are showing that there’s a smaller or nonexistent gap between the number of men and women who are interested in casual sex and sex in general.
I know you’ve kind of scoffed in the past about using culture as an explanation for everything. However, it really does account for a large portion of how we act every day. I mean, just think about how much of an effect religion has on people. I think culture does the same thing, but its effect is much more subtle and controlling. Definitely the hardest decisions I have had to make, the decisions I still struggle with today are the ones where I chose my happiness over societal expectations. I think the really big deal with all of this is we can change culture. People are slowly becoming less religious over time, and less racist, less sexist, less homophobic. All of these things are cultural. It’s obviously possible to overcome or subvert biological drives – birth rates are dropping as well, after all – but I think it’s a harmful, defeatist attitude to say that men are just always that different from women when we don’t yet have the evidence to back it up. Maybe someday, we will be able to say that X% of men’s aggression or whatever comes from testosterone and only hormone therapy or other extremes can make up the difference. Until then, I think it’s important to emphasize the large majority of things men and women have in common, and to celebrate the large amount of diversity within groups of men and women instead of enlarging the differences with the Women are from Venus attitude.
For many years I worked in the environs of government agencies and military contractors. The engineers and managers I worked with were HEAVILY skewed toward the male gender and a very high percentage were ex-military. In a division with 280 people, there might be 4, 5 or 6 democrats; the rest rest were republicans, ranging from Goldwater republicans in the early days to mouth-breathing, cross-eyed Tea Bugger republicans more recently.
In this group (the only fair sized sample I have any experience with) I think that guys being able to get it up for 70% of the women they encountered would be conservative. It wouldn’t surprise me if the numbers were closer to 90%—just for this specific crowd, mind you. These people weren’t necessarily limited to being sexually attracted to human females, either. There were a considerable number of inanimate candidates as well, as long as they were gender appropriate, that is, having a cavity rather than protuberance.
I got teased when we’d go out of town on business and these guys, off the leash for a few days, would head directly for the topless bars. I’ve never liked strip joints and I’d get a lot of, “Wassamatta? Don’ you like girls?” To which I would reply, “Which girl are we talking about?” I’ve always been heterosexual and have only ever had sex with women, but it mattered to me—a lot—which woman. To these guys, it didn’t. They operated on the level of a bull placed in a pen with a cow in heat—it was going to happen. And they were proud of their supposedly insatiable libidos; they wer REAL men.
So the point of that rant is that I think it matters a lot which crowd you’re taking about. I doubt the engineering staff at a place like Google behaves like my colleagues in the military/industrial complex—or at least not as much like them.
I’m just sayin’ . . .
Exactly. I’m a structural engineer, so I’m one of a few women in our bureau. I have not experienced any sexual harassment or even the slightest sexual attention in my office. However, I’ve heard horror stories from some of the women who have had to go out on construction for extended periods. In some groups there’s a huge feedback loop of who can be the “manliest man” and be the rudest to women. In most groups fortunately, that’s not acceptable. It’s all about the local culture – people will act it up or put it away to fit in. Are we all “naturally” more like the stuffy office workers or the rude construction workers? Probably neither, just a varying spectrum in between.
I was just looking up some statistics that got prompted by the 70% thing which I thought you might like to keep in mind when re-evaluating it.
In Canada at least 68% of the population is between 15-65 and the median age is 40.9. Maybe women around your area wear a lot of good makeup, idk. Or perhaps you just don’t keep tabs on how many women you actually ignore. Perhaps you could take a notepad and pencil and some matches and go for a walk one day and take a “yay” or “nay” count just to get a realistic perspective of your own sexuality. The matches are to burn the notebook before your wife sees it of course. ;P
I think it’s also a bit wrong headed to put male sexuality under the proviso of ‘given that they would want to and that there would be no consequences’, while keeping women’s choices realistic and weighted by consequences. Maybe if you were asking women “well would you hump him if you were in the mood and there wasn’t anyone else to choose from and there would be no consequences.” you’d get a different answer, plus you’d have to have a robot asking her to avoid the social consequences of answering anything that could sound remotely ‘slutty’. (Some would argue that promiscuous women aren’t really more sexual in appetite, they’re just more adventurous people) You can’t really get more apples and oranges than the way it was asked.