Is Male Promiscuity All In the Genes?

There was a great hue and cry in August over a study purporting to offer further evidence for the claim that men are more promiscuous than women due to evolutionary reasons.

Evolutionary psychologist David Schmitt presented the results of a study of 16,000 individuals from around the world. Schmitt surveyed the study participants about their sexual preferences, including how many sexual partners they would like to have in the next month and over the next 10 years.

Men, on average, wanted 1.87 sexual partners in the next month and 5.95 over the next 10 years. Women, on average, said they wanted 0.78 sexual partners in the next month and 2.17 in the next 10 years.

Schmitt, with his evolutionary psychologist hat on, argues that this is proof that men’s preference for more sexual partners is therefore universal across cultures and reinforces the evolutionary psychology explanation of male promiscuity as a behavior that maximizes male reproductive fitness. Schmitt told the Washington Post,

This study provides the largest and most comprehensive test yet conducted on whether the sexes differ in the desire for sexual variety. The results are strong and conclusive — the sexes differ, and these differences appear to be universal.

Not so fast say those who believe that this preference may have more to do with differing social and cultural norms for men and women.

In the other corner is Ohio State University psychologist Terri Fisher who has done some fascinating studies of how men and women respond to surveys about sexual behavior differently based on the conditions and type of survey being administered. Here’s how the Washington Post summarizes some of her work,

Because of society’s double standard, Fisher said, women are hesitant to report their true sexual desires. In one study, she asked men and women to report whether they masturbated, watch soft-core pornography or hard-core pornography. Each “yes” got a point. She found, on average, that men scored 2.32 and women 0.89.

BUt she also found that women’s scores changed depending on how confident they were of remaining anonymous. In the study, both men and women had been told to hand their questionnaires to a researcher. But when women were told to deposit their answers in a locked box supervised by a researcher, their average score jumped to 1.53. And when the women took the test alone in a locked room and then deposited their answers in a locked box — ensuring privacy and anonymity — their score shot up further, to 2.04. The men’s answers did not change significantly, indicating they were less concerned about their opinions being discovered.

In an article for Reason magazine, Cathy Young noted that Fisher did, in fact, find anonymity affected men somewhat, but in a slightly different way. Young writes,

For men, the results were virtually the same regardless of the setting in which they answered the questionnaire — except that men reported losing their virginity at an earlier age hen they were not assured of anonymity. In other words, men’s and women’s reports of their sexual behavior are influenced by stereotypical social expectations. Surprise, surprise.

I think Young is correct that there is likely some genetic-based variation between men and women as far as the number of sexual partners that they desire to have, but that, as she puts it, “there is no reason to believe that this legacy is impervious to social change.”

Sources:

Desire and DNA: Is Promiscuity Innate? Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, August 1, 2003.

Look Who’s Cheating. Cathy Young, Reason, August 12, 2003.

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