I mean, it's like, we come from the same planet and similiar cultures and everything.
After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate for mostly the same motivations.
I mean, who would have guessed that the number one reason people have sex is "Because I was attracted to the person."
Baffling, really.
What attractiveness means to different people (no matter the gender) varies quite a bit, which is why some people would argue that the title is a misnomer. I'd argue, in fact, that the title's right on. A lot of women, growing up, hear that it makes us better people to be attracted to people primarily based on how "good" they are, and men are told it's better to be attracted to people based on how "hot" the person is (socially determined standards of "attractive" of course). I think both genders factor in personality and looks, and those things influence each other to a huge degree, so sure, you're going to bed with someone cause you're attracted to them: what attraction is, what is means, varies wildly from person to person (which is why even those of us who are socially deemed "unattractive" by the media at large are still having lots of hot sex).
There were social things that were pretty unsurprising, too, like the fact that women were more likely to have sex to "please a partner" (or to say they wanted to have sex to please a partner: absolutely, there's patriarchy and coersion and etc. to deal with, but I think men are more likely to omit this or pretend it's something else, or even just more likely to refuse to have sex if they don't feel like it because of privilige, I think).
The aggrevating thing about this "study" was that they left out all the good parts. Like, women rank "wanted to give sexual partner a sexually trasmitted disease" at the bottom of their list of reasons why they have sex, but they don't say where men ranked this one (!). Why the omisson? Because it ranked #2 or because it ranked second to last? And then there's this tantalizing quote at the end:
“Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I found that there should be some added,” Meston said.
Like what? What was missing? What were the top things people wrote in? And where's a copy of the comprehensive list of 237?
Why does the AP always leave out the most interesting parts and make the huge "news" story about the "well duh" part?
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Men & Women: Not So Different
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