Sex With Strangers and Other Lies from Captain Obvious

A new study in Archives of Sexual Behavior claims men are more likely to accept sexual propositions from women unknown to them than women are to do the same with strange men. The author is Nicolas Guéguen, a French social psychologist.

In truth, however, it may be helpful to know that Guéguen is the secret identity of that intrepid masked crusader Captain Obvious! Endowed with superpowers by the ancient Talking Codpiece of It’s In Our Genes and the Butt Plug of It’s Not Our Fault! Captain Obvious titillates news reporters with tales of anonymous sex that isn’t anonymous sex, and brings about the comforting lies of unity in human behavior! In short, his superpower is to tempt other humans into believing the truth about sex is damned simple.

In fact, the whole thing seems to boil down to this stunning pronouncement from Guéguen:

“Men are apparently more eager for sexual activity than women are.”

In Guéguen’s study, as is typical for “sex studies,” an enforcement of heteronormative views about men and women, reifying concepts that “everybody knows” and reiterating a gender binary so clearly delineated that it seems like Captain Obvious is holding out a pair of biological shackles. Is it any wonder that the press is having a gender-essentialism party?

I ran across this grotesque study in a piece from the Times of India, but it’s appeared in a wide variety of mainstream sites that quote the Daily Star as the source. It’s like watching a train wreck. The revolting piece of anti-science is purported in the press to have shown, specifically, that men are more likely to have sex with a female stranger if she approaches them in the street than women are to have sex with a male stranger if he approaches them in the street:

In an experiment, the scientists found that when men were approached by gorgeous female strangers in the street, 97 per cent agreed to go back to their apartments while 83 per cent said yes to instant sex, the Daily Star reported.

But wait! If a hot chick’s doing the asking, then that ups her chances!

However, when average-looking girls asked the question, 80 per cent of blokes agreed to go back for a drink while 60 per cent immediately agreed to a romp.

[Link.]

If you’re not saying “Wha-ha!?!” then I would suggest your sex-nerd pencils may need a little sharpening.

Let me clarify why I believe this to be the gospel of Captain Obvious. It’s not so much that I argue with whether the results are true; I neither concede nor question that men tend to to fuck around more than women. Nor do I question whether “attractive” women who proposition strangers are more likely to attain success.

Personally, I don’t give a damn; to me, there are far more interesting ways to look at fidelity, infidelity, casual sex, sex with strangers, and sexual behavior in general than setting up people to be propositioned on a street corner in what must be conditions that are either painfully controlled or unethical.

No, In studies like these, what I question first (and most importantly) is their value. Who benefits from knowing this shit? Is science really learning anything by producing this research, or is it just trying to take sexual presumptions and transport them into the realm of science?

But even if the study is corrupt in its intention, does it still show a demonstrated human behavior? Not in my view. Real problems show up once I start asking questions about how “scientists” got these garbage results. Like far too many newspaper-friendly “scientific studies” about sexual behavior, it’s not just questionable whether the study benefits anybody. It’s questionable whether it demonstrates anything at all.

By all indications, this looks like classic and infectious shit-science.

For instance: “Average-looking?” “Gorgeous?” Those are subjective terms — just one of several ways in which this study, as reported, looks wonky as hell. But it gets worse from there. Mainstream news sources do not provide actual citations, preferring to, at best, quote a journal name, sometimes incorrectly. Since Guéguen’s own CV does not list the article, all I get is this article in which Guéguen seems to have done the study in The Netherlands. The citation, annoyingly, like many behavioral sciences papers, is undated, because, you know, everybody who’s anybody has access to a university computer…everybody, that is, except news reporters. Whether this article is the right one, I haven’t the foggiest idea, but it’s from March, 2011.

Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers have been found in previous studies conducted in the United States. However, this effect has never been replicated in another culture, and the impact of the attractiveness of the solicitor remains in question. An experiment was conducted in France in which male and female confederates of average versus high attractiveness approached potential partners of the opposite sex (120 males and 120 females) and asked them: “Will you come to my apartment to have a drink?” or “Would you go to bed with me?” The great majority of the men were willing to have a sexual liaison with a woman, especially when she was physically attractive. Women were more disinclined to have a drink, and none but one accepted the male’s sexual request. Such results confirm that men are apparently more eager for sexual activity than women are. (Guéguen, Nicolas, Effects of Solicitor Sex and Attractiveness on Receptivity to Sexual Offers: A Field Study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, March 3, 2011.)

[Link.]

The mainstream press has been reporting this shit as showing that “scientists claim” that men are more likely to fuck around than women are, and that if an “attractive” female stranger solicits sex from a male stranger, she’s more likely to get a “yes” than an unattractive one. But right in the abstract of Guéguen’s study, whether this one or an earlier one, it states that the sole purpose of this study is to take the results of previous studies that “showed something” in the United States, and attempt to “replicate” them in another culture…the Netherlands. If that’s the study the press is reporting, they’re six months late to the party.

But if September’s press orgy is based on a later study of the same behaviors with the same methodlogy by the same scientist published in the same journal, then Archives of Sexual Behavior is milking the same half-hard prong.

If that’s the case, then…seriously, that’s what Archives of Sexual Behavior feels is the state of the art as far as sexual research goes? That’s pretty pathetic. Archives, according to Wikipedia, has a 2009 “impact factor” that makes its scientific influence “9th out of 93 in the Clinical Psychology category and first out of 68 in the category Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.” And this is what a publication that influential in the field feels is important enough to obsess over? Whether men are more likely to respond to a stranger’s proposition on the street than women, and more likely to respond if it’s an “attractive” woman?

Guéguen, for his part, appears to be a prince among men, concerned primarily with “testing” things like whether men are really grumpier than women, better-looking waitresses get better tips, and Barry White songs really do make women horny. The agenda seems obvious to me: “People always say X is true; how can I reduce it to data?” And, to no one’s surprise, Guéguen’s “findings” seem to “prove” what “everyone” has “always figured” about who gets laid, when, why, how, and by whom.

To me, this is not sexology. This is gender norm enforcement. A survey of journal articles on which Guéguen is listed as author or coauthor yields a curious craving on his part to cook male-female behavior down to its essentialist elements. Cruising, admittedly, only the abstracts (because why would I want to pay $36.95 for a full-text article that will only piss me off?), I find Guéguen’s work to be absent anything other than reiterating or undermining mind-bendingly mainstream, bland, vapid, content-free, binary-normative and heteronormative prejudices about male-female sexual and courtship behavior:

The receptivity of women to courtship solicitation across the menstrual cycle: A field experiment. (Biological Psychology, 80:3, March 2009, Pages 321-324.)

Menstrual cycle phases and female receptivity to a courtship solicitation: an evaluation in a nightclub. (Evolution and Human Behavior, 30:5, September 2009, Pages 351-355.)

Determinants and consequences of female attractiveness and sexiness: realistic tests with restaurant waitresses. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 38:5, Pages 737-745.)

‘Love is in the air’: Effects of songs with romantic lyrics on compliance with a courtship request. (Psychology of Music, 38:3, July 2010, Pages 303-307.)

Waitresses’ facial cosmetics and tipping: A field experiment. (International Journal of Hospitality Management, 29:1, March 2010, Pages 188-190.)

Hitchhiking women’s hair color. (Perceptual and Motor Skills: Volume 109 (issue # blank), pp. 941-948.)

Here’s a complete Google translation into English of the good doctor’s publications. More horrors await!

If you agree with me that it’s not the job of social psychology to enforce essentialist gender binaries and provide fuel for sexual partners to criticize each other and/or excuse their own bad behavior, perhaps you agree with me that Guéguen seems to spend an awful lot of time trying to put into numeric terms just how likely a man is to get a woman into bed, and how much money a woman is likely to get for batting her eyelashes. Does that seem reductionist to anyone?

Guéguen’s doctorate, incidentally, is in Social Psychology, but his undergraduate degree is in Computer Engineering. Since I’m fairly obsessed myself with the ways in which human interactions can be reduced to data (and I couldn’t engineer a computer if it bit me on the ass), I won’t make any glib comments about applying the models of computer engineering to human behavior. But Guéguen’s specialty certainly doesn’t seem to be a nuanced view of individual human mating choices. It’s reducing human behavior to “tendencies.” These tendencies are then reported in the press not so much as tendencies — which “tend” to get lost in mainstream news articles on complex scientific topics — especially when it comes to sex. They’re reported as fact…as “science has shown,” just like every other dumbass thing that Joe and Jane Average wants to believe about human sexual behavior.

…Or that news reporters want to believe that the non-existent yet constantly-arguing Average Family want to believe…so that said reporters can help them believe it all over again, instead of doing their jobs and asking hard questions about whether human knowledge of behavioral science and sex is being helped or hindered by having people stand on a street corner and get propositioned for sex.

In short, I ask this:

What f$#*!#*#!ing point could there possibly be in reiterating, as scientific findings, the “conventional wisdom” of sexual behavior? In most social sciences fields, it’s common to test established tenets about how social structures function. But when it comes to sex, and specifically to male-vs-female, why do the studies reported in the press always seem to reinforce what the majority of people think they “already know” about men and women? Even more to the point, why do most studies reported in the mainstream press seem to seek out the difference between “male” and “female,” as if by teasing out this catastrophic and potentially apocalyptic divergence they are addressing a question more urgent and centrally human than, say, famine, war, or pestilence?

The answer, of course, is that “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” generalizations get headlines. Throw in a little sex with strangers — something that’s as titillating a sexual fantasy to women as it is to men — and you’ve got a guaranteed eyeball-sucker. But all this repetition of the same tired tropes is in itself repeating the maxim that far too many men and women of all orientations live their lives by: “Men and women are fantastically different, and their behavior is — maybe — irreconcilable.” The “dopamine squirt” the self-satisfied repetition of this belief by conjuring some new “scientific” proof of it, I submit, does far more harm than good.

If there’s a gender plague, it’s in the attempt to reduce men and women not only to merely two genders, but to a set of behaviors that can be explained by science. It may be sexier to “explain why” people do things than to rely on descriptive studies of individual “real world” experience. It’s not just true, to my mind, that explaining sexual behavior isn’t understanding it. I would assert that explaining sexual behavior, in the wrong context, defeats any chance of ever understanding it on a human level.

People aren’t just their genders and they aren’t just numbers. Trying to boil humans down to a set of engineered numbers shows a profound disrespect for human experience and a contempt for what I consider to be the real lessons offered by the disciplines of psychology and sexology.

Photo from NuDolls (hot gallery here).