https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sexual-personalities/201501/women-want-short-term-mates-too
https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1211165240261595136
"sex ratio imbalances on people’s mating strategies..When men are abundant, they shift their energy toward committed long-term relationships and parenting..when women are abundant, they display greater willingness to engage in casual sexual relationships"
https://www.slideshare.net/nehabans84/short-term-mating-strategies
Yet another psychological solution to securing a variety of casual sex partners is men's relaxation of their standards for acceptable partners. High standards for attributes such as age, intelligence, personality, and marital status function to exclude the majority of potential mates from consideration. Relaxed standards ensure the presence of more eligible players.
Women prefer men to be in the 65th percentile in earning capacity for marriage, and drop it to 50th percentile for casual sex
Men prefer women in the 40th percentile in earning capacity for marriage, and drop it to 20th percentile for casual sex onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111
Women prefer men to be in the 60-65th percentile in intelligence for marriage, and drop it to 50th percentile (average IQ) for casual sex
Men prefer women in the 65th percentile in intelligence for marriage, and drop it to 40th percentile for casual sex onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111
College students in the study provided information about the minimum and maximum acceptable ages of a partner for a temporary and permanent sexual relationship. College men accept an age range that is roughly four years wider than women do for a temporary liaison. Men are willing to mate in the short run with members of the opposite sex who are as young as sixteen and as old as twenty-eight, whereas women require men to be at least eighteen but no older than twenty-six. This relaxation of age restrictions by men does not apply to committed mating, for which the minimum age is seventeen and the maximum is twenty-two, whereas for women the minimum age for committed mating is nineteen and the maximum is twenty-five.
Men relax their standards for a wide variety of other characteristics as well. Out of the sixty-seven characteristics nominated as potentially desirable in a casual mate, men in the study express significantly lower standards than the women do on forty-one of the characteristics. For brief encounters, men require a lower level of such assets as charm, athleticism, education, generosity, honesty, independence, kindness, intellectuality, loyalty, sense of humor, sociability, wealth, responsibility, spontaneity, cooperativeness, and emotional stability. Men thus relax their standards in relation to a range of attributes, which helps to solve the problem of gaining access to a variety of sex partners.
When the college students rated sixty-one undesirable characteristics, women rated roughly one-third of them as more undesirable than men did in the context of casual sex. Men have less objection in short-term relations to drawbacks such as mental abuse, violence, bisexuality, dislike by others, excessive drinking, ignorance, lack of education, possessiveness, promiscuity, selfishness, lack of humor, and lack of sensuality. In contrast, men rate only four negative characteristics as significantly more undesirable than women do: a low sex drive, physical unattractiveness, need for commitment, and hairiness. Men clearly relax their standards more than women do for brief sexual encounters.
Relaxed standards, however, are still standards. Indeed, men's standards for sexual affairs reveal a precise strategy to gain sexual access to a variety of partners. Compared with their long-term preferences, men who seek casual sex partners dislike women who are prudish, conservative, or have a low sex drive. In contrast to their long-term preferences, men value sexual experience in a potential temporary sex partner, which reflects a belief that sexually experienced women are more sexually accessible to them than women who are sexually inexperienced. Men abhor promiscuity or indiscriminate sexuality in a potential wife but believe that promiscuity is either neutral or even mildly -desirable in a potential sex partner. Promiscuity, high sex drive, and sexual experience in a woman probably signal an increased likelihood that a man can gain sexual access for the short run. Prudishness and low sex drive, in contrast, signal a difficulty in gaining sexual access and thus interfere with men's short-term sexual strategy.
The distinguishing feature of men's relaxation of standards for a temporary sex partner involves the need for commitment. In contrast to the tremendous positive value of +2.17 that men place on commitment when seeking a marriage partner, men seeking a temporary liaison dislike a woman's seeking a commitment, judging it -1040, or undesirable, in a short-term partner. Furthermore, men are not particularly bothered by a woman's marital status when they evaluate casual sex partners, because a woman's commitment to another man reduces the odds that she will try to extract a commitment from them. These findings confirm that men shift their desires to minimize their investment in a casual mating, providing an additional clue to an evolutionary history in which men sometimes sought casual, uncommitted sex.
For short-term mating, men are more attracted to psychopathic women, who are more open to casual sex #speeddating https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/per.2040
women's bisexuality associated w/ darker Dark Triad traits (mediated by more unrestricted sociosexuality)
...
Another psychological clue to men's strategy of casual sex comes from studies that examine shifts in judgments of attractiveness over the course of an evening at a singles bar. In one study, 137 men and 80 women were approached at nine o'clock, ten thirty, and twelve midnight and asked to rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex in the bar using a lO-point scale. As closing time approached, men viewed women as increasingly attractive. The judgments at nine o'clock were 5.5, but by midnight they had increased to over 6.5. Women's judgments of men's attractiveness also increased over time. But women's ratings overall of the male bar patrons were lower than men's ratings of women. Women rate the men at the bar as just below the average of 5.0 at nine o'clock, increasing near the midnight closing time to only 5.5.
Men's shift in perceptions of attractiveness near closing time occurs regardless of how much alcohol has been consumed. Whether a man has consumed a single drink or six drinks has no effect on the shift in viewing women as more attractive near closing time. The often noted "beer goggles" phenomenon, whereby women are presumed to be viewed as more attractive with increasing intoxication, may instead be attributable to a psychological mechanism sensitive to decreasing opportunities for casual sex over the course of the evening. As the evening progresses and a man has not yet been successful in picking up a woman, he views the remaining women in the bar as increasingly attractive, a shift that will presumably increase his attempts to solicit sex from the remaining women in the bar.
Another perceptual shift may take place after men have an orgasm with a casual sex partner with whom they wish no further involvement. Some men report viewing a sex partner as highly attractive before his orgasm, but then a mere ten seconds later, after orgasm, viewing her as less attractive or even homely. There have been no systematic studies of these shifts in emotions and perceptions, and further research must determine whether they exist commonly, and, if so, under which conditions. Based on the cumulative evidence of men's sexual strategies, one may speculate that the perceptual shift will occur most frequently when a man is motivated primarily by the desire for casual sex rather than a committed relationship, and when the woman with whom he has sex is below him in her desirability on the mating market. The negative shift in attraction following orgasm may function to prompt a hasty departure to reduce risks to the man such as getting involved in an unwanted commitment or incurring reputational damage if others become aware of the affair. The notion that male desire elevates a man's judgments of beauty prior to orgasm and then lowers his judgments of beauty following orgasm is a speculation. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to believe that mechanisms attuned to reaping the benefits of casual sex without paying the costs have evolved and will be discovered within the next decade of research on men's and women's strategies of casual sex.
...
Perhaps because the reproductive benefits to men of casual sex are so large and direct, the benefits that women reap from short-term mating have been almost totally neglected. Although women cannot increase the number of children they bear by having sex with multiple partners, they can gain other important advantages from casual sex as one strategy within a flexible sexual repertoire. Ancestral women must have sought casual sex for its benefits in some contexts at some times at least, because if there had been no willing women, men could not possibly have pursued their own interest in brief affairs. Men could not have evolved the psychological mechanisms attuned to short-term opportunities.
For ancestral women, unlike men, seeking sex as an end in itself is unlikely to have been a powerful goal of casual mating, for the simple reason that sperm have never been scarce. Access to more sperm would not have increased a woman's reproductive success. Minimal sexual access is all a woman needs, and there is rarely a shortage of men willing to provide the minimum. Additional sperm are superfluous for fertilization.
One key benefit of casual sex to women, however, is immediate access to resources. Imagine a food shortage hitting an ancestral tribe thousands of years ago. Game is scarce. The first frost has settled ominously. Bushes no longer yield berries. A lucky hunter takes down a deer. A woman watches him return from the hunt, hunger pangs gnawing. She makes him an offer for a portion of the prized meat. Sex for resources, or resources for sex-the two have been exchanged in millions of transactions over the millennia of human existence.
In many traditional societies, such as the Mehinaku of Amazonia and the natives of the Trobriand Islands, men bring food or jewelry, such as tobacco, betel nuts, turtle shell rings, or armlets, to their mistresses. Women deny sex if the gifts stop flowing. A girl might say, ''You have no payment to give me-I refuse." A Trobriand man's reputation among women suffers if he fails to bring gifts, and this interferes with his future ability to attract mistresses. Trobriand women benefit materially through their affairs.
Modern women's preferences in a lover provide psychological clues to the evolutionary history of women's material and economic benefits from brief sexual encounters. Women in the study on temporary and permanent mating especially value four characteristics in temporary lovers more than in committed mates-spending a lot of money on them from the beginning, giving them gifts from the beginning, having an extravagant life style, and being generous with their resources. Women judge these attributes to be only mildly desirable in husbands but quite desirable in casual sex partners. Women dislike frugality and early signs of stinginess in a lover because these qualities Signal that the man is reluctant to devote an immediate supply of resources to them. These psychological preferences reveal that the immediate extraction of resources is a key adaptive benefit that women secure through affairs.
The benefit of economic resources from casual sex is most starkly revealed in extreme cases such as prostitution. In cross-cultural perspective, many women who become prostitutes do so out of economic necessity because they lack suitable opportunities for marriage. Women who have been divorced by a man because of adultery, for example, are often unmarriageable among cultures such as Taiwan Hokkien or the Somalis. Women among the Chinese, Burmese, and Pawnee may be unmarriageable if they are not virgins. Women among the Aztec and Ifugao are unmarriageable if they have diseases. In all these societies, unmarriageable women sometimes resort to prostitution to gain the economic benefits needed for survival.
Some women, however, say that they turn to prostitution to avoid the drudgery of marriage. Maylay women in Singapore, for example, become prostitutes to avoid the hard work expected of wives, which includes the gathering of firewood and the laundering of clothes. And among the Amhara and Bemba, prostitutes earn enough through casual sex to hire men to do the work that is normally expected of wives. Immediate economic resources, in short, remain a powerful benefit to women who engage in temporary sexual liaisons.
Affairs also provide an opportunity to evaluate potential husbands, supplying additional information that is unavailable through mere dating without sexual intercourse. Given the tremendous reproductive importance of selecting the right husband, women devote great effort to evaluation and assessment. Affairs prior to marriage allow a woman to assess the intentions of the prospective mate - whether he is seeking a brief sexual encounter or a marriage partner and hence the likelihood that he will abandon her. It allows her to evaluate his personality characteristics - how he holds up under stress and how reliable he is. It allows her to penetrate any deception that might have occurred - whether he is truly free or already involved in a serious relationship. And it allows her to assess his value as a mate or to learn how attractive he is to other women.
Sexual intercourse gives a couple the opportunity to evaluate how compatible they are sexually, providing important information about the long-term viability of the relationship. Through sex women can gauge such qualities as a man's sensitivity, his concern with her happiness, and his flexibility. Sexually incompatible couples divorce more often and are more likely to be plagued by adultery. Twenty-nine percent of men and women questioned by the sex researchers Samuel Janus and Cynthia Janus state that sexual problems were the primary reason for their divorce, which makes that reason the most often mentioned. The potential costs inflicted by an unfaithful mate and by divorce potentially can be avoided by assessing sexual compatibility before making a commitment.
Women's preferences for short-term mates reveal hints that they use casual sex to evaluate possible marriage partners. If women sought short-term mates simply for opportunistic sex, as many men do, certain characteristics would not be particularly bothersome, such as a man's preexisting committed relationship or his promiscuity. Women, like men, would find promiscuity in a prospective lover to be neutral or mildly desirable. In truth, however, women regard a preexisting relationship or promiscuous tendencies in a prospective lover as highly undesirable, since they signal unavailability as a marriage partner or the repeated pursuit of a short-term sexual strategy. These characteristics thus decrease the woman's odds of entering a long-term relationship with the man. They convey powerfully that the man cannot remain faithful and is a poor long-term mating prospect. And they interfere with the function of extracting immediate resources, since men who are promiscuous or whose resources are tied up in a serious relationship have fewer unencumbered assets to allocate.
Women's desires in a short-term sex partner strongly resemble their desires in a husband. In both cases, women want someone who is kind, romantic, understanding, exciting, stable, healthy, humorous, and generous with his resources. In both contexts, women desire men who are tall, athletic, and attractive. Men's preferences, in marked contrast, shift abruptly with the mating context. The constancy of women's preferences in both scenarios is consistent with the theory that women see casual mates as potential husbands and thus impose high standards for both.
A more accurate self-assessment of their own desirability is another potential benefit that women gain from casual sex. In human evolutionary history, reproductive penalties would have been imposed on women and men who failed to assess their own value accurately. Underestimates would have been especially detrimental. A woman who settled for a less desirable mate because she underestimated her own value would have secured fewer resources, less paternal investment, and perhaps inferior genes to pass on to her children. A woman who overestimated her own value also suffered costs on the mating market. By setting her standards too high, she ensured that fewer men would reach her threshold, and those who did might not desire her because they could obtain more desirable women. If a woman's excessive self-estimate persisted too long, her actual mating value would decline as she aged. By engaging in brief affairs with several men, either simultaneously or sequentially, a woman can more accurately assess her own mating value. She obtains valuable information about the quality of the men she can potentially attract.
Through casual sex, women may also secure back-up protection against conflicts that arise with other men or with competitors. Having a second mate who will defend and protect her may be especially advantageous for women in societies where they are at considerable risk of attack or rape. In some societies, such as the Yanomamo of Venezuela, women are vulnerable to male violence, including physical abuse, rape, and even the killing of their children when they lack the protection of a mate. This vulnerability is illustrated by the account of a Brazilian woman who was kidnapped by Yanomamo men. When men from another village tried to rape her, not a single Yanomamo man came to her defense because she was not married to any of them and had no special male friends to protect her.
The use of such special friendships for protection has a primate precedent among savanna baboons. Female baboons form special friendships with one or more males other than their primary mates, and these friends protect them against harassment from other males. Females show a marked preference for mating with their friends when they enter estrus, suggesting a strategy of exchanging sex for protection. As Robert Smith points out:
A primary mate cannot always be available to defend his wife and children and, in his absence, it may be advantageous for a female to consort with another male for the protection he may offer.... absence of the primary mate [for example, when he is off hunting] may create the opportunity and need for extrabond mating.... a male may be inclined to protect the children of a married lover on the chance that his genes are represented among them.
A lover may also serve as a potential replacement for the woman's regular mate if he should desert, become ill or injured, prove to be infertile, or die, which were not unusual events in ancestral environments. A permanent mate may fail to return from the hunt, for example, or be killed in a tribal war. Men's status may change over time-the head man to whom a woman is married might be deposed, his position usurped, his resources co-opted. Women benefit by positioning themselves to replace a mate quickly, without having to start over again. A woman who must delay the replacement by starting over is forced to incur the costs of a new search for a mate while her own desirability declines. Women benefit from having men waiting in reserve.
78
Casual Sex
Rather than just admit that hookup culture was never what most women wanted or enjoyed, we've made normal straight women queer
*You'll Find ME In The Bottom Left Quadrant Going Hard, My Nigga!
Here the central character successfully cleared all of the obstacles
to reproductive success that women normally encounter when
choosing a mate. First, through her choice of long-term partner, she
engineered an environment conducive to the easy and successful
raising of children (from the point of view of being in a position to
offer them every opportunity, anyway). Secondly, she managed to
collect some of the most sought-after male genes in her vicinity. As
a result, she produced children with the looks and ability to make the
most of the comfortable environment into which they were born. Her
strategy was risky, but innate ability was on her side. She made the
most of her daring and cunning, her composure and good looks, and
successfully walked the tightrope of disease, discovery and
desertion.
In choosing a man or men with whom to share her life, a woman
has two major issues to consider. On the one hand, she needs a man
who can help her raise her children. On the other, she needs genes
that in combination with her own will produce attractive, fertile and
successful children. The better the environment and the better the
assistance, the more fully each child will achieve his or her genetic
potential.
A woman's difficulty is that she has a much wider choice of men
to provide her with genes than she has of long-term partners. She
could probably persuade many men of her choice to give her their
genes — it takes only a few minutes of sex, after all. Her options for
a long-term partner, though, are much more limited. Most men in
most societies have not the time, the energy nor the resources to help
support more than one woman and her children at any one time. Her
choice of long-term partner is therefore restricted to those men who
are unattached, ready to desert their current partner, or who have so
much time, energy or wealth that they can support more than one
family.
An equally difficult problem is to identify which of the few
available men would make the best long-term partner. The most
reliable way would be to look at past performance, but inevitably the
best long-term partners are already paired to other women. Much of
the woman's choice, therefore, is limited to young and unattached
men who have not yet proved themselves as long-term partners. All
she can do is look for signs of potential, and hope that her judgment
is accurate.
Surveys of many cultures around the world consistently show that,
in looking for a long-term partner, women prefer men who have, or
have the potential of, wealth, status, stability and durability. In the
past, in all cultures, the children of women paired to men at the top of
the scale for these qualities had a far greater chance of survival,
health and subsequent fecundity. The same holds true even in today's
industrialised societies.
The preferences are clear, but for most women a level of
compromise is necessary. One man may be wealthy but uncaring;
another may be of high status but unstable; yet another may be poor,
but stable and caring. So, inevitably, a woman has to opt for the best
compromise. Of course, she does not have to stay with her first
partner. Again, studies show that when a woman leaves one partner
for another, she invariably moves up the scale to a better
compromise.
In choosing a man to help raise her children, a woman is only
secondarily impressed by looks, whereas in choosing a short-term
partner for sex, looks are much more important. The features she
finds most attractive are clear eyes, healthy skin and hair, firm
buttocks, a waist that is about the same in circumference as his hips,
shapely legs, broad shoulders, quick wit and intelligence. She is also
attracted by symmetry in his physical features. These various
qualities are all reasonably reliable indicators of genetic health,
fertility and competitiveness. As such, they imply a genetic
constitution that would also be desirable in her children.
Since women are seeking different attributes in short-term and
long-term partners, but have more choice of short-term they may again have to compromise. They have two main options.
They can choose the best available long-term partner, and then rely
on infidelity to obtain the best genes. This can succeed, but only if
they successfully avoid the disadvantages of infidelity that we have
already discussed (Scenes 8 to 11). Alternatively, they can choose a
man who, although neither the best provider of genes nor the best
partner, is at least the best available compromise.
expressing mate preferences with limited budgets to spend on traits...men spend a little more on good looks in long-term mating, but both men and women spend a lot more on good looks for booty calls and STM journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117
As we have found in so many aspects of reproductive success,
women's behaviour and experience are mirrored by other animals. In
this instance, women are not the only females who have to trade off
between male support and male genes. One of the most revealing
studies of the problem concerns a bird, the blue tit. The females of
this species show all of the behaviour we have just described for
women. Those lucky ones paired to genetically superior males with
the best territories are totally faithful. Neighbouring females, paired
to genetically inferior males, take every opportunity to seek infidelity
with the superior males. They sneak into the better males' territories,
solicit intercourse, then return unobserved to the partner they have
just cheated. On average, about a third of young birds in a nest have
not been sired by their mother's partner. Actual levels range from 0
per cent in the nests of the most favoured males to about 80 per cent
in the nests of the least favoured ones.
A surprisingly similar pattern is found in humans. On average,
about 10 per cent of children are not sired by their supposed father.
Some men, however, have a higher chance of being deceived in this
way than others — and it is those of low wealth and status who fare
worst. Actual figures range from 1 per cent in high-status areas of
Switzerland and the USA, through 5-6 per cent for moderate-status
males in Britain and the USA, to 10-30 per cent for lower-status
males in Britain, France and the USA. Moreover, the men most
likely to sexually hoodwink the lower-status males are men of higher
status. Anthropological studies have shown precisely the same
pattern. Men of higher wealth and status obtain partners earlier, start to reproduce earlier, are less likely to have their partners
impregnated by other men and are more likely to do exactly that to
other males. So in all ways, men of wealth and status have the
potential to be reproductively more successful than their lower-status
contemporaries.
Returning to birds — it is rare, unless the male is infertile, for all
of the young in 'his' nest to have been sired by other males. It is as if
the female always gives her partner some chance of paternity so as to
retain his help in paternal care. The same may be true for humans.
Moreover, when we look at which children are most likely to belong
to their partner, women show a clear pattern. As with the woman in
Scene 18, the child most likely to have been sired by a woman's
partner is the second; the children least likely are the first, and
particularly the last. The reasons, though, are slightly different for
first and last.
Often, a woman is already pregnant when she settles down with a
long-term partner, and occasionally this partner is not the father of
her child. Sometimes he knows this and takes on the woman and her
child anyway (Scene 15), for reasons we have discussed (Scene 9),
but sometimes he doesn't know. The woman is least likely to be
unfaithful in the weeks or months preceding the conception of her
second child. Subsequent children, however, are more and more
likely to be the product of infidelity.
Identifying the best partners and the best providers of genes, then
pursuing the best available compromise, is only one aspect of a
woman's problem in obtaining a mate. Having selected him, she then
has to recruit him into the chosen role. She can do this only if the
man finds her attractive enough. If she cannot attract her first choice,
she then has to compromise yet again. The man she finally recruits
will be the best compromise among those she wants and those she
can attract. The woman in Scene 18 was successful because a rich
and successful man, thirty-five years older than herself, picked her
out from the crowd. Then, without her infidelity being detected, she
set about collecting genes from other successful men. She succeeded
once again because these men considered sex with her to be worth the risk. In short, she
succeeded because she was attractive to men, both as a partner and as
a lover.
138
Scene 18
"We found that Americans tended to associate monogamy with high self-esteem, especially for women. More striking, they associated casual sex with low self-esteem – but only for women." -- &
