As the saying goes, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But what does this mean, really?
In this metaphor, Mars is a place of carnal obsession and emotional autism; a planet whose inhabitants think about sex every seven seconds and get in fights all the time, and Venus, on the other hand, is a warm and hospitable place of social empathy and interaction, but not so much of sex.
However, how accurate is this Mars-and-Venus stereotype?
There are obvious reasons why men and women have different approaches when it comes to sex. Although men and women are similar in many ways, there’s that one thing that’s indisputably different – their sexual organs. Hence, we should not be surprised if they also have different psychological systems to determine how they use those organs.
Dr Diana Fleischman, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, explains, “If a man has sex with 100 women in a year, he might have 100 babies. If a woman has sex with 100 men in a year, she might have one baby and a very sore bottom.”
This is a result of “obligate parental investment”: a man’s minimum investment towards a child might be light work and a teaspoonful of sperm; a woman’s minimum investment is nine months of pregnancy and a painful and potentially dangerous labour – and that’s even before the question of who raises the child is addressed.
This imbalance means that men are expected to be more motivated to have sex, says Dr. Fleischman, and women to be more choosy about their sex partner.
Dr. Fleischman also says that not one study found that women think about more sex than men. One study published in the Journal of Sex Research, found that men think about sex – on average – 34 times a day, compared with women’s 19.
Dr. Fleischman mentions another study that puts the figures much lower – about once a day for men, once every several days for women. But at the end of the day, the findings attest the same thing – men think about sex more than women.
“Men have more intrusive thoughts, too – it’s harder for them to ignore thoughts about sex,” she says.
And it’s not just thinking about sex, it’s also about performing the act. Normally, men’s sexual activity is limited by how often women will consent to sex. But looking at the lifestyles of gay men would show what would happen if it was limited by how often men consent.
“If you look at gay men and women,” says Fleischman, “you’ll see that gay men have a lot more partners than gay women do.” Having to gain consent from a man is way easier than gaining consent from a woman.
Maybe it’s meant to be this way. And since it’s harder for males to get sexual consent from females, you can say that it’s enjoyable for us to have that sort of power over them.
[Source]
