From an article in the August 2004 issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior:
Guided by sperm competition theory, we predicted and found that men prefer short-term sex partners who are not already involved in relationships and hence present a relatively low risk of sperm competition. Because women sometimes use short-term sexual relationships to acquire long-term partners, we predicted and found that women prefer short-term sexual partners who are not already involved in relationships and hence present relatively greater promise as a potential long-term partner.
In other words, both sexes stated the same preference.
Great link.
Do fix the italics at the end of the quotation — on my computer, everything is in italics. Love HTML…
Whoops! That’ll teach me to not check what the post looks like on the blog after I post. Thanks for the catch!
And yet somehow, they managed to ascribe differing motivations to the genders.
Funny, that.
That’s great. The data are empirical, but the reasons behind the data are made up out of whole cloth. Evolutionary Psychology: the new bell curve?
There was a experiment done with babies that resulted in the same sort of same behaviour/different ascribe reasons for the behaviour. The took new borns, without regard to their sex, and placed either pink or blue booties on the children. Inevitably blue booted babies who cried were angry, pink ones were sad or scared, regardless of their actual gender.
Similar discussions grow up around animal behaviour; males having harems, but the females are often getting their babies from elsewhere. So both are playing the field in different ways. We miss so much but starting with a particular idea instead of simply observing and recording and then making conclusions.
“The data are empirical, but the reasons behind the data are made up out of whole cloth.”
Exactly. What gets up my nose is that it’s so obvious, yet so few people seem to notice.
Orwell woulda’ loved this article. [shakes head]
Gevalt.
yet another in the series of completely pointless articles by evolutionary psychologists. C’mon over from the dark side, honeys, and do some real biochemistry!