Sexual Economics: A Model of Heterosexual Behavior (transcription)

Transcript of a youtube educational video.

https://youtu.be/h_od6L2_odQ

My name is Kathleen Voss. I am a professor at the University of Minnesota. I am a social psychologist who works in the business school I work in the marketing department and today my lecture will be on the topic of heterosexual sexual relationships.

Imagine that you sat down one morning to breakfast and you opened up your newspaper, or you clicked on your favorite news browser, and you read that officials in the UK let a group of foreigners settle without proper immigration checks.

Okay now imagine further that you read that the group of foreigners was a group of women and even further that this is a group of highly attractive women. The story ended by noting that there may or may not have been sex between the immigration officers and the foreign women.

Now a few days later you read in the newspaper something again about sex. In this case it's a Viennese shopping mall and they're offering women a special promotion. Women who agree, not just agree, but women who come to the shopping mall topless receive a bottle of champagne, a free meal, and a shopping voucher worth 40 euros. This campaign was a huge success by the way.

Very last, imagine back to your history days when you learned that Australia was a penal colony. So back then, this is in the 1800's, a severe punishment for infractions was to have a public whipping. Female prisoners were given an option that male prisoners were not, their whippings would be cut in half if they agreed to take them naked. Presumably to please the male onlookers.

What do these stories have in common? They have in common in the idea that sex is something that women have and seem to own or possess in a sense and that men are willing to trade resources to obtain that sex in some way shape or form.

The resources can be living in a safe country, it can be monetary money resources, or it can be the lessening of a very harsh punishment. The lecture today will be about this very idea that sex is a female resource and that men are willing to trade resources that they possess or have access to in order to gain sexual access to women. It is called sexual economics and it's probably the most unromantic theory about sex you'll ever have learned, but in it we're able to describe and predict people's behaviors on the basis of fundamental basic economic principles.

The core ideas of sexual economics theory, are that countries, cultures, and individuals treat female sexuality as if it has value and is precious. Male sexuality however has no value or worth. Women own sex, that is it is theirs to decide when sex occurs, with whom, why, and how. Men conversely enter into a sexual interaction with other resources and they're seeking to trade them with women for access to them sexually. These resources can be monetary. They can also be things like rights like voting rights or land. They can be emotional such as caring and being kind to them or affectionate. They can be relationship oriented resources as well, such as commitment, devotion, marriage, and even children the agreement that this relationship can bear children.

In the sexual economic theory it's understood that high price of sex, which is to say the amount, or the costliness, or the preciousness of the resources that men give, favors women. Men would like the price of sex to be low. Women's goals are often to obtain resources, as many as possible, before sex will commence. Men's goals will be to obtain sex, without having to give many resources.

What are we talking about, when we talk about sex in this theory? The idea of sex is broader than simply the act of sexual intercourse. Sex can be talking about sex, it can include being near an attractive woman or a sexual woman. Sex can include viewing or finding sexual imagery appealing. This includes acts with a variety of sexual overtones, such as dating, flirting, touching, fondling, and also of course sexual intercourse.

How do we know that sex is a female resource? There are several experiments that pinpoint this idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex. One telling study asked men and women in dating relationships at what number of dates do you think it's appropriate for men and women to first have sex? (Men on average think that the number of dates should be half as many as women.) More importantly, for this idea that women own sex and decide when sex occurs in a relationship, the researchers then further asked these men and women, when in your dating relationships did sex take place?

They find that men's preferences, or ideas about what number of dates sex should first take place, bore no relationship to when they were actually having sex in their relationships. Women's preferences, ideas about when sex should first take place in a relationship, were almost perfectly correlated with when men and women actually had sex in those relationships. It underscores this idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex, they decide when, how, and why sex occurs.

We come to understand the idea that women have more negotiating power when it comes to sex, as stemming from a basic underlying difference between men and women's desire to have sex. In a paper that my colleagues and I published in early 2000s, we investigated whether men or women want sex more. It may not sound like a very interesting or surprising question, but in fact the literature was quite divided.

When we looked at various textbooks about sexuality, some of them said well of course men want sex more than women, but others said women want sex more than men. Still yet others said the question should not even be asked. We decided to do an investigation into the science. We wanted to read all scientific articles on men and women's sexual preferences, emotions, ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. and so we did.

We found over 250 articles about men and women's sexual desires and behaviors. We broke the research down into 12 different categories of indicators of sexual motivations. Things like how frequently people have sexual fantasies, the desired number of sexual partners, the liking for a variety of sexual practices, and the amount of masturbation that people engage in. Across all 12 categories we found overwhelming evidence that men want sex more than women. Perhaps not surprising to some, but again that was an important step for us in this investigation of sexual economics.

When we now understand that men want sex more than women, we can better understand how men and women enter into a sexual relationship Or rather a relationship that may turn sexual. Understanding that on average when a man and a woman come together in a relationship that may turn sexual, he on average will want sex more than she does. This means that she has more negotiating power, in order to request or demand other types of resources before sex will take place.

There's a theory called the principle of least interest and it states that whenever two parties come together to have a negotiation, the party that is interested in the outcome the least has the most power. If you've ever been in love with someone and you love that person more than that person loves you, you felt this that you would do more things, you would sacrifice more, than the other person. When men and women enter into a sexual negotiation, because men in general will want sex more than women, women then can ask for more resources in exchange before sex will take place.

The sexual economics theory is backed up by a variety of research. In the other paper I described, we read over 200 scholarly articles about how men and women think about sex, whether we could understand sex as a female resource, and that men trade other resources to obtain. We reviewed scholarly research from anthropology, sociology, clinical psychology, demography (statistics), medicine, health, history, and the like, and we were overwhelmed by the amount of evidence that we were able to obtain in support of a sexual economics theory.

Let me tell you a few pieces of information and some experiments that my lab conducted. One piece of information that helps us understand sexual economics, are conditions with the discrepancies in the number of men and women there are in a local environment. If we understand women as owning sex and men wanting sex, this is going to be a very crude analogy. Because we're talking about an economic model, we can understand women being sellers and men being buyers.

There are studies of what happens in a local environment, when there are more women to men or more men to women. In one of these studies the researchers found, in a historical analysis of women's clothing, that when there are more men in a local environment compared to women this means that women have even more negotiating power than they would otherwise. In the clothing analysis they found that women's skirt length were the longest, in conditions in which there are more men in a local environment compared to women. In local environments across history when there'd be more women in the environment than men, skirt links rose so that the skirts were shorter. We understood this in our theory, as the way that women dress, and the way that their skirts rise and fall might represent something like advertising. When women's sexuality is their product, then they need to advertise their product, and wearing alluring clothing is one way for women to seem more sexual. That need would arise when women are competing with other women, more so than when there are fewer women to compete with. When there are conditions in which there are lots of women and very few men, women dress more sexually. When there are more men than women in an environment, women didn't have to dress very sexy and they kept their skirt lengths long.

Other research supports this idea that men and women trade sex and other types of resources. In one paper that asked men and women, what most annoys or irritates them about dating relationships with the opposite sex? They found evidence in support of sexual economics theory. Women reported that the most irritating thing about dating a man, is when a man offers relationship promises before the couple has sex. Once the couple has sex he is nowhere to be found and the relationship does not ensue. Men have a different complaint. Men complain when the relationship never turns sexual after they court a woman for a very long time, shower her with gifts, dinners, and other kinds of monetary or even affectionate resources. In both of these cases, we see that a resource was given up by one gender and there was an expectation that the other resource would come in and be traded for it. But then that expectation then was not met. These irritations about courtship also support the idea of sexual economics and sex as a female and tradable resource.

We move to some experiments in my lab to try to better understand sexual economics and in particular how we can understand women's reactions to the ideas of sex. In these experiments what we have men and women doing is we have them viewing sexual imagery and we use their reactions to sexual imagery as a proxy for how they feel about sex in general. The general setup of these experiments is that subjects come into the lab and they sit down and they view a series of print advertisements. The key advertisement is one for a watch and that watch is either promoted by an ad that features a highly sexual scene or an ad that features a non-sexual scene. In this scene we have a picture of mountains. We have our subjects coming in and looking at these and then giving us their spontaneous reactions to the ads. While we have them doing that, when they're viewing the ads, they rehearse a ten digit number in their heads. Why do we do this? Because previous research has shown that when you get men and women to be distracted with another task, their spontaneous gut reactions to the environment can come out more and we're interested in men and women's spontaneous, impulsive reactions to sexual imagery.

In the first experiment our subjects come into the lab and they start rehearsing that 10 digit number. We have them looking through a booklet with print advertisements, one of which then shows that watch that I mentioned either being advertised in a sexual scene or in a mountain scape scene. The part that makes this study having to do with sexual economics, is we then further varied the ads by one other dimension. Some participants saw the ad for the watch and it was plain, nothing about it was particularly different it was either situated in a sexual scene or mountain scene. Other participants saw the ads and they saw the watch being draped by a red ribbon and underneath the ad we'd written the tagline, "this is a watch that men will give to the special woman in their lives."

In these conditions we hope to bring up the idea of a resource transfer from men to women. In this way we thought that we could get women to view the sexual ads as being more appealing, than they would otherwise. What we know from previous research is that women don't generally like sexual ads. They view them as unfavorable, unlikable, crass, crude and so on. Our goal with this experiment was to see if we could get women to think about a sexual ad, or sexual imagery, as representing resource transfer between a man and a woman. Maybe women would like the sexual imagery more. Our prediction was that when women saw a sexual ad, and that sexual ad reminded them of gifts that men give to special women in their lives, they would like the sexual ad more than if the sexual ad had no reminders of gifts being given from men to women. That is exactly what we found. We found that when women saw a sexual ad compared to a mountain ad, they didn't like the sexual ad very much. They thought it was relatively unfavorable, unlikeable, and so on. When women saw a sexual ad that was paired with the understanding that the product in the ad could be used by a man to honor the special woman in his life, then they liked the sexual ad much more. In fact it came statistically equivalent to their feelings about the non-sexual ad. This was quite remarkable, because in general women take a hard stance against sexual imagery and they tend not to like it. This was a novel finding, that we could make women appreciate sexual imagery more because of this reminder of resource transfer.

In the second experiment we conducted, we wanted to understand several new things. One we wanted to shift the idea of resource transfer away from something that was monetary and physical, like a gift, and move it to something that especially modern women are interested in receiving. Emotional and relational resources. In study two we connected the idea of resource transfers from men to women in an emotional, relational way. I'll tell you in a minute how we did that. The second thing we did in experiment two, that was different from experiment one. We not only measured how women felt about the sexual imagery, we also measured their mood. Our hypothesis was that sexual imagery, when it's used without mentions of resource transfer, makes women upset and angry. When resource transfer is involved in the sexual imagery, that would soften women's negative mood.

In this experiment we have women coming into the lab and the first thing they do for us is they do a proofreading task. In a proofreading task, their job is to read a paragraph of text and to find if we have misspellings or grammar errors in the text. This task is one where we are able then to get women exposed to different types of information. In this experiment we have them reading text that refers to one of three themes.

We have a loyalty prime. In the loyalty prime condition, our participants are reading about a man and a woman who are a couple and the man is extremely loyal to the woman. For example it would read things like, "John and Mary are young and have a lot going for them. Their friends notice how completely devoted John is to Mary and how he used to lead a bachelor lifestyle, but that all has changed."

Another condition had subjects reading about a disloyalty prime. In this proofreading task our subjects also read about John and Mary who are also a young couple with a lot going for them. In this condition, our subjects also read that all their friends noticed John is not completely devoted to Mary. John used to lead a bachelor lifestyle and that has not really changed. Now they're thinking about men not being very loyal to women and not transferring those emotional and relational resources.

In a third aspect of this proofreading task, we also have our subjects reading about John and Mary. Now John and Mary are students at the University, who are both involved with the university organizations. The student senate, for example. (should they read about the two of them working on activities together)

After one of these three proofreading tasks, we have our subjects looking at the sexual imagery or the mountain imagery again in a way to view a product. Our prediction was that when women are reminded of a lack of research transfer from men to women, the disloyalty prime condition, they would view the sexual imagery in a very negative fashion. When women read about the loyalty Prime, and that activated for them the idea of emotional and relational resources being transferred from men to women, they would like the sexual ad more and would find it more appealing. Women's reactions to the sexual imagery was predicted by whether we reminded them of a loyal relationship partner, a disloyal relationship partner, or a neutral relationship. We found that reactions to the ad were most negative when women were reminded of a disloyal partner, but reactions to the sexual ad were more positive when women were reminded of a loyal partner. Stimulating, again, that idea of emotional and relational resources from men to women. Reactions to the sexual ad fell in between for our participants who read about John and Mary being in the Student Senate.

Furthermore I told you that we tested mood. Our idea was that when women read about a sexual ad, that doesn't include resource transfer, that makes them angry. Women were the most upset about the sexual ad and they registered the highest degree of negative emotions, when they saw a sexual imagery scene that was preceded by a reminder of men not being loyal to women. When women read about men being loyal to women, seeing the sexual imagery didn't make them all that upset and their negative emotions were lower.

We found evidence for the idea that women like the concept of resource transfer from men to women. When that idea of a transfer is broken, in the disloyalty condition, they get quite upset and they have a negative reaction to the idea of sex. In conclusion the lecture today has made several points. One is that female sexuality is treated as if it has value, is precious, has a price (so to speak), and hence sex is a female resource. Male sexuality conversely has no such value. Countries, cultures, and individuals do not treat male sexuality as if it is precious or can be traded for a price. There is a sexual marketplace that exists that link couples together, where women can trade sex for other resources that men might give them. These might be gifts, money, rights, relationship commitment, affection, or children. Lastly, data from my own lab has shown that linking resource transfers, the idea of men giving women resources possibly a gift or relationship loyalty, that makes the idea of "sexy" more appealing to women.