Sex Power Money

by Sara Pascoe

  One night we got drunk and Nicholas told me the reason he didn’t have long-term relationships was because of porn. Because after a couple of months with someone it wasn’t exciting. He’d watch porn and masturbate, thinking, ‘This is the real stuff, this is the real sexy feeling.’ Nicholas looked sad, and I was supposed to understand and be kind to him. He was brave, being vulnerable – telling me the truth of what he was going through.

  I was very angry with the truth. I was jealous. The world was set up unfairly, so that I, singular woman with one vagina and tiny breasts, was having to compete with the hundreds of thousands of people that high-speed internet could produce. I was losing, I had lost. The truth was my deepest fear: I am insufficient.

  The Coolidge effect uses the sex lives of chickens to illuminate an accepted certainty about humans: that while females will be content with one stud, males, if unchecked, will do it with anything that moves. I do not want to believe that men are more sexual than women, but some evidence supports the argument that they are. Sometimes I hate evidence.

  There’s a study that I think about often, conducted by Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield on American university campuses in 1989. They employed stooges to approach students of the opposite gender and ask one of these questions:

  a) Would you go out with me tonight?

  b) Would you come over to my apartment tonight?

  c) Would you go to bed with me tonight?

  The results of the first question didn’t show much gender discrepancy; 50 per cent of males said yes versus 56 per cent of females. Women were slightly more likely to agree to a date than males. But the other propositions found a vast divergence. A whopping 69 per cent of men agreed to visit a stranger’s apartment compared to 7 per cent of women. I know you can do your own maths, but that’s 62 per cent more men. The huge ramification here is that a man’s more likely to agree to come round your house than go on a date with you. For question c, 75 per cent of men agreed to sex. Just like that. Come on a date? Erm … Come round my house? I’ll think about it. Wanna have sex? COUNT ME IN.

  Can you guess how many of the female students agreed to the sex question? Zero. Big fat none. A difference of 75 per cent. Three quarters of men versus no women. This is massive, undeniable. It reinforces the cultural stereotypes of men as free-roaming cads, while women are uptight prudes requiring wining and dining.

  Studies like the one above are used as evidence that we’ve evolved sexual strategies reflecting the amount of ‘parental investment’ incumbent upon us. Males have a teeny input; four minutes, a few thrusts and a dribble of sperm can result in their genetic success. A female must grow any offspring inside her body, then breastfeed for years afterwards. This is costly and demanding, not to mention gross. We learned earlier that it’s more difficult to raise a baby human than any other ape. This means that selection pressures have moved a female human’s behaviour away from the freer, looser promiscuity of her chimp and bonobo relatives. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that the children of sexually prodigious, unattached women millions of years ago were less likely to survive because they lacked male parental input. Sexual exclusivity and carefulness were rewarded with genetic success, which is a bit depressing. This doesn’t match our modern values; we have contraception and babysitters and believe in personal sexual expression. Evolution is being pretty uncool here.

  Do we believe that men are by nature more promiscuous than women? Research has consistently found that, compared to straight men, homosexual men have more partners and more sex with strangers. This is taken to be a true reflection of male sexuality without us frigid females slowing you down. It’s a strong argument that women limit men’s sexual potential, impede you with our big ‘NO’ signs and ‘Take me to dinner first’ banners.

  Who ruins the world? Girls.

  This is hard enough for me to process without you misquoting Beyoncé. Also, there’s more to this than mere sexual inclination, as we shall see.

  Sex and Danger

  What if this isn’t simply about sex drive?

  To use a vehicular analogy, if male drivers were whizzing around at hundreds of miles per hour in their cars, while females were tootling about at 30 mph, our first assumption would be MEN LIKE DRIVING FAST WOMEN SLOW BORING BEEPBEEP GET OFF THE ROAD. But what if I gave you more information, if I said all the males’ cars were reinforced? They’re made of stronger steel and full of airbags. Whereas the females’ cars, they’re tin cans, fragile, with no seat belts. Could you still make the same conjecture? We’d probably have to agree that the women were driving slowly because their cars were precarious. Some women might really, really wish they could drive fast, but just couldn’t take the risk.

  I believe it’s exactly the same with shagging. Throughout our evolution, women have not been free to follow our loins’ desire, not just because of pregnancy risks and parental investment, but because being alone with a man can be unsafe.

  If a female student says no to an offer of sex or visiting a stranger’s apartment, it’s not automatically a reflection of low libido, but an assessment of danger. Males are bigger and stronger than females; in scientific terms, humans have a body-size dimorphism of around 1.1 in the male’s favour. This isn’t accidental, it’s the result of male competition. In species where males compete for females the strongest are more likely to win and share their big genes with the next generation. This worldwide physical advantage has historically been used to justify the superiority of men, justify why they should be respected and obeyed, and paid more in virtually all vocations.* But if you flip this around, the reason women are smaller and weaker is that men weren’t worth fighting over.

  Hold my bag while I victory-lap.

  The sex difference in size and strength means that men have not evolved to be wary of women in the way we are of you. Sorry, I’m sure you personally are absolutely lovely, but we’re talking hundreds of centuries of pre-civilised barbarism here; a few years of liberalism and a hashtag is not going to reverse it. The results of the Clark and Hatfield study do not prove that women don’t enjoy sex or fancy new men, they prove that even the women who would like some sex, please, dare not take the risk. Zero per cent. ZERO women said yes. We do not have zero sex drive – I think we’re predisposed to be wary of male sexuality.

  I can’t ascertain how much of my personal fear of men was learned. I read about phobias being learned from parents. That if a mum screams when she sees a spider, that makes her children jump and become scared also. It only needs to happen a couple of times for a spider–fear response to be conditioned. I won’t say my mum demonised men because she’ll read this and say I’ve cock-blocked her. So let’s just say I was told a great deal about the evils committed by spiders, particularly spiders who preyed on little girls, and warned never to marry a musician spider because they lie.

  Early in my adolescence it only took a couple of … infractions, and I was changed. From eleven or twelve I did not want to be alone with a man, not even my dad, who never ever encroached upon me, but I feared him and felt guilty about it. Every man was a potential threat. I know how extreme that sounds and how unfair to most men. The reason I began with Anaïs Nin’s words, ‘We see things not as they are but as we are,’ is because I understand men in general through a lens tainted by a few. I know why men shout at me on Twitter and write me angry emails about feminism – it’s because they want to be understood as individuals, not as representative of a gender. And I laugh, of course, because that’s all that feminism is asking for, for everyone. My fear is not your personal fault, and I was never saying it was.

  It’s been theorised that while terror of spiders is irrational in a country like England, we all evolved in countries and habitats where arachnids were deadly poisonous, and that’s why we have a tendency to dislike them. All it takes is a little trigger, like our mother screaming or being assaulted by one on the way to school, and suddenly we’re phobic. Is it the same with fear of men? Does their size and strength advantage –
their potential to be deadly – live deep in my genes?

  This is really sexist.

  They used to be more dangerous, you know, in ancestral times. Any strange man would have been threatening. Tribes fought each other, raped each other, there were no courts or legal punishments. Perhaps the past is restraining some women’s sexuality? Maybe without all that we’d be uninhibited and agree to shag more strangers we met in the campus car park?

  I want that to be true, but there’s evidence that suggests it’s more complicated.

  If it was simply fear of male violence that is hampering the heterosexual lady libido then homosexual women should be enjoying the same sexual variety as gay men. Lots of partners, more hook-ups, less boring commitment. Except they aren’t. Studies measuring novelty in relationships and sex lives have found lesbians have even fewer one-night stands and fewer sexual partners than tedious old straight people do. Studies have also found that gay women orgasm more reliably during sex than straight women.

  Signifying what?

  I just wanted to mention that in case it looked like I was using stats to denigrate lesbian love-making – they are clearly excellent at it. Although, interestingly, women are more likely to orgasm when they feel ‘safe’, and what could be safer than sex with the people who comprise only 10 per cent of murderers?

  It cannot purely be prehistoric fear that constrains female sexuality. The disparity between male and female parental investment cannot be discounted as affecting our sexual decision making. Men, technically, can have consequenceless sex; the male body cannot get pregnant. No amount of sex with any number of partners will get him up the duff and dependent on others for food. For the female-bodied person, pre-contraception, all sex has a potential five-year drain on her body and resources. That’s if she doesn’t die pushing a baby’s big head out of her small body.

  Broody?

  It’s fair to say that selectivity has become a female necessity. There are many things to assess in a potential sex partner. Personal safety is one thing, genes and health another. Our bodies cannot forget the connection between sex and babies, even though we can control that in modern times. Our bodies cannot un-know the toll of parental investment.

  We’ll be investigating later how our species’ lack of paternity certainty has led to stigma about sex work. We still have to discuss the complex relationship between men and their penis size, and before we delve into the topic of pornography, I want to signpost one thing. It is a basic human instinct to be private and secretive about sex. Across all cultures. Yet all the other animals do it outside without caring who sees them. Couldn’t give a shit. No shame, no underpants. But us Homo sapiens have a deep-seated desire to hide, to be embarrassed.

  What about exhibitionists?

  Yes. Some people get off on doing the exact opposite. We’ll be investigating how human sexuality holds within its rules a million contradictions. Individuals have perverted idiosyncrasies, but in general, humans have sex in private. It’s likely this evolved alongside our deep pair bonds. Our coupledom developed by excluding others. In other apes high-status males dominate fertility: in gorillas an alpha male maintains a harem of females; in chimps the lower-status males have to be sneaky or must settle for females with a low mate value. In humans, we couple up and avoid fights by doing our sexy stuff at home.

  There are social rules we all abide by; unconcealed sexual performance is so rare we consider it a sign of mental impairment. You tell your doctor, ‘Aunty Sheila tried to wank off her husband on the bus this morning,’ and your doctor will reply, ‘I’m afraid Aunty Sheila needs a brain scan.’

  The reason I want to remind you of this before the next section is SEEING SEX TURNS US ON. We hide it from each other not because it’s dirty or immoral but because it’s arousing. In hunter–gatherer societies, pre-religion and getting sacked from work, the reason we evolved to conceal our sex was that other people might want to join in. And if they are stronger than you, you might not be able to stop them.

  We have sex in private for our safety and for paternity certainty and all that stuff. But our sensitivity to sexual cues, the fact that we get aroused by seeing sex – that’s older than the pair-bonded bit of us, it’s our fundamental animal root. While we’ve learned a lot so far about the ancient mechanisms that have shaped some of our emotional behaviour, we are going to push this further. I want to understand why porn has become such an important part of the modern world; I want to know why some people become consumed and obsessed with it while others remain blasé. We’re going to use representations of the penis in porn to try and understand what it means. WHY IS THE PENIS SO IMPORTANT TO YOU PEOPLE?

  Let’s learn about porn.

  * Although not in our main area of interest, porn.

  Dirty Daubings

  Waw chica waw waw, please come in and fix the washing machine.

  Tens of thousands of years ago Homo sapiens began making images of bodies. We don’t know how erotic early people found the images, whether these figures were nude to inspire lust or purely because no one had any clothes on. We don’t know the intentions of the artists because they didn’t do TED talks and Q&As explaining ‘this piece represents the death of my mother. Although she lives on in my mind. And in Chelmsford.’ What I’m trying to say is that olden-days artists weren’t pretentious arseholes, they just did their little pictures and died. We can’t know what was considered aesthetically arousing by these ancient people. We only have their dusty artefacts and our modern ideas.

  The earliest human-made image is arguably a vulva. The word ‘arguably’ doesn’t flatter anyone, does it? Some poor woman ‘flashing the pink’ thirty-seven thousand years ago would be rightfully insulted by recent historians’ doubt. Ditto the sculptor who carved it on the wall of a French cave: ‘Zut alors! Dis defo is le voolva.’ I apologise for that accent; I don’t know if they had cultural stereotypes back then. I don’t know if France was even a thing that long ago. Either way this is our first evidence of human art, and it’s a fanny (probably). If you want to see this engraving search ‘Abri Castanet female genitalia’ on your computer. And do it on your boss’s time, this image is absolutely SFW in that it doesn’t really look like a vulva. I’ve drawn it for you as well – I’m sure thirty-seven thousand years means it’s out of copyright:

  So that’s what we are starting with. It could be a prehistoric premonition of a doughnut, it could be the invention of the sideways smile emoji, it could be a masturbatory aid or a feminist self-portrait. I’ll never know, and nor will you. Aren’t mysteries fun?

  Moving along, the oldest known example of figurative art is a tiny female nude known as the Venus of Hohle Fels. She is more than thirty-five thousand years old (there’s no age limit on glamour modelling), carved from ivory, and has ‘pronounced breasts and genitals’. In your face vagina, cave vagina.

  For a younger woman, check out the Venus of Willendorf, who is a mere twenty-five thousand years old. She has massive stony boobs and a head like the handle of a table tennis bat.

  There are tons of artefacts depicting the naked human form and lots of pervy daubings on walls and rocks which prove how long our species has delighted in its own image. As our forebears became more sophisticated in the visual arts, they used those skills to depict sex more accurately. There are plates from Mesopotamia that couldn’t be used pre-watershed nowadays, and vases from ancient Greece that would get you banned from your pottery evening class. Because there’s fucking on them.

  The oldest image of human sex was found in a cave near Bethlehem. A carved couple wrapped around each other, it’s called Ain Sakhri. The lovers are thought to be around eleven thousand years old. The extra fun is that whatever angle you look at them from their pairing resembles the baby Jesus a penis … apparently. I think a lot of ancient erotic art was made by people who hadn’t seen genitals. Or only seen them after they’d been run over. If this was meant to be a penis it’s gone terribly wrong. I mean, it’s two people, so it has two heads. If
you turn it on its side, it looks more phallic. But then doesn’t everything?

  Moving into more recent times, three thousand years ago the enticingly named Turin Erotic Papyrus was produced in Egypt. It’s less than ten inches long. One third of it is pictures of animals doing human jobs and the rest is explicit and occasionally ambitious sex positions. Basically, the entire internet painted on plant material during the Ramesside period.

  One art historian described the men on the papyrus as ‘scruffy, balding, short, and paunchy … with exaggeratedly large genitalia’, while the women are ‘nubile’ and ‘gorgeous’. So far, so modern pornography – not that the papyrus is porn. Images of nudity and sex don’t become pornographic until – well, aha, there is the riddle.

  What is over two thousand years old but only became porn around two hundred years ago?

  The Invention of Porn

  Once upon a time (AD 79) there was a place called Pompeii in a place called Italy in a place called The World. All the people in Pompeii were living their normal lives near a volcano called Vesuvius when it suddenly ejaculated red-hot dangerous lava onto everyone. The liquid stone covered people wherever they were and whatever they were doing – making dinner, washing the dog or, ironically, contemplating suicide. The lava cooled, and the city of Pompeii was encased in rock and ash and hidden until 1748. The archaeologists who dug it up saw how saucy the ancient artwork of Pompeii was and were shocked and appalled. This is the historical equivalent of your mum coming into your room and finding you wanking, except you’re a million Pompeiians and your mum is a volcano and this analogy doesn’t work.