Atomic Nerds

I spent a good chunk of my afternoon reading a fascinating article at Yes Means Yes discussing a very large and complex set of studies done by Terri Conley, which is such a complete dissection and destruction of the famous Clark and Hatfield study- the one in which the researchers sent people in to cold-proposition college students of the opposite sex for casual sex and recorded the results by gender arrangement- that I want to frame it as an example of the art. The Yes Means Yes post is better than this will be, so you should go read it. I will, however, summarize.

The original Clark and Hatfield study is very frequently cited as an argument for why men are much more interested in sex than women are, or to support some sort of evo-psych argument that women are programmed to be choosy and men are programmed to be promiscuous. The result, if you’re not familiar, is that the female college students turned down the cold proposition from a strange man across the board, whereas the men accepted the proposition from a strange woman at much higher rates. Or, at least, this was the result that everyone talks about- much less discussed is that they had their propositioners offer three kinds of requests, one for a date, one to go back to their apartment, and one for sex, and that men and women were equally likely to accept an offer for a date with a complete stranger. But I digress.

Many people have pointed out the biggest logistical problem with their method, which is that accepting an offer for sex from a complete stranger is a totally different risk/reward scenario for women than it is for men; even a woman who is completely down with casual sex knows damn well that there is a not-insignificant chance that going somewhere private with a strange man who might theoretically think she’s a “slut” could result in her being in several pieces in his freezer by morning. Men propositioning strange women out of the blue for sex is not only unusual, its larger cultural context makes it potentially threatening to her, whereas the larger cultural context of being propositioned by a strange woman for sex is, for the man, largely encapsulated by the word “score!”.

Professor Conley goes way beyond this observation, and constructed four substudies to examine the scenario from different angles and controlling for different variables. The biggest difference was asking the participants of the study to imagine a propositioner rather than respond to one, then cite a likelihood on a scale of 1-7 they would accept the offer, and rating the imagined propositioner along several different kinds of variables, including warmth, likelihood of being good in bed, likelihood of carrying an STD, status, dangerousness, and so forth. Basically, they were grouped roughly into variables relating to desirability and relating to perceived risk. With this basic model in mind, the substudies offer further twists: whether the subject pool was all heterosexual or all homosexual, whether the offers came always from a member of the subjects’ preferred sex or randomly from either, whether the imagined scenario was a random stranger or a celebrity, and how attractive the celebrity was generally agreed to be. Again, for the complete breakdown of the results of each variation, read the YMY post; this is just a collection of some of the more interesting data points.

- From the department of the obvious: women rated the variables relating to dangerousness of strange men much higher than men rated the same variables in strange men. No shockers there, as it was obviously the biggest weakness of the original study, at least in the kinds of conclusions that can be usefully drawn about how much either gender likes sex.

- Women also rated their imaginary man much lower on the desirability variables- when trying to conjure a stranger asking her for sex in their heads, they pictured one that was low in status, warmth, unlikely to give gifts, and unlikely to be good in bed. Maybe not so surprising given that we don’t normally associate creepiness (threat) with attractiveness, especially when imagining things rather than evaluating real people. Men, in contrast, rated their imaginary women as about middle of the road on such variables.

- Here’s where it gets more interesting: in the substudy where the subjects were heterosexual but their offers were random as to which sex it came from, neither men nor women much wanted to sleep with the same sex- but heterosexual women were equally as unlikely to sleep with a strange man as with a strange woman. What’s more, they rated the imaginary female proposer as better on the desirability variables than the male proposer, and lower on the danger variables… as the men rated male proposers as lower on desirability variables and higher on danger. So heterosexual men and women apparently have the same general opinion of strange men proposing sex versus strange women*.

- When the subject pool changed to all bisexual women and the sex of the propositioner was random, prospective offers from women were significantly more likely to be taken up than offers from men. For some reason the perception questions weren’t included- perhaps Conley thought she had amply proved her point already about the differences in perception of risk and the imagined kind of man that would randomly ask for sex versus the kind of woman.

- When the proposition scenario changed from an offer from a stranger to an offer from a (carefully preselected by polling the subject pool beforehand) celebrity of the opposite sex meant to be attractive or unattractive, with the idea being that well-known faces are at least perceived to be less likely to make their partners into skin suits, the likelihood of accepting the offer suddenly attains parity between men and women- both unlikely to sleep with the unattractive celebrity, both about as likely as the other to sleep with the attractive one. The scenario with the stranger was run with the same group, and the gap between them reappeared.

- The celebrity model was repeated, with a different group and different celebrities, and the questions about perception of danger and desirability were added back in. The results from the first study reappeared- the gender gap either vanished or mostly vanished. Given that women’s response to the unattractive celebrity (in this instance Carrot Top, in the first Donald Trump) was only slightly lower than the response to the imaginary stranger, and the men’s response to the attractive celebrity is only slightly higher than to the stranger, Conley theorizes that the women are picturing the imaginary stranger as someone Carrot-Top like whereas the men are picturing theirs as someone unusually babelike. An interesting result in and of itself. YMY speculates about differences in optimism, or differences in “the kind of person” imaginings- I would also wonder if it weren’t partially experiential. Many women experience random sexual offers in terms of street harassment, and it doesn’t usually come from someone who reminds us of Brad Pitt.

-The next scenario tried on the next group replaced the stranger or celebrity with an offer from the recipient’s closest male or female friend, with the same perception questions. Women’s likelihood of agreeing went up a little, and men’s went down a little, compared to the stranger scenario. More interestingly, of the perception questions, the only one that had a gender gap was assessment of sexual prowess- women simply think less optimistically about a prospective man’s fun quotient in bed than men do of women, even ones they already know well. Ouch.

- The last one out of the cold-approach scenarios is the one that most interests me: instead of an all-heterosexual mixed group, or all-bisexual women, this group was homosexual men and women, and the offered scenario was one of propositions from strangers of their preferred sex. No gender gap at all- gay men and lesbians were about equally likely to accept an offer. And that likelihood was low- around 2.5 on that 1-7 scale. For the record the result for the straight guys imagining a strange woman was only 3.7- still a big jump over the women considering strange men, but far from “I’d absolutely hit that”**. From this Conley concludes that most people just plain aren’t very receptive to random cold propositions from strangers, which should not have required this amount of data to take as a reasonable assumption but really did anyway. Conley also theorizes that getting this result from gay men, who are generally accepted and found from research to be more open to casual sex, proves the offputtingness of the approach- I think there’s a lot more places to go with that. It doesn’t look like she included the questions about perceived threat; are gay men less likely to accept than straight because it’s really that much more offputting, because they too perceive a strange male partner to be more potentially dangerous than a female one, or because gay male college students maybe aren’t necessarily as promiscuous in 2011 as they might have been whenever previous research was done? I’d actually bet on the “perceived threat”, just because of the possibility that it’s a warped guy looking for a fag to beat the shit out of.

-Having gone to some lengths to prove that the cold approach of the original Clark and Hatfield is highly offputting to a lot of people and especially to women, Conley does one last survey relying on self-reported data about actual past propositions for casual sex. The accepted rate jumps significantly for both sexes, to 40% for women and 73% for men. YMY points out the unreliability of self-reported data, but either way the evaluations of dangerous and desirable traits reflect as they did for imaginary scenarios- women ranking men as more dangerous and less likely to be good in bad, men the opposite.

Takeaway conclusions: The biggest predictor of an accepted offer was whether the subject thought the offerer was going to be good in bed. When status was involved- as with the unattractive celebrities- people were even less likely to want to sleep with someone “safe” and very high-status, but ugly, than they were with an imagined total stranger, which as Conley points out knocks a big hole into “women are most attracted to status when seeking any mate”, a common trope of trashy evo-psych. There’s quite a bit more specifically going after that school- or, more formally, Sexual Strategies Theory, the idea that pretty much all sexual interaction is driven by strategies to reproduce well, as opposed to Pleasure Theory, the idea that most of it is driven by the search for pleasure rather than a strong direct unconscious reproductive effort. Unfortunately, much of it is behind the content wall, which after reading the rest I’m tempted to either pay for or find another way around.

*With of course the usual caveat that these are college students and not representative of all populations and cultures at all times, though it can be argued that as demographics go, college students are experts on casual sex.

**I’m not looking at the raw data, but if I had to make a bet before I did I’d bet the result was less a lot of answers in the 3-ish range than answers all over the map from “hell yes hold my beer” to “not with a stolen dick”.

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