This might not be the most amazing discovery ever you know: men and women have (in general) different attitudes to one night stands.

Many women are left unhappy in the aftermath of casual sexual encounters, a survey has revealed.

Just under half of women who answered the internet poll, published in the journal “Human Nature”, said they felt it had been a bad idea.

Four out of five men, in contrast, said they were happy with a brief fling.

That’s not a finding that would shock the proverbial maiden aunt, I’m sure. That men and women will have different attitudes to casuaal sex is pretty much insisted upon by the main evolutionary theories: that given the investment that women have to make into childbearing as opposed to the minimal involvement that a man can have, we’d expect women to a great deal more picky about their partners and how well they know them before getting down to the old rumpy pumpy.

One report on this rather missed the distinction:

Eighty per cent of men enjoy casual sex because it satisfies their prehistoric instinct to breed.

Erm, no. Men and women feel exactly the same instinct to breed: that’s something that’s inherent in being human for we are all, after all, descended from those who did breed. The point is that the method of having the next generation makes much greater demands upon women that it does upon men (in the purely physical sense that is: child support laws have rather changed the equation in the modern world). There are also many fewer chances for women to breed than men: in theory a man can have hundreds of children while the upper bound for a woman is somewhere between ten and twenty (with exceptions, of course).

So we expect women to be much more choosy about who they have children with: and while we’ve now got decent contraception, there’s still a great deal of hard wiring from those hundreds of thousands of years when we didn’t.

The academic leading the research said it showed that there was no evolutionary advantage for women in one night stands.

That’s the correct interpretation: there is an advantage for men and not one for women. Thus the different feelings aabout such sexual encounters.