Casual sex….something we all like to talk about and there’s even the occassional rumour that some of us like to engage in it. No, really, it has been known to happen!

There’s an article here tut tutting about how casual sex has become more common:

BRITISH men and women are now the most promiscuous of any big western industrial nation, researchers have found.

In an international index measuring one-night stands, total numbers of partners and attitudes to casual sex, Britain comes out ahead of Australia, the US, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.

I will admit that they do have to rather torture the data to come out with a table that puts Britain at the top. They exclude a lot of industrial countries because they are small and a lot of countries with more casual sex because they are not industrial countries. But then this wouldn’t be unusual for a British newspaper, to fiddle with the data until they can find something which puts Britain at the top of whatever table it is they are talking about…as here with casual sex.

“Britain 11 th in casual sex table” doesn’t really make much of a headline…in fact, “Britain 11 th” in anything doesn’t make much of a story, well, unless you were talking about the soccer World Cup results in which case everyone would fall over in surprise at how well we had done.

But I think that the interesting things here are twofold. Firstly, the obvious economic point:

Schmitt says the ratio of men to women is one of the factors that determine a country’s ranking.

The high scores in many Baltic and eastern European states might be linked, Schmitt said, to the fact that women outnumber men and so are under more pressure to conform to what men want in order to find a mate. In Asian countries, by contrast, men tend to outnumber women slightly, so it is men who have to conform.

Quite, those with the scarcity value do indeed get to impose their ideas and ideals on those chasing that scarcity. This works in marriage, sex, casual sex and the rest, just as much as it does in hte market for widgets.

But there’s another more subtle economic point here as well, one that reflects that point that economists are so insistent about, opportunity costs.

The researchers behind the study say high scores such as Britain’s may be linked to the way society is increasingly willing to accept sexual promiscuity among women as well as men.

It’s not so much that the rise in casual sex reflects society’s approval of women becoming more like men I think. Rather, it’s that women are realising that there are fewer costs to having casual sex.

There is of course the point that things like virginity are nowhere near as highly valued as they once were….but that I think is a consequence of this other point. Cheap, reliable and easily available contraception. For virginity was valued I think not just for itself but for the proof that it gave that children were likely to be of the man in that specific relationship.

When women risk pregnancy as a result of casual sex the costs of indulging in such casual sex can be very high. When there’s a high cost to doing something we not surprisingly see less of it being done. But now that that industrially available contraception is indeed available then the costs (more correctly, the opportunity costs) to women of such casual sex decline. Indeed, they decline to pretty much the same level as has always been true for men. If a woman wants to have sex and doesn’t want to get pregnant she can now do so. And the last 20 years or so are the first time in human history that this has been generally true for any generation of women.

So I can’t say that I’m really all that surprised by the change in behaviour. Indeed, if I wasn’t actually married myself I might even approve of it.

This is really rather amusing. The way in which the rich are economising on their mistresses as a result of the current financial turmoil.

You know times are tough when the rich start cutting costs on their mistresses.

According to a new survey by Prince & Assoc., more than 80% of multimillionaires who had extra-marital lovers planned to cut back on their gifts and allowances. Still, only 12% of the multimillionaire cheaters said they plan to give up on their lovers altogether for financial reasons.

Indeed, most amusing, tee hee.

However, there is something of more interest to us buried further down the report.

The most surprising stats in the study relate to gender and what might be termed “length of service.” Fully 82% of men in the study said they planned to lower the allowances to their mistresses, while more than three quarters planned to provide fewer gifts, less expensive gifts and fewer perks, like jet rides, resort vacations and top restaurant meals.

Women were far more generous to their paramours in the face of financial crises. Less than 20% planned to lower allowances, gifts and perks, while more than half planned to raise them.

Susan Shapiro Barash, who teaches gender studies at Marymount Manhattan College and wrote “Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets,” about why women lie, said women value their lovers more than men in a time of economic trouble. “For the women, lovers matter more than ever now because the rest of life is so dreary,” she said. “For the men, they’re just cutting across the board.”

This would indicate, at least to me, that there’s a gender difference in the reason that (rich) people have lovers in the first place. For the men it might well be access to younger women, or to women who have not had children.

That last can actually be rather important actually. For of course most men do indeed desire children but they also desire that their sexual partner have a body that has not gone through the traumas and changes of pregnancy and childbirth.

But for women there’s much more of an emotional, rather than purely physical or sexual, attatchment to their paramours. We might even call it love rather than sex. Not that we might find that all that surprising. We do generally think that women go to bed with men that they like whereas men are thought to go to bed with women they like the looks of.

And if there is this difference between why men and women take lovers (rather than their steady partner) in the first place then I can’t say that we should be all that surprised if they react differently to straightened times. Indeed, that different reaction might be taken as an indication that they do take them for different reasons in the first place.

I’m always amazed at how some people continually express surprise at the fact that boys and girls are different. It really doesn’t come as a shock to me that the two sexes (sorry to be so exclusive here but I’m not talking about the sexual complexities that accrue to some 2 or 3% of the population) are indeed different. We’re entirely unsurprised that male animals are different in behavior to females of the same species, after all.

So, as I say, I’m always rather amazed at the surprise shown by these sorts of figures:

Official figures show girls dramatically outperform boys in every area of early development - including basic literacy, communication and imaginative play.

Some 58 per cent of girls were competent in all areas, new figures have revealed, compared to only 41 per cent of boys.

The gap in reading and writing has stretched over the last three years.

The disclosure is made in a Government analysis of 556,000 children aged four and five at the end of the foundation stage - before infants move into Year One.

It suggests the majority of boys start compulsory school not fully prepared for lessons.

The gender gap persists as children move through primary and secondary school.

At the age of 16, almost seven in 10 girls gain five good GCSEs - compared to only 60 per cent of boys.

So, boys are different from girls at the age that they start school….and they make up some part of that difference by the time they reach 16. So what actually is the problem that everyone is worried about?

I have to admit that I rather like the findings of this little paper.

A woman’s sex drive begins to plummet once she is in a secure relationship, according to research. Researchers from Germany found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex. Conversely, the team found a man’s libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship.

OK, I’m willing to believe that, it certainly seems to accord with the anecdotal evidence. Indeed, the number of jokes that are made about the way that sex stops when marriage starts would seem to make it that the entire society understands this point.

Women, he said, have evolved to have a high sex drive when they are initially in a relationship in order to form a “pair bond” with their partner. But once this bond is sealed, a woman’s sexual appetite declines, he added.

Again, entirely willing to accept that. For those sufficiently cynical sex is what women give to men in order to gain committment and committment is what men give to women in order to get the sex. (It’s at about this point that the truly cynical would deploy Robert Heinlein’s point that only on Earth could we have a shortage of what every woman has an infininte supply of.)

However, this seems to me to be entirely wrong.

The rationale for why a woman’s sex drive declines may be down to supply and demand. If something is in infinite supply, the perceived value would drop.”

At least, put that baldly it fails. For if it was indeed just this simple supply and demand then it would apply to both men and women, would it not? Male sex drive would fall equally, as sex for the man is quite obviously in just as much infinite supply as it is for the woman.

However, we can construct a scenario where this supply and demand story might actually work. Which is that, in a stable relationship, sex is indeed infinitely avaliable to the man and thus might lose some of its perceived value. Thus the woman (not consciously you understand) will reduce supply of it to increase that perceived value.

And that does indeed provide us with a decent economic model of what is happening. That an artificial restriction of supply increases perceived value. Hey, it works for baseball cards so it’s difficult to see why it wouldn’t with sex.

Girl cooties really do exist!

No, seriously, what we all believed as children is true, that girls really do have cooties (which, of course, is why all little boys shun them. It takes a certain number of years of maturity to understand that the attractions of women over ride the presence of such girl cooties. Sort of, umm, cooties into cuties perhaps?).

That fuller report is here.

Ladies, your hands are a zoo. Sampling the bacterial DNA on human skin has revealed that while women’s hands get washed more often than men’s, they teem with a more diverse selection of germs.

What’s more, the average person’s hands probably carry at least 3000 different bacteria belonging to more than 100 species. This startling cornucopia may make it possible to tell which objects have been touched by someone, just by looking at the bacteria left behind.

Now it is true that women’s hands have fewer germs, as they say. But more different types, more diversity.

I think we could happily say that some of those different types are indeed the famed girl cooties, no?

OK, such joking aside, this actually has a larger implication. We know very well that womens’ immune systems are stronger than mens’. If they do indeed have a more diverse population of fauna upon them this bolsters the idea (one that I hold certainly, although not on the basis of all that much evidence to be sure) that immune systems need to be primed in order for them to get stronger. That idea encapsulated in the old phrase what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Yesterday I declared that the feminisation of education was complete and we should all start worrying about other things now. I was, as I am wont to be, a tad hasty perhaps.

For there is something which still isn’t quite right. That is the occupational segregation in hte education system. It is indeed true that more degrees are awarded to women now than are to men, but it’s also true that the subjects studied can be wildly different.

As you can see, there are huge differences in what it is that men and women choose to study.

Now this doesn’t surprise us much around here. For the very basis of our EQSQ personality test is that there will indeed be such differences on average. Human minds are arrayed on a spectrum, from those interested in systems and processes (what we call “systemisers”) to those interested in other people (”empathisers”). Everyone has a little of both, of course, but we do find men clustered at the systemising end, women at the empathising. Do, please, note that this is about averages, not an individual. An individual can of course be anywhere upon that spectrum.

OK, so it’s also not too much of a stretch to think that these brain types might also influence job or career choice, right? It might be what it is that a certain brain type enjoys or it might be what it’s good at. But we can all accept the thought that certain people will be predisposed to certain activities….and that this split might not be equal between men and women.

Now to the extent that the choices in the chart above are made for such rational reasons we’re of course delighted. But there is something of a problem still.

I have no problem if women want to spend four years at college studying (at their own expense) the role of indigenous women in the postmodernist Marxist movement of 1960’s Paraguay, or whatever.  However, I do have a problem when these same folks later complain that their income is below average or they are under-represented in the board room.

College degrees most dominated by women include library science, consumer science, social science, education, language, psychology, and gender studies.  Top college degrees most dominated by men include construction trades, engineering tech, transportation, military technologies, engineering and computer science.

Sorry, but I cannot imagine any possible restructuring of society and the economy where the first list is more valuable and has higher income potential than the second list.

There’s part of the gender pay gap right there. In the subjects that men and women differentially decide to get their training in. And I agree, I cannot think of any method (short of a full blooded and bloody Marxist takeover) which would reorder society so that, say, librarians were paid more than computer engineers.

So we’re rather stuck at a little bit of an impass here. That people go and study what they want, what they’re suited for is great. But it does seem to be one of the things leading to the pay gap later on in working life.

I’m not sure there’s any solution here at all. It just depends upon which trade off you prefer I guess.

I’ve been less than complimentary about what I see as the feminisation of education over the past few decades. This feminisation to me is about the reduction in the importance of exams and tests and more weight being put upon course and project work.

Of course, I’ve no real proof that this is in fact “feminisation”, that’s really rather just prejudice on my part. Well, except for the fact that those pushing for these changes did so because they insisted that an education system based purely upon test results was something which favored competitive boys rather than girls.

However, there’s another meaning to the “feminisation of education” phrase and that’s one that I fully support. That is, that in the upper reaches of the education system, at college, more women than men are now getting their degrees.

The proof is here at this Carpe Diem post.

Now we all know that women make up the majority of those entering college….and we’ve all also known that the majority of Bachelor degrees have been to women for some years now. But the important point to be made now is that since the mid 1980s, more Masters degrees have been awarded to women than to men.

That still doesn’t show equality in education of course: what about higher degrees, Doctorates for example? Will the feminisation of education get that far? Actually, it already has. Since 2006 the majority awarded go to women.

In every year before 2006, men received more doctoral degrees than women, and in every year after that women are projected to earn more doctoral degrees than men (see graph below). By 2016, women will receive slightly more than 55% of doctoral degrees vs. less than 45% for men.

I’d say that shows that the education system is pretty well feminised now. Whatever it was that we needed to do we have done. It’s fixed, so perhaps we can stop worrying about it and go on to some other problem?

This is an interesting little finding, that women are closing the infidelity gap with men.

Perhaps I should explain a little background first. It’s long been known that women report fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men do. It’s also long been known that men tend to commit adultery (and we’re using that in the wider sense here, not just straying from a marriage, but from a relationship) more often than women do.

Now given that it takes two to make the two backed beast, this might be thought of as being a little strange, for it one man strays then so must one woman. But the standard explanation is that there are some women, some very small number, who have a huge number of partners. Prostitute is one name for them of course.

Another point often made is that as men are seen as virile if they have many partners while women are seen as promiscuous, then men over report and women under.

However, researchers are now finding that this infidelity gap is shrinking.

But a handful of new studies suggest surprising changes in the marital landscape. Infidelity appears to be on the rise, particularly among older men and young couples. Notably, women appear to be closing the adultery gap: younger women appear to be cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.

The older men part is easily explained: Viagra. But the younger women part is a little more complex. However, not so complex that I don’t think we can tease out the likely reasons.

One part of it is that sex itself has simply become more normal. Of course, human beings have always been having sex, that’s why there are still human beings, but it’s only in the last generation or two that non-commercial sex without marriage has become easily available. That in turn rests primarily upon the invention of reliable contraception. With that women have become as free (perhaps “almost” is necessary there) as men to have sex for fun, without the potential problems of childbirth.

So, if sex itself becomes more of the openly admitted and enjoyed part of the society then it won’t come as all that much of a surprise if various aspects of sex and sexuality, like infidelity, also change in their incidence.

There’s also obviously an economic aspect to this. It wasn’t all that long ago that a woman found it very difficult to live a life independent of a man in a financial sense. Crude though this may sound, many a bargain was struck in which the woman agreed to be exclusively available to the man who was providing for her. Think, for example, of the way in which adultery was both a reason for divorce and one which also would change the financial settlement of it.

Again, that dependence has now gone as well, so it’s not surprising really that the incidence of what there were such incentives against is rising.

So, the infidelity gap is rising because women are freer and more independent than they were: sounds like a good think to me really.

A lady in red is more attractive to men than a lady dressed in any other color. Or so yet another of these surveys reported in a newspaper insists. I’m afraid I don’t buy the explanation though, this lady in red thing being genetic, or associated with monkeys and baboons.

The study said that men appear to be driven by primal instincts that associates the colour with sex.

Women sporting shades of scarlet or crimson are more likely to be asked out on a date, according to the research from the University of Rochester in the US.

That monkey explanation for the lady in red being salivated over is here:

Prof Elliot said: “Although this ‘red alert’ may be a product of human society associating red with love for eons, it also may arise from more primitive biological roots.”

Noting how certain male primates were attracted to females when they displayed red, he added: “It could be this very deep biologically based automatic tendency to respond to red as an attraction cue given our evolutionary heritage.”

The basic attraction for red I’ve no problem with, but that evolutionary explanation looks very odd to me indeed. While certain primate females do indeed display red patches when they are fertile, most do not. And we’re very different indeed than monkeys and apes in our sex habits: for example, we have menstruation rather than its opposite, oestrus.

I’d say that this is purely societal. We’ve had such a long association in our culture (and it’s very much worth noting that the association of red with sex isn’t common to all cultures) with sex and red that those wearing it will almost inevitably be seen as being more sexual. And given the depth of this cultural association (from phrases like the scarlett woman, the scalrett letter, the lady in red of the song and so on) there will also be that association amongst women who decide to put on red cloting. Which if course will simply reinforce the assumptions of the men that observe the behaviour of those that wear red.

No, nothing to do with monkeys, entirely a cultural phenomenon.

Good news for those wondering about how to split the household chores! We finally have a scientific argument to put all of the gender arguments to rest.

Who should do all those household chores then? Yes, it’s the women.

Now, before you accuse me of being a misogynist, I can prove this contention. And no, it’s not the point mentioned a few weeks back about why women should do the cleaning, that they care more about the standards of cleanliness than men do.

So, what is this evidence to show that women should do the household chores?

Doing heavy household chores could slash a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer by a third, experts have found.

Well, that convinces me, doesn’t it you? A mid level newspaper reports it so it must be true!

Scrubbing floors, washing windows and digging the garden are just as effective as running, cycling and playing tennis at warding off the illness, a study claims.

But lighter tasks like vacuuming and painting, or pastimes like bowls and walking do not have the same effect, said the report for the journal Breast Cancer Research.

Now all I need to do is bribe some scientists into announcing that drinking beer while reading a book prevents prostate cancer and the world will be perfect. My wife and I will be able to avoid the most common cancers that each of us, for gender reasons, might be prey to and I will be able to read and drink in a clean house!

Somehow though, despite the thorough scientific grounding of this finding, I’m not really sure that I’ll be able to get my wife to believe it. Sadly.