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.

I have to admit to a certain confusion at the information here. You understand of course, that I’m English, and so view American society through a slightly distorted lens. I’ll tell you of my confusion later: the first part of this information set causes me no confusion at all.

Someone went out and surveyed the state of virginity or sexual experience amongst the undergraduates at Wellesley College (which I am pretty sure is still an all female college). They were able to find not one single virgin (although I do have to admit, that state or not of the hymen was self-reported rather than physically checked) in the Studio Art program. While 83% of the women in the mathematics program were indeed still virgins.

There are some departments which seem to deviate a little from what we might expect but the general pattern could have been culled from an examination of our EQSQ personality tests. Moving along the continuum, from those subjects which we would expect to be colonised by the empathic types, along to the hard sciences which we would expect to be full of the systemizers, we pretty much see that the virginity rate rises the more likely the students are to be systemizers.

Not too hard to understand: those at the systemizing end do indeed have greater problems with human relationships than those at the empathic end.

So I’m not confused by that part. But I am as I said above by another.

Now my exposure to American teenagehood is of course minimal, really only from the movies and TV (I have lived in the US, but at an age when if I were thought to be taking an interest in the sex lives of teenagers I would be at best run out of town on a rail) so it is of course a very partial view.

But certainly the impression I get is that all of that virginity thing is taken care of by the time people go to college, isn’t it? In fact, I’m under the definite impression that driving home from the Prom date is written into everyone’s personal organiser.

Isn’t it?

An interesting little finding:

Scientists investigating human sexuality have found that the brains of homosexuals have structural and functional differences from those of “straight” people.

Lesbians appear to have a lower proportion of grey matter in their brains than straight women, giving their brains a more “male-like” structure.

The brains of gay men appear to have structural similarities to those of heterosexual women. They also exhibit the same powerful response as straight women to the sex hormones released in male sweat.

The research comes amid growing interest in how variations in brain structure are linked to human behaviour.

This of course speaks directly to the theory behind our own EQSQ personality tests. We are, essentially, making the same assumption. That there’s a spectrum of brain types, from systemizing to empathic, and that these map pretty well to the stereotypes of male and female. Any individual, whether XX or XY, can have the “male” or “female” brain but as a matter of probability we find more XYs with the male and XXes with the female.

We also think that the mechanism by which said male or female brains are produced is the exposure to testosterone by the fetus while in the amniotic fluid. We don’t of course know whether this finding about sexuality has the same cause or not.

In fact, we don’t as yet know whether those two sets of brain differences are indeed the same or not: certainly, there’s no research as yet to even hint at the idea that male empathizers, or female systemizers, are more or less likely to be either gay or heterosexual.

Be interesting to find out though, eh?

Here’s something you might think it was unlikely you would ever see:

‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’ Napoleon Bonaparte’s lacklustre response to the bedtime blandishments of his wife is being repeated every evening in bedrooms across the country. Men are simply going off sex, according to the UK’s largest firm of relationship counsellors.

Relate, which provides counselling, sex therapy and relationship education, said there had been a 40 per cent increase in male clients admitting that, despite being physically able to have sex, they can’t be bothered.

No, it’s not because they can’t have sex, it’s because they’re not really worried about it. Even more, it’s not because they don’t want to have sex with their wives (a regrettable state of affairs to be sure, but not one that has been all that unusual in history) but would like to do so with women perhaps unobtainable. No, it’s just the whole idea of sex simply isn’t all that fascinating any more.

Who would have thought of that happening?

Various possible explanations are offered and the one I find funniest is the idea that as women know more about what they want these days, or perhaps it’s rather that they’re a great deal more vocal in letting on what they want, thus men find it all too much of a strain. That makes us sound even more wimpish than just not being interested really.

However, there is one explanation which we can reject entirely:

Professor Cary Cooper, president of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, agreed. ‘Men have less social support and, as a generalisation, are less emotionally intelligent than women and have not traditionally been encouraged to share their feelings,’ he said.

Cooper, who is professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, also blamed Britain’s culture of long working hours. ‘Britain’s work culture has gone from 9 to 5 to extremely long hours, which makes for a very stressful life,’ he said. ‘Stress can be cumulative, which means eventually people can find it impossible to switch off and relax.’

I agree, as a thesis, it sounds plausible. The stresses and strains of modern life, long working hours culture, yadda, yadda.

The only unfortunate thing is, male working hours have been declining for at least a century, both paid work outside the home and unpaid work in it. So the stress associated with work has also been declining: so sad, isn’t it, when a beautiful theory gets destroyed by an inconvenient fact?

Here’s an interesting little thing about the differences between the sexes. Women’s voices sound sexier when they’re at their most fertile part of the cycle.

Researchers found that the female voice altered according to the time of the month.

They recorded women counting from one to 10 at different stages of the menstrual cycle, then played the voices back at random to a group of students.

Both men and women judged the voices to be most attractive when they were recorded at periods of peak fertility and less attractive during non-fertile periods.

This ties in with various things that we’ve already discussed here: for example, the way that female singers’ voices change over their cycle as well.

And, of course, the way in which lapdancers‘ earnings seem also to change with their position on that same cycle.

All of these findings are pointing to very much the same finding. That while the basic and outward signs of oestrus in human beings are no longer visible, in the same way that the bright red bottom of a baboon in heat (or the yowling of a domestic cat when she is) are, the more subtle signs are still there.

And the explanations of all of this are well understood too. Humans (and to a lesser extent, other apes and monkeys) are slightly odd in that they mate when not necessarily fertile. We’re also a long lived pair bonding species, something else which sets us apart. There’s thus an advantage to the female side to keeping the knowledge of when she is fertile private: it aids in both beating off the unwanted attentions of those she has not bonded with but also keeps her mate guessing about when she is fertile. This is important knowledge in the battle of the sexes.

However, it’’s such important knowledge in that battle that the ploy is not going to go unanswered: males are going to try to work out the fertility or not, the point in the cycle, from other more subtle clues. And some of them, at least, are going to work it out and many of us will be descended from those who did, thus providing a genetic strengthening of such a talent down the generations.

This is an interesting little right brain test. So interesting in fact that I still haven’t found the man after about 15 minutes of looking at the picture.

Have a look here for the picture and the rules.

To be honest with you, I’m not even sure that there is a man in the picture: either that or I have no right side brain at all.

Anyone mind if I stick with our own EQSQ personality tests? They are at least based on science: and I can do them too, which always helps.

The latest attempt to link vaccines and the mercury within them (not that there is any mercury within them any more) with the causation of autism seems to be laid out here.

According to David Geier, the father-son team first became interested in this question after viewing a poster in which Dr. Boyd Haley showed how the addition of even a small amount of testosterone greatly enhanced the destructive power of mercury.

Through the work of Dr. Jill James, the Geiers were aware that people with autism had significantly lower levels of glutathione. In their investigations the Geiers found that testosterone blocks the body’s ability to make glutathione and that mercury binds to glutathione, thus inactivating whatever stores the body may already have.

According to the Geiers mercury also raises testosterone levels, while dramatically lowering glutathione. At special risk would be those individuals who have a family history of low estrogen and high testosterone. The Geiers’ theory might tie together several disparate findings and give hope for those children who have not fully recovered through bio-medical interventions.

A known side-effect of high testosterone is precocious puberty, or the early development of adult features in children. When the Geiers went looking for signs of precocious puberty in the autistic children in their clinic they found it in approximately 80% of their patients.

According to the Breast Cancer Fund, over the past forty years the age of puberty in girls has dropped one to two years. The Geiers believe this is a population-wide effect of mercury from the vaccines. When the Geiers tested seventy children with autism for abnormal testosterone levels they found results outside the normal range in approximately one-quarter to one-third of their patients.

Now, no, I’m not a scientist (at least, not a physical scientist) so I’m not going to try and either prove or disprove this thesis. I’ll leave that to the people with the appropriate qualifications. That they’re discussing chelation as a treatment for autism makes me think it’s unlikely at the best to be true, but that’s not my point in mentioning it here.

Rather, it’s the way in which they seem to think that this post birth, indeed, post vaccine, connection between mercury and autism has anything at all to do with Simon Baron-Cohen’s views on autism being a product of the extreme male brain.

Just one little thing about Baron-Cohen’s ideas: he does think he’s found the explanation for many or most cases of autism. That hesitancy is because autism isn’t so much a disease or a genetic condition as it is a set of symptoms. Those who have the symptoms are said to be on the autistic spectrum: but that doesn’t mean that all occurences of said symptoms have the same cause. We know very well that there are certain genetic conditions which produce the same or very similar symptoms just as we also know that most showing the symptoms don’t have those genetic conditions.

But the little thing: while he thinks he’s along the right lines he most certainly has not ruled out there being either environmental causes for some cases or even all. It could be that there is a predisposition which needs a trigger to cause the full syndrome. I might add that he doesn’t think that it’s mercury in vaccines, as that has been removed from vaccines in different countries at different times and the incidence of autism hasn’t fallen after that removal in any of them.

But on to the major point here: Baron-Cohen’s connection between testosterone and autism, that extreme male brain idea, is something to do with in utero exposure, that is, fetal exposure to testosterone. As the brain develops in utero the various hormones it is exposed to do indeed change the paths of development: this is why pregnant women are advised so strongly not to drink, or why sufficient folic acid needs to be in the mother’s diet to avoid spina bifida. This creation of the extreme male brain is nothing to do with testosterone levels in the bloodstream post partum, nothing to do with the receptors for testosterone in the child (if it were we’d be having female autists growing beards). The theory is about what happens in the womb, not anything that happens after it.

Now, as I say, I’m not about to declare the theory put forward in the linked post to be incorrect, even if I think it is. Rather, I just want to point out that you can’t use Simon Baron-Cohen’s theory to support it, not unless you’ve got some interesting form of time machine. He is saying that autism is connected with fetal exposure to testosterone, not to the levels of testosterone (or mercury) that the child is exposed to after birth.

Apropos nothing very much, just really liked this blog post. From a woman with Asperger’s making sense of life:

Grounded in heart. That is often an aspergerian asset, a self-defense from squandering our lives in larger realms we cannot fathom. Contrary to the NY Times article – and my own life experience — I suspect there are numerous aspie women whose marriages succeed and therefore, their minds are never labeled. They are just appreciated by their families. They are honored as leaders in small groups. They produce and educate professionally accomplished sons.

No, I suspect that universal screening for aspies and other learning differences would yield a more complex picture of aspergerian women than this article held forth. Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this syndrome, and some of it has been romantic love. And it has been bestowed on us. Likewise, I cannot believe there have not been successful aspie women in unheralded careers. In fact, I consider it likely that many of the “behind every successful man” women – the ones who consistently find themselves training a succession of hot young male bosses – are aspies who deserve a lot more credit.

Worth noting:

Love is really the only thing that triumphs over this…

That is true, and wonderfully so, of so many things we encounter in this vale of tears.

I do love these survey style things. This one was trying to find out who is rated as the most seductive woman of all time. The answer?

She is two parts Kelly Brook, one part Jennifer Lopez and one part Angelina Jolie.

Angelle combines Brook’s hair and body, Lopez’s nose and Jolie’s lips, wrapped up in “the most seductive dress of all time”: Marilyn Monroe’s white halter dress from The Seven Year Itch.

Don’t worry if you don’t know who Kelly Brook is, I didn’t either. From Wikipedia:

Brook’s modeling career began at 16 after winning a beauty competition, her early work was in a range of advertising campaigns, including for the new “Bravissimo” company that specializes in bras and lingerie for big-breasted women, and for Foster’s beer. Brook is 5 feet, 7 inches (168 cm) tall, and her voluptuous figure caught the eye of the editorial team of the Daily Star tabloid, which began featuring her as a Page Three girl.

Umm, a certain plushness to her figure then, something that appeals rather to the male mind.

However, there is in fact something of an error, unfortunately one of a rather basic nature, in the logic of this whole survey.

She was created from a survey of British women’s views about seduction, commissioned by fabric conditioner firm Lenor.

Yes, they were asking the women to define the most seductive woman of all time. Doesn’t really work, does it? As it’s (with a small set of exceptions of course) the men who will be the seducees, it would be rather better to have them defining the seductiveness, wouldn’t it?

This is a slightly out of date book, “Creating a Life, Professional Women and the Quest for Children” but it seems to have bounced back up again into the blogs recently.

Here’s Bryan Caplan on it, an older piece from Prospect about it and the Falkenblog. I tend to side with economic arguments rather than the feminist ones, but then I pretty much always do side with the economic arguments.

Essentially, I don’t think it’s any surprise at all that women who have great success in a career or professional life tend to have fewer (or no) children than those who have directed their attentions somewhat less to said careers. It seems blindingly obvious that one cannot do everything in this life and that concentration on one matter or another is going to mean that other opportunities slip one by. We do live in a society where to get to the top you have to work both very hard and very long hours: whether we’d like it to be this way or not is another matter, as is what we might do if we want to change it. But given that this is so I simply cannot summon up even any wonder, let alone surprise, at the idea that those who have taken one path have by doing so given up other options.

After all, we do know that this whole scenario is (one of) the causes of the gender pay gap. Those women who do have children tend to drop out of the workforce for a few years, often only coming back part time until the children are older. While there are those that complain, it’s not difficult to understand that this makes scaling the very peaks of a professional career somewhat difficult. I simply can’t raise that wonder at the idea that those who do scale those dizzy heights are the ones who have not so dropped out.

Two sides of the same coin really.