Sungold uses reactions to the Rep. Weiner cybersex scandal to emphasize a far more "scandalous" but actually utterly mundane fact about "sexting." (emphasis mine)
I wouldn’t be able to give [reporters asking for a gender-studies take] a pat explanation, because I think that masculine sexual entitlement isn’t the whole story. We all have an unruly id. Men aren’t the only folks playing at sex on the Internet. Every hetero man playing around in the vast cyber sex emporium is interacting with female partners (or at least, so he thinks).
Source: Kittywampus
Yes. Yup. Yeah, exactly! Whatever one might think of Weiner himself (I'm generally forgiving but not at all about to forget) the behavior he actually engaged in was by all (or possibly all but one) accounts step-wise consensual and/or reciprocally escalated.
But how, sez all the knee-squeezing twits who reflexively think "hurr hurr they said 'weiner,'" could that possibly happen if people with lady parts were involved? Sungold has a suggestion that will shock them even further.
Mainstream practitioners of ev psych systematically avoid theorizing about pleasure. It’s all about “reproductive success.” And yet, the quest for pleasure is by far the more parsimonious explanation for Weiner’s actions. What’s more, it even explains his partners’ actions! Weiner and his partners were looking to get off. They wanted the thrill of being wanted. They enjoyed the thrill enough to risk (or repress) the potential for embarrassment, should they be caught out. Of course it’s true that Weiner, as a congressman, had more to lose, but the women have also been dragged through the mud in ways that were foreseeable. They, too, took a risk.
Shocking I know. But there you go. Lady parts don't get wet when you drop a quarter in them (the "women need a reason, men just need a place" theory), or when they think they're going to get a baby (the hysterical womb theory) or even just for their husbands (the monogamous "what evolution does to keep the offspring's father around the house" theory.)
Instead I have it on very good authority (on average more than 103.4 million authorities in the United States alone) that lady parts get wet when women get horny. And on average when they get horny it feels really, really good when someone rubs their lady parts just right or (gasp!) when they do it to themselves! And on average stuff like consensual, reciprocally escalated online flirting, sexting, and phone cyber sex makes women horny, which makes them wet, which makes it feel even better when they rub their lady parts.
Hmm... wouldn't it be funny if you had to lay out a similar case to explain why men like online flirting, sexting, and phone- and cybersex?
Now to respond fairly to the field Sungold is interrogating, yes, the fact that rubbing your own lady- or gentleman is really pleasurable is probably a byproduct of evolution. But only in the same way the hair on our heads grows in such a way that we can enjoy looking at it when we part it in the middle is a byproduct of evolution: as a byproduct of some other probably-more-critical function.
But trying to explain why our drives to reproduce is directly rather than very-indirectly responsible for our appreciation of parting our hair in the middle or rubbing our own parts, without using a general (no-doubt evolved) ability to hack our gene expressions for pure personal enjoyment is going to be a fool's chase.
Hmm... to digress even further, an even better example of the general phenomenon of hacking might be that many people like Jagermeister despite the fact that eons ago our animal ancestors evolved a kind of taste bud that identifies poisonous alkaloids as bitter. We evolved the taste buds to avoid eating poisonous plants and minerals, but since we're flexible enough to hack taste-bud expression we're able to take pleasure from the flavor of Jagermeister.
To get back on track, anyway, Sungold's right that the general, non-sex-specific drive to create pleasurable sensations from direct stimulation of nerve endings, regardless of their original "purpose" goes way farther to explain why men and women sext and cybersex each other than any amount of speculation about seed spreading or husband retention.