In a Huffington Post, err, post hypothesizing about (white? western?) men's fascination with women's breasts Larry Young and Brian Alexander reference the old sociobiology canard about men. Something about the way they said it made me feel even more skeptical than usual. (Emphasis mine.)
But men aren't known for being particularly choosy about sex partners. After all, sperm is cheap. Since we don't get pregnant, and bear children, it doesn't cost us much to spread it around. If the main goal of sex -- evolutionarily speaking -- is to pass along one's genes, it would make more sense to have sex with as many women as possible, regardless of whether or not they looked like last month's Playmate.
Source: Huffington Post
Is this true? Are men really not particularly choosy about sex partners? Really?
And even if they are is it really because of biology? Or is it maybe more about
Are that many men completely indifferent about their even casual partner's unplanned, unwanted pregnancies? Enough so that it can be tossed off as a blanket statement about all men? Because under normal circumstances even the most desperately non-choosy men are generally pretty appalled to learn their current or erstwhile partner is "knocked up." (That alone ought to scotch the whole "seed spreading" meme.)
I mention "normal circumstances" because there are circumstances of dislocation such as military or wage-seeking migrant separation where men don't appear to be as choosy, and there are circumstances where shame-driven alienation (religious/social strictures) or fear-driven alienation ("wide stanced" men in homophobic cultures) drive men to be less choosy. But almost by definition those aren't the normal circumstances in which most men live most of their lives.
I mean...
Look, if you lock men, or women, in confined quarters for months at a time they routinely start smearing the walls with their feces. Yet somehow we don't make statements such as "men aren't known for being particularly choosy about where they smear their feces." That's because, actually, under normal circumstances people are actually pretty well known for not smearing their feces.
And speaking of normal circumstances...
Really?
Really?
Men aren't particularly choosy?
Are you kidding me? First of all, if men weren't particularly choosy then Cosmopolitan Magazine wouldn't have a circulation rate of three million would it? If men weren't particularly choosy there would be no traditions of partnerless women behind stories or songs about "wallflowers" would there? If men weren't particularly choosy there wouldn't be so much frickin' choosiness expressed in endless comments on various porn and not-so porn websites about how anyone short of utterly flawless doesn't measure up at all. Nor would there be male-to-male putdowns like "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick." Nor would you have other commenters on the right opining that they wouldn't want to have sex with, say, Hillary Clinton, or equally as bad there wouldn't be commenters on the left making similar judgments about, say, Ann Coulter. Nor would there be so very many married women (especially women bloggers) so aching with frustration with their long-term partner's lack of libido that they blog or comment about it.
More importantly, nor would there have been the online post that inspired me to write "The limits of 'no means no'" which was about a woman's observation that the misogynist notion that "women have the power" in sexual relations applies only to those women who are asked!
Clue: in any given year, month, week, or day an enormous number of women are not being asked.
Anyway, I know, I know, it's part of the dominant paradigm to just "know" that men are the "sex class:" reflexively, uncontrollably, and otherwise eternally obliged to seek sex at every opportunity and never to decline it. And, being ingrained in the dominant paradigm it's almost impossible not to bake the assumption into even somewhat skeptical scientific discourse.
But...
But...
Is it true that men are not particularly choosy? Or do we just "know" it's true... so true we don't even bother to check. (Or even so true we outright discard men from the data set if they don't fit the profile?!?!?)