There's a lot of buzz in the press and blogosphere about a study by Professor Terri D. Conley of the University of Michigan called "Perceived Proposer Personality Characteristics and Gender Differences in Acceptance of Casual Sex Offers" from the February 2011 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
As with virtually all science research paid for with taxpayer dollars you (or if you're in academia, your employers) have to pay $30 to a private company (that adds exactly zero additional value) in order to read it. Consequently pretty much nobody who's talks about such studies have actually read the study!
Thomas of Yes Means Yes spent the money. And came up with a lot of stereotype-debunking gold.
The bottom line, after testing multiple variations of a standard experiment that's supposed to measure men's vs. women's receptivity to out-of-the-blue propositions, Prof. Conley draws two counterintuitive but perfectly logical conclusions:
1) Rather than testing individual's receptivity to propositions the original experiment actually tests individual's stereotypes about whether men or women who make out-of-the-blue propositions are likely to be any good in bed.
2) Women are just as likely as men to accept an out-of-the-blue proposition based on whether or not they expect the resulting sex to be a pleasurable experience!
Or to put it another way
2a) Men are no more likely than women to accept an out-of-the-blue proposition when there's an expectation that the sex won't be pleasurable.
While I'd love to talk about the permutations Conley went through to confirm her finding, Thomas does a very thorough job.
And besides, if did that I'd miss the coolest part. Conley's findings poke a big, fat hole in the gender-stereotype-driven theory that, unlike men, women make strategic decisions to have sex based on how "high-status" she perceives the man to be. It's a theory beloved of Pickup Artists, economists, sociobiologists, and evolutionary psychologists. It's also evidently bullshit.
Here's how Thomas puts it.
By contrast, this research demonstrated some of the limiting conditions of SST. Sexual strategies theory clearly predicts that higher status proposers should be accepted by women more readily than low-status proposers. The fact that status did not predict women’s acceptance of casual sex offers is therefore a problem for SST. Neither status, nor tendency for gift giving, nor perceived faithfulness of the proposer (nor, more precisely, the interaction of any of these variables with gender) predicted whether a participant would agree to the sexual offer, contradicting SST. Likewise, if men’s central goal, as suggested by SST, is to transfer their genetic material to future generations, men should have a greater base rate likelihood of accepting a sexual offer from any woman than women have of accepting a sexual offer from any man, regardless of the proposer’s attractiveness (i.e., women should be choosier than men). SST does not predict that women would be equally likely to accept offers as men when (a) the proposers are very attractive, (b) the proposers are very unattractive, (c) the proposers are familiar people, and (d) the proposer and the individual are of the same sex.
Source: Yes Means Yes
Conely's Pleasure Theory is sufficient to but simpler and more general than the far more complex cycles and epicycles of Sexual Strategies Theory. Occam's Razor (plus intuition) therefore says Conely gets the nod. That doesn't mean SST isn't possible, just that it requires considerably more cognition to assess the complexity of status in humans the onus falls on its supporters to explain why we shouldn't abandon it.
Incidentally Conoly's findings also call bullshit on the sociobiological assumption that men's attraction to women is based on whether or not they're in their "reproductive prime." In a variation that used participant-selected celebrities, male respondents speculated that they would respond more positively to an out-of-the-blue proposition by Christie Brinkley than by Roseanne Barr, even though they perceived (inaccurately it turns out) that Brinkley is the older of the two. (At 57 Brinkley is well past reproductive age, let alone in her "reproductive prime.")