Most people in sexual partnerships end up facing the conundrum biologists call “habituation to a stimulus” over time, a growing body of research suggests that heterosexual women, in the aggregate, are likely to face this problem earlier in the relationship than men. And that disparity tends not to even out over time. In general, men can manage wanting what they already have, while women struggle with it.
Wednesday Martin
February 14, 2019
The Bored Sex
[I’d like to see the research on this. I’m a bit skeptical that women are more likely than men to have these feelings. However, I have talked to a number of women who identify with this.
One women asked me to take some sexy pictures of her. It turned out it was for one of her boyfriends. Not her husband. The husband wasn’t supposed to know about them. “How many boyfriends do you have?”, I asked. Her answer was a bit of a surprise to me, “Enough for my own basketball team.”
Another woman was married a couple years to a really nice guy when she started getting “restless”. She felt she just had to have sex with someone other than her husband. She decided there was something wrong with her mate selection and divorced him. She found someone else, thought things were great, then after a couple years the same thing happened. She ended up finding a local sex club that she started attending regularly.
Another woman had been married something like five to seven years and found she could barely stand to have sex with her husband. He was a really nice guy and she liked him a lot, he was good looking, but sex just wasn’t something she wanted to do with him. What about sex in general? Did she have an interest in sex with some other men? Ahh…. yes, she would like to have sex “with like seven guys at the same time”. The last time I talked to her she was meeting a married man several times a week but still had no interest in her husband.
Another woman “stopped counting” after she had 200+ sex partners (both male and female) before she finally “settled down” and got married. After a couple years she was “climbing the walls”. She got her husband to regularly go to a sex club with her and her cravings were brought under control. But her husband didn’t really care for that solution and the last I heard from her there were a lot of compromises on both sides but without either being very happy about the situation.
Those are just the few I can think of off the top of my head. I could go dig through my notes and find many more examples. The point is,I am quite sure what Martin is saying has some truth to it. “Conventional wisdom” on this topic is at least not universally applicable. I’m willing to consider the hypothesis that a significant portion of the female population is content being monogamous but there is a lot of data that says it is not universal and that women who have very ordinary childhoods with no discernible “damage” are not comfortable with monogamy.
See also Sex at Dawn (Sex at Dusk is a counter argument) and Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free.—Joe]
Hypergamy.
There is a reason that restrictions of most religions of the world try to tie women down with legal structures. Many are always seeking “better” “resources,”men want to know they are supporting their own offspring with the bacon they work so hard for.
Yeah, Anon quoted it properly, the word you are looking for is Hypergamy.
Joe, you need to leave the confines at Sex at Dawn/Dusk and read Rollo Tomassi’s “The Rational Male.” This will give you the ground floor to branch out into other sources that examine inter and intra-relationship dynamics.
Books like Sex at Dawn/Dusks ignore… a lot. They don’t place relationship dynamics into a modern evo/behavioral-psych view that can be digested easily, while Tomassi just slaughters a sacred cow with every chapter.
Thank you. It’s downloading to my phone now.
These women are “sexual leftists”. They only like it if it’s gotten on the sly. Like the wealth acquisition a leftist, it isn’t any fun unless it’s pirated.
Therefore it isn’t so much a matter of having it. That’s not the point at all. It’s a matter of getting excitement from doing something “wrong”.
Once this hypergamy is “normalized” to the point that no one sees it as a shock or as “bad” any more, they’ll become completely bored with it and they’ll have to raise the stakes to something more “shocking”, and so on, etc., ad infinitum.
Likewise, if a leftist is forced to observe the property rights of others for a time, he will eventually be “climbing the walls”, “lusting” for the pleasure of “economic justice” and he’ll have to go out and rob someone, make up lies about someone or vandalize someone’s property.
The “physical stimulation”, either of sex or of acquiring wealth, isn’t really what’s being desired here. What’s being desired is the act of “getting away with something nasty”.
Only suckers acquire wealth legitimately and only a chump settles down and has a loving, committed relationship which builds a solid family and enhances the community. These women end up despising and rejecting their husbands because, once married and committed, those men are among the world’s “chumps”. He’s a nice guy but…sheesh; what a boring chump.
It’d be like a Progressive activist socialite woman marrying a logger. She might like to have sex with said logger on the sly, once or twice, but marrying one? Hah!
Similarly, such a mindset may have some intellectual respect for a “nice guy” but still prefers the excitement of being with, and under the protection of, pirates. And the more the better because you’re now part of a gang of sorts, and gangs have power.
Leftists in general have likewise always had a fascination with gangsters. They want to know them and be with them. Gangsters, pirates, et al are always more exciting than dumb ole farmers, machinists, miners, or store clerks (all the people and institutions that make civilization actually work).
Those people who tear civilization apart are the fun ones.
So I’ve come up with the term “Pleasure Pirates”. Pleasure pirates are always the more respected in popular culture. All the world tends to look up to a pleasure pirate.
Then there’s the process of “feminism”. This is where some women envy what they have been made to see as the freedom, dominance, and the power, and the cheating, carousing, pirating nature, of men. Envy leads to hate, so they come to hate their carefully crafted image of men with a passion (passion being a key in understanding all of this), and yet then attempt, subconsciously, to become it (envy leads to hate, hate stimulates the passions, passion leads to a transformation into the hated caricature of that which was originally envied). You throw down the dictator and become, eventually, a dictator.
Before they know what is happening they’ve become a caricature of what it was they hated, or worse, because often what they hated was in itself a caricature. Just as you are what you eat, when you’re fed hate and you swallow it and digest it, so you become hate.
So it is that we are all in danger of becoming the very caricature of that which we hate. When my gay brother-in-law was showing us around San Diego, he pointed across a large parking lot to a neon sign, and warned us, “That’s the lesbian bar. Don’t go near that place or they’ll actually beat the shit out of you.” And there it is, folks.
Also, for you men who wish to understand the tactical landscape a bit better; a woman despises a man that she can control with sex. To her he’s a pathetic, injured little boy, like putty in her hands. How can she stay committed to such a foolish man? Why should she?
Do you have data to back up your claim, “These women are “sexual leftists”. They only like it if it’s gotten on the sly.”?
Some of the women I described above do not fit that description. And I have interviewed many, most in fact, that do not hide their need for sexual variety from their husbands. And some of them have been doing this for decades and seem to have very happy relationships with their husbands.
One example. One woman has been married close to 20 years now. For a couple years before I met her and her husband she had, in essence, a secondary husband who live in a trailer parked next to their house. The second “husband” eventually moved away for work. When I separated from my first wife she wanted me as her secondary husband. The primary knew about this and seemed okay with it. I liked them both. Gun friendly (probably as many guns in their home as in mine), and our politics were closely aligned. He had women friends (also married) he was sexually active with when he was away on hunting trips in another state. It wasn’t the type of relationship I wanted so I politely declined and continued to be friends with them.
Some of the women I have interviewed are lefist but only a few have a relationship that might match your claim. The majority have sexual variety in what appears to be a loving and respectful relationship.
The distinction being between a political leftist and a “sexual leftist”. Of course. I did not intend to conflate the two, but to illustrate a common psychological mechanism. Certainly one can be a principled libertarian and a “sexual leftist” at the same time.
One does not preclude the other, but there is a similar mechanism at play in both.
A scientist may question various scientifically derived theories without being “anti science”.
That a spouse may approve of a behavior considered by society as a whole to be “wrong” doesn’t really change the mechanism I’ve described either. I don’t believe so, anyway.
Similarly, Dennis Preger was talking about adultery on his show, and a popular opinion was that if the spouse approved, then it couldn’t be adultery, or that if the person was first divorced then it wasn’t adultery. Well if either of those are to be considered true, then we must redefine the word “adultery”.
It has a clear and specific meaning. That some may not agree with its meaning doesn’t not change the meaning.
So here’s the secret; it may be approved by the husband in this case, and by all of their friends and associates, but because it is considered “bad” by society, historically, for thousands of years, it is thus “more exciting”. Also having more men on a string might give her a greater sense of power and security.
I hold by my previous comments on those bases.
If everyone did it, and had been doing so for thousands of years, and if it were considered the right thing to do, I’m saying it would lose a substantial amount of its appeal. Unfortunately such a thing would take thousands of years to test for proof.
That’s not to say that the thrill of being wanted sexually would be gone; it would simply change behavioral influences, favoring whatever else is still considered “wrong” or “nasty”, or deviant, etc,.
These concepts may not apply to everyone in all cases, but I am saying they are prevalent.
I recently visited my mother in law and her husband. On my out, I hugged her and said, “Be good.” You can’t almost guess her reply I bet. She said, “Well that wouldn’t be any fun, now, would it.”
She is an alcoholic, with multiple diseases, but still can’t shake off the notion that deviancy from what is “good” is how a person has the most fun. Nor is she at all unique in that belief. I assert that it is so deeply engrained that we scarcely think about.
So if monogamy was rare, disapproved of, and had been for “thousands of years” would you then claim that monogamy would then be “more exciting” and would be more appealing to those inclined to seek novelty? If so, then we end up with an odd sort of thing, sex with only one person for decades (sameness), being different and exciting.
I can’t answer for Lyle, but you might think of it in terms of “adrenaline junkies,” thrill-seekers who push the edge because of the danger that amps up the fear/pleasure response of the amygdala. In an extremely safe, comfortable society like ours, the sense of fear/comfort, right/wrong, etc., get all out of whack because it has nothing to calibrate to. Think about the range of reactions people have after their first honest-to-god self-defense shooting. A near-death experience of any sort often gives a person a major priority readjustment.
We are constantly bombarded in media, advertisements, movies, etc., the idea of “exciting,” while day-to-day life is made ever more mundane, boring, and safe via stifling regulations and products that actually ARE safer. Part of the brain seeks stimulation, excitement, close calls. In a well-adjusted amygdala, that can be satisfied by many ordinary events. In an atrophied one, they must constantly seek new borders to push. Like the psychopath who starts with torturing insects, then small animals, then beating up kids, then killing people, then taunting the police about their killing; just getting away with it is enough at first, then they need more. Or a politician looking for gun control – it’s not that they think it’ll make your life better, it’s that they are showing their ability to exert force over you, and make you submit to their control and whim. For the psychopath politician, they get to combine those two things and become genocidal. But it all starts with seeking to push the edges, seek thrills and stimulation and control.
Some stop at “reasonable” limits, but some will not (insert slippery slope here).
Interesting hypothesis. Have you compared your hypothesis to the research data? Or, lacking that, how many women have you interviewed to validate it?
No, no specific papers or books to point to. just an accumulation of observations, reading a wide variety of sources, and interpolation of theory on related psych subjects. Perfectly willing to be proven wrong, because I can’t say that non-traditional sex-preference research is something I spend much time reading on.
I forget who she was. She was a famous movie star, very attractive, and all the men around her of course only lusted after her. She was depressed over this fact, and put it thusly (I paraphrase); “If only I could find a man, for once, who could tell me, ‘No’.” Many wanted her, but no one in her life loved her
So it is that real love is corrective, and doesn’t seek only short term excitement and pleasure.
In Biblical terms, this concept can be illustrated by saying that Adam should have told Eve, “No, Eve! Put the fruit down!” Eve would have loved him for it, and the whole world, for millennia to come, would have been a better place for it. So it is that Man’s weakness for Woman, which is also a form of disrespect for Woman, is identified as a downfall of civilizations.
Adam then went on to blame the woman; “The woman you gave to be with me; she beguiled me, and I did eat…” That’s a typology for us today.
You know you can see that in other people’s lives, with all the mean divorces, broken families, lawsuits, destroyed estates, broken businesses, suicides, and depressed, angry, wayward children being raised more by the government, or by gangs, than by the parents, seeking that very kind of relationship which destroyed the family in the first place? Can you not see at least some little bit of that it in your own life?
What destroyed the relationship of nearly 40 years in my life had nothing to do with “short term excitement and pleasure”. It was a mental illness (probably Borderline Personality Disorder) which grew worse over time. It probably had a genetic component because you could see similar issues in her relatives. Almost none of those affected could be described as leftist.
Years ago, I had an epiphany regarding women in the US. It dawned on me that a lot of them, possibly a majority, had a lack of self-esteem. This seemed to manifest as a desire to be badly treated, as they didn’t think they deserved to be treated well. They expressed this by chasing “bad boys”, as those bad actors/wild guys generally had a better chance of being the type to mistreat the females.
I learned this when I shared a place with a former lover. I became her confidant, and she literally cried on my shoulder a few times over her problems with her love life. One day I asked her why she was ignoring a certain guy who was chasing her, and her answer was that “he was a nice guy”, followed by her covering her mouth and flashing me an “oops!” look. Clearly she was also labeling me the same, and I finally made the connection between who chased her, who she chased, the difference in treatment, and why she chose to be mistreated.
It was like a light-bulb went on over my head, and I found that I could walk through a mall and pick out the ones like her. It was very depressing, as they were the ones that I was normally attracted to, and had to conclude were too much trouble to bother with any more.
The problem was I looked like a bad boy, with long hair and motorcycle gear, and I think I projected an aura of trouble. I recall second hand comments when I was in my teens about how some girls thought I was “scary” when I looked at them. THAT is why they were misreading me.
A psychologist recently clued me in on what the basis of it was. My mother beat me constantly as a child, and he tells me this engenders a mental response/character trait of being willing to fight ANYONE who starts trouble, and many people can read this unconsciously. We are the ones who run toward the sound of gunfire. I am a small guy, and it never mattered how big an opponent was.
It’s NOT JUST SEX that sees this phenomenon with women. It’s life in general.
No matter what a woman may have eventually it isn’t good enough. My wife of more than 3 decades bitches about ‘quality of life’, isn’t happy with her lot and longs for “something else”….but can’t articulate exactly what it is that would be.
We are both college educated, our combined income puts us WELL above the 90th percentile in America, we own a large custom home on a large piece of property. Both our daughters graduated college are successful and we see them all the time. We have essentially ZERO physical needs and ALWAYS have enough $$$ to go out to eat or buy whatever we desire within upper middle class standards. I am 6 feet tall and 180#…. and while I’m not young I’m not bedridden or incapable of doing things. I do laundry, dishes, fix whatever breaks, maintain the vehicles ( of which we own quite a few), pay the bills, do the taxes, stack firewood…..fix broken shingles…..etc. etc. etc. Yet she is STILL NOT HAPPY with her lot in life. She has it better than at least 95% of women in America and 99.9% of women on planet Earth. The ONLY thing that explains this is genetics. Women are HARDWIRED to be unhappy and seek “better”…
whatever the hell “better” might be….even if they can’t describe it. The best advice one can give about dealing with women is simple….do not get too attached to them because no matter HOW WELL you take care of them there is ALWAYS the very real chance they will get the “Unhappies” and dump your ass looking for greener pastures.