Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today
Speaker 1: we have Wednesday Martin on the podcast. Doctor Martin has
Speaker 1: worked as a writer and social researcher in New York
Speaker 1: City for more than two decades. The author of Stepmonster
Speaker 1: and the instant New York Times Best Hour Primates of
Speaker 1: Park Avenue, she writes for the online edition of Psychology Today,
Speaker 1: and her work has appeared in The New York Times
Speaker 1: and Time dot Com. Doctor Martin's latest book is called Untrue,
Speaker 1: Why nearly everything we believe about women, lust and infidelity
Speaker 1: is wrong and How the New Science can set us Free.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being on the show today, Wednesday.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on, Scott. My pleasure. Now, when
Speaker 1: you say that the new science can set us free,
Speaker 1: do you mean all of us? Like will your book
Speaker 1: set men free too. You can be free too knowing
Speaker 1: this information. Yes, we want to use science and social
Speaker 1: science to set everybody for you about their sexuality. Men, women,
Speaker 1: and people who identifies neither are cordially invited to read
Speaker 1: um true. Yeah, I want them all to be part
Speaker 1: of the conversation. I love that, you know. I've been
Speaker 1: trying to represent this topic more on the Psychology podcast.
Speaker 1: In fact, we recently had Justin Lee Miller on the
Speaker 1: show talking about sexual fantasies. Well, he's a good friend
Speaker 1: and love his work on sexual fantasies. He's great, he
Speaker 1: is great. Your book differs from him though, in that
Speaker 1: you talk a lot about living out the reality, not
Speaker 1: just the fantasy of sex, right right, not just the fantasy,
Speaker 1: the reality. Have female sexuality. Yay, Yeah, more sex, more
Speaker 1: sex on your podcast, more and more and more and more.
Speaker 1: But when you talk about sex, what's interesting is first
Speaker 1: there will be this tremendous hush from the other person,
Speaker 1: and then the floodgates are open once the person starts
Speaker 1: to talk, or once they you know, hear you talking,
Speaker 1: or once they start to read. So I think it's
Speaker 1: a topic about which you know, we have like this
Speaker 1: gate and once the gate is open, people are really
Speaker 1: curious and really hungry for accurate information. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it starts when we're so young that we get
Speaker 1: pretty bad information about sexuality, and so we're kind of
Speaker 1: conditioned that it has to be secretive or we come
Speaker 1: from a long tradition of bad information. I mean, some
Speaker 1: people we're still living in the shadow of sex education
Speaker 1: that's abstinen. It's only sex education, so it's not really
Speaker 1: sex ed. So there's so much time to be made
Speaker 1: up up and so much ground to cover in terms
Speaker 1: of people wanting and needing to talk about sexuality and
Speaker 1: hear about it. So that was one of the fun
Speaker 1: aspects of writing this book, just connecting, you know, with
Speaker 1: the really deep need people have for their information about
Speaker 1: sex to be scientific but also to be fun and
Speaker 1: accessible and relevant. That's what I always try to do.
Speaker 1: So I tried to take the newish, the newer and
Speaker 1: the newish and the brand new science and social science
Speaker 1: about female sexuality from the experts and from the studies
Speaker 1: and kind of cross it over and make it delicious
Speaker 1: and fun. And that's really the point of one. Sex
Speaker 1: should be delicious and fun, right, It should be candy, right,
Speaker 1: And that's what I wanted my book to be, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted it to be. I wanted my book to
Speaker 1: be substance that went down easily. And you know, the
Speaker 1: title of untrue of the book is kind of a
Speaker 1: play on words. It's because the book looks at female
Speaker 1: infidel specifically, which is that you know, just been mired
Speaker 1: and so much misunderstanding female infidelity and infidelity in general.
Speaker 1: But it's also the book is also more broadly in
Speaker 1: exploration of some of the bad science and the misconceptions
Speaker 1: around female sexuality more generally. So to be able to
Speaker 1: dispel those myths and make it all appealing has you know,
Speaker 1: it's been a fun job and it's been fun to
Speaker 1: see how people respond to it. I bet, hey, did
Speaker 1: you read the New Atlantic article about millennials and sex? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I did, and so it was really interesting and great.
Speaker 1: I love how it started a big conversation. So you
Speaker 1: and I know that the data on that came out
Speaker 1: some months ago, I mean a while back, and so
Speaker 1: people in your field and in the in the sex
Speaker 1: fields have been talking about that finding for a while.
Speaker 1: But people and it's even been in the press before,
Speaker 1: but it was great to see it in a big
Speaker 1: kind of think piece and to get people really to
Speaker 1: wrap their minds around the idea that, you know, millennials
Speaker 1: fifteen percent of them I believe the figure was were
Speaker 1: cellibate and one and a half they were one and
Speaker 1: a half times more likely to not be having sex
Speaker 1: than their gen X peers had been at that age.
Speaker 1: So really surprising findings. And then the stuff that about,
Speaker 1: you know, the kind of ecological circumstances that helped form
Speaker 1: our sexuality. I think it's great for people to think
Speaker 1: about that. So this article went into how millennials are
Speaker 1: living at home for longer because of the economy. They're
Speaker 1: availing themselves of technology more than previous generations, so less
Speaker 1: likely to get out there and actually date and relate,
Speaker 1: and some of them are feeling financial strains in the
Speaker 1: world that previous generations didn't. So I liked the way
Speaker 1: the article balanced this surprising finding with helping us understand
Speaker 1: that human sexuality is pretty flexible and it depends a
Speaker 1: lot on its container. So it was great to see that.
Speaker 1: And also, you know, I think it's time for us
Speaker 1: to stop thinking of millennials in one way. We've had
Speaker 1: one thought about millennials, which is, we've just been flipping
Speaker 1: out about hookup culture, and this article forced us to
Speaker 1: think of them in more nuanced ways maybe, and think
Speaker 1: of them beyond our own personal preoccupations with you know,
Speaker 1: what we think of as the horrors of hookup culture,
Speaker 1: and think of them more broadly. So I'm glad that
Speaker 1: that information is out there, and it's the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that I tried to have and untrue. You know,
Speaker 1: new findings, new social science that challenges the way we're
Speaker 1: used to thinking about sexuality. Can I just see one
Speaker 1: other thing that was really interesting, the research that shows
Speaker 1: that millennial women are actually sexual adventurouses compared to millennial men.
Speaker 1: I get into in untrue the way that there's some
Speaker 1: data suggesting that millennial women outpace millennial men when it
Speaker 1: comes to infidelity. Women in their twenties are twice as
Speaker 1: likely to go to a BDSM dungeon or a sex party.
Speaker 1: They're much more likely to have group sex. So that's
Speaker 1: a surprising and interesting thing about millennials too, that the
Speaker 1: young women are adventurous, more adventurous than their male peers,
Speaker 1: And it begs the question, are they just reporting more
Speaker 1: honestly and you know, do we get socialized out of
Speaker 1: being more adventurous as we age? So millennials full of surprises.
Speaker 1: Thank you millennials. Wow, you're really breaking down a lot
Speaker 1: of stereotypes here. Now, did you say that women are
Speaker 1: more likely to cheat than men? Yes, some interesting information
Speaker 1: that came out of recent a crunch of about you know,
Speaker 1: decades worth of the General Social Survey. Wendy Wang at
Speaker 1: the Institute for Family Studies did a kind of a
Speaker 1: deep dive into who's cheating in twenty seventeen, and she
Speaker 1: found that women ever married women between the ages of
Speaker 1: eighteen and twenty nine, we're slightly more likely to have
Speaker 1: cheated on a spouse than men the same age. Now,
Speaker 1: when we factor in that we are unlikely to feel
Speaker 1: one hundred percent comfortable disclosing to a stranger that we
Speaker 1: have committed in fidelity, and that there's asymmetrical stigma attached
Speaker 1: for women that it's you know, it's a little harder
Speaker 1: for women to admit it. We have to consider that
Speaker 1: they might be in that age range, women might be
Speaker 1: outpacing their male peers by even more than it appears.
Speaker 1: So that was some really interesting data that came out
Speaker 1: and when you dig into it deeper, what you see
Speaker 1: is that there are a number of really very good
Speaker 1: representative or national weighted samples suggesting that men and women
Speaker 1: cheat at equal rates until well into their forties. A
Speaker 1: you gov study done in the UK and the US
Speaker 1: showed that the difference between men and women cheating was
Speaker 1: a single percentage point twenty percent for men versus nineteen
Speaker 1: percent for women. So, as you and I know, that's
Speaker 1: a statistically insignificant difference, and it's likely that because women
Speaker 1: are less likely to disclose transparently, that those numbers are
Speaker 1: at the very least. Even so, when you look at
Speaker 1: the data, there are all kinds of challenges to the
Speaker 1: easy assumption that we've made over the years that you know,
Speaker 1: men are wired to cheat, they're more likely to cheat,
Speaker 1: and that women are sort of wired for monogamy. We're
Speaker 1: starting to see that that's untrue. Very interesting. I mean,
Speaker 1: in general, we know from evolutionary psychology that we didn't
Speaker 1: evolve for any particular sexuality, right, there's no sex that
Speaker 1: we're wired to like more than any other kind of sex.
Speaker 1: We evolved our species as really flexible social and sexual strategists.
Speaker 1: It's just in us, which is what makes studying human
Speaker 1: sexuality so incredibly interesting. Agreed, So what's female flexuality? So
Speaker 1: female flexuality is the term that I used when I
Speaker 1: was writing about the work of Lisa Diamond. Lisa Diamond
Speaker 1: is a sex researcher in Salt Lake City at the
Speaker 1: University of Utah. And some years or that she was
Speaker 1: at Cornell. And she told me that she would drive
Speaker 1: her Toyota Corolla all over upstate New York interviewing women
Speaker 1: about their sexuality. And she told me that when she
Speaker 1: was studying at Cornell some years ago, you know, everybody
Speaker 1: else was studying like infant cognition in her department, and
Speaker 1: she was studying female sexuality. And she told me she
Speaker 1: used to wonder, like, am I ever going to get
Speaker 1: a job? You know? And it was it was tough,
Speaker 1: But did she ever because she came up with this
Speaker 1: great idea. She was studying a group of women, roughly
Speaker 1: one hundred women. She's not been studying this group of
Speaker 1: women for twenty years. And as she recorded their stories
Speaker 1: and their experiences of sexuality, she noticed that there was
Speaker 1: this thing going on where sometimes the women were having
Speaker 1: sex with men, and sometimes they were having sex with women,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they were you know, identifying for example, as
Speaker 1: gay for a long time, and then suddenly they would
Speaker 1: want to have sex with a man, or they were
Speaker 1: straight for a long time and considered them straight and
Speaker 1: considered that that was their orientation. But things would happen
Speaker 1: and they would be having sex with women. Okay. So
Speaker 1: until Lisa Diamonds started thinking about it, everybody would look
Speaker 1: at this information and say, what is all this noise
Speaker 1: in the data about female sexuality? This stuff, this passing bisexuality.
Speaker 1: They sometimes called it, what is all this noise in
Speaker 1: the data? And Lisa Diamond's brilliance, which she said, I
Speaker 1: don't think this thing that you're calling passing bisexuality is
Speaker 1: noise in the data. I think it is the data.
Speaker 1: And she dug into it and she coined a term
Speaker 1: called female sexual fluidity to describe what she was seeing,
Speaker 1: which is that, in her view of it, we all
Speaker 1: have an orientation. We all have a sexual orientation. That's
Speaker 1: a real thing. But for some of us, our sexual
Speaker 1: orientation doesn't provide the last word on who we're attracted to,
Speaker 1: and if we're in a context that's conducive to us
Speaker 1: switching it up, we might do so, and so you know,
Speaker 1: a great example of this is say that you're a
Speaker 1: woman who your orientation is that you're heterosexual, but you're
Speaker 1: at an all women's college, for example, and sex ratios
Speaker 1: are skewed and there are lots of women, and also
Speaker 1: you're in an environment that's conducive to experimentation where there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of stigma around that. And say you
Speaker 1: have a really really close to female friend who's a
Speaker 1: lesbian or she's bisexual. These conditions on the ground if
Speaker 1: you are a woman and you are sexually fluid, would
Speaker 1: lead to it being more likely that you express it.
Speaker 1: But we see female sexual fluidity in lots of different contexts.
Speaker 1: Sociologists had this really unfortunate term for it. They call
Speaker 1: it the Harem effect, and they talk about sociologists have
Speaker 1: written for many years about how, for example, in women's prisons,
Speaker 1: in all women's schools, or I wrote about it happening
Speaker 1: in the Hamptons, right, which is the summer habitat of
Speaker 1: a group of very wealthy people from Manhattan. And in
Speaker 1: the summer the men and women are separated, and a
Speaker 1: lot of these assumably heterosexual women who are married to
Speaker 1: men are living in the Hamptons all summer without their husbands,
Speaker 1: only seeing their husbands on the weekend, and a lot
Speaker 1: of them form intimate attachments and have a number of
Speaker 1: them that told me about forming intimate attachments with trainers
Speaker 1: and having sexual involvements with them. Now, these are women
Speaker 1: who are married or in long term heterosexual partnerships. Often
Speaker 1: they have children, and their whole life is based on
Speaker 1: heterosexual normativity. But in the right, in particular ecological circumstances,
Speaker 1: they'll be open to a sexual relationship with a woman.
Speaker 1: So we see that ecology plays a big role in females.
Speaker 1: Like Lisa Diamond saw that early on. Now here's a
Speaker 1: cool thing. For a long time she thought that sexual
Speaker 1: fluidd was something more inherent to women, and she wrote
Speaker 1: about why that might be. Recently, she published a paper
Speaker 1: and the paper was called I was Wrong. And in
Speaker 1: this paper Lisa Diamond said that after studying this group
Speaker 1: of nearly one hundred women for twenty years and having
Speaker 1: thought based on that data that sexual fluidity was a
Speaker 1: uniquely female thing, she then went and interviewed a group
Speaker 1: of young men in Salt Lake City and they told
Speaker 1: her surprising things. The ones who were identified as heterosexual.
Speaker 1: They told her surprising things about the fact that they
Speaker 1: liked watching porn of men together, that they were interested
Speaker 1: in being with men, that they had been with men.
Speaker 1: And what she came up with after that is that
Speaker 1: sexual fluidity is not just dependent on your ecological circumstances,
Speaker 1: but ideology plays a really big role. And she said,
Speaker 1: these younger men in Salt Lake City, these millennial men,
Speaker 1: were able to push the eject button on the stigma
Speaker 1: that older men feel men in their forties and fifties,
Speaker 1: and beyond the stigma that they feel about male homosexuality
Speaker 1: or the stigma they feel about just the idea of
Speaker 1: male sexual fluidity, these younger men, in having escaped that
Speaker 1: were showing levels of sexual fluidity comparable to what women
Speaker 1: were showing. So it's a work in progress. Hey, here
Speaker 1: we are back to millennials just mixing everything up for us.
Speaker 1: I know, they're really changing the boundaries of gender identity,
Speaker 1: aren't they. Yeah, they're pushing us right in new directions.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's so funny because I had not expected
Speaker 1: the number of people that I spoke to in researching
Speaker 1: this book to tell me many things like I'm post
Speaker 1: binary or I'm gender fluid, and that it's a real
Speaker 1: change in the landscape that millennials are driving. It was
Speaker 1: so funny. This is just I was at a party
Speaker 1: and I introduced a woman in her twenties to a
Speaker 1: woman who's in her early fifties. And the woman in
Speaker 1: her early fifties identifies as gay, and so she was
Speaker 1: talking to this younger woman, and I was there when
Speaker 1: the younger woman said, I'm post binary. I'm you know,
Speaker 1: I identify it's actually fluid. And the woman in her
Speaker 1: early fifties turned to her and said, I'm fifty. I'm
Speaker 1: in my fifties. Are you gay or not? You saw
Speaker 1: right there in that moment at a party and somebody's
Speaker 1: living room. You saw the sort of clash of cultures
Speaker 1: and how we're undergoing a shift. Wait, what is post binary?
Speaker 1: I've sort of non binary? Is that the same thing
Speaker 1: as post binary? I've heard both, I should say, I've
Speaker 1: heard non binary and post binary. Do you think these
Speaker 1: young people have a lot of wisdom about these topics
Speaker 1: that older folks just don't get. I think they do.
Speaker 1: And I just had to have so much respect for
Speaker 1: the people who educated me in this way, you know,
Speaker 1: I was coming from a kind of worn paradigm. I
Speaker 1: started thinking about this book Untrue, and I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I've kind of made a career out of studying women
Speaker 1: we love to hate, right, I wrote a book about
Speaker 1: I wrote a book about our cultural antipathy towards stepmothers,
Speaker 1: and I said that I thought that there was gender
Speaker 1: bias that play there. And I wrote a book about
Speaker 1: rich Mommy's on the Upper east Side, a group of
Speaker 1: people that you know, readers seem to all have an
Speaker 1: opinion about. So then I said, well, you know, I've
Speaker 1: written I am really attracted to these women that we
Speaker 1: have cultural hostility too, because I think they teach us
Speaker 1: a lot about ourselves. Why are we so hot still
Speaker 1: toward these groups of women? What is it about them
Speaker 1: that triggers us? So I said, well, naturally, now I
Speaker 1: have to look at women who refuse monogamy. I have
Speaker 1: to look at in quotes, the adulteress, right, because she's
Speaker 1: a real lightning rod for our cultural rage. Okay, So
Speaker 1: I decide to do this, And this is the great
Speaker 1: thing about social science. As soon as you want to
Speaker 1: look into something, you realize, well, the ground has been
Speaker 1: changing underneath my feet, even as I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: this issue, because what happened was it wasn't there. You know,
Speaker 1: I had used the term the adulteress in quotation marks,
Speaker 1: knowing that our attitudes have changed historically, and that she
Speaker 1: was sort of a rhetorical figure, a literary figure, a signifier.
Speaker 1: But once I started researching the book, I realized how
Speaker 1: much has changed and how little has changed. I mean,
Speaker 1: we now have women sort of at the forefront of
Speaker 1: the polyamory movement in our country. We have women as
Speaker 1: sort of vocal proponents of consensual non monogamy. Consensual non
Speaker 1: monogamy is a thing now, So the whole landscape of
Speaker 1: what used to be called adultery had changed a lot.
Speaker 1: But I did find that, you know, the definition of
Speaker 1: adultery or infidelity or whatever we want to call it,
Speaker 1: had really undergone a see change with the emergence of
Speaker 1: the consensual non monogamy movement, if you will. What's the
Speaker 1: consensual non monogamy movement some people call it CNM, and
Speaker 1: basically what's emerged and I think we have gay men
Speaker 1: to thank for this a lot is over the last decades,
Speaker 1: it's increasingly common for straight people now to decide that
Speaker 1: rather than presume they want to be monogamous for life
Speaker 1: with their life partner, or even to presume that they
Speaker 1: want to be monogamous with a long term partner or
Speaker 1: even in a shorter partnership. People are now having conversations
Speaker 1: out of the gate about what they want and you know,
Speaker 1: whether sexual exclusivity is for them. So I do believe
Speaker 1: that this started mostly with gay men. I like to
Speaker 1: say that gay men gentrified consensual non monogamy for straight people,
Speaker 1: sort of the way they gentrified San Francisco. Right that
Speaker 1: you speak to therapists work with couples, they will often
Speaker 1: tell you, and I interviewed a number of them in
Speaker 1: the course of researching this book. I would sit down
Speaker 1: with these couples therapists and they would say, well, I
Speaker 1: first became aware that there was a sort of a
Speaker 1: sea change going on because I had worked with gay
Speaker 1: men for many years, and these couples would come to
Speaker 1: me and they would say, we're open, or we're non monogamous,
Speaker 1: or we don't do monogamy, or we play right and
Speaker 1: the gay men we're using these terms. Of course, it
Speaker 1: wasn't all gay men, It wasn't all gay couples. A
Speaker 1: lot of couples, therapists and sex researchers who have a
Speaker 1: long history of working with the gay community will tell
Speaker 1: you that they first that gay men kind of pioneered this.
Speaker 1: Eventually straight people caught on, and you know, we had
Speaker 1: books like The Ethical Slut by Dottie Esmond, We had
Speaker 1: Sex Dawn by Chris Ryan and Casilda Jetta, So we
Speaker 1: had all of these books coming out. Esther Perell's books
Speaker 1: have been to a lot of people, and the work
Speaker 1: of Michelle Shankman. All this started coming out, and people
Speaker 1: over perhaps the last decade especially, we've seen straight people
Speaker 1: cottoning in new ways to consensual non monogamy. So one
Speaker 1: of the things one of the things that I write about,
Speaker 1: and we don't have straight up a lot of data
Speaker 1: on it yet, but if people are interested in learning
Speaker 1: more about consensual non monogamy, they might like to look
Speaker 1: at the work of the sex researcher Amy Moorees. Amy
Speaker 1: Moorees discovered that between two thousand and six and twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: our Google searches for terms like open relationship and polyamory
Speaker 1: increased exponentially. At the same time that you know, ninety
Speaker 1: one percent of people told Gallup pollsters in twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: that they thought that infidelity was wrong. They're doing these
Speaker 1: google searches, So I like to say that in the aggregate,
Speaker 1: Americans maybe monogamists, but we're curious about our options. And
Speaker 1: Amy Moore's work sort of points to that. Also the
Speaker 1: work of a researcher named Terry Connolly. I believe she's
Speaker 1: at the University of Michigan. So if people really want
Speaker 1: to dig into the research about the emergence of consensual
Speaker 1: non monogamy as kind of a movement over the last
Speaker 1: decade or two, they'll probably want to look at the
Speaker 1: work of those researchers. And then there's polyamory, which is
Speaker 1: sort of a subgroup of consensual non monogamy. You know,
Speaker 1: usually we divide consensual non monogamy into different groups. Swingers
Speaker 1: who kind of had their heyday in the seventies, but
Speaker 1: they're still out there and they're still going. Then people
Speaker 1: in what we call open relationships, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: a misnomer a lot of times. The ethos of an
Speaker 1: open relationship is, you know, you go off and do
Speaker 1: your thing, and I'll go off and do my thing,
Speaker 1: and we together will be home base, but we'll keep
Speaker 1: it kind of quiet. And then the polyamory community, people
Speaker 1: who identify as polly are in relationships that they might
Speaker 1: call thrupples or triads because it's a relationship of three
Speaker 1: people or quads a relationship of four people, and often
Speaker 1: in a polyamorous relationship, and there won't be a hierarchy
Speaker 1: among swingers and people in open relationships. The diad right,
Speaker 1: the pair bond is pretty much the relationship, the strongest relationship,
Speaker 1: the relationship that takes precedence. But people who are polyamorous
Speaker 1: might live in an arrangement or be in a romantic
Speaker 1: and personal arrangement where there is no hierarchy and all
Speaker 1: four people's relationships with each other matter just as much.
Speaker 1: Or in a throttle or a triad again, there might
Speaker 1: be no hierarchy, there might be no pair bond as
Speaker 1: home base, and people are making trying to make these
Speaker 1: relationships work. So I think the emergence of polyamory and
Speaker 1: it's sort of coming out in a big way. There
Speaker 1: will tell about it, and there are lawyers who draw
Speaker 1: up contracts for people in polyamorous relationships and therapists who
Speaker 1: treat polyamorous people. They told me that their couches have
Speaker 1: to be really big. So there's a whole industry emerging
Speaker 1: to help these people. So this is the new wrinkle
Speaker 1: in the culture that is really fascinating and important for
Speaker 1: us to look at as well and kind of challenges
Speaker 1: this whole idea of what is infidelity, what is monogamy?
Speaker 1: What do people want? Now? Wow, so it almost seems
Speaker 1: like it's a free for all now, like, you know,
Speaker 1: like it could be like any combination as possible. Now,
Speaker 1: what do you make of You know, not every listener
Speaker 1: to our podcast is going to be okay with that.
Speaker 1: You know, you can imagine there'd be certain maybe some
Speaker 1: more conservative listeners or what not that are not I
Speaker 1: think maybe we can get out of hand a little
Speaker 1: bit too much. How do you respond to that sort
Speaker 1: of thing? You know, there is no real response except
Speaker 1: to say, first of all, that, for example, on the
Speaker 1: topic of polyamory, absolutely, we live in a culture that
Speaker 1: has pretty much fetishized the diad, the pair bond. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that we have wrong in our
Speaker 1: attachment to the pair bond, which how are we might
Speaker 1: feel about it? And a lot of us love being
Speaker 1: pair bonded, We love being in a monogamous in a
Speaker 1: sexually exclusive long term relationship, and a lot of us
Speaker 1: thrive there. So that's important to say. But a lot
Speaker 1: of people might think, well, that's the way it's always been,
Speaker 1: so that's the way it should be. In fact, you know,
Speaker 1: when we look to our evolutionary prehistory and when we
Speaker 1: look to the data about that, what we see is
Speaker 1: that living in monogamous pair bonds is pretty new for
Speaker 1: human beings. It started between ten and twelve thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: which through the lens of anthropology is like yesterday. So
Speaker 1: people might be interested to know that the old idea
Speaker 1: in anthropology was from a guy named irv DeVore. He
Speaker 1: is an anthropologist who came up with the man the
Speaker 1: Hunter hypothesis, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Speaker 1: It was this idea that we evolved in monogamous pair bonds, right,
Speaker 1: and the guy would go off and like hunt and
Speaker 1: then bring meat back to his woman and his baby
Speaker 1: in the cave. Okay, Now, that idea persisted for a
Speaker 1: really long time because it really fit nicely into the
Speaker 1: way we ourselves were living when that idea came into
Speaker 1: in the fifties and sixties, when we did live in
Speaker 1: monogamous pair bonds, and of course we projected back in
Speaker 1: the science that it was ever Thus, this is natural,
Speaker 1: this must be how we're intended to live. Meanwhile, so
Speaker 1: some female anthropologists came into the field and started looking
Speaker 1: at the actual behavior, you know, of our species and
Speaker 1: other species on the ground, and they realized that when
Speaker 1: we look at traditional hunter gatherer populations, when we look
Speaker 1: at human primates who are our closest non human relatives,
Speaker 1: and when we really look to the cross cultural data,
Speaker 1: what we see as the overwhelming likelihood that we evolved
Speaker 1: not as you know, straight sexually exclusive couples, but as
Speaker 1: cooperative breeders. And cooperative breeding means that we lived in large,
Speaker 1: pretty rangy groups, and that we raised our offspring cooperatively
Speaker 1: because that was really the most efficient way to make
Speaker 1: sure that they survived to an age where they themselves
Speaker 1: could reproduce, and to facilitate this happening and to create
Speaker 1: social cohesion and bonds, we also tended to mate cooperatively.
Speaker 1: So monogamy really is a very recent invention. It's ten
Speaker 1: or twelve thousand years old, and I like to say
Speaker 1: that we're still having growing pains getting used to it,
Speaker 1: but we have embraced it, and there is tremendous resistance
Speaker 1: sometimes to the idea of people just not wanting to
Speaker 1: be pair bonded and everything from us, you know, calling
Speaker 1: women who don't get married spinsters, to thinking that people
Speaker 1: who are polyamorous are consensually non monogamous, to pathologizing them,
Speaker 1: whether it's psychologists pathologizing them and saying that they must
Speaker 1: have had some kind of early life trauma, to therapists
Speaker 1: couple's therapists saying that there's no way that non monogamy
Speaker 1: can work, to women being slut shamed. There's a whole
Speaker 1: range of ways that people reject people rejecting being pair bonded.
Speaker 1: So the resistance is real, but the urge to experiment
Speaker 1: and live beyond monogamy is just as real. I spoke
Speaker 1: to Lisa Diamond about it, and she said to me,
Speaker 1: we do see that polyamory is becoming increasingly popular. We
Speaker 1: do see that women are driving the polyamory movement, which
Speaker 1: really surprised me. We do see increasing numbers of heterosexual people,
Speaker 1: not just gay men, wanting to sort of push at
Speaker 1: the edges and invent relationships that work for them. That
Speaker 1: said Lisa Diamond said to me, there is no monogamy
Speaker 1: revolution in our near future. She sees monogamy being with
Speaker 1: us for the long term and she doesn't see it
Speaker 1: going anywhere anytime soon. There. You know, there are other
Speaker 1: people like my friend Misha Lynn, who's the co founder
Speaker 1: of Open Love New York and the past president of
Speaker 1: that organization. She's really cool and it's a support group
Speaker 1: for people who are polyamorous or polly curious. You know.
Speaker 1: She would argue that that she sees that this will
Speaker 1: change society in a real in a big way. And
Speaker 1: I should say, you know, this isn't the first time
Speaker 1: that people in recent history, even that people have pushed
Speaker 1: against the confines of monogamous marriage forever, the Transcendentalists and
Speaker 1: the Romantic, the Romantic poets. So first the Romantic poets
Speaker 1: and then the Transcendentalists did all these experiments with marriage
Speaker 1: and relationships, and they often lived communally and rejected monogamy.
Speaker 1: The second big wave of consensual non monogamy, and the
Speaker 1: historian Elizabeth Chef, who writes a lot about consensual non monogamy,
Speaker 1: gets into this. If people are more interested in following
Speaker 1: up and learning even more about the history of consensual
Speaker 1: non monogamy. She calls the Transcendentalists and Romantic poets the
Speaker 1: first wave. She says, the second wave of consensual non
Speaker 1: monogamy in our country was the sort of free love
Speaker 1: era of the seventies, and now she's calling right now
Speaker 1: the third wave of consensual non monogamy in our country.
Speaker 1: People might resist it, it might make them angry, but boy,
Speaker 1: they're doing those Google searches and people are curious about it. Sure.
Speaker 1: To be curious is to be human, Yeah, exactly, Sure.
Speaker 1: And the more the more taboo it is. You know,
Speaker 1: it's justin Leie Miller and I talked about you know there,
Speaker 1: just play into it and plain old science, right, because
Speaker 1: as other experts I interviewed told me, look, being monogamous,
Speaker 1: truly sexually exclusive for an entire lifetime with one person
Speaker 1: and being enthusiastic about it does not conform to any
Speaker 1: model we have of desensitization to stimuli over time, right
Speaker 1: of habituation to a stimulus over time. It doesn't make
Speaker 1: sense from a scientific standpoint that we are going to
Speaker 1: be able to maintain a monogamous life easily and with
Speaker 1: zeal for a lifetime. So I think it helps people
Speaker 1: a lot when they just have permission to understand that
Speaker 1: there are good reasons that monogamy is hard for them
Speaker 1: and that they have a number of options to consider
Speaker 1: what steps to take next. Yeah, there's clearly huge individual
Speaker 1: differences in that. Like there's the dimension that called socio
Speaker 1: sexuality that has the scale as a like a one
Speaker 1: to five rating sex without love is okay would be
Speaker 1: one of the items. And you find, I mean that
Speaker 1: individual difference variables is by the way, not correlated with psychopathology.
Speaker 1: So you know, something very good about what you're you're
Speaker 1: doing is showing that there's all sorts of variations. And
Speaker 1: if you maybe high in socio sexuality you think love
Speaker 1: without sex is okay, or you think, like you know,
Speaker 1: monogamous ideas are attractive to you. It doesn't mean something's
Speaker 1: wrong with you. But at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: there are people who do go forty to fifty years
Speaker 1: of marriage and are quite content, if not find it
Speaker 1: a very spiritual, wonderful, meaningful experience and not having sex
Speaker 1: with anyone else. So they sure do, they sure do.
Speaker 1: And we find also to your point, Scott, absolutely right,
Speaker 1: And there is a lot of research on how different
Speaker 1: sexual personalities do with non monogamy. And here are some
Speaker 1: interesting findings that were surprising to me. Well, this is
Speaker 1: a kind of this finding makes intuitive sense. But attachment
Speaker 1: style has a lot to attachment theory. Yeah, I do too,
Speaker 1: and it has a lot to do with how well
Speaker 1: people do with consensual non monogamy. Unsurprisingly, people with anxious
Speaker 1: attachment styles have a harder time with consensual non monogamy,
Speaker 1: and people with very secure attachment styles tend to be
Speaker 1: the people who thrive in these arrangements. Makes sense, I
Speaker 1: think everything it does make sense. It does. Now, here's
Speaker 1: the other thing that was really interesting. Terry Connolly and
Speaker 1: the last Society for Sex Therapy and Research conference in Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: the twenty eighteen she presented some interesting new findings and
Speaker 1: she did. She talked about findings from a study about
Speaker 1: relationship satisfaction and self reported jealousy. And here's what she found.
Speaker 1: She looked at several groups of people. She looked at
Speaker 1: people who were polly and people who were swingers on
Speaker 1: the one hand. On the other hand, she looked at
Speaker 1: people in open marriages and monogamists, and she asked them
Speaker 1: to self rate their levels of jealousy. The most jealous
Speaker 1: people were the people in open relationships, which, remember, is
Speaker 1: usually a misnomer. Usually what you're saying is you're in
Speaker 1: a paara bond, and you're saying, you go do your thing.
Speaker 1: I'll go do my thing. I don't want to see
Speaker 1: or hear about it. Right, So those people and monogamists
Speaker 1: reported the highest levels of jealousy about their spouses. In
Speaker 1: the swinger group and the group of polyamorous people, they
Speaker 1: reported the lowest levels of jealousy. Now it gets more
Speaker 1: interesting because the polyamorists and the people who are swingers
Speaker 1: reported the highest levels of relationship and life satisfaction, whereas
Speaker 1: the people in open relationships and monogamous relationships those levels
Speaker 1: they reported were lower. And Terry Connelly suggested that the
Speaker 1: key here might be a couple of things. First of all,
Speaker 1: that people in the polyamory community and people who are
Speaker 1: swingers have a community of support. They're practicing a culturally
Speaker 1: stigmatized or taboo behavior, but they have created a community
Speaker 1: of support around themselves and they don't feel alone. So
Speaker 1: that might be why they reported higher relationship and sort
Speaker 1: of life satisfaction, Whereas if you're in an open relationship.
Speaker 1: You don't have a community of support when you're having
Speaker 1: an extramarital or an extra pair relationship, and you might
Speaker 1: feel kind of lonely and alienated and like there's something
Speaker 1: weird about you. So the importance of community comes into play.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing that a lot of experts
Speaker 1: told me that I think is evident in this research
Speaker 1: is that reporting a high level of relationship satisfaction, if
Speaker 1: you're in a poll or a swinger relationship, you have
Speaker 1: to communicate with each other a lot. First of all,
Speaker 1: you have to communicate to say we're going to do
Speaker 1: this thing. Then you have to communicate to be on
Speaker 1: the same page. Then every time you're having an adventure
Speaker 1: with another person or in a relationship with another person,
Speaker 1: you have to be communicating effectively about that. So, to
Speaker 1: my complete surprise and maybe to a lot of surprise
Speaker 1: of your listeners and people who read my book, people
Speaker 1: in swinging and polyamorous relationships report really high relationship satisfaction
Speaker 1: and they have excellent communication skills. I love that point.
Speaker 1: And you also find THEES and M community there's you know,
Speaker 1: communication as amost importance. Yeah, with people who are in kink. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people who are into kink not only about consent right,
Speaker 1: but just you know, setting the ground rules, setting the
Speaker 1: ground rules and communicating about what you like and what
Speaker 1: you want to do. And also, again what we have
Speaker 1: with people who are into kink is luckily for them,
Speaker 1: they have a community. Monogamouss might be basically the whole world,
Speaker 1: but we don't have a particular community, and nor do
Speaker 1: people in open relationships if it's in the traditional sense
Speaker 1: of open, where that's a misnomer and they're not communicating
Speaker 1: with each other about it. They're saying, you go do
Speaker 1: your thing, you go do mine. They're kind of splintered
Speaker 1: off and isolated. So some surprising findings about the psychological
Speaker 1: well being of people doing things that we might a
Speaker 1: while of as have said, Oh, that's kind of pathological behavior. Yes,
Speaker 1: and that's a very good service you're doing with your
Speaker 1: work and writing. I wanted to talk about some other
Speaker 1: findings I've seen in the literature that I want to
Speaker 1: reconcile with all this. You talked about attachment style as
Speaker 1: being one port individual differences variable, but another one I've
Speaker 1: found which I think there should be more research on,
Speaker 1: is disagreeable women. So the agreeableness dimension of personality seems
Speaker 1: to be the biggest predictor of socio sexuality. So those
Speaker 1: who score very very high in disagreeableness, particularly the women.
Speaker 1: You don't find this effect among the men as much.
Speaker 1: They really are not happy with us with one partner,
Speaker 1: like they are really like you know, they really like
Speaker 1: sex without love, you know. And I mean, on one sense,
Speaker 1: it's not shocking like that. The agreeableness dimension predicts the
Speaker 1: extent to which intimacy and conformity, right, that's correct. Rule
Speaker 1: conformity and politeness. There's two compassions, two aspects of that.
Speaker 1: There's a compassion and there's politeness. You know, they're both
Speaker 1: correlated with it. So I've always I've always done like
Speaker 1: when I saw Peter, when I saw David Schmidt's research,
Speaker 1: for instance, on cross cultural and also David Buss's research
Speaker 1: on uh that like why do people have sex? You know,
Speaker 1: and you always find that one very like disagreeable women
Speaker 1: like are off the charts in terms of like trying
Speaker 1: everything and and you know, oh, go ahead, finished, No, okay,
Speaker 1: well I just love First of all, I want to
Speaker 1: suggest a T shirt disagreeable woman. Yeah, yeah, is that
Speaker 1: better than nasty women's and I want to point out
Speaker 1: like the sort of you know, the nomenclature is really important.
Speaker 1: Think about how if and the causality, the sort of
Speaker 1: chicken egg aspects of this. Think about what it takes
Speaker 1: to be a woman who dares to acknowledge the fact
Speaker 1: that she wants more than one sexual part. Yeah, she's
Speaker 1: going against the cultural pressure. So yeah. The sex researcher
Speaker 1: Alicia Walker talks about this in terms of these women
Speaker 1: who dare to refuse monogamy. And you know, to me,
Speaker 1: these women are brave. We might judge them harshly, we
Speaker 1: might think there's something wrong with them, but it is
Speaker 1: pretty brave for the following reason. First of all, you know,
Speaker 1: if you're a woman who refuses monogamy, not only are
Speaker 1: you going against the well established cultural script that healthy, mature,
Speaker 1: mentally solid people are monogamous and that monogamy is sort
Speaker 1: of the hallmark of maturity, right and healthiness. You're going
Speaker 1: against that script, but you're also going against the script
Speaker 1: that women are less sexual than men, that women have
Speaker 1: lower libidos than men do, and you're going against the
Speaker 1: script that women are naturally sort of more heart bound
Speaker 1: and more naturally monogamous, which you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: bad science asserted that in the science has been contradicted
Speaker 1: by newer science that women did not, you know, are
Speaker 1: not wired to be more monogamous than men. But it
Speaker 1: still takes a lot to go against the grain of
Speaker 1: those very deep cultural beliefs. So it's almost like disagreeableness
Speaker 1: factors in in a way, just what it takes to
Speaker 1: push against a cultural container that's telling women that they
Speaker 1: desire less and that they're more naturally monogamous. It's a
Speaker 1: really interesting issue. At the heart of female infidelity is
Speaker 1: daring and kind of being a double renegade. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: believe that actually that point was made in the discussion
Speaker 1: section of the Why Humans Have Sex article Cindy Mesta,
Speaker 1: India bus Route. I believe that it was. If not,
Speaker 1: I'm confusing another pair. But yeah, that has a point
Speaker 1: that's been made about why maybe that effect is so prominent.
Speaker 1: But I've always thought that there should be more research
Speaker 1: on that specific sub population. However, like in fact, I'd
Speaker 1: like to do that research on disagreeable women then sections
Speaker 1: this is something for us to talk about when we
Speaker 1: have coffee. Yeah, that'd be a great sty to collaborate on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love it. You know what else has been really
Speaker 1: interesting in terms of female infidelity, or being disagreeable or
Speaker 1: kind of being a you have to necessarily be a
Speaker 1: renegade in certain ways to be female and to own
Speaker 1: your sexuality. I mean, people like car Be are helping
Speaker 1: to change that. Female sex researchers are helping to change that.
Speaker 1: But when we look at the behavior of different female
Speaker 1: species on the ground back to this issue of why
Speaker 1: we have sex. You know, we used to bend over
Speaker 1: backwards to figure out the reasons that females of many
Speaker 1: species had sex, and just in primatology alone, what has
Speaker 1: come to life is that, and this is the view
Speaker 1: of evolutionary biology. You know, females have sex because it
Speaker 1: feels good. And you know, non human female primates and
Speaker 1: human females have orgasms, and some of us, you know,
Speaker 1: human and non human, are capable of multiple orgasm. So
Speaker 1: one thing that's emerging right now. I know this seems
Speaker 1: tangential to your point about why we have sex, but
Speaker 1: you know, we've recently discovered that the human female clitterists
Speaker 1: has a much more extent anatomy than we ever knew.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not just a little button like we
Speaker 1: used to think. It's hundreds of times bigger. We now
Speaker 1: have a new imaging thanks to the Australian neurologist Helen
Speaker 1: O'Connell who mapped it out and showed most of the
Speaker 1: glitterists is on the inside of a woman's body. It's
Speaker 1: very extensive. It's sort of the super high way of
Speaker 1: sensation and it's there for no other reason than to
Speaker 1: feel good. So we have to ask ourselves, well, wow,
Speaker 1: why did women evolve this particular anatomy? And then we
Speaker 1: have to ask ourselves, what does it mean that women
Speaker 1: have as much a rectile tissue pound per pound, ounce
Speaker 1: per ounce as men do? What does it mean that
Speaker 1: women wake up with directions every morning that women get
Speaker 1: hard on so when they're aroused. What is this new
Speaker 1: discovery about human female anatomy tell us about the human
Speaker 1: female and about females of some other mammal species. But
Speaker 1: we know that human females and bonobo and chip females
Speaker 1: and the Caque six species of female macaques, that they
Speaker 1: have orgasms, and that orgasms sometimes multiple orgasms, and that
Speaker 1: that would have been the ultimate payoff, and that seeking
Speaker 1: pleasure is part of the evolutionary prehistory of human female sexuality,
Speaker 1: and that the clitterist is there as proof of that.
Speaker 1: So we still have a lot more thinking to do
Speaker 1: before our culture can catch up with this new science.
Speaker 1: It'll be interesting to watch us try to reconcile ourselves
Speaker 1: to it since we've been taught that women are less sexual, right,
Speaker 1: I agree, and it'll be interesting to look at some
Speaker 1: new methodologies to get that in more nuanced ways. Well,
Speaker 1: that said, there is a very very very large literature
Speaker 1: on average sex differences in sex drive between men and women.
Speaker 1: You're not like overturning all these thousands of studies showing
Speaker 1: that like on average, like men are more visual, men
Speaker 1: are more interested in short term flings than women on average.
Speaker 1: Are you challenging that as well? The on average of finding.
Speaker 1: I think that the most sort of revolutionary and surprising
Speaker 1: finding for people in untrue would probably be the work
Speaker 1: and you know it emerges from the work of for example,
Speaker 1: Kristen Mark March and Mianna and numerous other Cynthia Graham
Speaker 1: who have found in their studies that long term relationships
Speaker 1: are particularly hard not on male desire but on female desire,
Speaker 1: and that the institutionalization of relationships when you put a
Speaker 1: ring on it, or when men and women because mostly,
Speaker 1: unfortunately the sex re search still focuses on heterosexual couples.
Speaker 1: We're making some progress, but it's slow. But what we
Speaker 1: know of the sex or search john heterosexual couples. The
Speaker 1: newer research is suggesting again that when men and women
Speaker 1: move in together, for example, it's female interest that declines
Speaker 1: and it's female desire that suffers. We have those wonderful
Speaker 1: couple of studies from Dietrich Klausman at the University of Hamburg,
Speaker 1: who found in two thousand and two. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, he looked at a range of adults from
Speaker 1: college age into their forties, so a whole range of
Speaker 1: adults over the course of ninety months, and he found
Speaker 1: that when they were in committed relationships, and these men
Speaker 1: and women over the course of ninety months, that male
Speaker 1: desire over the course of ninety months kind of slowly
Speaker 1: ebbed like this, over the course of the ninety month period, right,
Speaker 1: which is what roughly eight years, here's what happened. A
Speaker 1: female desire started at the same level, right with what
Speaker 1: I like to call sex insanity, but the technical term
Speaker 1: for that, I guess is Limerens right. When you're in
Speaker 1: a new relationship, it's so exciting you want to have
Speaker 1: sex all the time. And here's what happened between years
Speaker 1: one and four for the women. Instead of the slow,
Speaker 1: gradual decline over ninety months that we saw among men,
Speaker 1: what we have is within the first year or four years,
Speaker 1: but often within the first year, female desire plunges takes
Speaker 1: a huge nosedive. Now, we used to read that as
Speaker 1: an indication that what do you expect? Women like sex
Speaker 1: less than men do. But what the newer thinking is
Speaker 1: is that we have to consider the possibility that women
Speaker 1: need variety and novelty every bit as much as men do,
Speaker 1: and perhaps more, and that what's happening within those first
Speaker 1: four years. And again, this isn't just Klausman study, it's
Speaker 1: Meanna's work, it's Cynthia Graham's findings, it's Kristen marks findings
Speaker 1: with pretty large sample sizes. Let's consider that what's happening
Speaker 1: is that it's not just that women like sex less
Speaker 1: than men do. It's that they struggle more with partnered
Speaker 1: sex with a single partner over the long term, and
Speaker 1: we need more fixes for women maybe even than we
Speaker 1: do for men. I mean, there's all they're alternative hypotheses too,
Speaker 1: right there. It could be simply to me, the more
Speaker 1: parsonalious explanations this men are not pleasing women sexually in
Speaker 1: a relationship. And then to take that one step further,
Speaker 1: and I do believe in parsimonious explanations, but do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like it, you know, like let's
Speaker 1: start there. Maybe it's that like maybe young men are
Speaker 1: not really learning like pleasing the woman is important, you know,
Speaker 1: explain it among younger people. And yet Cosmon's findings and
Speaker 1: these other findings are a range of age groups. And
Speaker 1: what we see that to me is indisputable is that
Speaker 1: female sexual boredom is real and that it kicks in
Speaker 1: earlier than male sexual boredom. And my method is the
Speaker 1: comparative method. I would never just look at the sex research.
Speaker 1: I would never just look at psychology. I would also
Speaker 1: look at what do we see among non human primates
Speaker 1: and what do we see in other cultures. So when
Speaker 1: I get into untrue about female sexual boredom kicking in
Speaker 1: sooner and women needing variety and novelty every bit as
Speaker 1: much as men do, I'm drawing on the primatological literature,
Speaker 1: which finds that the single most observable sexual behavior of
Speaker 1: non human female primates is the search for novelty, as
Speaker 1: well as over here the sex research about women's reported
Speaker 1: boredom and turning off sex in a coupled relationship before
Speaker 1: men do, combined with over here you know, the worldwide
Speaker 1: ethnographic data. So to me, there is a really compelling
Speaker 1: case to be made that women are not made for
Speaker 1: monogamy anymore than men are. I mean, we know from
Speaker 1: the work of the wonderful Patricia Goadi in her lab
Speaker 1: at UCLA. She recently discovered that everything we believed based
Speaker 1: on the work of Angus Bateman, who asserted in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight that males benefit from mating multiply and females
Speaker 1: don't benefit from mating multiply. Right, we believe that for
Speaker 1: years and years and years, we believed that women were
Speaker 1: naturally monogamous because females of most species didn't benefit from
Speaker 1: mating multiply and that males did benefit from it. Patricia
Speaker 1: Goadi goes back and tries to replicate the study. She
Speaker 1: can't replicate the study because females do benefit from mating multiply,
Speaker 1: and we learn that from primatologists who did meticulous field
Speaker 1: studies demonstrating how non human female primates benefit from mating multiply,
Speaker 1: but also looking at human populations like the Pimbue of Tanzania,
Speaker 1: or the Himba of Namibia, or the most Su people
Speaker 1: in China, in all these contexts where women have multiple
Speaker 1: partners and it increases the reproductive success. From all these directions,
Speaker 1: we're getting data suggesting that this idea that women like
Speaker 1: sex less and that women are naturally more monogamous is
Speaker 1: really up for grabs now and that we need to
Speaker 1: really be accounting for actual human female behavior on the ground.
Speaker 1: And so it's exciting to see this science and it's
Speaker 1: really challenging for a lot of people. I should also say,
Speaker 1: and you're probably aware of this, but there are sex
Speaker 1: researchers who were challenging on the idea that androgen and
Speaker 1: testosterone are the main drivers of libido, And of course
Speaker 1: Rosemary Bassen came up with this fascinating insight, which is
Speaker 1: that there are different kinds of desire. There's spontaneous desire
Speaker 1: in which men always almost always outpace women, and spontaneous
Speaker 1: desire is your city there, and suddenly you want to
Speaker 1: have sex just the way you might, you know, want
Speaker 1: to have a Hamburger. So on the measure of spontaneous desire,
Speaker 1: men always score higher than women. But Rosemary bass And said,
Speaker 1: I think there are these other desire styles going on,
Speaker 1: and she'd call them triggered or responsive desire, and men
Speaker 1: and women can both experience it. But it's when you
Speaker 1: are sitting there, you're not thinking about sex, and then
Speaker 1: you're watching you know, maybe you're watching an episode of Outlander,
Speaker 1: or you're reading a sexy passage in a book, or
Speaker 1: some guy or woman on the street just gives you
Speaker 1: like a really lustful glance, or even you start fooling
Speaker 1: around and then you want to have sex. That's called
Speaker 1: triggered a responsive desire. And the fascinating thing is that
Speaker 1: when we measure triggered a responsive desire, sometimes women's libidos
Speaker 1: measure is higher than men. So we need to dig
Speaker 1: into that more. We totally need to get into that more.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's interesting. Meredith Chivers did a study
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen where she had people in her lab
Speaker 1: at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, rate their responses to pornography,
Speaker 1: and men and women who were reporting equal levels of arousal.
Speaker 1: So everywhere we're seeing these challenges to our very easy
Speaker 1: assumptions about how men and women are different sexually, even
Speaker 1: the biology from Patricia Goladie's lab. So we live in
Speaker 1: interesting times, Oh, we sure do. And there's so many
Speaker 1: interesting research questions that still ask. I think that you know,
Speaker 1: there we will still find that there are some sex differences.
Speaker 1: Like it's not like you know, yeah, and I know
Speaker 1: you're not disagreeing with that, but I think it'll be
Speaker 1: interesting to see in what more nuanced ways there are
Speaker 1: these differences, because I think we will continue to find
Speaker 1: that there are substantial average sex differences regarding porn viewing.
Speaker 1: I saw this interesting statistic that I think maybe is
Speaker 1: consistent with what you're saying. They asked people to report
Speaker 1: what they're most likely men and women to report. These
Speaker 1: are mostly college students, I should say, so might not
Speaker 1: generalize to adults. But why did they stop watching porn?
Speaker 1: You know? Why'd they like change to a new a
Speaker 1: new one, or like move on? Men? Like most men
Speaker 1: stop watching port and when they orgasmed, whereas women stop
Speaker 1: watching porn because of boredom, and there was a very
Speaker 1: very striking sex difference there, and these are people in college. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there. I think these are just anonymous surveys and
Speaker 1: so many more women in kind of standard kind of
Speaker 1: you know, porn. I don't know what I mean by
Speaker 1: standard kind but but well, this is what I mean
Speaker 1: by standard, because I know there are some now there's
Speaker 1: cropping up like porn for women, you know, and there's
Speaker 1: a there are certain websites about that, but you know,
Speaker 1: just in terms of like you're running the mill sort
Speaker 1: of like non emotional or non like or just you know,
Speaker 1: totally like it's not even clear like the men and
Speaker 1: women are enjoying it, you know, and the porn like
Speaker 1: like women are more likely to get bored with that
Speaker 1: and that's why they move on, you know, or on average.
Speaker 1: So through the lens, through the comparative lens, which is
Speaker 1: the one that I always like to use. I always
Speaker 1: want to ask where and how so for example, this
Speaker 1: is it sounds like an interesting sample of college aged
Speaker 1: people in the United States, in the industrialized West, which
Speaker 1: is a very specific world. So I would be very
Speaker 1: wary with my training in anthropology to extrapolate big sex
Speaker 1: differences based on that without visiting, revisiting and looking at
Speaker 1: it in different cultural contexts. And I don't mean just
Speaker 1: going to older groups of people or people in different states,
Speaker 1: or you know, people in France. I mean looking at
Speaker 1: it comparatively the worldwide data. I'm very wary of sort
Speaker 1: of asserting kind of a scent just because of what
Speaker 1: I've seen. I'm wary of extrapolating a lot from those
Speaker 1: kind of studies that are very, very Western in their nature.
Speaker 1: So for sure, we might be able to say that
Speaker 1: there was this really interesting sex difference between men and
Speaker 1: women in the industrialized Western and mun collegious I love
Speaker 1: that it's a really interesting finding. And then I would
Speaker 1: want to say, before I took it further and you know,
Speaker 1: said that we could make assertions about essential before we
Speaker 1: put that into a master narrative about essential sexual differences
Speaker 1: between men and women. I would want to find ways
Speaker 1: to go out into the world and compare it, you know,
Speaker 1: to the other worldwide ethnographic data, because I think that
Speaker 1: what has happened too often, and it does a disservice
Speaker 1: to men and women alike, is that we have extrapolated
Speaker 1: or presumed, Okay, well we found this in the study,
Speaker 1: like the famous Florida State University study, right, do you
Speaker 1: remember this great study where they got It was in
Speaker 1: the seventies, and they got what they called I loved
Speaker 1: this term. They found attractive male and female confederates too.
Speaker 1: It just meant like people helping the psychologists do you
Speaker 1: want to do you want to come back to my
Speaker 1: place right now? Affected me? And they made much of
Speaker 1: the fact that the women were much more likely to
Speaker 1: say no, I don't and the men were more likely
Speaker 1: to say yes, I do. And there might have been
Speaker 1: some essential reasons for that. So many years later the
Speaker 1: study was revisited, I believe by German researchers what is
Speaker 1: it about Germany? And they found that when you removed
Speaker 1: variables such as fear of getting raped, fear of getting raped,
Speaker 1: fear of getting murdered, the fear of reputational assault, which
Speaker 1: women would face more than that, the difference between who
Speaker 1: said yes was statistically insignificant, which kind of blew my mind.
Speaker 1: So I like to always run through the comparative, you know, contest, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but so no, I appreciate that. So this seems like
Speaker 1: there's kind of multiple points in your book. And you know,
Speaker 1: one we we have definitely touched on a lot is
Speaker 1: the felidity and the importance of female choice and autonomy,
Speaker 1: and I think we've covered that really well. I just
Speaker 1: want to end here with the cheating one in particular,
Speaker 1: because I think there's different ways, there's different ways of
Speaker 1: interpreting it. So so let me give you the most
Speaker 1: like cynical view of it, which is not your point
Speaker 1: at all of the book. But I could look at
Speaker 1: the data and say, well, all you're really saying is
Speaker 1: that women could be just as horrible human beings as
Speaker 1: men can. Like there are horrible women, they are horrible men.
Speaker 1: So one could because cheating, like isn't cheating bad like
Speaker 1: hurting your partner and like not having that or at
Speaker 1: least like, you know, like expressing your partner that like,
Speaker 1: look I have these other sexual needs, like is it okay?
Speaker 1: You know, like if I like maybe we maybe they
Speaker 1: need I ask you present, But saying like look I'm
Speaker 1: going to leave the relationship, it would probably be healthier
Speaker 1: than secretly cheating on your partner, arguing it is empowerment
Speaker 1: that that women are out there like cheating on their partners.
Speaker 1: No not at all, not absolutely. First of all, i'm
Speaker 1: very you know, being very upset about infidelity, and I'm
Speaker 1: not upset I'm trying to be the devil's avocate. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's just really upsetting to be deceived. It is. It
Speaker 1: really is very painful, and you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: couples therapist spend a lot of time with people who
Speaker 1: have experienced infidelity. I will say a few things. First
Speaker 1: of all, the reason that I wanted to focus on
Speaker 1: female infidelity among others. First of all, it's just so fascinating,
Speaker 1: like isn't interested and people who decide, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be a monogamous anymore. It's just
Speaker 1: fascinating because it's it's still a taboo behavior. The second
Speaker 1: really interesting thing is what we find is that you know,
Speaker 1: through the comparative lens again, which is how I look
Speaker 1: at things. Anywhere in the world where women have really
Speaker 1: high rates of meaningful political participation and meaningful labor force participation.
Speaker 1: Wherever in the world those rates are high, you're going
Speaker 1: to see higher rates of female infidelity. So do I
Speaker 1: think by cheating a woman says, yeah, I'm empowered. No,
Speaker 1: But I think that where you see high rates of
Speaker 1: female infidelity. What the data show us is you see
Speaker 1: that women are indeed empowered on other metrics of female autonomy.
Speaker 1: So I think that female infidelity is a very telling
Speaker 1: metric of how a given nation or community feels about
Speaker 1: female autonomy. If you really do think that women deserve
Speaker 1: to be autonomous, your take on female infidelity will more
Speaker 1: likely be something like, this is a bad thing, and
Speaker 1: it happens, and it's part of the human condition. What
Speaker 1: can we do now? Where women don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of autonomy on other measures, you will tend to see
Speaker 1: that female infidelity can be very dangerous and even have
Speaker 1: lethal consequences. For example, in the United States, the social
Speaker 1: psychologist David Lee, who studies female and yeah, he's great,
Speaker 1: and he studies the cuckold lifestyle and hot white thing,
Speaker 1: and he tells us that he believes, based on his
Speaker 1: expertise and the data that he's looked at, that just
Speaker 1: the suspicion of female infidelity and female infidelity are the
Speaker 1: greatest triggers of domestic violence. So other experts tell us that,
Speaker 1: aside from school shootings, one of the most common triggers,
Speaker 1: if you will, for a mass shooting, is gendered coercive
Speaker 1: violence in which a man is attempting to kill his ex,
Speaker 1: someone who has left him, and whoever happens to be
Speaker 1: around her at the moment. So we have to be
Speaker 1: very real about the fact that in the United States,
Speaker 1: for women, committing infidelity can have lethal consequences. And we
Speaker 1: think of ourselves as a very enlightened nation. So that
Speaker 1: fact really got me thinking, and I hope we'll get
Speaker 1: other people thinking too, about is it possible that the
Speaker 1: way we respond to female infidelity tells us how we
Speaker 1: feel about the most basic form of female autonomy, that
Speaker 1: we don't like it, and what does that tell us
Speaker 1: about ourselves as people and as a nation. It's a
Speaker 1: challenging question. Infidelity in general challenges us on a lot
Speaker 1: of levels, and I think especially female infidelity, it challenges
Speaker 1: everything we believe about gender and what's right and women
Speaker 1: as the guardians of monogamy. I should say something else,
Speaker 1: which is that a fair number of couple's therapists now
Speaker 1: are looking more to the segmented model of marriage when
Speaker 1: they work with people experience infidelity or people who are
Speaker 1: struggling with monogamy. So the segmented model of marriage is
Speaker 1: one that was put forward by the psychotherapist Michelle Shankman,
Speaker 1: and what she put out there was that in Latin
Speaker 1: America and parts of Europe, there's a belief that marriage
Speaker 1: is a wonderful thing and that we get a lot
Speaker 1: out of it, but that it can't satisfy all our needs,
Speaker 1: and that there are cultures where people believe that their
Speaker 1: marriages are valuable and they'll go to their graves, you know,
Speaker 1: invested in their marriages and doing everything they can for them,
Speaker 1: but they look for their sexual needs to be met elsewhere.
Speaker 1: So this is a model that some people are looking at. Now,
Speaker 1: do we really believe that we can be everything to
Speaker 1: our partners for an entire lifetime? And Esther Perell has
Speaker 1: crossed over Michelle Shankman's insights and writings in a big, wonderful,
Speaker 1: helpful way. Another thing that's going on is, again, for example,
Speaker 1: within consensual non monogamy, this idea of disclosing, of telling
Speaker 1: your partner we need to have this discussion what should
Speaker 1: we do and approaching it. And so there's a big
Speaker 1: value in consensual non monogamy placed on transparency and I'm
Speaker 1: being honest and telling people. So these are some of
Speaker 1: the solutions. Another solution that I've seen to the dilemma
Speaker 1: is couples decide. When you write a book like this,
Speaker 1: people tell you a lot of stuff. So couples, couples
Speaker 1: who remain committed to each other but decide to adventure
Speaker 1: together or adventures or adventures separately and use their relationship,
Speaker 1: and their relationship remains the home base. So you know,
Speaker 1: back to humans being these endlessly creative, flexible, sexual and
Speaker 1: social strategists. I think we're applying our creativity right now
Speaker 1: to the pair bond and trying to see what we
Speaker 1: can do, how we can innovate where we can go
Speaker 1: with it. And some people are going to want to
Speaker 1: leave it just as is, but I think it helps
Speaker 1: a lot to get out there the simple truth that
Speaker 1: the vast majority of us will have a hard time
Speaker 1: living out exclusivity for a lifetime with total zeal and
Speaker 1: that's okay, And it just becomes what do you want
Speaker 1: to do about it? Yeah, you're challenging lots of these
Speaker 1: centered assumptions. Is Another big assumption is that men and
Speaker 1: women cheat for different reasons. I mean, you've seen that
Speaker 1: in the literature for years and years and years that
Speaker 1: women are cheat because their emotional needs aren't being met
Speaker 1: whereas men, you know, and that's not fair to men too,
Speaker 1: like what men only care about sex? Like really like
Speaker 1: I hate the way. Can I just say, I hate
Speaker 1: the way the science and social science has profiled men
Speaker 1: and backed them into a qum. I'm not a fan.
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan. I'm not fans of that. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I think that, you know, bad social science and science
Speaker 1: is really culpable in our current cultural crisis. You know,
Speaker 1: that brought us me too, and that brought us really
Speaker 1: reactionary ideas about men and women. But bad science did
Speaker 1: a big disservice to men as well, saying that it's
Speaker 1: more natural that men are more naturally sexually assertive that
Speaker 1: they're more naturally sexual than women are. Because that's kind
Speaker 1: of not just paving the way to provide cover for
Speaker 1: bad behavior. It's profiling men and it's making them into
Speaker 1: the enemies of women. And that's not the way. It
Speaker 1: is what the newer science is showing us, and what
Speaker 1: the social scientists that I interviewed and the experts who
Speaker 1: are therapists like you, who see people and work with
Speaker 1: couples every day, Tammy Nelson told me something so interesting.
Speaker 1: She wrote a book called The New Monogamy, and she
Speaker 1: talks about how monogamy is a continuum, and she says
Speaker 1: monogamy can mean anything from please don't look at porn.
Speaker 1: It hurts my feelings, it's a betrayal of our bond.
Speaker 1: Monogamy can be everything from that to like, go ahead
Speaker 1: and have sex with other people as long as they're
Speaker 1: giving our relationship total priority. And you'll stop if I
Speaker 1: ask you too. She says that whole continue we should
Speaker 1: think of as the new monogamy. But a big point
Speaker 1: that she's careful to make when she speaks when she's
Speaker 1: interviewed is that, in her years and years of experience
Speaker 1: dealing with couples in infidelity, she says to me, men
Speaker 1: and women's motivations are so much closer than we have allowed.
Speaker 1: And many, many men, she says, in my practice and
Speaker 1: the practices of my colleagues, are cheating if you want
Speaker 1: to call it that, for emotional intimacy, And many women
Speaker 1: are cheating, if we want to call it that, in
Speaker 1: pursuit of a great orgasm. So our motivations are closer
Speaker 1: than we've really been allowed to acknowledge. And I think
Speaker 1: it's great that there's a merging science that's allowing us
Speaker 1: to reconsider this. Just one other researcher that I spoke
Speaker 1: with is Alicia Walker, and she's a sex researcher and
Speaker 1: sociologist at the Missouri State University. Sorry, And she worked
Speaker 1: with several different samples groups of women, but she worked
Speaker 1: with groups of women who were just completely using affairs,
Speaker 1: if you will, as a strategy to get sex in
Speaker 1: marriages that were otherwise satisfying to them. But they were
Speaker 1: not able to get sexual satisfaction in their marriages. They
Speaker 1: were sexually incompatible with their husbands or their long term partners,
Speaker 1: they were in sexless marriages, whatever it was. So they
Speaker 1: were availing themselves of outside partnerships in order to have sex.
Speaker 1: And they told doctor Walker, I am not unhappy in
Speaker 1: my marriage. It's just that my marriage is sexless or
Speaker 1: that sexually unsatisfying. But my marriage is valuable and lots
Speaker 1: of other ways. I'm just going on the side here
Speaker 1: simply for sexual satisfaction. And she found that these women
Speaker 1: were auditioning men and asking them questions like, you know,
Speaker 1: what are you interested in sexually? What is your how
Speaker 1: would you rate your skills in X, Y, and Z.
Speaker 1: Are you happy with a completely sexual thing instead of
Speaker 1: a relationship, because that's what I'm looking for. Okay, that
Speaker 1: kind of flew in the face of what I was
Speaker 1: expecting and what we expect that women are going to
Speaker 1: want and desire. So, you know, the research of people
Speaker 1: like doctor Walker and the findings that people like Tammy
Speaker 1: Nelson are really challenging us to rethink all the things
Speaker 1: that we've comfortably assumed about not just what women want,
Speaker 1: but who women are and who men are. So yeah, fascinating,
Speaker 1: not just science, but you know, the culture, like the
Speaker 1: Me Too movement, everything seems to there's something in the
Speaker 1: air where women aren't taking as much shit from men anymore.
Speaker 1: It seems like there's a I mean, it seems like
Speaker 1: there's a more general I feel like all this stuff,
Speaker 1: there's a more general point is that women are as
Speaker 1: satisfied anymore with unsatisfactory sex. They're not satisfied anymore with
Speaker 1: with abuses of power. They're not, do you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's like a whole list of things that like, there's
Speaker 1: a list of things right, for so long I think
Speaker 1: female sexuality meant and this isn't because men are bad people,
Speaker 1: or there weren't good committed male sex researchers and social scientists.
Speaker 1: There always happen, But I think that what happened for
Speaker 1: a long time is that female sexuality was reduced to
Speaker 1: sort of women being sexy for men in the popular culture.
Speaker 1: And Me Too has been really interesting for the way
Speaker 1: that the women and men who participate in it are
Speaker 1: sort of saying female desire is not an extension of
Speaker 1: male desire. Let's look at it as this separate thing.
Speaker 1: So my hope with a movement like me Too, or
Speaker 1: you know, the songs of Cardi b and Beyonce, or
Speaker 1: the scripted series like oh gosh, there's so many great
Speaker 1: ones now, like Orange is the New Black, and Outlander
Speaker 1: is one that I come back to again and again.
Speaker 1: It's like porn practically, or Insecure by aesary. I think
Speaker 1: that what all these cultural movements are doing is they're
Speaker 1: sort of saying, Okay, you know, me too and stuff.
Speaker 1: We've told you what women don't want, and we've told
Speaker 1: you that female desire is not just an extension of
Speaker 1: male desire. Now, I think we've opened up the space
Speaker 1: where we can say, okay, female desire, what is it.
Speaker 1: We've told you what women don't want and want to tolerate.
Speaker 1: Now let's talk about what women do want and what
Speaker 1: we like and who we are sexually speaking. So maybe
Speaker 1: I'm a Pollyanna, but I find it very I find
Speaker 1: it a very exciting cultural moment, not only because of
Speaker 1: what's going on in sex research, but because of what's
Speaker 1: going on in scripted TV and anthropology and the music industry.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of possibility, a lot of possibility. I
Speaker 1: think the more that we open up the freedom and
Speaker 1: autonomy for men and women to express their full sexuality,
Speaker 1: it'll all have hotter sex. I guess I'll end on
Speaker 1: that point. Yeah, that's a great point to end on.
Speaker 1: Better science can help us have better sex and be
Speaker 1: happier and leave more meaningful lives. I'm going to end.
Speaker 1: I will end on a quote of yours to that point.
Speaker 1: I thought i'd quote you. There can be no autonomy
Speaker 1: without the autonomy to choose without coors and or constraint,
Speaker 1: or in spite of it, who our lovers will be.
Speaker 1: So thank you so much for your thoughtful, comparative, comprehensive
Speaker 1: work and challenging a lot of stereotypes. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for having me on scott and for bringing psychology
Speaker 1: to so many people. Oh, thank you. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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