It’s official! Men are more likely to have sex with random strangers than women. There’s an old study done in the United States on sexual attraction that I discuss in my various Seduction Mindtricks 情場高手速成班 seminars and workshops as well as in a few of my university courses on communication. In the study, students (male and female) were sent around the campus and asked to say “I’ve noticed you around campus and think you seem interesting, would you like to ____?” with the blank filled in by “have a cup of coffee” or “come to my room and chat” or “have sex” and the results were tallied it was found that in terms of just getting a date about half of folks were up to going to a neutral place with someone new while fewer women were interested in going to a strange man’s room and virtually no women would go to a stranger’s room for sex while the number of men who opted for sex was higher than the number who opted to going to a girl’s room to chat.

Well, a group of researchers at a university in France wondered if this result was purely American or if it crossed cultural boundaries to so they repeated the study and have published the results at “Effects of Solicitor Sex and Attractiveness on Receptivity to Sexual Offers: A Field Study” by Nicolas Guéguen of the Département Lettres, Langues et Sciences Humaines, Université de Bretagne-Sud, in Lorient Cedex, France. The abstract of the piece is as follows:

“Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers have been found in previous studies conducted in the United States. However, this effect has never been replicated in another culture, and the impact of the attractiveness of the solicitor remains in question. An experiment was conducted in France in which male and female confederates of average versus high attractiveness approached potential partners of the opposite sex (120 males and 120 females) and asked them: “Will you come to my apartment to have a drink?” or “Would you go to bed with me?” The great majority of the men were willing to have a sexual liaison with a woman, especially when she was physically attractive. Women were more disinclined to have a drink, and none but one accepted the male’s sexual request. Such results confirm that men are apparently more eager for sexual activity than women are.”

See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21369773 for the piece.

One issue I have with the conclusion . . . “Such results confirm that men are apparently more eager for sexual activity than women are” . . . nope, not neccessarily. It defintiely shows the women are probably more reluctant to go to a private location with a male stranger than men are to go to such a location with an unknown woman. This may not have anything to do with their inherent interest or desire for sex than it has to do with their concern for safety – physical and sexual. Women may be perfectly willing to go to a private location with someone they know and can trust and they may actually desire sex with someone they trust and have an emotional connection with or at least a reasonable assumption of being free of disease. Or, maybe women are indeed prudes or perhaps men are just plain insane with their higher critical factors shutting off at the slightest hint of sexual opportunity in the wind (actually, that last part does have some support in other studies). Human sexual attraction is a complex dance and can’t be boiled into a single strategy or sentence . . . although, both studies did clearly show that the fear many have in terms of asking strangers for a date is unfounded . . . no magick formulae needed, if you want to meet someone new just talking to them is usually enough and you have a fifty percent chance of having them say yes to a cup of coffee so if one person says “no” just move on to the next (see earlier posts on this blog regarding Ugly George for even more good news).

All the best,
Brian
http://www.briandavidphillips.com