Wednesday Martin || The Flexibility of Female Sexuality

we have Wednesday Martin on the podcast. Doctor Martin has worked as a writer and social researcher in New York City for more than two decades. The author of Stepmonster and the instant New York Times Best Hour Primates of Park Avenue, she writes for the online edition of Psychology Today, and her work has appeared in The New York Times

and Time dot Com. Doctor Martin's latest book is called Untrue, Why nearly everything we believe about women, lust and infidelity is wrong and How the New Science can set us Free. Thanks so much for being on the show today, Wednesday. Thanks for having me on, Scott. My pleasure. Now, when you say that the new science can set us free, do you mean all of us? Like will your book set men free too. You can be free too knowing this information. Yes, we want to use science and social

science to set everybody for you about their sexuality. Men, women, and people who identifies neither are cordially invited to read um true. Yeah, I want them all to be part of the conversation. I love that, you know. I've been trying to represent this topic more on the Psychology podcast. In fact, we recently had Justin Lee Miller on the show talking about sexual fantasies. Well, he's a good friend and love his work on sexual fantasies. He's great, he

is great. Your book differs from him though, in that you talk a lot about living out the reality, not just the fantasy of sex, right right, not just the fantasy, the reality. Have female sexuality. Yay, Yeah, more sex, more sex on your podcast, more and more and more and more. But when you talk about sex, what's interesting is first there will be this tremendous hush from the other person, and then the floodgates are open once the person starts to talk, or once they you know, hear you talking,

or once they start to read. So I think it's a topic about which you know, we have like this gate and once the gate is open, people are really curious and really hungry for accurate information. I mean, I think it starts when we're so young that we get pretty bad information about sexuality, and so we're kind of conditioned that it has to be secretive or we come from a long tradition of bad information. I mean, some people we're still living in the shadow of sex education

that's abstinen. It's only sex education, so it's not really sex ed. So there's so much time to be made up up and so much ground to cover in terms of people wanting and needing to talk about sexuality and hear about it. So that was one of the fun aspects of writing this book, just connecting, you know, with the really deep need people have for their information about sex to be scientific but also to be fun and accessible and relevant. That's what I always try to do.

So I tried to take the newish, the newer and the newish and the brand new science and social science about female sexuality from the experts and from the studies and kind of cross it over and make it delicious and fun. And that's really the point of one. Sex should be delicious and fun, right, It should be candy, right, And that's what I wanted my book to be, Like, yeah, I wanted it to be. I wanted my book to

be substance that went down easily. And you know, the title of untrue of the book is kind of a play on words. It's because the book looks at female infidel specifically, which is that you know, just been mired and so much misunderstanding female infidelity and infidelity in general. But it's also the book is also more broadly in exploration of some of the bad science and the misconceptions

around female sexuality more generally. So to be able to dispel those myths and make it all appealing has you know, it's been a fun job and it's been fun to see how people respond to it. I bet, hey, did you read the New Atlantic article about millennials and sex? Yeah? I did, and so it was really interesting and great.

I love how it started a big conversation. So you and I know that the data on that came out some months ago, I mean a while back, and so people in your field and in the in the sex fields have been talking about that finding for a while.

But people and it's even been in the press before, but it was great to see it in a big kind of think piece and to get people really to wrap their minds around the idea that, you know, millennials fifteen percent of them I believe the figure was were cellibate and one and a half they were one and a half times more likely to not be having sex than their gen X peers had been at that age.

So really surprising findings. And then the stuff that about, you know, the kind of ecological circumstances that helped form our sexuality. I think it's great for people to think about that. So this article went into how millennials are living at home for longer because of the economy. They're availing themselves of technology more than previous generations, so less likely to get out there and actually date and relate, and some of them are feeling financial strains in the

world that previous generations didn't. So I liked the way the article balanced this surprising finding with helping us understand that human sexuality is pretty flexible and it depends a lot on its container. So it was great to see that. And also, you know, I think it's time for us

to stop thinking of millennials in one way. We've had one thought about millennials, which is, we've just been flipping out about hookup culture, and this article forced us to think of them in more nuanced ways maybe, and think of them beyond our own personal preoccupations with you know, what we think of as the horrors of hookup culture, and think of them more broadly. So I'm glad that that information is out there, and it's the kind of

stuff that I tried to have and untrue. You know, new findings, new social science that challenges the way we're used to thinking about sexuality. Can I just see one other thing that was really interesting, the research that shows that millennial women are actually sexual adventurouses compared to millennial men. I get into in untrue the way that there's some data suggesting that millennial women outpace millennial men when it

comes to infidelity. Women in their twenties are twice as likely to go to a BDSM dungeon or a sex party. They're much more likely to have group sex. So that's a surprising and interesting thing about millennials too, that the young women are adventurous, more adventurous than their male peers, And it begs the question, are they just reporting more honestly and you know, do we get socialized out of being more adventurous as we age? So millennials full of surprises.

Thank you millennials. Wow, you're really breaking down a lot of stereotypes here. Now, did you say that women are more likely to cheat than men? Yes, some interesting information that came out of recent a crunch of about you know,

decades worth of the General Social Survey. Wendy Wang at the Institute for Family Studies did a kind of a deep dive into who's cheating in twenty seventeen, and she found that women ever married women between the ages of eighteen and twenty nine, we're slightly more likely to have

cheated on a spouse than men the same age. Now, when we factor in that we are unlikely to feel one hundred percent comfortable disclosing to a stranger that we have committed in fidelity, and that there's asymmetrical stigma attached for women that it's you know, it's a little harder for women to admit it. We have to consider that they might be in that age range, women might be outpacing their male peers by even more than it appears.

So that was some really interesting data that came out and when you dig into it deeper, what you see is that there are a number of really very good representative or national weighted samples suggesting that men and women cheat at equal rates until well into their forties. A you gov study done in the UK and the US showed that the difference between men and women cheating was a single percentage point twenty percent for men versus nineteen

percent for women. So, as you and I know, that's a statistically insignificant difference, and it's likely that because women are less likely to disclose transparently, that those numbers are at the very least. Even so, when you look at the data, there are all kinds of challenges to the easy assumption that we've made over the years that you know, men are wired to cheat, they're more likely to cheat, and that women are sort of wired for monogamy. We're

starting to see that that's untrue. Very interesting. I mean, in general, we know from evolutionary psychology that we didn't evolve for any particular sexuality, right, there's no sex that we're wired to like more than any other kind of sex. We evolved our species as really flexible social and sexual strategists. It's just in us, which is what makes studying human sexuality so incredibly interesting. Agreed, So what's female flexuality? So female flexuality is the term that I used when I

was writing about the work of Lisa Diamond. Lisa Diamond is a sex researcher in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah. And some years or that she was at Cornell. And she told me that she would drive her Toyota Corolla all over upstate New York interviewing women about their sexuality. And she told me that when she was studying at Cornell some years ago, you know, everybody else was studying like infant cognition in her department, and

she was studying female sexuality. And she told me she used to wonder, like, am I ever going to get a job? You know? And it was it was tough, But did she ever because she came up with this great idea. She was studying a group of women, roughly one hundred women. She's not been studying this group of

women for twenty years. And as she recorded their stories and their experiences of sexuality, she noticed that there was this thing going on where sometimes the women were having sex with men, and sometimes they were having sex with women, and sometimes they were you know, identifying for example, as gay for a long time, and then suddenly they would want to have sex with a man, or they were straight for a long time and considered them straight and

considered that that was their orientation. But things would happen and they would be having sex with women. Okay. So until Lisa Diamonds started thinking about it, everybody would look at this information and say, what is all this noise in the data about female sexuality? This stuff, this passing bisexuality. They sometimes called it, what is all this noise in the data? And Lisa Diamond's brilliance, which she said, I don't think this thing that you're calling passing bisexuality is

noise in the data. I think it is the data. And she dug into it and she coined a term called female sexual fluidity to describe what she was seeing, which is that, in her view of it, we all have an orientation. We all have a sexual orientation. That's

a real thing. But for some of us, our sexual orientation doesn't provide the last word on who we're attracted to, and if we're in a context that's conducive to us switching it up, we might do so, and so you know, a great example of this is say that you're a woman who your orientation is that you're heterosexual, but you're at an all women's college, for example, and sex ratios are skewed and there are lots of women, and also

you're in an environment that's conducive to experimentation where there's not a lot of stigma around that. And say you have a really really close to female friend who's a lesbian or she's bisexual. These conditions on the ground if you are a woman and you are sexually fluid, would lead to it being more likely that you express it. But we see female sexual fluidity in lots of different contexts.

Sociologists had this really unfortunate term for it. They call it the Harem effect, and they talk about sociologists have written for many years about how, for example, in women's prisons, in all women's schools, or I wrote about it happening in the Hamptons, right, which is the summer habitat of

a group of very wealthy people from Manhattan. And in the summer the men and women are separated, and a lot of these assumably heterosexual women who are married to men are living in the Hamptons all summer without their husbands, only seeing their husbands on the weekend, and a lot of them form intimate attachments and have a number of them that told me about forming intimate attachments with trainers and having sexual involvements with them. Now, these are women

who are married or in long term heterosexual partnerships. Often they have children, and their whole life is based on heterosexual normativity. But in the right, in particular ecological circumstances, they'll be open to a sexual relationship with a woman. So we see that ecology plays a big role in females. Like Lisa Diamond saw that early on. Now here's a cool thing. For a long time she thought that sexual fluidd was something more inherent to women, and she wrote

about why that might be. Recently, she published a paper and the paper was called I was Wrong. And in this paper Lisa Diamond said that after studying this group of nearly one hundred women for twenty years and having thought based on that data that sexual fluidity was a uniquely female thing, she then went and interviewed a group of young men in Salt Lake City and they told her surprising things. The ones who were identified as heterosexual.

They told her surprising things about the fact that they liked watching porn of men together, that they were interested in being with men, that they had been with men. And what she came up with after that is that sexual fluidity is not just dependent on your ecological circumstances,

but ideology plays a really big role. And she said, these younger men in Salt Lake City, these millennial men, were able to push the eject button on the stigma that older men feel men in their forties and fifties, and beyond the stigma that they feel about male homosexuality or the stigma they feel about just the idea of male sexual fluidity, these younger men, in having escaped that were showing levels of sexual fluidity comparable to what women

were showing. So it's a work in progress. Hey, here we are back to millennials just mixing everything up for us. I know, they're really changing the boundaries of gender identity, aren't they. Yeah, they're pushing us right in new directions. I mean, it's so funny because I had not expected the number of people that I spoke to in researching this book to tell me many things like I'm post binary or I'm gender fluid, and that it's a real change in the landscape that millennials are driving. It was

so funny. This is just I was at a party and I introduced a woman in her twenties to a woman who's in her early fifties. And the woman in her early fifties identifies as gay, and so she was talking to this younger woman, and I was there when the younger woman said, I'm post binary. I'm you know, I identify it's actually fluid. And the woman in her early fifties turned to her and said, I'm fifty. I'm in my fifties. Are you gay or not? You saw right there in that moment at a party and somebody's

living room. You saw the sort of clash of cultures and how we're undergoing a shift. Wait, what is post binary? I've sort of non binary? Is that the same thing as post binary? I've heard both, I should say, I've heard non binary and post binary. Do you think these young people have a lot of wisdom about these topics that older folks just don't get. I think they do. And I just had to have so much respect for the people who educated me in this way, you know,

I was coming from a kind of worn paradigm. I started thinking about this book Untrue, and I thought, you know, I've kind of made a career out of studying women we love to hate, right, I wrote a book about I wrote a book about our cultural antipathy towards stepmothers, and I said that I thought that there was gender bias that play there. And I wrote a book about rich Mommy's on the Upper east Side, a group of people that you know, readers seem to all have an

opinion about. So then I said, well, you know, I've written I am really attracted to these women that we have cultural hostility too, because I think they teach us a lot about ourselves. Why are we so hot still toward these groups of women? What is it about them that triggers us? So I said, well, naturally, now I have to look at women who refuse monogamy. I have to look at in quotes, the adulteress, right, because she's

a real lightning rod for our cultural rage. Okay, So I decide to do this, And this is the great thing about social science. As soon as you want to look into something, you realize, well, the ground has been changing underneath my feet, even as I've been thinking about

this issue, because what happened was it wasn't there. You know, I had used the term the adulteress in quotation marks, knowing that our attitudes have changed historically, and that she was sort of a rhetorical figure, a literary figure, a signifier. But once I started researching the book, I realized how much has changed and how little has changed. I mean, we now have women sort of at the forefront of the polyamory movement in our country. We have women as

sort of vocal proponents of consensual non monogamy. Consensual non monogamy is a thing now, So the whole landscape of what used to be called adultery had changed a lot. But I did find that, you know, the definition of adultery or infidelity or whatever we want to call it, had really undergone a see change with the emergence of

the consensual non monogamy movement, if you will. What's the consensual non monogamy movement some people call it CNM, and basically what's emerged and I think we have gay men to thank for this a lot is over the last decades, it's increasingly common for straight people now to decide that rather than presume they want to be monogamous for life with their life partner, or even to presume that they want to be monogamous with a long term partner or

even in a shorter partnership. People are now having conversations out of the gate about what they want and you know, whether sexual exclusivity is for them. So I do believe that this started mostly with gay men. I like to say that gay men gentrified consensual non monogamy for straight people, sort of the way they gentrified San Francisco. Right that you speak to therapists work with couples, they will often tell you, and I interviewed a number of them in

the course of researching this book. I would sit down with these couples therapists and they would say, well, I first became aware that there was a sort of a sea change going on because I had worked with gay men for many years, and these couples would come to me and they would say, we're open, or we're non monogamous, or we don't do monogamy, or we play right and the gay men we're using these terms. Of course, it

wasn't all gay men, It wasn't all gay couples. A lot of couples, therapists and sex researchers who have a long history of working with the gay community will tell you that they first that gay men kind of pioneered this. Eventually straight people caught on, and you know, we had books like The Ethical Slut by Dottie Esmond, We had Sex Dawn by Chris Ryan and Casilda Jetta, So we had all of these books coming out. Esther Perell's books have been to a lot of people, and the work

of Michelle Shankman. All this started coming out, and people over perhaps the last decade especially, we've seen straight people cottoning in new ways to consensual non monogamy. So one of the things one of the things that I write about, and we don't have straight up a lot of data on it yet, but if people are interested in learning more about consensual non monogamy, they might like to look

at the work of the sex researcher Amy Moorees. Amy Moorees discovered that between two thousand and six and twenty fifteen, our Google searches for terms like open relationship and polyamory increased exponentially. At the same time that you know, ninety one percent of people told Gallup pollsters in twenty thirteen that they thought that infidelity was wrong. They're doing these google searches, So I like to say that in the aggregate,

Americans maybe monogamists, but we're curious about our options. And Amy Moore's work sort of points to that. Also the work of a researcher named Terry Connolly. I believe she's at the University of Michigan. So if people really want to dig into the research about the emergence of consensual non monogamy as kind of a movement over the last decade or two, they'll probably want to look at the work of those researchers. And then there's polyamory, which is

sort of a subgroup of consensual non monogamy. You know, usually we divide consensual non monogamy into different groups. Swingers who kind of had their heyday in the seventies, but they're still out there and they're still going. Then people in what we call open relationships, and that's kind of a misnomer a lot of times. The ethos of an open relationship is, you know, you go off and do your thing, and I'll go off and do my thing, and we together will be home base, but we'll keep

it kind of quiet. And then the polyamory community, people who identify as polly are in relationships that they might call thrupples or triads because it's a relationship of three people or quads a relationship of four people, and often in a polyamorous relationship, and there won't be a hierarchy among swingers and people in open relationships. The diad right, the pair bond is pretty much the relationship, the strongest relationship,

the relationship that takes precedence. But people who are polyamorous might live in an arrangement or be in a romantic and personal arrangement where there is no hierarchy and all four people's relationships with each other matter just as much. Or in a throttle or a triad again, there might be no hierarchy, there might be no pair bond as home base, and people are making trying to make these relationships work. So I think the emergence of polyamory and

it's sort of coming out in a big way. There will tell about it, and there are lawyers who draw up contracts for people in polyamorous relationships and therapists who treat polyamorous people. They told me that their couches have to be really big. So there's a whole industry emerging to help these people. So this is the new wrinkle in the culture that is really fascinating and important for us to look at as well and kind of challenges this whole idea of what is infidelity, what is monogamy?

What do people want? Now? Wow, so it almost seems like it's a free for all now, like, you know, like it could be like any combination as possible. Now, what do you make of You know, not every listener to our podcast is going to be okay with that. You know, you can imagine there'd be certain maybe some more conservative listeners or what not that are not I think maybe we can get out of hand a little bit too much. How do you respond to that sort

of thing? You know, there is no real response except to say, first of all, that, for example, on the topic of polyamory, absolutely, we live in a culture that has pretty much fetishized the diad, the pair bond. And one of the things that we have wrong in our attachment to the pair bond, which how are we might feel about it? And a lot of us love being pair bonded, We love being in a monogamous in a sexually exclusive long term relationship, and a lot of us

thrive there. So that's important to say. But a lot of people might think, well, that's the way it's always been, so that's the way it should be. In fact, you know, when we look to our evolutionary prehistory and when we look to the data about that, what we see is that living in monogamous pair bonds is pretty new for human beings. It started between ten and twelve thousand years ago,

which through the lens of anthropology is like yesterday. So people might be interested to know that the old idea in anthropology was from a guy named irv DeVore. He is an anthropologist who came up with the man the Hunter hypothesis, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It was this idea that we evolved in monogamous pair bonds, right, and the guy would go off and like hunt and then bring meat back to his woman and his baby

in the cave. Okay, Now, that idea persisted for a really long time because it really fit nicely into the way we ourselves were living when that idea came into in the fifties and sixties, when we did live in monogamous pair bonds, and of course we projected back in the science that it was ever Thus, this is natural,

this must be how we're intended to live. Meanwhile, so some female anthropologists came into the field and started looking at the actual behavior, you know, of our species and other species on the ground, and they realized that when we look at traditional hunter gatherer populations, when we look at human primates who are our closest non human relatives, and when we really look to the cross cultural data, what we see as the overwhelming likelihood that we evolved

not as you know, straight sexually exclusive couples, but as cooperative breeders. And cooperative breeding means that we lived in large, pretty rangy groups, and that we raised our offspring cooperatively because that was really the most efficient way to make sure that they survived to an age where they themselves could reproduce, and to facilitate this happening and to create social cohesion and bonds, we also tended to mate cooperatively.

So monogamy really is a very recent invention. It's ten or twelve thousand years old, and I like to say that we're still having growing pains getting used to it, but we have embraced it, and there is tremendous resistance sometimes to the idea of people just not wanting to be pair bonded and everything from us, you know, calling women who don't get married spinsters, to thinking that people who are polyamorous are consensually non monogamous, to pathologizing them,

whether it's psychologists pathologizing them and saying that they must have had some kind of early life trauma, to therapists couple's therapists saying that there's no way that non monogamy can work, to women being slut shamed. There's a whole range of ways that people reject people rejecting being pair bonded. So the resistance is real, but the urge to experiment and live beyond monogamy is just as real. I spoke to Lisa Diamond about it, and she said to me,

we do see that polyamory is becoming increasingly popular. We do see that women are driving the polyamory movement, which really surprised me. We do see increasing numbers of heterosexual people, not just gay men, wanting to sort of push at the edges and invent relationships that work for them. That said Lisa Diamond said to me, there is no monogamy revolution in our near future. She sees monogamy being with us for the long term and she doesn't see it

going anywhere anytime soon. There. You know, there are other people like my friend Misha Lynn, who's the co founder of Open Love New York and the past president of that organization. She's really cool and it's a support group for people who are polyamorous or polly curious. You know. She would argue that that she sees that this will

change society in a real in a big way. And I should say, you know, this isn't the first time that people in recent history, even that people have pushed against the confines of monogamous marriage forever, the Transcendentalists and the Romantic, the Romantic poets. So first the Romantic poets and then the Transcendentalists did all these experiments with marriage and relationships, and they often lived communally and rejected monogamy.

The second big wave of consensual non monogamy, and the historian Elizabeth Chef, who writes a lot about consensual non monogamy, gets into this. If people are more interested in following up and learning even more about the history of consensual non monogamy. She calls the Transcendentalists and Romantic poets the

first wave. She says, the second wave of consensual non monogamy in our country was the sort of free love era of the seventies, and now she's calling right now the third wave of consensual non monogamy in our country. People might resist it, it might make them angry, but boy, they're doing those Google searches and people are curious about it. Sure. To be curious is to be human, Yeah, exactly, Sure.

And the more the more taboo it is. You know, it's justin Leie Miller and I talked about you know there, just play into it and plain old science, right, because as other experts I interviewed told me, look, being monogamous, truly sexually exclusive for an entire lifetime with one person and being enthusiastic about it does not conform to any model we have of desensitization to stimuli over time, right

of habituation to a stimulus over time. It doesn't make sense from a scientific standpoint that we are going to be able to maintain a monogamous life easily and with zeal for a lifetime. So I think it helps people a lot when they just have permission to understand that there are good reasons that monogamy is hard for them and that they have a number of options to consider what steps to take next. Yeah, there's clearly huge individual

differences in that. Like there's the dimension that called socio sexuality that has the scale as a like a one to five rating sex without love is okay would be one of the items. And you find, I mean that individual difference variables is by the way, not correlated with psychopathology. So you know, something very good about what you're you're

doing is showing that there's all sorts of variations. And if you maybe high in socio sexuality you think love without sex is okay, or you think, like you know, monogamous ideas are attractive to you. It doesn't mean something's wrong with you. But at the same time, you know, there are people who do go forty to fifty years of marriage and are quite content, if not find it a very spiritual, wonderful, meaningful experience and not having sex with anyone else. So they sure do, they sure do.

And we find also to your point, Scott, absolutely right, And there is a lot of research on how different sexual personalities do with non monogamy. And here are some interesting findings that were surprising to me. Well, this is a kind of this finding makes intuitive sense. But attachment style has a lot to attachment theory. Yeah, I do too, and it has a lot to do with how well

people do with consensual non monogamy. Unsurprisingly, people with anxious attachment styles have a harder time with consensual non monogamy, and people with very secure attachment styles tend to be the people who thrive in these arrangements. Makes sense, I think everything it does make sense. It does. Now, here's

the other thing that was really interesting. Terry Connolly and the last Society for Sex Therapy and Research conference in Philadelphia, the twenty eighteen she presented some interesting new findings and she did. She talked about findings from a study about relationship satisfaction and self reported jealousy. And here's what she found. She looked at several groups of people. She looked at people who were polly and people who were swingers on

the one hand. On the other hand, she looked at people in open marriages and monogamists, and she asked them to self rate their levels of jealousy. The most jealous people were the people in open relationships, which, remember, is usually a misnomer. Usually what you're saying is you're in a paara bond, and you're saying, you go do your thing. I'll go do my thing. I don't want to see or hear about it. Right, So those people and monogamists

reported the highest levels of jealousy about their spouses. In the swinger group and the group of polyamorous people, they reported the lowest levels of jealousy. Now it gets more interesting because the polyamorists and the people who are swingers reported the highest levels of relationship and life satisfaction, whereas the people in open relationships and monogamous relationships those levels they reported were lower. And Terry Connelly suggested that the

key here might be a couple of things. First of all, that people in the polyamory community and people who are swingers have a community of support. They're practicing a culturally stigmatized or taboo behavior, but they have created a community of support around themselves and they don't feel alone. So that might be why they reported higher relationship and sort of life satisfaction, Whereas if you're in an open relationship.

You don't have a community of support when you're having an extramarital or an extra pair relationship, and you might feel kind of lonely and alienated and like there's something weird about you. So the importance of community comes into play. And then the other thing that a lot of experts told me that I think is evident in this research is that reporting a high level of relationship satisfaction, if you're in a poll or a swinger relationship, you have

to communicate with each other a lot. First of all, you have to communicate to say we're going to do this thing. Then you have to communicate to be on the same page. Then every time you're having an adventure with another person or in a relationship with another person,

you have to be communicating effectively about that. So, to my complete surprise and maybe to a lot of surprise of your listeners and people who read my book, people in swinging and polyamorous relationships report really high relationship satisfaction and they have excellent communication skills. I love that point. And you also find THEES and M community there's you know,

communication as amost importance. Yeah, with people who are in kink. Yeah, people who are into kink not only about consent right, but just you know, setting the ground rules, setting the ground rules and communicating about what you like and what you want to do. And also, again what we have with people who are into kink is luckily for them,

they have a community. Monogamouss might be basically the whole world, but we don't have a particular community, and nor do people in open relationships if it's in the traditional sense of open, where that's a misnomer and they're not communicating with each other about it. They're saying, you go do your thing, you go do mine. They're kind of splintered off and isolated. So some surprising findings about the psychological well being of people doing things that we might a

while of as have said, Oh, that's kind of pathological behavior. Yes, and that's a very good service you're doing with your work and writing. I wanted to talk about some other findings I've seen in the literature that I want to reconcile with all this. You talked about attachment style as being one port individual differences variable, but another one I've found which I think there should be more research on, is disagreeable women. So the agreeableness dimension of personality seems

to be the biggest predictor of socio sexuality. So those who score very very high in disagreeableness, particularly the women. You don't find this effect among the men as much. They really are not happy with us with one partner, like they are really like you know, they really like sex without love, you know. And I mean, on one sense, it's not shocking like that. The agreeableness dimension predicts the extent to which intimacy and conformity, right, that's correct. Rule

conformity and politeness. There's two compassions, two aspects of that. There's a compassion and there's politeness. You know, they're both correlated with it. So I've always I've always done like when I saw Peter, when I saw David Schmidt's research, for instance, on cross cultural and also David Buss's research

on uh that like why do people have sex? You know, and you always find that one very like disagreeable women like are off the charts in terms of like trying everything and and you know, oh, go ahead, finished, No, okay, well I just love First of all, I want to suggest a T shirt disagreeable woman. Yeah, yeah, is that better than nasty women's and I want to point out like the sort of you know, the nomenclature is really important. Think about how if and the causality, the sort of

chicken egg aspects of this. Think about what it takes to be a woman who dares to acknowledge the fact that she wants more than one sexual part. Yeah, she's going against the cultural pressure. So yeah. The sex researcher Alicia Walker talks about this in terms of these women who dare to refuse monogamy. And you know, to me, these women are brave. We might judge them harshly, we might think there's something wrong with them, but it is

pretty brave for the following reason. First of all, you know, if you're a woman who refuses monogamy, not only are you going against the well established cultural script that healthy, mature, mentally solid people are monogamous and that monogamy is sort

of the hallmark of maturity, right and healthiness. You're going against that script, but you're also going against the script that women are less sexual than men, that women have lower libidos than men do, and you're going against the script that women are naturally sort of more heart bound and more naturally monogamous, which you know, a lot of bad science asserted that in the science has been contradicted by newer science that women did not, you know, are

not wired to be more monogamous than men. But it still takes a lot to go against the grain of those very deep cultural beliefs. So it's almost like disagreeableness factors in in a way, just what it takes to push against a cultural container that's telling women that they desire less and that they're more naturally monogamous. It's a really interesting issue. At the heart of female infidelity is

daring and kind of being a double renegade. Yeah, I believe that actually that point was made in the discussion section of the Why Humans Have Sex article Cindy Mesta, India bus Route. I believe that it was. If not, I'm confusing another pair. But yeah, that has a point that's been made about why maybe that effect is so prominent. But I've always thought that there should be more research

on that specific sub population. However, like in fact, I'd like to do that research on disagreeable women then sections this is something for us to talk about when we have coffee. Yeah, that'd be a great sty to collaborate on. Yeah, I'd love it. You know what else has been really interesting in terms of female infidelity, or being disagreeable or kind of being a you have to necessarily be a renegade in certain ways to be female and to own your sexuality. I mean, people like car Be are helping

to change that. Female sex researchers are helping to change that. But when we look at the behavior of different female species on the ground back to this issue of why we have sex. You know, we used to bend over backwards to figure out the reasons that females of many species had sex, and just in primatology alone, what has come to life is that, and this is the view of evolutionary biology. You know, females have sex because it

feels good. And you know, non human female primates and human females have orgasms, and some of us, you know, human and non human, are capable of multiple orgasm. So one thing that's emerging right now. I know this seems tangential to your point about why we have sex, but you know, we've recently discovered that the human female clitterists has a much more extent anatomy than we ever knew. You know, it's not just a little button like we

used to think. It's hundreds of times bigger. We now have a new imaging thanks to the Australian neurologist Helen O'Connell who mapped it out and showed most of the glitterists is on the inside of a woman's body. It's very extensive. It's sort of the super high way of sensation and it's there for no other reason than to feel good. So we have to ask ourselves, well, wow,

why did women evolve this particular anatomy? And then we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean that women have as much a rectile tissue pound per pound, ounce per ounce as men do? What does it mean that women wake up with directions every morning that women get hard on so when they're aroused. What is this new discovery about human female anatomy tell us about the human

female and about females of some other mammal species. But we know that human females and bonobo and chip females and the Caque six species of female macaques, that they have orgasms, and that orgasms sometimes multiple orgasms, and that that would have been the ultimate payoff, and that seeking pleasure is part of the evolutionary prehistory of human female sexuality, and that the clitterist is there as proof of that.

So we still have a lot more thinking to do before our culture can catch up with this new science. It'll be interesting to watch us try to reconcile ourselves to it since we've been taught that women are less sexual, right, I agree, and it'll be interesting to look at some new methodologies to get that in more nuanced ways. Well, that said, there is a very very very large literature on average sex differences in sex drive between men and women.

You're not like overturning all these thousands of studies showing that like on average, like men are more visual, men are more interested in short term flings than women on average. Are you challenging that as well? The on average of finding.

I think that the most sort of revolutionary and surprising finding for people in untrue would probably be the work and you know it emerges from the work of for example, Kristen Mark March and Mianna and numerous other Cynthia Graham who have found in their studies that long term relationships are particularly hard not on male desire but on female desire, and that the institutionalization of relationships when you put a ring on it, or when men and women because mostly,

unfortunately the sex re search still focuses on heterosexual couples. We're making some progress, but it's slow. But what we know of the sex or search john heterosexual couples. The newer research is suggesting again that when men and women move in together, for example, it's female interest that declines and it's female desire that suffers. We have those wonderful couple of studies from Dietrich Klausman at the University of Hamburg,

who found in two thousand and two. In two thousand and six, he looked at a range of adults from college age into their forties, so a whole range of adults over the course of ninety months, and he found that when they were in committed relationships, and these men and women over the course of ninety months, that male desire over the course of ninety months kind of slowly ebbed like this, over the course of the ninety month period, right,

which is what roughly eight years, here's what happened. A female desire started at the same level, right with what I like to call sex insanity, but the technical term for that, I guess is Limerens right. When you're in a new relationship, it's so exciting you want to have sex all the time. And here's what happened between years

one and four for the women. Instead of the slow, gradual decline over ninety months that we saw among men, what we have is within the first year or four years, but often within the first year, female desire plunges takes a huge nosedive. Now, we used to read that as an indication that what do you expect? Women like sex

less than men do. But what the newer thinking is is that we have to consider the possibility that women need variety and novelty every bit as much as men do, and perhaps more, and that what's happening within those first four years. And again, this isn't just Klausman study, it's Meanna's work, it's Cynthia Graham's findings, it's Kristen marks findings with pretty large sample sizes. Let's consider that what's happening is that it's not just that women like sex less

than men do. It's that they struggle more with partnered sex with a single partner over the long term, and we need more fixes for women maybe even than we do for men. I mean, there's all they're alternative hypotheses too, right there. It could be simply to me, the more parsonalious explanations this men are not pleasing women sexually in a relationship. And then to take that one step further, and I do believe in parsimonious explanations, but do you

know what I mean? Like it, you know, like let's start there. Maybe it's that like maybe young men are not really learning like pleasing the woman is important, you know, explain it among younger people. And yet Cosmon's findings and these other findings are a range of age groups. And what we see that to me is indisputable is that female sexual boredom is real and that it kicks in earlier than male sexual boredom. And my method is the

comparative method. I would never just look at the sex research. I would never just look at psychology. I would also look at what do we see among non human primates

and what do we see in other cultures. So when I get into untrue about female sexual boredom kicking in sooner and women needing variety and novelty every bit as much as men do, I'm drawing on the primatological literature, which finds that the single most observable sexual behavior of non human female primates is the search for novelty, as well as over here the sex research about women's reported boredom and turning off sex in a coupled relationship before

men do, combined with over here you know, the worldwide ethnographic data. So to me, there is a really compelling case to be made that women are not made for monogamy anymore than men are. I mean, we know from the work of the wonderful Patricia Goadi in her lab at UCLA. She recently discovered that everything we believed based on the work of Angus Bateman, who asserted in nineteen forty eight that males benefit from mating multiply and females

don't benefit from mating multiply. Right, we believe that for years and years and years, we believed that women were naturally monogamous because females of most species didn't benefit from mating multiply and that males did benefit from it. Patricia

Goadi goes back and tries to replicate the study. She can't replicate the study because females do benefit from mating multiply, and we learn that from primatologists who did meticulous field studies demonstrating how non human female primates benefit from mating multiply, but also looking at human populations like the Pimbue of Tanzania, or the Himba of Namibia, or the most Su people in China, in all these contexts where women have multiple

partners and it increases the reproductive success. From all these directions, we're getting data suggesting that this idea that women like sex less and that women are naturally more monogamous is really up for grabs now and that we need to really be accounting for actual human female behavior on the ground. And so it's exciting to see this science and it's

really challenging for a lot of people. I should also say, and you're probably aware of this, but there are sex researchers who were challenging on the idea that androgen and testosterone are the main drivers of libido, And of course Rosemary Bassen came up with this fascinating insight, which is

that there are different kinds of desire. There's spontaneous desire in which men always almost always outpace women, and spontaneous desire is your city there, and suddenly you want to have sex just the way you might, you know, want to have a Hamburger. So on the measure of spontaneous desire, men always score higher than women. But Rosemary bass And said, I think there are these other desire styles going on, and she'd call them triggered or responsive desire, and men

and women can both experience it. But it's when you are sitting there, you're not thinking about sex, and then you're watching you know, maybe you're watching an episode of Outlander, or you're reading a sexy passage in a book, or some guy or woman on the street just gives you like a really lustful glance, or even you start fooling around and then you want to have sex. That's called

triggered a responsive desire. And the fascinating thing is that when we measure triggered a responsive desire, sometimes women's libidos measure is higher than men. So we need to dig into that more. We totally need to get into that more. And you know, it's interesting. Meredith Chivers did a study in twenty fourteen where she had people in her lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, rate their responses to pornography, and men and women who were reporting equal levels of arousal.

So everywhere we're seeing these challenges to our very easy assumptions about how men and women are different sexually, even the biology from Patricia Goladie's lab. So we live in interesting times, Oh, we sure do. And there's so many interesting research questions that still ask. I think that you know, there we will still find that there are some sex differences.

Like it's not like you know, yeah, and I know you're not disagreeing with that, but I think it'll be interesting to see in what more nuanced ways there are these differences, because I think we will continue to find that there are substantial average sex differences regarding porn viewing. I saw this interesting statistic that I think maybe is consistent with what you're saying. They asked people to report

what they're most likely men and women to report. These are mostly college students, I should say, so might not generalize to adults. But why did they stop watching porn? You know? Why'd they like change to a new a new one, or like move on? Men? Like most men stop watching port and when they orgasmed, whereas women stop watching porn because of boredom, and there was a very very striking sex difference there, and these are people in college. Yeah,

so there. I think these are just anonymous surveys and so many more women in kind of standard kind of

you know, porn. I don't know what I mean by standard kind but but well, this is what I mean by standard, because I know there are some now there's cropping up like porn for women, you know, and there's a there are certain websites about that, but you know, just in terms of like you're running the mill sort of like non emotional or non like or just you know, totally like it's not even clear like the men and women are enjoying it, you know, and the porn like

like women are more likely to get bored with that and that's why they move on, you know, or on average. So through the lens, through the comparative lens, which is the one that I always like to use. I always want to ask where and how so for example, this is it sounds like an interesting sample of college aged people in the United States, in the industrialized West, which

is a very specific world. So I would be very wary with my training in anthropology to extrapolate big sex differences based on that without visiting, revisiting and looking at it in different cultural contexts. And I don't mean just going to older groups of people or people in different states, or you know, people in France. I mean looking at it comparatively the worldwide data. I'm very wary of sort of asserting kind of a scent just because of what

I've seen. I'm wary of extrapolating a lot from those kind of studies that are very, very Western in their nature. So for sure, we might be able to say that there was this really interesting sex difference between men and women in the industrialized Western and mun collegious I love

that it's a really interesting finding. And then I would want to say, before I took it further and you know, said that we could make assertions about essential before we put that into a master narrative about essential sexual differences

between men and women. I would want to find ways to go out into the world and compare it, you know, to the other worldwide ethnographic data, because I think that what has happened too often, and it does a disservice to men and women alike, is that we have extrapolated or presumed, Okay, well we found this in the study, like the famous Florida State University study, right, do you remember this great study where they got It was in the seventies, and they got what they called I loved

this term. They found attractive male and female confederates too. It just meant like people helping the psychologists do you want to do you want to come back to my place right now? Affected me? And they made much of the fact that the women were much more likely to say no, I don't and the men were more likely to say yes, I do. And there might have been some essential reasons for that. So many years later the study was revisited, I believe by German researchers what is

it about Germany? And they found that when you removed variables such as fear of getting raped, fear of getting raped, fear of getting murdered, the fear of reputational assault, which women would face more than that, the difference between who said yes was statistically insignificant, which kind of blew my mind. So I like to always run through the comparative, you know, contest, Yeah, but so no, I appreciate that. So this seems like

there's kind of multiple points in your book. And you know, one we we have definitely touched on a lot is the felidity and the importance of female choice and autonomy, and I think we've covered that really well. I just want to end here with the cheating one in particular, because I think there's different ways, there's different ways of interpreting it. So so let me give you the most like cynical view of it, which is not your point

at all of the book. But I could look at the data and say, well, all you're really saying is that women could be just as horrible human beings as men can. Like there are horrible women, they are horrible men. So one could because cheating, like isn't cheating bad like hurting your partner and like not having that or at least like, you know, like expressing your partner that like, look I have these other sexual needs, like is it okay?

You know, like if I like maybe we maybe they need I ask you present, But saying like look I'm going to leave the relationship, it would probably be healthier than secretly cheating on your partner, arguing it is empowerment that that women are out there like cheating on their partners. No not at all, not absolutely. First of all, i'm very you know, being very upset about infidelity, and I'm not upset I'm trying to be the devil's avocate. Yeah. Absolutely,

it's just really upsetting to be deceived. It is. It really is very painful, and you know, a lot of couples therapist spend a lot of time with people who have experienced infidelity. I will say a few things. First of all, the reason that I wanted to focus on female infidelity among others. First of all, it's just so fascinating, like isn't interested and people who decide, you know what, I'm not going to be a monogamous anymore. It's just

fascinating because it's it's still a taboo behavior. The second really interesting thing is what we find is that you know, through the comparative lens again, which is how I look at things. Anywhere in the world where women have really high rates of meaningful political participation and meaningful labor force participation. Wherever in the world those rates are high, you're going to see higher rates of female infidelity. So do I

think by cheating a woman says, yeah, I'm empowered. No, But I think that where you see high rates of female infidelity. What the data show us is you see that women are indeed empowered on other metrics of female autonomy. So I think that female infidelity is a very telling metric of how a given nation or community feels about female autonomy. If you really do think that women deserve to be autonomous, your take on female infidelity will more likely be something like, this is a bad thing, and

it happens, and it's part of the human condition. What can we do now? Where women don't have a lot of autonomy on other measures, you will tend to see that female infidelity can be very dangerous and even have

lethal consequences. For example, in the United States, the social psychologist David Lee, who studies female and yeah, he's great, and he studies the cuckold lifestyle and hot white thing, and he tells us that he believes, based on his expertise and the data that he's looked at, that just the suspicion of female infidelity and female infidelity are the

greatest triggers of domestic violence. So other experts tell us that, aside from school shootings, one of the most common triggers, if you will, for a mass shooting, is gendered coercive violence in which a man is attempting to kill his ex, someone who has left him, and whoever happens to be around her at the moment. So we have to be very real about the fact that in the United States, for women, committing infidelity can have lethal consequences. And we

think of ourselves as a very enlightened nation. So that fact really got me thinking, and I hope we'll get other people thinking too, about is it possible that the way we respond to female infidelity tells us how we feel about the most basic form of female autonomy, that we don't like it, and what does that tell us about ourselves as people and as a nation. It's a

challenging question. Infidelity in general challenges us on a lot of levels, and I think especially female infidelity, it challenges everything we believe about gender and what's right and women as the guardians of monogamy. I should say something else, which is that a fair number of couple's therapists now are looking more to the segmented model of marriage when they work with people experience infidelity or people who are

struggling with monogamy. So the segmented model of marriage is one that was put forward by the psychotherapist Michelle Shankman, and what she put out there was that in Latin America and parts of Europe, there's a belief that marriage is a wonderful thing and that we get a lot out of it, but that it can't satisfy all our needs, and that there are cultures where people believe that their marriages are valuable and they'll go to their graves, you know,

invested in their marriages and doing everything they can for them, but they look for their sexual needs to be met elsewhere. So this is a model that some people are looking at. Now, do we really believe that we can be everything to our partners for an entire lifetime? And Esther Perell has crossed over Michelle Shankman's insights and writings in a big, wonderful,

helpful way. Another thing that's going on is, again, for example, within consensual non monogamy, this idea of disclosing, of telling your partner we need to have this discussion what should we do and approaching it. And so there's a big value in consensual non monogamy placed on transparency and I'm being honest and telling people. So these are some of the solutions. Another solution that I've seen to the dilemma is couples decide. When you write a book like this,

people tell you a lot of stuff. So couples, couples who remain committed to each other but decide to adventure together or adventures or adventures separately and use their relationship, and their relationship remains the home base. So you know, back to humans being these endlessly creative, flexible, sexual and social strategists. I think we're applying our creativity right now to the pair bond and trying to see what we can do, how we can innovate where we can go

with it. And some people are going to want to leave it just as is, but I think it helps a lot to get out there the simple truth that the vast majority of us will have a hard time living out exclusivity for a lifetime with total zeal and that's okay, And it just becomes what do you want to do about it? Yeah, you're challenging lots of these centered assumptions. Is Another big assumption is that men and

women cheat for different reasons. I mean, you've seen that in the literature for years and years and years that women are cheat because their emotional needs aren't being met whereas men, you know, and that's not fair to men too, like what men only care about sex? Like really like I hate the way. Can I just say, I hate the way the science and social science has profiled men and backed them into a qum. I'm not a fan.

I'm not a fan. I'm not fans of that. Sometimes I think that, you know, bad social science and science is really culpable in our current cultural crisis. You know, that brought us me too, and that brought us really reactionary ideas about men and women. But bad science did a big disservice to men as well, saying that it's more natural that men are more naturally sexually assertive that

they're more naturally sexual than women are. Because that's kind of not just paving the way to provide cover for bad behavior. It's profiling men and it's making them into the enemies of women. And that's not the way. It is what the newer science is showing us, and what the social scientists that I interviewed and the experts who are therapists like you, who see people and work with couples every day, Tammy Nelson told me something so interesting.

She wrote a book called The New Monogamy, and she talks about how monogamy is a continuum, and she says monogamy can mean anything from please don't look at porn. It hurts my feelings, it's a betrayal of our bond. Monogamy can be everything from that to like, go ahead and have sex with other people as long as they're giving our relationship total priority. And you'll stop if I ask you too. She says that whole continue we should

think of as the new monogamy. But a big point that she's careful to make when she speaks when she's interviewed is that, in her years and years of experience dealing with couples in infidelity, she says to me, men and women's motivations are so much closer than we have allowed. And many, many men, she says, in my practice and the practices of my colleagues, are cheating if you want to call it that, for emotional intimacy, And many women are cheating, if we want to call it that, in

pursuit of a great orgasm. So our motivations are closer than we've really been allowed to acknowledge. And I think it's great that there's a merging science that's allowing us to reconsider this. Just one other researcher that I spoke with is Alicia Walker, and she's a sex researcher and

sociologist at the Missouri State University. Sorry, And she worked with several different samples groups of women, but she worked with groups of women who were just completely using affairs, if you will, as a strategy to get sex in marriages that were otherwise satisfying to them. But they were not able to get sexual satisfaction in their marriages. They were sexually incompatible with their husbands or their long term partners,

they were in sexless marriages, whatever it was. So they were availing themselves of outside partnerships in order to have sex. And they told doctor Walker, I am not unhappy in my marriage. It's just that my marriage is sexless or that sexually unsatisfying. But my marriage is valuable and lots of other ways. I'm just going on the side here simply for sexual satisfaction. And she found that these women were auditioning men and asking them questions like, you know,

what are you interested in sexually? What is your how would you rate your skills in X, Y, and Z. Are you happy with a completely sexual thing instead of a relationship, because that's what I'm looking for. Okay, that kind of flew in the face of what I was expecting and what we expect that women are going to

want and desire. So, you know, the research of people like doctor Walker and the findings that people like Tammy Nelson are really challenging us to rethink all the things that we've comfortably assumed about not just what women want, but who women are and who men are. So yeah, fascinating, not just science, but you know, the culture, like the Me Too movement, everything seems to there's something in the air where women aren't taking as much shit from men anymore.

It seems like there's a I mean, it seems like there's a more general I feel like all this stuff, there's a more general point is that women are as satisfied anymore with unsatisfactory sex. They're not satisfied anymore with

with abuses of power. They're not, do you know. I mean, there's like a whole list of things that like, there's a list of things right, for so long I think female sexuality meant and this isn't because men are bad people, or there weren't good committed male sex researchers and social scientists. There always happen, But I think that what happened for a long time is that female sexuality was reduced to sort of women being sexy for men in the popular culture.

And Me Too has been really interesting for the way that the women and men who participate in it are sort of saying female desire is not an extension of male desire. Let's look at it as this separate thing. So my hope with a movement like me Too, or you know, the songs of Cardi b and Beyonce, or the scripted series like oh gosh, there's so many great ones now, like Orange is the New Black, and Outlander is one that I come back to again and again.

It's like porn practically, or Insecure by aesary. I think that what all these cultural movements are doing is they're sort of saying, Okay, you know, me too and stuff. We've told you what women don't want, and we've told you that female desire is not just an extension of male desire. Now, I think we've opened up the space where we can say, okay, female desire, what is it. We've told you what women don't want and want to tolerate. Now let's talk about what women do want and what

we like and who we are sexually speaking. So maybe I'm a Pollyanna, but I find it very I find it a very exciting cultural moment, not only because of what's going on in sex research, but because of what's going on in scripted TV and anthropology and the music industry. There's a lot of possibility, a lot of possibility. I think the more that we open up the freedom and autonomy for men and women to express their full sexuality, it'll all have hotter sex. I guess I'll end on

that point. Yeah, that's a great point to end on. Better science can help us have better sex and be happier and leave more meaningful lives. I'm going to end. I will end on a quote of yours to that point. I thought i'd quote you. There can be no autonomy without the autonomy to choose without coors and or constraint, or in spite of it, who our lovers will be. So thank you so much for your thoughtful, comparative, comprehensive

work and challenging a lot of stereotypes. Thank you so much for having me on scott and for bringing psychology to so many people. Oh, thank you. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of

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