Is that a wallet in your pocket, or…
Bad Evo-Psych always drives me a little nuts.
The latest little news report to get under my skin is a piece that starts with this tidbit of radical "scientific truth":
Ah yes, the delightful reminder that you can get almost anything reported if you simply confirm sexist tropes. Where the actual paper is published is never mentioned, so that raises red flags. As far as what they actually found, the article reports it thusly:
The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China for in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partners whose data was the basis for the study.
They found that 121 of these women always had orgasms during sex, while 408 more had them “often”. Another 762 “sometimes” orgasmed while 243 had them rarely or never. Such figures are similar to those for western countries.
There were of course, several factors involved in such differences but, said Pollet, money was one of the main ones.
He said: “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women’s self-reported frequency of orgasm.So, to summarize - women in China reported more orgasms as their male partner’s income increased. Of course, we have no actual data given, but let’s assume there was an actual correlation. If so, would you leap to the conclusion that it is the size of the income that is producing the orgasms, because richer men are more desirable lovers? What other possible explanations could there be? (I leave that question as an exercise to the readers, since I am pretty sure my readers aren’t stupid.)
This kind of thing drives me batty, but things that reassure the "common wisdom" are far easier to get press for. Evo Psych might have been an interesting field, but is used primarily to provide "scientific" cover for some heavy gender-essentialism.
Of course, when the "great minds" of the Evo Psych field such as David Buss produce this explanation of why the female orgasm exists, you see why.
"They could promote emotional bonding with a high-quality male or they could serve as a signal that women are highly sexually satisfied, and hence unlikely to seek sex with other men,” he said. “What those orgasms are saying is ‘I’m extremely loyal, so you should invest in me and my children’."
