New sociosexuality research could revolutionize how we think about casual sex
psypost.org
psypost.org
The issue here is that humans are a combination of their natural state (how they would be if they were raised with no contact, direct or indirect, with society) and social conditioning (the system of induced emotions and mental strategies that society instills in people to sustain and propagate itself).
"Committed relationships" are in the natural state most likely naturally living in a tribe, with probably little or no pair bonding/coupling in humans, while western social conditioning is about committed relationships, marriage, etc. with several very different flavors (traditional marriage, polyginous marriage, hierarchical polyamory, etc.)
"Casual sex" in the natural state probably "just happens", while social conditioning has a whole lot of mental ideas about with whom/when/how much you should do it, what it means if you do/don't do it, etc.
The problem with studying the natural state is that there are little or no humans living in it (and certainly none accessible to most/all researchers), and the closest animals, chimpanzees and bonobos, are significantly different between them in their sociosexuality.
The problem with studying social conditioning is that it massively varies between gender, location, subculture, age, historical period, and varies randomly between individuals.
So this study at best might manage to describe the average social conditioning that currently affects Mechanical Turk users (clearly chosen because it's easy and cheap to target them, rather than any attempt at producing quality research), and thus is pretty much useless.
It really might be one of the worst papers I have read. It is basically a magazine article using more scientific sounding language.
There is a huge age/experience confound that I can think of from my own life. My answers would be so much different at 25 vs 55 after so many failed attempts at pair bonding. From my dating experience and life I would say the time average and ensemble average are not equal. Even forgetting about experience we know hormone levels change drastically over time. I can think of all kinds of ridiculous experiments in other domains that would be analogous to studying sex without accounting for sex hormones.
Revolutionary! Ground-breaking!
Start with books from Rollo Tomassi and Rian Stone.
"The seduction community has done more to advance the understanding of intersexual dynamics in the last 15 years than the whole of psychology and sociology has done in the past 150 years." – Nick Krauser
Acting confident, putting forward your best leg and trying to be attractive is not manipulation anymore than most other social interactions.
Especially since appearing desirable generally means your partner will have a better time. Few people have sexual fantasies about sleeping with a loser.
More and more people seem to have lots of baggage from years of being used by PUAs though.
> Calling that manipulation is just insulting the intelligence of women.
When you see someone completely numbed to the constant casual negging from their partner, calling it what it is sometimes is the only way to snap them out of it.
I believe that as a single dude who graduated into COVID, works remotely, and moved to a new state where the only person I knew was my roommate, I believe I have a fairly exceptional social life. I met a lot of people through a local maker space. The key is just finding weird people to be weird with.
I would describe myself and many of the people I interact with as being very genuine and true to themselves.
Semiotics is the better way to understand the complexity and layers of culture and philosophy that brought us the DSM-5 and “psychology”.