Why Do Women Have Sex?
Earlier this month, I was contacted by a journalist working at a men’s magazine who wanted to talk about the reasons why women have one night stands. As if I’m the best person to talk to — like I’m Johnny Conquest, and carry a special golden axe for notching my already splintered bedpost! I mean, yes, I am nominally an expert in human attraction, but that doesn’t mean I actually know anything.
Lucky for me, then, that a couple of weeks ago a pair of proper scientists from the University of Ottawa published a research paper entitled “Women’s Motivations to Have Sex in Casual and Committed Relationships with Male and Female Partners”. Hopefully the paper’s authors, Heather Armstrong and Elke Reissing, have a better idea why women like to dance the “shaking of the sheets” than I do.
They had over 500 women complete the YSEX? questionnaire. The YSEX? is a list of over two hundred reasons a person might give for having sex. For example, “I was ovulating (and wanted to get pregnant)”, “I saw my partner naked and could not resist”, “I wanted to get a raise”, “I wanted to keep warm”, and “it was a special occasion”. So, pretty much every reason we might give for making the beast with two backs, from the banal to the ridiculous, to the rather sweet and the downright depressing. For each reason, the volunteers had to rate the likelihood that they themselves would use that reason to explain their own sexual behaviour.
Now, once someone fills in the questionnaire the researchers are left with a lot of responses to a lot of different questions, so to make sense of their data they boil everything down. Each reason belongs to one of four categories. Some reasons for having sex are purely physical, others are to do with attaining goals like revenge or social status, others are emotional, and the remainder are about insecurity — having sex to boost self esteem to stop a partner from leaving.
Armstrong and Reissing’s volunteers completed the questionnaire twice — once while thinking about why they had sex with a committed long-term partner and once more, thinking about their motivations for one night stands . Of the 360 straight volunteers, 81% reported having had sex with a long-term partner, and 59% with a casual partner. Of the 150 volunteers with same-sex or bisexual attraction, 25% had had a long-term female sex partner and 40% a casual partner.
The most common reasons women gave for having casual sex with a female partner was wanting to experience the physical pleasure. Close behind was “the person’s physical appearance turned me on”, which was also the top reason women had casual sex with men. Physical reasons was the most commonly endorsed category in both cases — all of the top ten reasons were physical in nature, regardless of sexual attraction or gender of the partner. The volunteers were very consistent, with eight of the top ten reasons the same for all women.
Women also gave many physical reasons for having sex in committed relationships, but emotional reasons such as wanting to express love or desiring emotional closeness were also common. Women who were attracted to men gave “it feels good” as their top reason, as did women with a same-sex or bisexual attraction: but only when their partner was female: bisexual women’s top reason for having sex with a male partner was it wanting show affection. “It feels good” ranked only fourth on their list. What that says about men’s sexual prowess compared to women’s, I’d rather not contemplate… Again, the volunteers gave similar responses: eight of the top ten reasons featured in everyone’s list.
What were the least commonly endorsed reasons for sex? Reasons in the goal attainment category were ranked lowest. Women who had sex with other women rated “I wanted to feel closer to God” as the least likely reason for a fling. Surprisingly, “I wanted to reproduce” was only ninth from the bottom of their list, suggesting that some women should have paid more attention in sex ed’ class. Women who have sex with men cited “I wanted to give someone a sexually transmitted disease” as the least likely reason for sex. I don’t know whether to be reassured that this reason is so low on the leader board, or petrified that anyone would even consider it. As the researchers point out, all of the reasons “were endorsed to some extent by multiple people”. Jeepers…
It’s worth pointing out that sexual motivations didn’t differ much by sexual orientation or sex of partner. Gay and lesbian women report having sex for much the same reasons as straight women. But the integral word here is “report”. What this type of research can’t tell us is the actual reasons why women have sex. If you think that people — and I include men here too — have 100% insight into their own behaviour and that there’s no such thing as self-deception, then fine. You can take Armstrong and Reissing’s results as gospel. I’m more dubious.
Why? Well, for one thing, women’s reputations are tied very closely to their sexuality. We all know that women can be bullied or slut-shamed for having sex with multiple partners, partners of a certain type, and for giving particular reasons for sex. Do all women have sex with partners to get ahead in life, to secure a job or a raise or other material goods? No, of course not. But do some women do that? The honest answer has got to be yes. And do I expect women to downplay the importance of goal directed reasons for having sex? Definitely, because admitting to yourself that one of the reasons you have had sex was for material gain probably makes you feel like a bad person, and who likes to feel bad?
Another thing is that our behaviour is often directed by multiple motivations, some of which are conscious and others not. For example, there are times when we humans have sex primarily because we want to reproduce — say, for a male-female couple who are trying to conceive by timing intercourse to the most fertile day of the woman’s cycle. When her luteinizing hormone levels surge, that couple’s getting down to business whether they’re into it or not. But most of the time getting knocked up is far from our mind. That is, our conscious mind. But our unconscious mind, our primitive monkey brains, our very genes, are crying out for us to reproduce. Why do you think women rank physical attraction so high on their list of reasons for casual sex? Probably because physically attractive men make the best genetic fathers for offspring, just as they do in other species.
All of which isn’t to say that this experiment was useless. Far from it. If we want to know why women think they have sex, the best approach is to do what Armstrong and Reissing did and ask them. But if we’re interested in the real reasons we’ll have to look a little deeper. It’s complicated.
Well, that’s what I told the journalist. I think he was looking for something a bit more… conclusive.
Armstrong, H. L., & Reissing, E. D. (in press). Women’s motivations to have sex in casual and committed relationships with male and female partners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the Jan 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
