A Pickup Artist Accidentally Proved Feminist Science Right

Relatively new research suggests that women’s sex drives might naturally rival or even exceed men’s…under the right conditions. That surprised me a little, even though it probably shouldn’t have. I spent years in the pickup artist community, and one of our most effective “techniques” worked on exactly that premise.

Most people believe that men are hornier and more promiscuous than women by nature.

A lot of scientific studies point to men having more sexual partners, participating in more risky sex, and experiencing greater regret from missing sexual opportunities.

It’s undeniable that nurture (social conditioning) played a huge part in these behavioral differences. Men are encouraged to have more sexual partners as a marker of success while women are fervently discouraged with slut-shaming.

But what about nature? Can we still say that the old evolutionary psychology papers by David M. Buss are accurate in light of more recent data?

Psychology teaches us that human behavior is always the result of a combination of nature and nurture. It’s difficult to imagine that nature had nothing to do with these differences in sexual behavior. It must be “natural” for men to be hornier and more promiscuous than women!

Or is it?

To find the truth, we first need to decide on the method of finding it.

What’s the best way to arrive at the truth? Is it easier to find it while clashing with dissenting voices, or in an echo chamber?

I, a man, was recently having a debate with a bunch of other men from the manosphere about whether women should be allowed in their discussion space.

It was specifically a forum for men trying to improve their love lives and sex lives with women. They discussed mindsets, behavioral habits, and personal stories in order to give and receive help and support to each other.

I used to be the senior moderator on another such (now defunct) forum more than a decade ago. The website was owned by a company that was called PUA Training.

Yes, I’m talking about pickup artists, a group chastised by society as a bunch of players and f**kboys who harass innocent women. Such criticism wasn’t entirely unwarranted; there was a lot of toxicity and misogyny festering in those spaces.

But you know what helps to prevent and curb the kind of toxicity that breeds hate and unempathetic, nonconsensual behavior toward other groups of people? Welcoming the voices of those very people.

When I was the senior mod for that forum website, our entire mod team made sure that women were welcome (we even had a couple women mods), and I unilaterally implemented an explicit site-wide rule against misogyny. What happened was even more constructive discussions, kind of like the great conversation I just had with social scientist

 right here on Medium, a space that welcomes people from all backgrounds.

Oh, and if you haven’t already guessed, I was strongly implying that it’s easier to arrive at the truth if you’re discussing things with people of various backgrounds and perspectives, NOT in an echo chamber just full of people who look like you.

Anyway, I digress. I apologize for that seemingly irrelevant tangent that adds nothing to this article’s main focus. It was really only for a very specific audience (the very men I was debating with…subscribe for more tea lol).

Elle and I were discussing the science behind promiscuity and gender.

She referenced studies (her article is linked below) on sexual behavior in several primate species that showed a lot more sexual aggression in females.

The implication? Human women, also primates, are restricted in their sexual expression to an unnatural degree by social scripts (nurture), and would thus naturally express sexuality like promiscuity to a degree at least comparable to men’s if those social frictions weren’t there.

I initially pushed back with the old science we all know: men consistently report more sexual partners, gay men have more casual sex than lesbians, trans people report more or less libido when transitioning to men or women, respectively, etc.

Wasn’t all this common sense?

However, she reminded me that not even the LGBT+ community is exempt from heteronormative social scripts, and that there are newer human studies that clash with our older “common sense.”

“And in four national surveys conducted between 1991 and 1996, women and men under the age of forty-five were basically neck and neck in the cheating game, while a 1992 survey found that American women aged eighteen to twenty-nine reported even more affairs than their male peers, and a more recent GSS found the same thing. Meanwhile, a 2017 study shows that among women aged twenty-five to twenty-nine, group sex and threesome experience equaled that of men the same age, and women were nearly twice as likely to have gone to a dungeon, BDSM, swingers’, or sex party, challenging the easy assumption that men are the naturally more sexually adventurous sex.”

— Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free by Wednesday Martin

I’ve read the book she was quoting. It’s chock full of science that debunks the gendered ideas we have based on older, more biased studies that sought to show a greater gender divide than what’s probably natural. I highly recommend reading it.

I could hardly believe I forgot about those studies she referenced, and I greatly appreciated the reminder.

Think about this: how would women’s sexual expressions change if society didn’t have things like slut-shaming and greater social risks for women who engaged in more casual sex? What if human society were freer like that of primates in the wild, if we hadn’t developed an agricultural system that centered power around family patriarchs, which ultimately led to the commodification and social regulation of women’s sexuality?

“Context is everything. If women were told, ‘Imagine you are propositioned by this guy, and there is no way he will kill you and there is no way he’ll be a jerk and it’s guaranteed that he’ll be skilled enough to give you an orgasm and you won’t get pregnant or get an infection or disease, and your mom will never know and neither will anyone in your dorm or neighborhood. He won’t make disparaging remarks about your body or gossip afterward. He will text you after or not, and want to see you again or not, depending on what you wish he would do.’ And so on. These are the kinds of conditions we would have to engineer in order to get an accurate sense of what a woman’s sex drive might be like under circumstances conducive to actually feeling entitled to have and admit to having a sex drive. Until such a test exists, we need to consider the likelihood that we are only measuring men’s willingness to admit they are sexual compared to women’s willingness to do the same. Guess who wins that contest?”

— Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free by Wednesday Martin

Well, from my personal experience as someone who used to be entrenched in the pickup artist community, I can tell you that this isn’t just theoretical.

Such conditions were “engineered.”

One of the pioneers from our community developed a “seduction method” based on this very concept of removing these social and sexual frictions.

And it works. It works very well.

In summary, the pickup artist who developed this method said that a lot of women act “choosier” and have their guard up because they’re worried about:

1. Potentially getting STIs
2. Potentially getting pregnant
3. The guy potentially becoming obsessed with her after having sex
4. The guy potentially just using her for sex and disappearing afterward
5. Social judgment (slut shaming)

…

If you’re able to demonstrate, directly or indirectly, that these potential risks are negated in some way, “seduction” becomes effortless if you can establish even the bare minimum amount of attraction.

This can be done by organically expressing, throughout the course of your interaction with her, how important things like safe sex and discretion are to you, that you don’t have a terribly anxious attachment style, and that you don’t have a terribly avoidant attachment style. I already talked about these things in my book in more actionable ways.

But let’s take it even further.

Dr. Wednesday Martin talked about other things in that above quote:

1. “there is no way he will kill you”
2. “it’s guaranteed that he’ll be skilled enough to give you an orgasm”
3. “He won’t make disparaging remarks about your body”

The other variables in the quote are more or less addressed by the aforementioned seduction method, but these three aren’t.

From these points, we can recognize that it’s also important to:

1. make a woman feel safe,
2. acknowledge the orgasm gap by expressing how much we want to give pleasure,
3. and convert any of her potential bodily insecurities into celebrations of her beauty.

From these women’s perspectives, we can learn how to be better lovers and more sexually appealing men. Well, I guess that tangent about the debate I had with those manosphere men about including women in our discussion space wasn’t entirely irrelevant after all.

Do you think women are naturally just as sexual as men, or do you think men really are hornier by nature? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.

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