My name is Kathleen Vohs. I am a professor at the University of
Minnesota. I'm a social psychologist who works in
the business school. I work in the marketing department.
And today, my lecture will be on the topic of heterosexual, sexual
relationships. So, imagine that you sat down one morning
to breakfast and you opened up your newspaper or you clicked on your favorite
news browser. And you read that officials in the UK let
a group of foreigners settle without proper emigration checks.
Okay, now imagine further that you read that the group of foreigners was a group
of women, and even further, that this was a group of highly attractive women.
The story ended by noting that there may or may not have been sex between the
immigration officers and the foreign women.
Now, a few days later, you read in the newspaper something again about sex.
In this case, it's a Vianese shopping mall and they're offering women a special
promotion. Women who agree, not just agree, but
women who come to their shopping mall topless receive a bottle of champagne, a
free meal and a shopping voucher worth 40 Euros.
This campaign was a huge success, by the way.
And very last, imagine back to your history days when you learned that
Australia was a penal colony. So, back then, this was in the 1800s, the
severest punishment for infractions was to have a public whipping.
Now, female prisoners were given an option that male prisoners were not.
Their whippings would be cut in half if they agreed to take them naked,
presumably to please the male onlookers. What do these stories have in common?
They have in common, the idea that sex is something that women have and, and seem
to own or posses, in a sense. And that men are willing to trade
resources to obtain that sex in some way, shape or form.
So, the resources can be living in a safe country, it can be money, monetary, money
resources or it can be the lessening of a very, very harsh punishment.
The lecture today will be about this very idea, that sex is a female resource and
that men are willing to trade resources that they posses or have access to in
order to gain sexual access to women. It is called sexual economics.
And it's probably the most unromantic theory about sex you'll ever have
learned. But in it we're able to describe and
predict people's behaviors on the basis of fundamental basic economic principles.
So, let me tell you a little bit more about the core ideas.
The core ideas of sexual economic series are that countries, cultures, and
individuals treat female sexuality as if it has value and is precious.
Male sexuality however, has no value or worth.
Women own sex, that is, it is theirs to decide when sex occurs, with whom, why,
and how. And men, conversely enter into a sexual
interaction with other resources. And they're seeking to trade them with
women for access to them, sexually. Now, these resources can be monetary.
But they can also be things like rights, like voting rights or land.
It can be emotional, such as caring and being kind to them or affectionate.
And they could be relationship oriented resources as well, such as commitment,
devotion, marriage and last, even children, the agreement that this
relationship can bear children. In the sexual economics theory, it's
understood that a high price of sex, which is to say the amount or the
costliness or the preciousness of the resources that men give, that the price
of sex when it's high, that favors women and men would like the price of sex to be
low. So, women's goals are often to obtain
resources as many as possible before sex will commence and men's goal will be to
obtain sex without having to give many resources.
what are we talking about when we talk about sex in this theory?
Well, the idea of sex is broader than simply the act of sexual intercourse.
Sex can be talking about sex. Sex can include being near an attractive
woman or a sexual woman. Sex can include viewing or finding sexual
imagery appealing. And this includes acts with a variety of
sexual overtones, such as dating, flirting, touching, fondling and also, of
course, sexual intercourse. So, how do we know that sex is a female
resource? Well, there are several experiments that
pinpoint this idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex.
So, one telling study, as to men and women in dating relationships, at what
number of dates do you think it's appropriate for men and women to first
have sex? In case you're wondering, men, on
average, think that the number of dates should be half as many as women.
And then, more importantly, for this idea that women own sex and decide when sex
occurs in a relationship. The researchers then further asked these
men and women when in your dating relationships did sex take place?
And what they find is that men's preferences or ideas about what number of
dates sex should first take place on or no relationship to when they were having
sex in their relationships. But women's preferences and ideas about
when sex should first take in a relationship were almost perfectly
correlated with when men and women actually had sex in those relationships.
So, this underscores, this idea that women are the gatekeepers of sex.
They decide when, how, and why sex occurs.
We come to understand the idea that women have more negotiating power when it comes
to sex as stemming from a basic underlying difference between men and
women's desire to have sex. So, in a paper that my colleagues and I
published in early 2000s, we investigated whether men or women want sex more.
[LAUGH] It may not sound like a very interesting or surprising question, but
in fact, the literature was quite divided.
When we looked at various textbooks about sexuality, some of them said, well of
course men want sex more than women. But others said, women want sex more than
men. And still, yet, others said the question
should not even be asked. We decided to do an investigation into
the science. We wanted to read all scientific articles
on men and women's sexual preferences, emotions, ideas, beliefs, attitudes and
behaviors. And so, we did that.
We read over 250 articles about men and women sexual desires and behaviors.
And we broke the research down into 12 different categories of indicators of
sexual motivation. So, things like how frequency, how
frequently people have sexual fantasies? the desired number of sexual partners,
the liking for a variety of sexual practices and the amount of masturbation
that people engage in. And across all 12 categories, we found
overwhelming evidence that men want sex more than women.
Perhaps not surprising to some, but again, that was an important step for us
in this investigation of sexual economics.
And so, when we now understand that men want sex more than women, we can better
understand how men and women enter into a sexual relationship.
Or rather, a relationship that may turn sexual.
So now, understanding that on average, when a man and a woman come together in a
relationship that may turn sexual, he, on average, will want sex more than she
does. This means that she has more negotiating
power in order to request or demand other types of resources before sex will take
place. There's a theory called the principle of
least interest. And in it, it states that whenever two
parties come together to have a negotiation, the party that is interested
in the outcome the least has the most power.
So, if you've ever been in love with someone and you love that person more
than that person loves you, you've felt this.
That you would do more things, you would sacrifice more than would the other
person. And so, when men and women enter into a
sexual negotiation, because men, in general, will want sex more than women.
Women then, can ask for other resources in exchange before sex will take place.
Now, the sexual economics theory is backed up by a variety of research.
Like in the other paper I described, we read over 200 scholarly articles about
how men and women think about sex and whether we could understand sex as female
resource that men trade other resources to obtain.
We reviewed scholarly research from anthropology, sociology, clinical
psychology, demography, medicine, health, history and the like.
And we were overwhelmed by the amount of evidence that we were able to obtain in
support of a sexual economics theory. So, let me tell you a few pieces of
information and then some experiments that my lab conducted.
And one piece of information that helps us understand sexual economics are
conditions in which there are differences, discrepancies in the number
of men and women there are in a local environment.
And so if we understand women as owning sex and men wanting sex, this is going to
be a very crude analogy, but because we're talking about an economic model, we
can understand women as in a sense being sellers.
And men, in a sense, being buyers. So there are studies of what happens in a
local environment when there are more women to men or more men, men to women.
And so, in one of these studies, the researchers found in a historical
analysis of women's clothing that when there are many, many, many more men in a
local environment compared to women, this means that women had even more
negotiating power than they would otherwise.
And, in the clothing analysis, they found that skirt lengths, women's skirt
lengths, were the longest in conditions in which there were many more men in a
local environment compared to women. Now, the converse happened as well.
In local environments across history, when there'd be more women in the
environment than men, skirt lengths rose, so that the skirts were shorter.
And we understood this in our theory as the way that women dress and the way that
their skirts rise and fall might represent something like advertising.
That when women sexuality is their, again, this is very crude, but is their
product then, they need to advertise their product in some ways.
And wearing alluring clothing is one way for women to see more sexual, and that
need would arise when women are competing with other women more so than when there
are fewer women to compete with. So, that means the conditions in which
there are lots of women and very few men, women dress more sexily.
And when there are many more men than women in an environment, women didn't
have to dress very sexy and they kept their skirt lengths long.
other research supports this idea that men and women trade sex in other types of
resources. So, in one paper that asked men and
women, what most annoys or irritates them about dating relationships with the
opposite sex, they found evidence in support of sexual economics theory.
So, women reported that the most irritating thing about dating a man is
when a man offers relationship promises before the couple has sex.
And once the couple has sex, he is nowhere to be found and the relationship
does not ensue. Men have a different complaint.
Men complain that when they court a woman for a very long time and shower her with
gifts and dinners and other kinds of monetary or even affectionate resources,
and then the relationship never turns sexual.
So, in both of these cases we see that a resource was given up by one gender and
there was an expectation that the other resource would come in and be traded for
it, but then that expectation then was not met.
These irritations about courtship also support the idea of sexual economics and
sex as a female and tradeable resource. Now, we move to some experiments in my
lab to try to better understand sexual economics.
And and in particular, how we can better understand women's reactions to, to the
idea of sex. So, in these experiments, what we have
men and women doing is we have them viewing sexual imagery.
And we use their reactions to sexual imagery as a proxy for how they feel
about sex in general. So, the general setup of these
experiments is that subjects come into the lab and they sit down, and they view
a series of print advertisements. And the key advertisement is one for a
watch. And that watch is either promoted by an
ad that features a highly sexual scene or an ad that features a non-sexual scene.
In this scene we have of a picture of mountains, actually.
We have our subjects coming in and looking at these, and then giving us
their spontaneous reactions to the ads. And we have them doing that by when
they're viewing the ads, they rehears a ten digit number in their heads.
Why do we do this? Because previous research has shown that
when you get men and women to be distracted with another task, their
spontaneous gut reactions to the environment can come out more.
And we're interested in men and women spontaneous impulsive reactions to sexual
imgary. So, in the first experiment, our subjects
come inside a lab and they start rehearsing that ten digit number.
Now, we have them looking through a booklet with print advertisements, one of
which then shows that watch that I mentioned, either being advertised in a
sexual scene or in a mountain-scape scene.
And the part that makes this study having to do with sexual economics is, we then
further vary the ads by one other dimension.
Some participants saw the ad for the watch and it was plain.
Nothing about it was particularly different.
It was either situated in a sexual scene or mountain scene.
But other participants saw the ads and they saw the watch being draped by a red
ribbon. And underneath the ad, we've written the
tag line, this is a watch that men will give to the special woman in their lives.
So, in these conditions, we hope to bring up the idea of a resource transfer from
men to women. And in this way, we thought that we could
get women to view the sexual ads as being more appealing than they would otherwise.
So, what we know from previous research is that, women don't generally like
sexual ads. They view them as unfavorable, unlikable,
crass, crude and so on. And so, our goal with this experiment was
to see if we could get women to think of about a sexual ad or sexual imagery as
representing resource transfer between a man and a woman.
Maybe women would like the sexual imagery more.
So, our prediction was that when women saw a sexual ad and that sexual ad
reminded them of gifts that men give to special women in their lives, they would
like the sexual ad more than if the sexual ad had no reminders of gifts being
given from men to women. And that is exactly what we found.
We found that when women saw a sexual ad, compared to a mountain ad, they didn't
like the sexual ad very much. They thought it was relatively
unfavorable, unlikable and so on. But when women saw a sexual ad that was
paired with the understanding that the product in the ad could be used by a man
to honor the special woman in his life, then they liked the sexual ad much more.
And in fact, it became statistically equivalent to their feelings about the
non-sexual ad. So, this was quite remarkable because in
general, women take a hard stance against sexual imagery and they tend not to like
it. And this was a novel finding that we
could make women appreciate sexual imagery more because of this reminder of
resource transfer. Now, in the second experiment, we
conducted, we wanted to understand several new things.
One, we wanted to shift the idea of resource transfer away from something
that was a monetary and, you know, physical, like a gift.
And move it to something that, especially modern women, are interested in receiving
emotional and relational resources. And so, in study two, we connected the
idea of resource transfers from men to women in an emotional relational way.
And I'll tell you in a minute how we did that.
The second thing we did in experiment two that was different from experiment one,
is we, not only measured how women felt about sexual imagery, we also measured
their mood. Because our hypothesis was, is that
sexual imagery, when it's used without mentions of resource transfer, makes
women upset and angry. But that, when resource transfer is
involved in the sexual imagery, that that would soften women's negative mood.
And so, in this experiment we have women coming into the lab.
And the first thing they do for us is they do a proofreading task.
In a proofreading task, their job is to read a paragraph of text and to find if
we have misspellings or grammar errors in the text.
This task is one where we are able then, to get women exposed to different types
of information. And in this experiment, we have them
reading text that refers to one of three themes.
We have a loyalty prime. And a, the loyalty prime condition are
participants who are reading about a man and a woman, who are a couple, and the
man is extremely loyal to the woman. So, for example, it would read things
like, John and Mary are young and have a lot going for them.
Their friends notice how completely devoted John is to Mary and how he used
to lead a bachelor lifestyle but that all has changed.
We, also, in another condition, had subjects reading about a disloyalty
prime. And in this proofreading task, our
subjects also read about John and Mary, who are also a young couple with a lot
going for them. But in this condition our subjects also
read that all their friends noticed that John is not completely devoted to Mary
and that John used to lead a bachelor lifestyle and that not, has not really
changed. So now, they're thinking about men, not
being very loyal to women and not transferring those emotional and
relational resources. And then, in the third aspect of this
proofreading task, we also have our subjects reading about John and Mary.
But now, John and Mary are students at the university who are both involved with
the university organization, the student senate.
So, they read about the two of them working on activities together.
After one of these three proofreading tasks, now we have our subjects looking
at the sexual imagery or the mountain imagery.
Again, in a way to view a product. And our prediction was, that when women
are reminded of a lack of research transfer from men to women, so the
disloyalty prime condition. They review the sexual imagery in a very
negative fashion. But when women read about the loyalty
prime and that activated for them the idea of emotional and relational
resources being transferred from men to women that they would like the sexual ad
more. And they would find it more appealing.
And that is what we found. So, women's reactions to the sexual
imagery was predicted by whether we reminded them of a loyal relationship
partner, a disloyal relationship partner or a neutral relationship.
We found that reactions to the ad were most negative when women were reminded of
a disloyal partner. But reactions to the sexual ad were more
positive when women were reminded of a loyal partner.
Again, stimulating that idea of emotional and relational resources from men to
women. And reactions to the sexual ad fell in
between for our participants who read about John and Mary being in the student
senate. Furthermore, I told you that we tested
mood. And our idea was that when women read
about a sexual ad, that doesn't include resource transfer, that makes them angry.
And that is what we found. That women we're the most upset about the
ad and they registered the highest degree of negative emotions when they saw a
sexual imagery seen, that was preceded by a reminder of men, not being loyal to
women. But when women read about men being loyal
to women, seeing this sexual imagery didn't make them all that upset and their
negative emotions were lower. So, we've found evidence for the idea
that women like the concept of resource transfer from men to women.
And that when that idea of transfer is broken in the, like the disloyalty
condition, that they get quite upset and they have a negative reaction to the idea
of sex. So, in conclusion, the lecture today has
made several points. One is that female sexuality is treated
as if it has value and is precious and has a price, so to speak, and hence, sex
is a female resource. Male sexuality, conversely, has no such
value. Countries, cultures, and individuals do
not treat male sexuality as if it is precious or can be traded for a price.
There is a sexual marketplace that exists, that link couples together
whereas, where women can trade sex for other resources that men might give them.
These might be gifts or money or rights or relationship commitment or affection,
or children. And last, data from my own lab has shown
that linking resource transfers for the idea of men giving women resources,
possibly a gift, possibly relationship loyalty, that makes the idea of sex seem
more appealing to women.