Are Men Perverts?

Women may disagree, but men have had to adapt and conform to the established norms and standards of society to a greater degree than have women. Men have had to force themselves to act totally in opposition to their natural tendencies with regard to sex, whereas women may simply behave the way nature intended.

Consider an experiment performed at a university in which males aged 18 to 24 were told to ask young women, whom they had never met, for sex. The men were supposed to find a female college student who was alone at the time, strike up a casual conversation about the weather, and then say something like, "I find you very attractive. Would you like to go to my room and have sex?"

In the experiment, 100 percent of the women refused the proposition. And, in fact, the vast majority of them not only refused to have sex, but also seemed insulted or annoyed at having been asked.

The next phase of the experiment reversed the roles. This time, the women were supposed to find a male student and strike up a casual conversation, ending with the same question. And this time, the results were quite different. Seventy percent of the men who were propositioned agreed to have sex. And the reaction of almost all the rest was not disgust. Most were apologetic. Some said things like, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid my girlfriend might catch us," or, "I don't think I should because I'm kinda going with someone right now."

Why should the women have felt so insulted or annoyed at being asked the same question that didn't bother most men? Women might say the answer is because all men are jerks, or perverts. But that still begs the question, "why is that so?"

The real answer, of course, lies with evolution. In the earliest history of humankind, it was the male's responsibility to make sure the species was promulgated. It was the man's duty to successfully breed with as many females as possible. He was genetically inclined to reproduce with reckless abandon.

Females, on the other hand, were genetically predisposed to seek out the single male that she thought would give her the best and strongest children. And then, her job was to stay at home and raise her family. This behavior was not something she considered consciously; it was simply pre-programmed in her genes. Genetically, she was not interested in having many partners in rapid succession. She simply wanted the best man to get her pregnant, after which time she would refuse sex until she was ready for her next child. In prehistoric times, it was nature's way of making sure the species survived.

The social morés that exist in today's society more nearly reflect the attitude of the early cave women, that is, don't have casual sex with multiple partners, and be true to the one you're with for life. But the men of today still have that genetic predisposition to fertilize as many women as possible in the shortest amount of time.

For that reason, it is the men who have had to adapt their behavior and suppress their tendencies in order to conform to what society says is acceptable behavior. Women have had to change little. These are, of course, general tendencies. There are men who have no repressed sexual desires; as there are some women whose sex drive rivals any man's.

For the most part, every man that approaches a woman that he finds attractive, and then gets tongue-tied as he tries to compliment her or ask her out, and every man who behaves like a jerk, whistling and winking at women on the street; all they really want to do is simply go up to that woman and say, "Hey, babe, let's have sex." But how many women have ever had a man come up to them out of the blue and ask that question? Probably very few have.

So the men, although they may behave like perverts occasionally from a woman's perspective, are actually suppressing a lot more of their true sexual desires than the women give them credit for. Women, therefore, should not react as though all men are jerks or perverts when the men occasionally regress to an earlier era. Men are simply doing the best they can at repressing their natural genetic tendencies.

That certainly doesn't excuse a man for behaving poorly. It just means that women should try to understand a man's view of sex from a biological point of view, as men have been forced to understand, or at least reluctantly accept, the nature of women. After all, for both sexes, it's all in the genes.