Q&A: Sex and Attraction
The science of attraction isn't very sciencey
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I love reader questions. In fact, I'm going to need more of them soon for this newsletter and for my upcoming podcast. Watch this space for more info!
Now let's dig in:
Q: Hello! I have your book "come as you are" but as I flip through I haven’t yet found anything on attraction. I’m curious, what happens in situations where you are not very physically attracted to your partner, but the sex is great, connection is great but overall the drive to jump their bones is not there?
A: Yup, you won’t find anything specifically about attraction in Come As You Are, because I find the research on “sexual attraction” to be… not great, in a variety of ways. I did write a newsletter post about attraction, but it’s not sciencey. Honestly, there’s no subject where I find as much confirmation bias or as many just-so stories posing as evolutionary thinking.*
What I do talk about is desire, and the situation you’re describing sounds to me like a question about desire, rather than attraction. Suppose both partners are experiencing responsive desire, rather than spontaneous desire. They schedule date nights or they agree one afternoon that it’s been long enough since they had sex, so how about it? And the sex is great for both of them! That’s how sex works in a lot of long-term relationships, and it’s 100% normal and healthy. There is nothing missing. The only reason we might believe something is missing is if we buy into the myth that “spontaneous” desire for sex is the only style of desire worth having.
Read about the Dual Control Model here.
If partners admire each other as people, if the relationship has strong trust, if partners can be kind to each other and attune to each other’s needs, you have everything you need for a great sexual connection.
Not to sound pedantic, but… my suggestion is that you read the book. I think you’ll learn some things that will help you to understand how (a) sex is not a drive, in the first place; (b) if the sex is pleasurable for everyone involved, that’s what matters, not how horny partners are for each other; and (c) how to create a context that makes the most of responsive desire!
Hope that helps!
The rest of this answer is for the people who dig science and philosophy of science, because it explains a little more about why I rarely talk about attraction:
Darwin wrote a whole separate book about sexual selection—i.e., females and males evolving traits that prove (what would turn out to be) genetic superiority--even if those traits are a liability to the individual. The peacock’s tail is the classic example. That thing is metabolically expensive to grow, serves no individual survival purpose, and even makes a peacock easier prey. A male peafowl shortens his individual life by growing a sexy, sexy tail that results in his DNA making it into the next generation. And this is a testable—a tested!—hypothesis, because researchers can artificially enhance or diminish the sexiness of a peacock’s tail and observe how it alters peahens’ sexual receptivity.
But how do we test that kind of hypothesis in humans? I’m inclined to agree with Stephen Jay Gould’s skepticism that there is a way to test an evolutionary adaptation hypothesis about sexual selection in humans.
In the case of human sexual attraction, for example, there’s a story that says women evolved two separate systems of attraction, one for a biological father, one for a social father, or human males evolved to prefer a particular waist-to-hip ratio. These are stories a lot of people enjoy, they seem vaguely plausible, but how do you test it as a hypothesis?
Problem 1: Any adult humans you try to test experimentally bring with them decades of cultural messages. They can’t answer your survey questions or even respond physiologically to any stimulus without all that culture shaping their response, which means you’re not learning about our evolutionary history.
Problem 2: We evolved into the species we are some millions of years ago, according to the bones that constitute the fossil record. Sociosexual systems are not captured in the fossil record. We can feel confident that the species reproduced via penile-vaginal intercourse, but that’s about it. And please recall that frequency of intercourse is not a helpful predictor of pregnancy, much less live birth, or raising an offspring to their own reproductive maturity, which is the real test of reproductive “success.” So selection for more frequent intercourse (NB: Over the last two millennia, it could be that almost half of all humans did not survive to reproductive age—but even that doesn’t tell us about what was happening two to five million years ago.) (Also yes, the metabolic cost of pregnancy, birth, and caring for infants is higher for a human who’s doing the bearing, birthing, and breastfeeding. Show me evidence that females didn’t share breastfeeding cost among each other, a million years ago. Show me evidence that, a million years ago, males didn’t take full responsibility for childrearing after a young human is weaned. You can’t, it’s not physically possible for it to exist. Even studying the handful of remaining cultures untouched by Western modernization only tells us what’s possible, not what is.)
Problem 3: Recorded history didn’t exist until about 5,000 years ago, which is very roughly one tenth of one percent of the existence of our species. It tells us nothing about the sociosexual systems that existed in our evolutionary origins.
Problem 4: A key trait of humans is our adaptability itself, our ability to adjust our bodies, our environment, and our sociosexual behavior to a vast range of environments across much of the surface of the Earth. Sociosexual systems vary and change across cultures and time.
Where science has had some success is in understanding what aspects of the environment might predict which sociosexual systems may emerge in human communities. For a comprehensive review of these and other important questions about studying humans from an evolutionary point of view I recommend Bobbi Low’s Why Sex Matters.
A book I also recommend, especially for those interested in the history of science, is Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, by Evelleen Richards.
Here’s what I feel confident saying:
(1) Human sexual attraction varies almost infinitely.
(2) Human sexual attraction changes over time, with exposure to different faces, bodies, etc, as well as across different wealth structures (or “resources abundance” in more biological terms).
And
(3) Initial human sexual attraction has little to no relationship to satisfying long-term sexual connection. It also has almost nothing to do with successfully raising an offspring to reproductive age.
So I don’t write much about attraction. It’s just not very relevant to my life’s work of teaching people to live with confidence and joy in their bodies. What science there is, isn’t the kind of thing that makes people’s lives better and has the potential to reinforce cultural stereotypes, particularly around gender.
Thanks for letting me rant about science a little bit!
* The term just-so stories comes from the Rudyard Kipling’s book of children’s stories by that title, in which he explains things like “how a leopard got his spots” and “how the elephant got his trunk,” generally by way of specific events that happened to an individual. (Feel free never to read them, they’re peak British Empire vibes.) In philosophy of science, Just-so stories are narratives about how a trait evolved, which researchers assemble from known facts, that people like the sound of. But these narratives are just that—narratives, not hypotheses, because they are untestable.Just-so stories appear in various domains of evolutionary storytelling (ahem, the Paleo diet), but it’s particularly rampant in thinking about sexuality, because sexual selection is wildly more complex than individual selection.
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