A new study by behavioral science researchers has found that men are judged more harshly than women for casual sex.
The study, published in the journal Sexuality and Culture, was carried out by researchers from the University of Nevada (USA). They interviewed people between the ages of 18 and 69 and asked them to rate one of eight fictional characters.
Descriptions of these characters, randomly assigned to participants recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, included three main distinctions: gender, number of sexual partners between one and 12, and whether these encounters occurred in casual or long-term relationships .
Participants answered a series of questions about their desire to be friends with, have sex with, or go on dates with the fictional characters. They were also asked to rate the characters on intelligence, likability, success and values.
Men are judged more harshly if they have had multiple casual relationships
It is relevant that characters of both genders who had more casual partners were evaluated more negatively than those with fewer partners. But, analyzing by gender, the researchers noticed an interesting trend: women were generally evaluated more positively than men, regardless of the number of partners, notes Futurism.
On the other hand, men are judged more harshly for having more partners, an example of a reversed sexual double standard that surprised the researchers.
“We expected women to be judged more harshly for a large number of sexual partners, but that’s not what we found,” explained Tara Busch, an instructor of human behavior at the University of Nevada, and an author of the study. Instead, “men were judged more harshly.”
While the results are certainly groundbreaking, there are a number of factors that could complicate them, one of which is the definition of a “large number” of sexual partners, which in the study is 12 people, a number that falls within the average number of partners for millennials according to a 2022 euroClinix study.
What did the study not consider?
The study also appears not to have taken sexual orientation into account or to have focused mainly on people who identify as straight, which could reflect a skewed attitude towards sex.
As Busch acknowledged, the study’s results could be different because the targets were fictitious.
“Recent research suggests that when evaluating real people, women are rated more negatively than men when their number of sexual partners increases. This makes me think that if we did this study in a similar way, but with real people instead of hypothetical characters, we might get different results,” Busch said.
Although influenced by social norms, how individuals report feeling on a personal level may not be the strongest indicator of a reversal of these norms.
Attitudes towards women and sex have changed significantly since the sexual revolution brought on by the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean people suddenly perceive men with multiple partners more negatively than women.
We recommend you also read:
General culture test. Why did the Chinese eat dinosaur fossils?
Erasing ‘bad memories’ could improve Parkinson’s disease treatment
Scientists may have discovered how to make fat cells burn calories
Coffee, eggs and white rice contain toxic substances that accumulate in the body
Source: www.descopera.ro
