Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 473mass-market equivalents to pornography for women are the romancenovel and the bodice-ripper, in which the sex is described in the contextof emotions and relationships rather than as a succession of bumpingbodies.The desire for sexual variety is an unusual adaptation, for it is insatiable.Most commodities of fitness show diminishing returns or an optimallevel. People do not seek mass quantities of air, food, and water, and theywant to be not too hot and not too cold but just right. But the morewomen a man has sex with, the more offspring he leaves; too much isnever enough. That gives men a limitless appetite for casual sex partners(and perhaps for the commodities that in ancestral environments wouldhave led to multiple partners, such as power and wealth). Everyday lifeoffers most men few opportunities to plumb the bottom of the desire,but occasionally a man is rich, famous, handsome, and amoral enough totry. Georges Simenon and Hugh Hefner claimed to have had thousandsof partners; Wilt Chamberlain estimated that he had twenty thousand.Say we liberally adjust for braggadocio and assume that Chamberlaininflated his estimate by a factor of, say, ten. That would still mean thatone thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine sex partners were notenough.Symons notes that homosexual relations offer a clear window on thedesires of each sex. Every heterosexual relationship is a compromisebetween the wants of a man and the wants of a woman, so differencesbetween the sexes tend to be minimized. But homosexuals do not haveto compromise, and their sex lives showcase human sexuality in purerform (at least insofar as the rest of their sexual brains are not patternedlike those of the opposite sex). In a study of homosexuals in San Franciscobefore the AIDS epidemic, twenty-eight percent of gay menreported having had more than a thousand sex partners, and seventy-fivepercent reported having had more than a hundred. No gay womanreported a thousand partners, and only two percent reported as many asa hundred. Other desires of gay men, like pornography, prostitutes, andattractive young partners, also mirror or exaggerate the desires of heterosexualmen. (Incidentally, the fact that men's sexual wants are the samewhether they are directed at women or directed at other men refutes the