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In a surprising new study, behavioral scientists found that people tended to judge men more harshly than women for having casual sex.
To get the unexpected findings, recently published in the journal Sexuality and Culture, researchers at the University of Nevada surveyed respondents between the ages of 18 and 69 — yes, we’re giggling too — and asked them to evaluate one of eight fictional targets.
Vignettes about these targets, which were randomly assigned to the study participants who had been recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, featured three key distinctions: gender, number of sexual partners between one and 12, and whether those encounters occurred during casual or committed relationships.
Participants were asked a series of questions about their willingness to be friends with, have sex with, and date each of the fictional targets, as well as to rate them based on other factors including intelligence, likability, success, and values.
Tellingly, the fictional targets of both genders who had had more casual sex partners were rated lower across the board than those who’d had fewer. When broken down by gender, though, the researchers found an interesting trend: that women were favored higher generally than men regardless of how many partners they’d had.
Male targets, meanwhile, seemed to be judged more harshly for having more sexual partners — an example of a reverse sexual double standard that the researchers did not expect.
“I was expecting women to be judged harsher for higher numbers of sexual partners, but that wasn’t what we found,” explained University of Nevada human behavior instructor and first study author Tara Bush in an interview with PsyPost. Instead, “men were judged harsher.”
While the findings are certainly novel, there are a number of factors that could complicate them — not least of which being the definition of a “high” number of sexual partners being 12 people, which falls within the average number of partners for millennials per a euroClinix study from 2022.
The study also appears to either not have taken sexual orientation into account or to have focused primarily on people who identify as heterosexual, which could reflect a warped attitude towards sex.
As Busch acknowledged, the study results may also have skewed different because the targets were fictional, too.
“Other recent research suggests that when evaluating people in the real world, or real people rather than hypothetical people, women are evaluated more negatively than men when their numbers of sexual partners increase,” she told PsyPost. “This leads me to believe that if we conducted this study in a similar fashion, with real targets rather than hypothetical targets, we might see different results.”
While influenced by societal norms, the way individuals claim to feel on a personal level is perhaps not the strongest indicator of a reversal of those norms.
Attitudes towards women and sex have, of course, changed significantly since the so-called sexual revolution brought on by the introduction of birth control pills in the 1960s — but that doesn’t mean people are suddenly viewing men with a lot of partners more negatively than women, either.
More on sexual attitudes: If You Watch Rough Porn, Researchers Have Bad News
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