If Pleasure Is Your Treasure, Remember To Stash The Trash

EDITORIAL TUESDAY 08.09.09.
Researchers from the University of Texas in the United States claim to have uncovered the reasons why women have sex. While most men might hope it’s because they love and adore us, find us irresistible and attractive, and they just can’t keep their hands off us, unfortunately the reality is that most often they want something, and it isn’t necessarily just a good time. It turns out that a whopping 84% of women agree to have sex in the hope of “a quiet life”. Yep, they will do it just so that you stop pestering them and let them get back to doing whatever it is that they would rather be doing. But that’s not quite the whole picture.

The research, undertaken by Cindy Meston and David Buss, involved interviewing 1000 women to discover what motivates a woman to sleep with a man. According to the results, physical attraction hardly rates a mention. Apparently, while most men will find most women at least reasonably attractive, it doesn’t work the other way around. Most women do not find most men to be attractive. Although most of us like to think that we could give Brad Pitt a run for his money, sadly the women just don’t see us that way. Instead they have a wide range of other reasons for sleeping with us, but most of them involve some sort of trade off.

As well as looking for “a quiet life”, it seems that women will have sex with men in an effort to get them to take the garbage out, or to do some other household chores. In fact, it seems that sex is a transaction more often than many people are prepared to recognize, with a survey of female university students showing that 10% admitted to having sex in return for gifts. Other women indicated that they reward men who pay for dinner, and generally show their affection by spending plenty of money. Bad news for blokes without a lot of cash to throw around, but all hope is not lost with a small number of women prepared to have sex with men because they feel sorry for them. Perhaps there really is somebody for everybody.

But before you become completely disillusioned, it seems that for many women it is just about having some fun. Six out of ten of those university students reported that they had slept with a male friend who was not their boyfriend, simply because “life is too damn short.” Maybe Cyndi Lauper was trying to tell us all something all those years ago when she sang that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” So that’s the secret. Take her out and pay for a nice dinner, spend money on gifts, and make sure she is having fun.

All the same, it probably wouldn’t hurt your chances if you make an extra effort to take the garbage out too.