Cassie is unrepentant about dating rich men. "Of course it is much better to sleep with men with lots of money," said the 27-year-old lawyer from
London. "Any girl who tells you different is lying. Rich men are powerful and successful and confident and charismatic. They know what they want, and they go out and get it. That translates to being fantastic in bed." Cassie is living proof of the latest scientific discovery about human sexuality: that the number and frequency of a woman's orgasms is directly related to her partner's wealth. Her explanation is simple. "Women don't want to lie back and think of the gas bill," she said. "It's a lot more fun to have sex in the Ritz than the Swindon Travelodge. And to be ripping off Rigby & Peller underwear than M&S knickers." Until now some of us may have taken consolation in the idea that the beautiful women involved in such relationships were just doing it for the lifestyle - and enduring the sex. Now, however, science is showing that a rich man's money has aphrodisiac qualities as well as purchasing power. Their partners really can have it all. Many will object to the idea that women are hardwired to be gold-diggers. Perhaps, however, they will be appeased by the revelation that the same kinds of primitive forces are at work in men too. They may operate in different ways and produce different behaviour - but they come from exactly the same source: a genetic code fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution to make us seek out whoever offers us the best deal in life. Thomas Pollet and Daniel Nettle, academics at the University of Newcastle, have been mulling over this question for years. As evolutionary psychologists, they believe everything about the way we flirt, court, have sex and bring up our children is strongly influenced by our genetic history. If female humans have acquired the ability to have powerful orgasms, they argue, then women will have evolved that ability for a reason. "Women's capacity for orgasm could be an evolutionary adaptation that serves to discriminate between males on the basis of their quality," said Pollet. "If so, then it should be more frequent in females paired with high-quality males." He and Nettle tested that idea using data gathered in one of the world's biggest lifestyle studies. The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China to conduct in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including detailed questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partners whose data formed the basis for the study. They found that 121 of these women always had orgasms during sex, while 408 had them "often". Another 762 "sometimes" orgasmed, while 243 had them rarely or never. There were, of course, several factors at work in causing such differences but, said Pollet, money was one of the main ones. He said: "We found that increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women's self-reported frequency of orgasm. More desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms." This is not an effect limited to Chinese women. Previous research in Germany and America has found similar responses. However, it begs a further question: what does an orgasm actually achieve? Why does having more of them give a woman's genes a better chance of passing down the generations? David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who raised this question in his book The Evolution of Desire, believes female orgasms achieve several possible purposes. "They could promote emotional bonding with a high-quality male or they could serve as a signal that they are highly sexually satisfied, and hence unlikely to seek sex with other men," he said. "In other words, they are saying ‘I'm extremely loyal, so you should invest in me and my children'."
No comments:
Post a Comment