What Men Want More than Sex…a Surprising Insight Brought to You by the Makers of Fine Whisky

In the years before Hulu Amanda and I consumed visual media almost entirely through DVD’s.  This meant that my exposure to commercials was limited to my occasional trips to sports bars to watch the Badgers, Sox, Kings, Sabers or Dolphins.[1]  So for years I had a very skewed sample of the kind of 30 second spots that the industry was generating.  Let’s just say, I’ve seen more than my share of beer ads.  And it became clear, pretty quickly, that if you are marketing alcohol, and the appropriate unit of measure for cleavage content in your commercial isn’t meters,[2] you’re just not trying. 

As ‘they’ say, sex sells.  And it turns out ‘they’ are right.  A spate of new (and sometimes disturbing[3]) research demonstrates that association of mundane objects with sexual arousal induces the same arousing brain chemicals (and reduces willpower) when the mundane objects are introduced in a sexually innocuous setting. 

Bottom line.  Sexual marketing is effective.  Which is what made this commercial[4] so striking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZVWdOD9AZ0&feature=relmfu

The most striking thing about this ad is what it lacks: Women.  There is a single brief exchange with a woman.[5]  The alcohol in question is not offered as some sort of sexual elixir, but as a catalysts of friendship.  It makes me wonder….As our culture grows more alienated and alienating[6]…is there something that men want more than sex?  Is there a desire that marketers are tapping into that is more powerful than our procreative impulses? 

I think the answer is yes.  I think you could argue that substantial community and authentic friendship are the more fundamental (or at least the more neglected) human need.  In his recent survey on the science of human flourishing[7], David Brooks cited a study which concluded that “joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income."  The sexualization of our culture and our obsession with romantic narratives[8] has led to a glaring lack in our platonic connectedness, and has left us poorer for it.  The Christian narrative could have told us this was how that would play out.  But in lieu of listening to ancient wisdom, a whisky commercial tells the same story.

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[1] One of the advantages to growing up hundreds of miles from the closest pro or D1 sports team is flexible loyalties.  I was not tied to childhood choices by the laws of sports bigamy.  In some cases (Red Sox, Dolphins) I kept my childhood teams chosen for childhood (enjoyment of mascots) and adolescent (contrarian annoyance with Yankee and Bills fans growing up in upstate NY) reasons.  In other cases, I was free to take on the teams of the various towns I lived in (Madison, Buffalo, and Sacramento). 

[2] Or yards if you must…but, really? 

[3] In Predictably Irrational Dan Aierly describes a study (that he needed to get European sponsorship for because US funding sources were not comfortable with it) that involved…let’s just say, providing the male subjects with ‘special,’ protected, laptops that were not vulnerable to damage from stray…‘fluids.’

[4] Which turns out to be a trailer for a short film, but I didn’t catch that from my first couple viewings, so I am treating it as stand alone content.

[5] That could be described as warm or even respectful

[6] Mainly because entertainment has become increasingly refined and individualized…but the workplace is also moving in those directions.

[7] The Social Animal, I used this quote a couple years ago when it showed up in his NY Times column and used it again in a recent talk. 

[8]I also think that focusing our romantic narratives on sexuality and ‘falling in love’ (or a peculiar 18 month dopamine surge at the beginning of relationships) has exacerbated this…because many marriages are not built on substantial friendships. 

Relationships (Part 5) - Pacing Physical Intimacy as an Act of Effective Hedonism

The talk is tonight[1], so here’s one last brief post for in this series…and I have saved the most bombastic [2] for last.

Here’s my thesis…

Pacing physical intimacy in a romantic relationship is an act of hedonism. [3]

Rushing physical intimacy seems like the hedonistic thing to do, but it is actually a pleasure miscalculation.

It’s a hedonism fail.

Here’s how I figure. By delaying each stage of physical intimacy, you get more out of each one. Holding hands is not quite as magical if you are kissing, [4] and kissing loses some of its allure when the cloths come off. So postponing physical connection maximizes physical enjoyment on a mulit-year time scale.

If hedonism is the intentional pursuit of maximum pleasure, postponing physical intimacy is the hedonistic thing to do…it generates the most pleasure from each progressive stage of connection. Rushing physical intimacy prematurely short-circuits reservoirs of romantic enjoyment that cannot be revisited. Christians seem prudish by advocating physical restraint, but actually, we believe it will maximize sexual enjoyment.

It is popular to advocate that single Christians who are observing the classical sexual ethic are ‘sexually frustrated’ [5] or that their relationships are seething with ‘sexual tension.’ But those who embrace the life stage for what it is worth, enjoy a season of ‘sexual anticipation’ that produces a qualitatively different kind of enjoyment than consummated attraction…which can never be re-captured.
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[1] CL starts at 8:00 in Geit 1001…a couple of cool students even made a fun promotional video.

[2] My brother says that I am definitionally a liberal because I am comfortable auditioning experimental ideas and seeing where they take me.  Well if my real life is where I audition ideas, my blog is casting call.  To say some of the theses I assert are experimental would be an understatement. 

[3] I had a professor for Western Civ in undergrad who told us his grading rules were “if I read your thesis and believe it, you are starting with a B and can only go down…but if I read your thesis and think ‘no way’ you’ve got a shot at an A.” Since then, I have been drawn to the bombastic thesis statement.
[4] e.g. That scene in the latest Pride and Prejudice where Mr. Darcy Helps Elizabeth into the carriage, and touches her hand for the first time, and as he walks away, is obviously affected by that simple touch.
[5] Yes, some of the Tebow jokes have been funny…but they demonstrate the standard reaction to this choice.

Relationships (Part 4) - A Sexual Snapshot of Campus Life: Donna Freitas’ Sex and the Soul

It has been a few years since I lived in the dorms. So I always question whether my perceptions of campus life, acquired over a decade ago at a small, academically rigorous school in western NY still calibrate. In particular, I wondered if my perceptions of the sexual [1] social contracts that dictate campus life comport with my assumptions. But how would you even test something like that.

Fortunately it has been done for me.

Donna Freitas collected 2,500 narrative surveys from seven different campuses and conducted 111 in depth follow up interviews. Results were reported in the very readable Sex and the Soul.

In particular, I wanted to leverage these data to test two hypotheses I had about the sexual landscape of most college campuses, namely:

1. Students are not finding hookup culture fulfilling. And
2. There is much less sex going on than most students think there is.

The research weighed in definitively on both of these hypotheses and then provided two, unanticipated insights, that I thought were worth sharing

Hypothesis 1: Students are not finding hookup culture fulfilling.

This may have been the overwhelming finding of Freitas research. Many women feel trapped in the hookup culture and a surprising number of men, admitted that they wish it was substantially different.

“In public, women maintain a lax attitude about no-strings-attached hookups, but in private, they express ambivalence and even dismay that they allow themselves to be pressure into sexual behaviors that often make them feel used an unhappy.” 99

“When pressed, few students express a desire to hook up randomly on a regular basis – though most accept that hookups are the most likely way to find a long-term romantic partner…and even greater number wish for more respect and awe about sex from their peers.” 156 [2]

Hypothesis 2: There is much less sex going on than most students think there is.

There is this perception that college is the place where everyone has their best and most frequent sex of their lives, and the college years are a scramble to have those experiences before you reluctantly capitulate to the dull sexlessness of marriage. But the people I knew who were actively seeking out sex in college, weren’t doing a whole lot better at having sex than my celibate friends and I were. I’ve always kind of believed that there is a whole lot less sex going on then everyone thinks there is. Freitas’ research confirmed this hypothesis as well. Apart from a couple ‘alpha-males’ it seems most people think that everyone else is having all the great and frequent sex.

“Students typically perceive hooking up as a social norm at college, even if their personal ‘numbers’ are rather low.” 14

Most students admitted to hooking up (a term with semantic range that may or may not involve intercourse) once or twice a semester.

I have this theory about why the sex-ratios in campus ministries (like the one I serve in) are so unbalanced (i.e. there are way more women than men). It is an economic argument (like Starks’ explanation of sex-imbalance in the Church in the Roman empire). The idea is that men are the power players in the economics of college sex. Therefore, in the (relatively) chaste Christian culture, women can find refuge from this kind of degrading objectification…but the cost is simply too high for the men. But, if it is true that most students are hooking up a couple times a quarter, then what are guys really ‘giving up’ by forgoing ‘the college experience’. 8-16 sexual encounters – many of which are just making out or oral sex (which Freitas includes in the definition of ‘hooking up’). So, intercourse with 4-10 women (and according to Freitas statistics, about half will be sober)? You are going to trade in on the experience of robust Christian community for that? Considering that in the first 10 years of a good marriage you will have sex >1000 times that seems like a regrettable exchange.

In addition to weighing in on these two hypotheses I held but did not have the resources to test, this research provided two surprising conclusions that I had never formed hypotheses about.

Unexpected Conclusion 1: Students don’t date any more.

Freitas concluded that the normative path to becoming a couple is a hookup that becomes a regular hookup where mutual feelings develop and then is labeled a ‘couple’.

“The hook up has replaced the first date” 217

“Claudia informs me about what to her is an obvious fact: dating is simply not an option at her school. “I’ve never gone on a date here…I don’t feel like people date anymore.” ‘the date’ is spoken of as a mythical artifact of a bygone era…some students didn’t even know what to make of it “I think girls want to go on dates, I really do…my friends and I have talked about this before. I really want to go on a date to see what it is like…it seems like such an odd idea in our head just because we don’t do that.” 136-7 [3]

“most relationships seem to begin as hookups. How else are relationships to begin if students are largely unacquainted with what they see as the quaint, old-fashioned practice of dating? Numerous students I interviewed said it was almost unheard of for one person to ask another out on anything approaching a traditional date…romantic encounters…typically happened after multiple hookups and the decision to become a couple. Dates just aren’t a common way into a relationship. Students don’t see many avenues into committed romantic relationships apart from hooking up.” 139

And the death of dating is particularly surprising given the second unexpected conclusion:

Unexpected Conclusion 2: Romance is Chaste

Freitas asked the surveyed students to describe their most romantic encounter. She reported that 79% of the students included ‘no more than kissing’ in their report of their most romantic memory [4] and over half didn’t even include kissing.

All students regardless of institution, religion or orientation, describe romance in decidedly non-sexual terms. “Romance, to them is chaste…Hardly ever did a student story about romance include any suggestion of sexual intimacy. At all the participating colleges and universities, women and men alike, regardless of religious affiliation, tended to disassociate romance from sexual intimacy.” 107

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[1] Note: There is a lot more sexual content in these posts that there will be in my talk. I cut most of it. There will be very little sexual content in my talk.
[2] However, while most students indicate dissatisfaction with campus sexual culture ‘and they disassociate themselves from the problems that are creating it.” 158
[3] Lauren Winner reports that “Groups such as the Independent Women’s Fourm have taken out ads in college newspapers calling for students to ‘Take Back the Date.”
[4] For a few, where sex was involved, several reported that it was romantic because drugs and alcohol weren’t.

Relationships (Part 2) - A Brief Reflection on ‘Sexual Compatibility’

One of the main objections [1] I hear to the Christian practice of postponing sexual connection until after the couple forges a public, lifelong, covenant through the exchange of vows is that you lose the opportunity to test ‘sexual compatibility.’

Let me be frank. I think this objection is goofy.

The frequency and quality of sex after a decade of marriage - in the vast majority of cases - has very little to do with anything that you could discover in early sexual encounters. The long term quality of the sexual connection is contingent on the quality of the friendship after it has been subjected to the eventual and inevitable full disclosure of crazy [2] on both sides.



The biologization[3] of sex (i.e. the standard campus narrative where it is simultaneously no big deal, yet something no one can live without) generates the myth that it is primarily a physical transaction. But decades into a relationship, the quality of sex is a function of how much you still like[4] your partner (and how much they like you). This is not something you will learn in the serotonin[5] soaked early sexual encounters. Your best chance at identifying long term ‘sexual compatibility’ is the sober enterprise of character assessment[6]…which is undermined, not aided by pre-vow physical intimacy.

This post was written while listening to the Jon Forman[7] station on Pandora
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[1] This started as a footnote to footnote [2] of the previous post. If you are keeping score at home, this text is the footnote to a footnote to a footnote of a post that began its life as a footnote in the talk manuscript.
[2] Keller argues (I think rightly) that many people come to hate their partner, not because of what they learn about their partner, but because of what they are forced to face about themselves: “the conflict that marriage creates is not conflict with your spouse but with yourself…you cannot run from yourself…in the past if someone revealed your flaws, you could always leave -marriage isn’t hard because it is hard to live with someone else, its hard because it is difficult to face your true self”
[3] Credit – Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. I always feel like citing this text is flirting with Goodwin’s Law…but its not my fault that really clear ethical thinking happens on death row in a Nazi prison.  And to not cite one of my 'top 5 favorite books of all time' is a bit much to ask in deference to oblique complience with a goofy-if-helpful internet law.
[4] Not just some abstract fuzzy idea of ‘love’ but actual, concrete, cultivated, sustained affection.
[5] Actually, I think dopamine is the bigger player…but serotonin alliterated, so the writer won over the scientist…but the scientist got to file a dissenting brief in the footnote. Yes, I am aware that I might have a serious problem.
[6] e.g. Is this someone who will consistently own their faults and forgive mine…because that is someone you will still like after a decade of marriage and the craziness carnival of kids and/or career.
[7] I am in a bit of a musical rut. Feel free to leave band recommendations in the comments.