The real question is not for the uncoupled,
but for those in highly stable long term
contracts… as to why they don’t have a higher
average of hits. The marginal response argument
is compelling and real, but the simpler answer
which is also at work is that the home runs
go much further when you are trying to impress
the dealmaker who signs the contract. Once the
ink is dry, you’ll still hit hard and far but
not *as* hard and far …since… your ink is dry.
Perhaps that is still part of a contractual
version of a marginal response (do the minimum
to stay employed once you are tenured).

But yes, clearly women’s desires (and their extended expression in culture and mores) are the largest braking factor on sex. This is not news to anyone, I hope. I would not call it a “problem”, though.

If you want to see what sex can be when unconstrained, look at the behavior of gay men before AIDs. Some of them would go to bathhouses, every night, and have essentially anonymous sex with 5-10 partners per night.

See, for example, this:
http://www.gaytubs.com/ahistory.htm

Quoting it:

This Club Bath Chain ads was among many that were printed in gay magazines of the 1970′s, such as Folsom, Blueboy, Numbers and Drummer Magazine.
One particular Club Bath advertisement from the late 1970′s advertised their facilities as such: “If your (membership) card doesn’t offer you 1400 rooms, on 64 floors, with 30 steam rooms, 25 saunas, 24 whirlpools, and 8 swimming pools, then you haven’t got THE CARD.”

More facts about the Club Baths:

In the late 1970′s, statistics showed that the average Club customer was white, between thirty and thirty-five, earned $12,000 a year, and stayed at the Club for approximately five hours during which he climaxed three times.

There is also the fact that a woman having too much sex becomes less desirable as a mate. Why? Presumably because her apparent ability to be loyal to a guy decreases.

Traditionally, a lot of our culture, taboos, etc. have come as a result of a men’s concern over the parentage of their mates’s children. The men are expected and expecting to raise those kids, and it is a bad trade if he wastes his time and resources raising someone else’s genes. So, he had better make sure that they are his own, before committing to spending his scarce resources taking care of a woman and her children.

That is not to say that there isn’t a bit of cheating going on, outside of marriages. Always has been. Happens with other, apparently bonded, species also. Traditionally, some percentage (some have estimated as high as 25%) of kids raised by their ostensible father were actually fathered by some other man. In other words, both the actual father and the mother cheated on him. The trick has always been not to get caught. Only time will tell whether or not genetic testing affects this.

This brings me to another interesting phenomenum. Apparently, certain (alpha) males get many more dates (and sex) than others. Women most often pick one type of guy to date, and another to marry. But one interesting thing here is that this is not universal. Most women pick a guy that they think will be loyal. But not, for the most part, alpha females, who are much more likely to marry the guy who could have almost any woman.

One suggestion on why this is true is that these women believe that they can keep the alpha male, against all comers. But, it often doesn’t work, regardless of her looks. My girlfriend fits in that category. Perfect body. Perfect features. When she met her ex 20 years ago, she still had enough baby fat on her face to make her look almost like an angel (with a DD cup). And he was (and still is, in his 50s) 6’3″, 250 lbs of pure muscle. But 10 years into the marriage she stumbled into the fact that he was supporting two other kids out of wedlock (from the same woman), and later found that the mother of his other kids was not the only one, but rather, one of many.

In other words, she thought that she could beat the odds through her looks, sex, etc., and failed. For him, sex was always easy, and he felt, cheap. Turns out, it wasn’t cheap in the long run, as he ended up supporting two families, with neither woman as his wife.

Might be because you tend to value what you don’t have (yet) more than what you already do have (which you tend to take for granted, even a little bit).

To be sure, there’s always that honeymoon phase where you’re having sex very often, but most relationships — including successful ones — cool down after that.

BTW, Will, did you know that your blog clears the comment form when you hit Preview?

The answer seems very obvious to me: because our sexual instincts are the product of evolution, they are very discriminate (and far more so for women than men). Men want partners who appear young and healthy, and women want a lot more than that. Further, because we are a species with a reasonable amount of monogamy and committment, there are relationship issues too.

As evidence for this perspective, I’m pretty sure that young gay men have a lot more sex than young heterosexual men.

But, I comment because there is something broader here. Your post takes the position that sex is rarer than it should be because it is difficult or costly to find partners. This is reasonable as far as it goes.

But I wonder why don’t people who have found partners have more sex? It would seem to me that if search was so costly that there would be a lot more nookie going on once that phase was over. If anything, this is the opposite of what happens (at least after the first few weeks or months).

Since your ideal partner will probably want to have sex with you too (ideal matching, right?) then all the high cost must come from “hooking up”.

I’d love to see some supply-and-demand deductions on this, in the style of G.S. Becker’s “An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour”… or didn’t he do that in that very book?

Since your ideal partner will probably want to have sex with you too (ideal matching, right?) then all the high cost must come from “hooking up”.

I’d love to see some supply-and-demand deductions on this, in the style of G.S. Becker’s “An Economic Approach to Human Behaviour”… or didn’t he do that in that very book?

But, I comment because there is something broader here. Your post takes the position that sex is rarer than it should be because it is difficult or costly to find partners. This is reasonable as far as it goes.

But I wonder why don’t people who have found partners have more sex? It would seem to me that if search was so costly that there would be a lot more nookie going on once that phase was over. If anything, this is the opposite of what happens (at least after the first few weeks or months).