News
Professor presents lecture on love, sex and romance
The Pointer
jglod170@uwsp.edu
Why do humans have sex? Which sex is more romantic? What do humans find attractive in certain people? What draws two seemingly different beings of male and female together?
These questions and more have been researched and theorized throughout the academic realm of psychology.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day these questions were the topic of Prof. Erica Weisgram’s lecture on Feb. 10, 2009, given before a packed room of students.
“There is a lot of interesting topics when talking about sex, romance and mate preferences,” said Weisgram.
She began the lecture by talking about how the media portrays gender differences pertaining to these topics, emphasizing that this is the popular view despite psychological research that points towards men and women being more similar.
“What the media says about sex, dating and mate preferences is that gender differences are large,” said Weisgram. “They will try to sell you on how you can attract an opposite sex mate. The media says that men and women have these different rules for dating. These different themes or ideas about relationships are really popularized by books about relationships that are usually targeted towards women.”
Research shows that gender differences pertaining to romance and mate preference are relatively small, and surprisingly, the same results can be found when looking at the topic of sex, which is highly divided by the media, often online, in magazines and throughout the American culture. “There are more similarities than differences when men and women are conceptualizing relationships,” said Weisgram. “Why are we not talking about the similarities? Because it is not sexy. Nobody wants to hear that men and women are the same on this trait or that men and women believe the same thing.”
There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule and individual cases do differ throughout all the studies.
“Men have more positive attitudes towards casual sex than women,” said Weisgram. “Yet, again we have some women that are more positive towards casual sex than some men. So there are those individual differences, but on the group level, you can find a large sex difference.”
Recent research by Cindy Meston and David Buss asks the question ëwhy do people have sex?’ This research took over 1,500 college students and found that there were 237 distinct reasons that humans have sex.
The top three most popular reasons for both men and women consisted of ëI was attracted to the person,’ ëit feels good’ and ëI wanted to experience the physical pleasure.’ The rest of the top ten also showed similar ties.
“When you look at this, men’s top ten reasons and the women’s top ten reasons are really, really similar to one another. In terms of sex, men and women have similar reasons for having sex,” said Weisgram.
Weisgram went on to discuss romance and finished with the topic of mate preference, pushing the same idea that men and women are not so different.
When looking for a mate, men and women look for many of the same attributes and requirements. Those attributes that are often seen to divide preference, such as money or attractiveness, actually fall to the back burner when people evaluate what attributes they see in their dream mate.
“Men and women basically want the same things,” said Weisgram. “People in general are looking for someone who shares their sense of humor, someone who is affectionate, someone who shares their interests and someone who is romantic. They are also looking for someone who is honest, kind and have shared activities. Moreso than the resources, moreso than the attractiveness, this is something that tends to pop up when you ask men and women what they want in a relationship.”
Research in the field of psychology really shows that men and women aren’t all that different when it comes to the topics around love.
Possibly psychology can help you when writing that last minute valentine for your sweetie as to how to say why you love the one you love.
