The Woody Allen of Sex

The magazine Psychology Today has a blog authored by Satoshi Kanazawa that deals with evolutionary psychology. It has interesting material with much of it from his book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.

This bit in his blog caught my eye:

In one study, nearly 40% of undergraduate women admitted to saying no to sexual advances from a man even though they actually wanted to have sex with him. More than a third of these cases where the women initially said no eventually resulted in consensual sex. As the late great behavior geneticist Linda Mealy, whom we’ve also encountered before, eloquently puts it: “That females are selected to be coy will mean that sometimes saying ‘no’ really does mean ‘try a little harder.’” Of course, women sometimes do mean no when they say no, but this isn’t always the case.

I was raised in the era when Woody Allen was the only reputable authority of sex. His considered recommendations were gathered in the classic book Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) authored by Dr. David Reubenstein, but then immortalized in the movie adaptation by Woody Allen. Of course the film became the authoratative text for my generation.

As a consequence, we never learned the subtleties of how "no" sometimes may simply mean "no", and at other times counter-intuitively means "yes". That occassionally it means "probably" or more accurately as Kanazawa points out "try harder". Less frequently it means "I have not clue what I mean". But on some occasions it means "you make one more advance buster and I'm calling the cops!". Ah yes... the mating habits of the female of the species was always a mystery.