Sociosexuality is the degree to which a person is interested in causal, uncommitted sex. Persons high in sociosexuality are happy to have sex with strangers, desirous of having multiple different sexual partners across their lifespan, and are both interested in and willing to have sex without any intimate commitments. As Perry describes, men, across all cultures, score higher on measures of sociosexuality than do women. The obvious datapoint here is gender asymmetry we observe in the buying and selling of sex. By far, men are more willing to buy sex from a stranger.
Returning to a point made earlier in this series, evolutionary psychologists believe the gender differences we observe with sociosexuality are rooted in the particular adaptive challenges men and women faced in ancestral contexts, given their unique reproductive biologies. Evolving to meet these challenges, women acquired a sexual psychology biased toward monogamous commitment and investment. Men, by contrast, evolved a sexual psychology that favored sociosexuality, a willingness to have sex with as many different partners as opportunity provided.
For Perry, these gender differences in sociosexuality present a problem for hook-up culture. Specifically, hook-up culture favors those higher in sociosexuality. Which means that hook-up culture favors men over women. The sexual revolution is designed to serve the sexual interests of men. Here's Perry:
The heterosexual dating market has a problem, and it's not one that can be easily resolved. Male sexuality and female sexuality, at the population level, do not match. On average, men want casual sex more often than women do, and women want committed monogamy more often than men do. Hook-up culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex. Some women are quite happy to do this, but most women find it unpleasant, or even distressing. Thus hook-up culture is a solution to the sexuality mismatch that benefits some men at the expense of most women.
I propose a different solution, based on a fundamental feminist claim: unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration. I'm not willing to accept a sexual culture that puts pressure on people low in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly women) to meet the sexual demands of those high in sociosexuality (overwhelmingly men), particularly when sex carries so many more risks for women, in terms of violence and pregnancy. Hook-up culture is a terrible deal for women and yet has been presented by liberal feminism as a form of liberation. A truly feminist project would demand that, in the straight dating world, it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites.
Stated sharply, the "liberation" of the sexual revolution is deeply patriarchal.
