Hold onto your codpieces, y’all. You’re not gonna believe the news coming out of Australia. I am currently shivering in a corner, feebly pecking away at a keyboard with my mouth, trying to finish up this post while I attempt to process all of this.
Here is the lede:
It’s a myth that men want sex and women want relationships, says a Sydney professor, as a long-simmering gender spat reaches Australia.
I am dead—and there’s still more:
It is not true that men are focused only on sex and women only want relationships, she says.
But. But. But. But. But how could she know?
Richters, an associate professor at the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales, uses data collected over 10 years from more than 25,000 Australians to make her case.
OK, so: stop. Please, stop. The headline of this story is “Women do like sex, says expert,” which would be funny if it was meant to be funny—but it’s not. It’s a straight-faced report that seems genuinely interested in these results, which is the problem. Women and men and different men and different women like things. Some men like things that other women like and some women like things that other men like and etc. It’s sort of frustrating that I need to type this, but oh well: human beings are not all the same. Splitting them off into two, over-generalized groups is dumb and lazy. I appreciate Professor Richters’ work here, and the effort this probably took—but it’s just perpetuating the garbage that it’s supposedly breaking down by giving some academic virtue to this idea—haha oh man, women wanna get married but don’t wanna have sex because they are women!—while making it even worse by advancing this construct of “all women.” Women like to have sex. Men also like to have sex. (Not long ago, women—not men—were supposedly the sex-crazed fiends.) Research is important—otherwise, you know, this publication wouldn’t exist—but we don’t need it to answer a question that never existed in the first place.
