By: Jack Samuel

It’s a bold assortment to make any kind of claim about a group of people, since invariably that single claim will be a broad generalization that only partially characterizes a portion of that group, and those that make it are lucky if that generalization is applicable to more than 10% of that group. So, you have to wonder why any sort of study would even begin to systematically try to explain, scientifically, what men seek in a woman when trying to have non-committal, casual sex.

They study appeared in an article of Slate Magazine, which featured the work of University of Texas-Austin graduate student Cari Goetz, who was testing the “sexual exploitability hypothesis”. Said hypothesis claims that the way we think about sex is linked back to millennia of a shared and common experience, one we all experience, for the most part; and that would be sex. It goes a step further to state that women have innately developed mechanisms to find a suitable mate that will fulfill their duties of caring for a child, since that is often times the inevitable product of sex—pre-1961, at least. The mechanisms have made women more in tune with certain intuitive aspects of the human condition, and, well, essentially smarter than men.

The other part of the “sexual exploitability hypothesis” goes on to state that men just want to get it in and out and be done with it. Or, in laymen’s terms: men like one-night stands with no commitment. And so a conflict arises within the sexes. One sex that has to bear the consequence of coitus has different motives than the sex that just seeks pleasure without the life-altering consequence. Thus, as “sexual exploitability hypothesis” claims, men seek women that appear to be either dumb or tired, though they very well might not appear to be.

So, while this might explain why the most alert girl in the club spouting out quotes from Yeats isn’t being hit on, it also certainly doesn’t explain all men’s behavior. There are plenty of men out there that are in committed relationships that don’t care for non-committal sex, despite how men are portrayed in media.

That’s why if they can prove the “sexual exploitability hypothesis” to explain what men look for in casual sex, then they’d also be able to prove what men look for in women for long-term relationships. Essentially, the opposite of dumb and tired, a woman who looks intelligent yet shy, able to have a conversation without slurring their words and alert enough to stay up all night and have a conversation about Kierkegaard or Russell—or maybe not. But you get the picture.

Men think that you’re more exploitable when you look drunk, or as if you’re at a party when you’re really not, or as if you’re about to fall asleep, which seems to be an odd thing to look for a girl when trying to have a one-night stand, since I would imagine a girl might go to sleep rather than have sex. This doesn’t suggest that all women who look tired or dumb want to engage in a one-night stand. In fact, they probably don’t. But the theory is that if you look exploitable, then men will approach you with the intention of exploiting you into bed. Whether they succeed or not is a different story—and much harder to prove—but perhaps it means that if a man approaches you with some really crappy pick-up line that you probably need to either go to sleep or read a book.