ZoeyBdo:
Man says “that woman is very nice looking”
What he’s thinking: “Yep, I’d have sex with her”
Well, there is some truth in that, but that is because by default, beautiful women are sexually attractive to men. So if a woman is beautiful, she is going to be sexually attractive. I wouldn’t say men necessarily think in those terms, though, but some do.
In women, it seems that there have to be several factors, such as physical attractiveness, psychological predisposition, social status, that make a man sexually desirable. Therefore, even if a guy is physically attractive, but doesn’t necessarily meet other criteria, he may not be sexually attractive to a woman. And so a good looking guy isn’t automatically a guy a woman would be disposed to have sex with. He needs to be a good looking guy with resources, who is willing to make a commitment.
In men, physical attractiveness by default makes a woman sexually attractive, and psychology and personality and other factors may either reinforce the attractiveness or ruin it completely and make a woman unattractive, despite her physical beauty. But if nothing else is known about a woman apart from her looks, then the other factors are assumed and physical beauty alone is what determines her sexual attractiveness.
This makes pretty good sense from a natural perspective, because a woman has to carry a child for 9 months and give birth, so she not only wants good genetic material for her children (physical attractiveness), but a man who will help provide her with the resources needed to raise them and who has the psychological dispositions to form an emotional commitment, so just being good looking usually is not enough to make a man sexually attractive to a woman.
Men don’t have to worry about the other factors, and so they are interested primarily in good genetic material, but will be turned off from forming emotional attachments (and therefore long term relationships) with women they perceive as easy or slutty, because it makes no sense investing time, energy and resources into a family where the wife is adulterous and where the children may not be his. Women have a guarantee that their children are theirs; men don’t. So in a long term commitment, physical fidelity is an extremely important factor in a man’s mind, almost to the exclusion of all others. And it is physical attractiveness as opposed to social status and material resources that is important, so the male sex drive is a simplified version of the female one.
This goes some way to explain why women may consider both emotional affairs (that are not sexual in nature) and physical affairs (which often involve emotional infidelity too) as very painful betrayals, as they may threaten a man’s commitment to her, whereas for men, emotional affairs are not so much on the radar, but it is a physical affair that is a very painful betrayal, as it turns his emotional commitment and investment of energies into a lie.
So, in the hypothetical scenario of a man catching his wife masturbating to pornography, he’d be less likely to feel that her physical fidelity is threatened, and so he would likely consider it as something minor compared to a literal, physical affair.
In the reverse scenario, a woman may subconsciously feel that her husband’s emotional fidelity is being undermined, and therefore there is a painful betrayal from her perspective. But men find that very difficult to see, as in men’s minds, only physical fidelity is relevant and we’re not innately aware of other factors, so we find it hard to understand the sense of betrayal that a woman may feel in this situation. We aren’t wired to see that as betrayal, but if we were, I don’t think that this whole issue would be the problem that it is.
