Coy Story

A male friend says that a woman who wants a hookup can just blurt out "I wanna have sex with you!" to a man and have him take her up on that. However, he claims that a guy who says this to a woman is taking a big risk and is likely to just offend her and possibly get a drink thrown in his face. Is he right?

--Confused Dude

A guy's "I wanna have sex with you!" does work on women -- uh...in movies where the entire plotline is "A nurse gets in the elevator." To be unappealingly frank, men, in a sexual pinch, have been known to get it on with items in their refrigerator. So, especially in guys' late teens and 20s, the bar for casual sex partners isn't set all that high -- as in, "Wow, girl, that's some pulse you have on you!" Women, on the other hand, evolved to be the choosier sex. Female emotions push them to hold out for signs that a man would be willing and able to stick around and commit resources, should a screaming baby result from their naked romp in the back seat of the, um, thing prehistoric people dragged firewood around on. These sex differences were reflected in recent research led by evolutionary psychologist Mons Bendixen on men's and women's signaling of sexual interest. Women tended to make themselves out to be more sexually interested in a particular man than they actually were. The researchers suspect this may be a strategy that allows women to hold men's attention for longer. This, in turn, gives a woman more time to assess a man or "strategically increase his hope of having a chance" with her (translation: keep the dude on the hook while milking his American Express card like it has a set of udders). In contrast, the researchers found that men generally pretended to be far less interested in sex than they actually were -- presumably to avoid coming off as a man tramp or the sexual version of a starving Dickensian orphan. In other words, your friend is probably right: Honesty, as a sex-seeking tactic for a man, is only "the best policy" if the photo of his perfect match on a dating site is a tall container of lotion wearing an old tube sock as a scarf. ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.