Because She Loves You

This might amuse in the run up to Valentine's....one of the scribbling jobs I have means that I'm continually hunting around for little stories about "men and women" (that 's the actual search term I use to find them) and one that popped out of the search engine was this:

Another young economist, Hugo Mialon of Emory University in Atlanta, has a racy but fascinating paper called "The Economics of Ecstasy." In it he works through a plausible "game-theoretical" analysis of -- prepare yourself -- when and why people fake orgasms. The model isn't simple; one page features a dozen lines of mathematical derivations. If you think mathematizing love is too crass for words, think again. Mr. Mialon, who did his undergraduate work at McGill, quotes Marguerite Duras (" It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most") among others, and proposes the reasonably sophisticated view that love is not mere altruism, but a mixture of altruism and possessiveness. People's faking behaviour will be different, his theorems suggest, according to how possessive of one another they are. And they will be more possessive and more altruistic when they are in love.

The actual finding is that women will fake orgasms (something men tend to do a great deal less often) more the more they are in love with their bed boogie partner. We might think that women, given what we think we know about female sexuality, might actually have more the more this is so and that may well be true, but isn't the point here. There's a pressure on men to induce that ecstacy, something women are well aware of, and the more they like you the less they'll flaunt your inability to produce it. Or so the argument goes.

So for those men who do worry about their technique, this is clearly good news. If you're actually providing that eye rolling pleasure all to the good: if you're not and she fakes it it just shows she loves you anyway.