I’ve been thinking about sex a lot lately, for any number of reasons, and it seems as if Tyler Cowen is collating interesting news on the sex front for me. He notes that monkeys will trade money for sex after linking to a couple of articles that indicate a woman’s ability to orgasm may be at least partially genetic. While I’m not entirely surprised by the orgasm news, I do find it interesting and, of course, it got me to thinking about the informational economics involved.
We now know that there are a few different groups of women, so suppose there are three types of women (for the sake of simplicity, it’s only a model):
1) Orgasms during intercourse with little effort
2) Will orgasm during intercourse, but only with foreplay
3) Will not orgasm during intercourse, but can orgasm through other techniques.
What I get from the New Scientist article is that the above are a decent, if rough, sketch of the sorts of women one is likely to run across. Let’s also assume that women like to have orgasms, that seems like a reasonable assumption. Let’s also assume that all women fall into one of these categories, and that those who will orgasm during intercourse can also get off on foreplay.
In the course of finding a mate, the woman with which a guy is currently having sex will either be a type 1, 2, or 3. What’s more, a guy will not know which type he is dealing with until either during or after having sex. In some cases, depending, he may not know even then. This creates an informational asymmetry: a woman knows, at least with much higher probability, which group she falls into while a guy does not.
This sort of informational asymmetry leads into an interesting question: If you don’t know which type of woman you’re dealing with, is there a strategy to maximize the liklihood that you cause her to orgasm?
A complicated strategy could involve first determining which group the gal you’re with is most likely to be in by looking at the general population distribution and assuming she represents a randomly selected datapoint. Now, that could be sort of a problem because there are going to be any number of confounding factors. We know that there is some genetically determined factor, but we don’t know anything more specific than that. Thusly, it could be linked to any number of other genetically determined things like blood-type or hair colour. Furthermore, a man’s choice of sex-partner is not going to be randomly selected from a normally distributed sub-set of the population; so unless we were randomly assigned copulation partners doing this calculation could be extremely tedious.
Instead we could assume that each of the possibilities is equally likely, but we know that’s not true from reading the articles about this new study, so that would also not give us a very good proxy for the underlying reality. Barring a fairly complicated attempt at determining expected values and then backing out a strategy, what might be the best approach?
Well, it seems to me that there’s a clearly dominant strategy. If you assume that the woman you’re with is a type 1, you’ll be wrong pretty often and may leave a trail of unsatisfied sexual partners in your wake. If you assume that every woman is a type 3, you’ll try hard with the foreplay etc, but stop with any effort once you get to intercourse because it doesn’t do much for her, and if she’s a type 1 or 2 you’ve sort of stopped halfway through achieving full satisfaction. If you assume every woman is a type 2, you’ll satisfy the type 1 and type 2 women all of the time, but leave type 3 women unsatisfied.
BUT, if you assume that all women are type 2 AND you make sure that the woman you’re with has at least one orgasm before you start on with the intercourse* you should be able to at least partially satisfy all types of women reasonably well. Type 1 women will get a nice warm up, and continue to have orgasms after you get to the intercourse part. Type 2 women will also orgasm before and during intercourse. Type 3 women will at least orgasm before intercourse, and even if they don’t get off during the sex they’ve at least had one.
So there you go, gents, if I haven’t managed to completely ruin the fun of sex for you (a feat I think is near impossible, but wouldn’t put past economics), go out and engage in this optimal strategy! But, if you run up against an iron hymen, there’s simply no way to win.
* Assuming, of course, that you’re willing to make a sincere effort at it rather than just getting yourself off and quitting you selfish bastard.
