Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

by Angela Saini

Baranowski and Hecht suspected that women might reasonably be put off having sex with a stranger for lots of good reasons, including the social stigma of getting picked up so casually and, more obvious, the risk that they might be attacked. “We wanted to find out how the original findings would stand up to a more naturalistic setting, such as a cocktail bar, and a more safe setting, namely a laboratory,” they wrote in their paper, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2015. They wanted to make sure they didn’t veer too far from the original experiment either, so they ran it on a university campus as well. Both on the campus and in the cocktail bar, they got fairly similar results to Clark and Hatfield, with slightly more men than women agreeing to a date, and many more men agreeing to sex. In both cases, though, men weren’t nearly as keen to go on dates or have sex compared to the Florida State University experiment. It wasn’t proof that Clark and Hatfield had got it wrong, but it was certainly evidence that different places and times can yield different results.

Doing that study post-AIDS makes a big difference