Snapshot · Modern Wisdom
Ashley Madison, the cheating website, had 20 million active male users and only 1,492 active female users, despite women receiving free lifetime membership and men having to pay.
Where this was said
At 1:03:18 · chapter starts 1:00:07
Stewart-Williams explains the sex difference in sociosexuality — interest in no-strings-attached sex — with an effect size of around Cohen's d=1, making it one of the larger psychological sex differences. The evolutionary rationale traces back to reproductive variance: males that seek multiple partners can dramatically increase their offspring count; females cannot. He then makes a key correction to a common assumption: men being more interested in casual sex does not mean women are less interested in committed relationships. Both sexes are comparably invested in long-term pair bonds; women simply lack the additional layer of desire for casual variety. The natural experiment provided by gay men and lesbians [1] — Steve Stewart-Williams "Gay men have more casual sex than straight men; lesbians have less than straight women. This isn't a coincidence — it's a natural experimen…" 1:11:35 makes this vivid: gay men have more casual sex than straight men, while lesbians have less than straight women, showing exactly what each sex's baseline motivation looks like when the opposite-sex compromise is removed. The Ashley Madison data — 20 million male users versus 1,492 female users despite free membership for women — is cited as a real-world illustration. Men are also more turned on by visual stimuli, partly because youthfulness is a stronger fertility signal in women due to menopause.
Ashley Madison, the infidelity website, had 20 million active male users and 1,492 active female users — even though women got free lifetime membership and men had to pay. The ratio almost exactly mirrors the global sperm-to-egg production asymmetry discussed earlier in the episode.
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