Human male sexuality
Men's sexual behavior can be affected by many factors, including evolved predispositions, individual personality, upbringing, and culture.
[5] Men typically find female breasts attractive[5] and this holds true for a variety of cultures.
[5] The exact degree to which physical appearance is considered important in selecting a long-term mate varies between cultures.
[5] When choosing long-term partners, both men and women desire those who are intelligent, kind, understanding, and healthy.
[5] The importance of premarital chastity varies a great deal according to culture, as well as the religious beliefs and sexual orientation of the individual.
These include evolved tendencies, such as a greater interest in casual sex, as well as individual and social factors related to upbringing, personality, and relationship status.
On average, men express a greater desire for a variety of sex partners, let less time elapse before seeking sex, lower their standards dramatically when pursuing short-term mating, have more sexual fantasies and more fantasies involving a variety of sex partners, report having a higher sex drive, find cues to sexual exploitability to be attractive for short-term mating, experience more sexual regret over missed sexual opportunities, have a larger number of extramarital affairs and are more likely to seek hookups and friends with benefits, and visit prostitutes more often.
[20] Sociosexually restricted males are less likely to approach females who have lower waist-to-hip ratios (0.68–0.72), generally rated as more physically attractive.
[21] Elizabeth Cashdan[22] proposed that mate strategies among both genders differ depending on how much parental investment is expected of the male, and provided research support for her hypotheses.
Cashdan argues the fact the research supports the idea that men expecting to invest emphasise their chastity and fidelity, which is a high-cost strategy (because it lowers reproductive opportunities), suggests that that type of behaviour must be beneficial, or the behaviour would not have been selected.
[23] In polygamous societies, men feel greater sexual jealousy when there is low paternity certainty.
[29] Masculine gender roles and a sense of general and sexual entitlement, which are usually endorsed in patriarchal and heteronormative societies,[30] predict rape-related attitudes and behaviors in men.
Multiple physiological methods exist, including measurement of penile erection, viewing time, FMRI, and pupil dilation.
The question of precisely how cultures through history conceptualized homosexual desire and behavior is a matter of some debate.
This evidence includes the cross-cultural correlation of homosexuality and childhood gender nonconformity, moderate genetic influences found in twin studies, evidence for prenatal hormonal effects on brain organization, the fraternal birth order effect, and the finding that in rare cases where infant males were raised as girls due to physical deformity, they nevertheless turned out attracted to females.
Hypothesized social causes are supported by only weak evidence, distorted by numerous confounding factors.
One hypothesis involves kin selection, suggesting that homosexuals invest heavily enough in their relatives to offset the cost of not reproducing as much directly.
[1][5] It has been hypothesized that homosexual behavior may itself be an adaptation for same-sex affiliation or alliance formation,[42][43] though this disposition would vary genetically among individuals[42] and occur more often when competition for female partners is especially severe.
