Mr. Big is a Big Lie
SURPRISE: Enjoying sex doesn’t neuter a man’s ability to feel love and compassion.
Men get a bad rap for being sex-obsessed… which is unfair, because so many of us are. If it’s any consolation, half of us want to talk about our feelings in between orgasms.
No. I didn’t steal that from John Mullaney.
That’s a Richard D’Ambrosio original.
And my joke is actually based on facts – unlike so much of today’s anecdotal trash about sex-crazed, butt-squeezing men, marketed to earn Tik Tok creator income, sell magazines and movie tickets, or attract eyeballs to digital banner ads.
If you have never explored the data, you would think that Mr. Big represents most men, that sex is all we can really commit to, and post-coital conversation and cuddling reminds us we have to get up early for work the next morning.
This ongoing narrative is why so many women relate to essays about sex and men – essays usually written by women, like Candace Bushnell and Jean Garnett.
Bushnell, Garnett and their friends have gathered so much fodder for their essays, you would think we didn’t have decades of research telling a more nuanced, complex and hopeful story.
Perhaps that’s their goal. Maybe they don’t want to feel good about what goes on inside the bedroom. Maybe it’s more validating that they feel good inside their tribe.
Math is sexy
If you have subscribed to my Substack for any period of time, you know how I prefer to base my content on research. Data gets us closer to the truth than essays filled with anecdotes.
Explaining the findings from 15,000 men and women who took the Clearer Thinking Gender Continuum Test, Spencer Greenberg points out how human brains favor vivid extremes “because they are so striking and memorable.” The problem, Greenberg points out, is that these extremes oversimplify gendered behaviors.
He explains this phenomenon by describing how most humans are conditioned to think women are compassionate and men are not — especially given the preponderance of men who commit violent crimes.
What goes unmentioned, Greenberg notes, is that acts of violence are associated with “extremely low levels of being peaceful, compassionate and forgiving.” So, while men and women share similar levels of these traits, “men are far more likely than women to have extremely low levels of all three of these traits at once!” A very small percentage of men.
Our thoughts about groups of people often are formed by “the extreme tail end of personality” exhibited by select individuals. It’s so much easier for us to default to knee-jerk assumptions and actions based on powerful and repeated stories and images.
The danger for humans is that people can be manipulated by anecdotes. Take what some bad actors have done to hurt Black Americans throughout American history.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan built support for gutting America’s assistance to the poor by using one woman’s emotionally charged fraud case in Chicago to condemn struggling Black mothers as “welfare queens.”
Similarly, non-profits trying to serve broad and abstract causes find they struggle to connect with the hearts and minds of donors. Some experts call this phenomenon “compassion collapse.”
In a 2024 study conducted by the Empathy and Moral Psychology Lab at Penn State University, director Daryl Cameron discovered that “People tend to feel and act less compassionately for multiple suffering victims than for a single suffering victim.”
I think men are experiencing a largescale collapse in compassion today, which is why for the last year in this Substack I have tried to include the stories of good and average men doing great things.
In a short series of upcoming essays about men, women and sex, I plan to create “personal stories” from the participant responses in Clearer Thinking’s Gender Continuum Test. (Yes. statistics can be sexy, so bear with me.). Maybe that can help us see men less as the butt end of jokes about sex, and more like the humans they are.
Spencer Greenberg graciously sent me an Excel Workbook with the full responses of 1,000 participants, a dataset acquired prior to Clearer Thinking putting his test online. All of us are wholly indebted to Spencer and his team for letting me analyze the data at a deeper level for this Substack.
Thank you so much Spencer for your trust in me to play around like this. Your research is one of the few datasets available to an amateur like me, someone who wants to stimulate REAL conversations about men and women, so that both genders can have a better understanding of and more compassion for each other. And in this case, better sex.
Before I launch this series, I want to make a personal appeal to anyone who has been following me on Substack or subscribing to Mindful Masculinity. There are more than 300 of you today, and I thank you all for being here.
As you can see, separating out gender facts from entertaining fiction takes a lot of time. I am continuously analyzing data to help me tell the most accurate narrative I can about men, women and gender. I do this to generate more human flourishing, and reduce suffering. The Buddhist in me propels me along.
But whether I’m a Buddhist, analyst or journalist, I have bills to pay. The time I put into my research and writing is time I could be earning an income elsewhere.
So, my personal plea to you is that you upgrade to a Paid Subscription or make a pledge to this cause.
Your payment will help cover a small fraction of the time I could dedicate to income earning endeavors. Whatever you can give is SO appreciated because changing people’s minds about masculinity is SO necessary today. We have a huge tide of false, harmful and manipulative content to turn back.
You also can share this essay with someone whom you think would gain something from it. That’s a big help too.
And by all means, comment. Join the conversation. Add your thoughts to the discussion. And it would be exceptionally cool if you brought me some new data to analyze.
That said, let’s dive under the spread sheets for a roll in the statistical hay.
The best place to start with statistics is as high up as numbers will allow.
A human’s focus on sex was just one of 18 traits Greenberg and his team tried to measure. Scores were calculated based on answers to two questions for each trait.
What Clearer Thinking found was that approximately 53 percent of men and 20 percent of women scored a 1.5 or higher responding to the “Sex Focused” questions (on a scale that ranges from -3 to +3).
The average sex focused score for a male was 1.1, while females averaged -0.3. Men had a “Sex Focused” overall score four and a half times greater than the female score (quite a large effect size).
“Sex Focused” scores were calculated based on respondents answering how much they agreed with two statements:
I often have sexual thoughts when I meet an attractive looking person.
I do not think about sex that often.
It’s important that we realize how different respondents might define words and phrases like “often,” or “sexual thoughts.”
Does looking at the Tik Tok reel below constitute a “sexual thought?” How often does someone meet an attractive looking person? And what might make them attractive to you?
See how this can get complicated pretty fast?
Still, let’s assume that since nearly 1,000 men and women are represented in this sample, comparing scores within this dataset gives us a pretty good idea of how men and women think about Shagging in Sag Harbor. (See Sunday’s essay if you don’t know what this means.)
I also analyzed data for the men who scored 2.0 or greater. Nearly 40 percent of men and only 11 percent of women scored 2.0 or higher.
Based on these numbers, it’s hard to deny that men are more sex focused than women – and hence my comedy club opening line above.
But anyone who has ever had sex or been in a sexually intimate relationship knows that the sex part is only part of what a human experiences. People have sex for a whole bunch of reasons, conscious and subconscious, and bring a lot more of themselves to those experiences. Further, people experience a wide range of emotions as part of a physically intimate encounter or relationship.
Lucky for us, Spencer Greenberg’s dataset gives us insight into 17 other traits that impact relationships. You can see the full list in the chart below.
As you can see, highly sex-focused individuals, regardless of gender, report presenting certain traits more than others – like warmth, compassion and a love for the beauty of things (aesthetic).
These individuals also tend to be highly aware of their own emotions and the emotions of others, and they are generally peaceful.
But once we get below the 6th or 7th trait, men and women start to present differently. Women self-report a higher degree of honesty and selflessness, while men report things like higher self-valuing (Mr. Big? Eddie? Buckley? Candace Bushnell?) and appear to be more “at ease” (being unlikely to worry or be afraid).
I plotted these results on a radar chart to get a visual depiction of how sex focused males and females compare across those 18 traits.
While there is quite a bit of overlap, the greater area at the top right and those spikes at the bottom show us how men and women differ.
So, if you’re a woman like Candace Bushnell who wants a man with a higher libido, AND a man who is emotionally aware, compassionate, considerate (unselfish), what are the odds of finding him?
Better than you might expect.
Below is a table showing the percentage of sex-focused individuals (by gender and sex focused score threshold) who also score high on several emotional maturity traits:
Emotionally attuned and sexually assertive individuals exist across genders. Yes, these traits are significantly more common among women. But at least half of the men scoring a 1.5 or higher on their sex-focused responses also scored high on emotional awareness and compassion. (See the end of this Substack for Clearer Thinking’s trait definitions and each trait’s two questions.)
The real unicorns are the men who combine all four traits – less than 5 percent.
Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3
The upshot of all of these numbers, charts and tables is this — men are definitely more sexual than women. Why that is, we’re still not sure. Like many researchers, I believe it has less to do with testosterone and more to do with how boys and young men are socialized, and how that socialization is reinforced throughout our society.
The more important takeaway is that men also have a great capacity to be the guy who lingers longer than Mr. Big was willing to. (Ummm, didn’t Samantha have “a one hour and you’re out of here” rule?)
As always, the most important tool men and women have to navigate these treacherous waters is mindfulness. With mindfulness, we can meet each other where we are — not where Candace Bushnell and her fellow media celebrities tell us to be.
Men can become more emotionally attuned; women can become less reflexively cynical. And all of us can have better sex.
Join me in my next essay to learn more …
Clearer Thinking Trait Definitions & Questions
Emotionally Aware
Awareness and understanding of emotional reactions, as measured by the questions:
I rarely notice my emotional reactions.
I don't understand people who are emotional.
Compassionate
Being concerned or sympathetic towards others, as measured by the questions:
I would feel very sorry for an animal caught in a trap.
I am indifferent to the feelings of others.
Peaceful
Not prone to violence, as measured by the questions:
I sometimes have the urge to physically hurt people when they anger me.
I feel that violence is never the best solution to a problem.
Unselfish
Looking out for others before looking out for yourself, as measured by the questions:
I am out for my own personal gain.
I look out for myself first before I look out for others.