Jokodo said:
A plausible scenario with inverted causality:
A significant minority of men who do more "feminine" chores do so in an attempt (conscious or otherwise) to "earn" more sex, after being unsatisfied with their sex life for other reasons. Doing so might even improve their sex lives and we'd still get this result as long as it doesn't improve their sex life enough to make up for the fact that their relationships were less sexually satisfying to start with.
Ironically, that is actually related to the popular but untested assumption that the researchers were investigating. They don't seem to have any agenda trying to show that doing "feminine" housework harms you sexlife. They were just skeptical of the opposite claim often made in pop-psych and the media that men would get rewarded with sex for housework. What their data shows is that this is not true or at minimum the rewards are so minimal that they fail to make up for the fact that men willing to do more such housework are getting less sex for other reasons. The researchers don't really make strong causal claims beyond pointing out that the data are inconsistent with the idea that housework results in more or better sex (note that the actual research article includes sexual satisfaction and shows the same result as sexual frequency).
I don't know if that's a popular assumption, but if it is, that'd make my scenario even more likely, wouldn't it? .
It would make it more likely that some men not getting much sex would try to do more housework to "buy" more sex. The observed correlations would only emerge if the men who do more housework to get more sex are also not very good at pleasing their wives sexually
That's not much of an assumption - that men who are poor at pleasing their wives would experience lower frequency of sex and thus be more motivated to try and buy sex by whatever means they consider likely to succeed is pretty commonsensical.
and if their housework strategy does not work.
Not much of a leap either. There's not logical reason why doing housework should make you better at sex, so
even if women would occasionally "reward" men for housework, that effect is expected to wear off quickly since the underlying reason isn't being addressed.
Also, it suggests that men who do little housework are often no less egalitarian or respectful of women, they are just more desirable and better at sex so they don't need to bribe their wives for it.
It suggests that
some men who do more housework than average do so in an attempt to bribe their wifes for sex. It does not imply that there aren't many other men who do housework just because they consider it a matter of course that they take their share in making the home a place where you'd want to be. The fact that those men would be spread over the whole spectrum from worst to best at sex just means they don't affect the averages.
Here's a very simple model. Intrinsic sexual prowess and intrinsic inclination to to housework are two uncorrelated numbers with values randomly distributed between 0 and 99. Of those men with sexual prowess below 30, 1 in 2 tries to buy sex buy doing more housework than he otherwise would (i.e., his value for housework increases by 40, although not exceeding the maximum of 99). And indeed, this helps him to get slightly more sex (his value for sexual prowess is increased by 5). Here's some Python code for this simple model:
Code:
#!/usr/bin/python
import numpy as np, random as rd
# initiate a population of 100k men as tuples of two uncorrelated figures.
# format: (<intrinsic_household_score>, <intrinsic_sexual_prowess>):
men_intrinsic = [(rd.randrange(100), rd.randrange(100)) for i in range(100000)]
men_actual = []
for man in men_intrinsic:
# 50% of men with a sexual prowess below 30 try
# to buy sex, with limited success:
if man[1] < 30 and rd.randrange(2) == 1:
man = (np.min([man[0] + 40, 99]), man[1] + 5)
men_actual.append(man)
# average sexual prowess of men with household scores below 20:
print np.average([man[1] for man in men_actual if man[0] < 20])
# Exemplary result:
# Out[62]: 56.0921398144
# average for men with household scores above 80
print np.average([man[1] for man in men_actual if man[0] > 80])
# Exemplary result:
# Out[61]: 43.001508116
If we now look at the averages, we find that actualised sexual prowess of men whose actualised household score is above 80 is roughly 43, while the actualised sexual prowess for men whose actualised household score is below 20 is 56. And this in a model where there is a reward, if modest, for household work.
