Erotic plasticity

According to Baumeister, the culture a woman is raised in affects her sexual attitudes and behaviours more than it would affect a man raised in the same culture. Factors such as politics, cultural and societal views on sexual behaviours would all play a role. A multinational study by Lippa (2009) found that women are more variable in their sex drives, suggesting that their sexuality is more malleable and influenced by society than men's.[6] Another study showed that South Korean women had a higher median age of first intercourse, lower rates of premarital sex, and greater disapproval of premarital sex.[8] In South Korea, there are strong gender-based sexual double standards such that women are expected to be passive and virgins at marriage. Therefore, Baumeister theorized that cultural norms have affected women's attitudes and behaviours more so than men. Another study showed that female, but not male, Hispanic immigrants to the United States were less likely to engage in vaginal, oral, and anal sex than Hispanics who had been born and raised in the United States.[9] Condom use was unaffected by whether or not the person was an immigrant, suggesting that upbringing and acculturation had a significant impact on engaging in sexual activity and not on how they would protect themselves during sex.

Baumeister predicted that acculturation, the process of adopting the behaviour patterns and attitudes of the surrounding culture, should have a greater effect on the sexual behaviours and attitudes of female immigrants. However, in a study conducted by Benuto and Meana, one of the two studies conducted about erotic plasticity, supporting evidence was not found.[4] When examining the acculturation of college students from an American college of non-American background, acculturation had the same effect on sexual behaviours and attitudes of both men and women. Numerous potential methodological flaws of the study are indicated that may have produced this contradictory data, such as women trying to appear socially desirable in their responses (see social desirability bias) or that participants were too acculturated.

Catholic nuns are more successful at fulfilling their vows of celibacy and more willing to commit to their promises of sexual abstinence than male clergy, suggesting women can more easily adapt to such high non-permissive standards.[10] A study on older unmarried adults found that those who were highly religious were less likely to have recently had sex compared to non-religious unmarried adults.[11] However, this effect was stronger in women, suggesting a stronger influence on women's sexual behaviour. Church attendance and religiosity is also associated with lower odds of reporting masturbation among females.[12] One possible explanation is that higher levels of spirituality and religiosity are associated with higher levels of sex guilt in women. One study even suggests that this differs amongst women of different culture. Religious Euro-Canadian women reported significantly higher levels of sexual desire and less sex guilt than Eastern Asian women.[13] This is an example of two societal pressures, religion and culture, interacting to shape sexuality. Finally, Farmer and colleagues (2009) found that unreligious women are more likely to engage in unrestricted premarital intercourse behaviour than religious women. Such a difference was not demonstrated in religious and non-religious men.[14]

Religiosity can also affect whether adolescents choose to abstain from sexual conduct. Commitment to religion and having friends with similar commitments has a stronger impact on girls than boys.[15] Other factors, such as family members’ disapproval of adolescent sexual behaviour also play a significant role.

Heritability is the amount of differences between individuals that is the product of genetics. According to female erotic plasticity theory, sexual behaviours of men should be more heritable because there is a stronger biological component driving these behaviours. A study examining adult twins in Sweden found a lower genetic component for the engagement in same-sex behaviours in women than in men.[16] Shared environment also played a larger role in women's same-sex behaviours than in men's, although unique environmental factors were roughly the same. On the other hand, in their study of Australian twins, Bailey, Dunne and Martin found a concordance in sexual behaviour of 20% for male MZ twins, and of 24% for female MZ twins.[17]

Another twin study showed male identical twins are more likely than female identical twins to begin having sex at the same age.[18] Shared environment plays a greater role than genetics in risky sexual behaviours in adolescent females.[19]

Baumeister's 3rd prediction states that women should have greater inconsistencies between their attitudes towards sexual behaviours and whether they actually engage in said behaviours. Wives are more likely than husbands to report that they changed a "great deal" in their habits, ideas and expectations of sex over 20 years of marriage.[20] Even more husbands reported that their spouses changed than did wives. Another example is condom use, for which women in the past have demonstrated difficulty in expressing their desire to use them during sex.[21] However, a 2008 study by Woolf and Maisto found that this trend is declining, suggesting traditional gender roles in culture may be changing.[22]

In a 2000 paper, Janet Shibley Hyde and Amanda M. Durik argued that a more sociocultural explanation could be used to explain erotic plasticity.[43] Firstly, education does not affect men's and women's sexual behaviour differently. Instead, it increases women's power, therefore women with the greatest amount of education are nearly equal in power with men. On the other hand, women who are the least educated have the least power relative to men. When comparing sexual behaviours of most educated and least educated men and women, they found that education actually increased the prevalence of many sexual activities in both sexes, including oral sex, anal sex, and having a same sex partner. The differences between men and women were much smaller in the most educated group than in the least educated group. Shibley Hyde and Durik speculate that more educated women are better at communicating their desires and have enough self-confidence to do so. They also may perform a greater variety of sexual activities because of their greater exposure to ideas and their commitment to learning.

Shibley Hyde and Durik also asserted that religion has a greater effect on women's sexual behaviours because a group with less power – in this case, women – will shape their behaviour to be more like the group with power, in this case, men. Therefore, women pay more attention to and conform more to religious teachings since it is the culture to which they must adapt. They back up this claim by presenting evidence that non-religious women and men are similar in the prevalence of all sexual activities, minus masturbation. On the contrary, Conservative Protestant men and women differed significantly in all sexual behaviours.

They also argued for a modern sexual double standard that is more restrictive of female sexuality than male sexuality. They claimed that now, extramarital sex is more tolerated in women than in the past, but it is still less acceptable in women than in men. Therefore, these different gender roles will exert powerful influences on both men's and women's behaviour and sexuality. Finally, they claim that the greater evidence for attitude-behaviour inconsistency in women is not the result of high erotic plasticity, but because of men's greater interpersonal power. Although women may, for example, have the intention of using condoms or have negative attitudes towards anal sex, men may use their greater power to do what it is they desire if it differs from what their partner wants.

Benuto (2009) argues that heightened fluidity and sociocultural influences, two components of erotic plasticity, actually stand in opposition to each other. Although scientific evidence exists that women's sexual behaviours are indeed more fluid than men's, Benuto argues there is nothing in society that would encourage women to engage in same-sex behaviour. She hypothesizes that, based on the properties of her EPQ scale (Benuto, 2009),[3] erotic plasticity may not be a unitary construct like Baumeister initially proposed, and that there perhaps may be multiple “plasticities”, each composed of different constructs. Such constructs include sociocultural influences, locus of control and changes of sexual attitudes over time. Finally, it is possible that the heightened attitude-behaviour inconsistency in women could either be due to the powerlessness of women, or women wanting to maintain harmony and nurturance in their relationship.