Booty Call journal article

Journal of Sex Research published an article about "The 'Booty Call': A Compromise Between Men's and Women's Ideal Mating Strategies." It is not even slightly representative, just some Texas undergraduates, but its conclusions are similar to those of the book Hooking Up that I reviewed here. Hooking Up was a qualitative study of two undergraduate populations that followed subjects in college and a year or two after graduation.

Here are its conclusions:

With regards to accepting versus rejecting booty call partners, physical attractiveness was considered the most important criteria by both genders. Fourth, whereas men tended to cite other reasons related to sexual access, women tended to cite reasons related to friendship, compatibility, and personality. Fifth, for booty calls that do not progress into long-term relationships, both genders attribute the lack of progression to the man's not wanting a long-term relationship. Taken together, our results suggest that, although booty calls are mostly a sexual relationship whereby physical attractiveness is important, there are elements in which booty calls differ from other casual sexual relationships, such as one-night stands or hookups. In addition, whereas men tend to favor the sexual aspects of booty calls, women tend to favor other, more long-term oriented considerations. These findings are consistent with our overall hypothesis that the booty call may represent a compromise between the short-term, sexual nature of men's ideal relationships and the long-term, commitment ideally favored by women.

As with Hooking Up, the women surveyed have long-term ideas in mind but are willing to settle for short-term. Unlike Hooking Up, none of the women discuss an initial stage of experimentation with hooking up when they did not want a long-term relationship and just wanted to experiment with short-term. Perhaps the survey did not ask them about that.