Women Sext For Attention While Men Sext to Show off, According to Science
First of all, I am not sure I am buying this as "science", but that's the headline. 
The (mixed gender) crew I hang with thinks the "sexting" phenomenon is really funny and puzzling, and this article caught my attention because they think anything about "sexting" is inherently humorous.
Have you ever wondered why people so often feel compelled to send each other photos of their naked bodies? According to Wired's Ogi Ogas, we cant help it: the urge to sext is primal, connected to "the design of our sexual brains" rather than celebrity culture or digital connectivity.
But it turns out that men and women don't feel compelled to sext for the same "primal" reasons, because men are from mars and women are from a planet where they crave male attention 24/7 to feel happy. It all boils down to this: men want to show off their dicks but women want to feel desired. While we would never want to science-shame, is it possible that the reasons we send each other nude pics aren't that simple? Let's see.
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Thus, Ogas arrives at this conclusion:
"Though hordes of men pay to peruse amateur photography depicting the anatomy of ladies, not a single website collects cash from ladies interested in surveying amateur photography of phalluses. It is this marked gender difference in interest that reveals the dichotomous evolutionary pressures shaping male and female exhibitionism: Women feel the conscious desire to catch the universally attentive male eye, but since women's erotic attention is rarely ensnared by a penis, the male exhibitionist urge is comparatively vestigial."
That conclusion feels forced, partially because it's so heteronormative (the only time LGBTQ people are mentioned is in the concluding paragraph, when Ogas notes that the only profitable penis websites are geared towards gay men), but also because there's a huge elephant in the room here (and, sorry Ogas, it's not an elephantine dick): the question of why some women prioritize feeling desired over other forms of sexual satisfaction. Is it just because our crazy lady brains are wired that way? Or, perhaps, is it because we're taught from the time we're little girls about the importance of being conventionally attractive? Maybe men don't feel as strong a need to be desired (and that's kind of a massive over-generalization, isn't it?) because they're not as harshly judged by society on their sexual choices or just plain sexiness. Ogas thinks Girls Gone Wild is so successful because it gives young women "a chance to be ogled by millions of men." But that doesn't necessarily prove that being ogled is sexually fulfilling for these women, just that some women are, unfortunately, susceptible to pressure that showing off your body will result in praise and positive attention.
Link: http://jezebel.com/5913032/women-sext-for-attention-while-men-sext-to-show-off-according-to-science
= new reply since forum marked as read
I was having an email conversation with a man who could not comprehend that I just do not give a fig how men react to my appearance. It is so pervasive amongst women to try to get male attention by making themselves visually appealing, and to get male attention for being visually appealing, that he simply could not grasp that it is just not part of how I operate.
His conclusion was: because I don't try to make an extra effort to be visually appealing to men, that must mean I am completely closed down to having any kind of relationship with a man.
And he asked: "But don't you want to be desired by men?"
Um.... no, I don't. I don't exist to be beautiful, and I especially don't exist to be beautiful to men. (And I said so.)
It is so bizarre to me.
Even more bizarre is the idea that people can't comprehend that I don't get self worth (or anything like it) from what people think about how I look.
It was actually suggested that I must have some kind of psychological block that is preventing me from soliticing male approval. 
My actual self esteem was magically reframed as some kind of psychological flaw. 
