The Cold Pizza Theory of Sex
Women are more sexually discerning than men—but that doesn’t mean they enjoy sex less.
A few years ago, I made a sweeping statement on Twitter which I now regret, and not because any kind of mob demanded an apology. I declared, very confidently, that men are much hornier than women.
I don’t think I was entirely wrong. There is not, last I checked, a booming industry of women paying for men’s used underwear. If a man wants to make money as an OnlyFans performer, his best bet would be to market himself to gay men, not women. Women do not seek out casual sex the way men do. To lure men onto apps and websites meant for casual hookups, a large number of female bots must be deployed. And famously, when social scientists ran an experiment by having an attractive person proposition random college students for sex, the woman had a 75% success rate and the man had a 0% success rate. (I can’t stop thinking about that study without imagining what the decoy told the men after they said yes—did Ashton Kutcher suddenly appear to punk them?)
It’s tempting to look at all this evidence and deduce that men desire women, and women don’t really desire men. Or at the very least, women desire men but only Glen Powell as a sadistic aristocratic vampire, so their desire never winds up sparked by anything in real life. Ergo, the everyday experience of heterosexuality is men lusting after women, and women recoiling and fleeing into the forest to locate the nearest bear (and they would, a bear has got to be at least seven feet tall. Grizzlymogged oncemore!)
But perhaps the most commonly-used argument to defend the idea that women don’t really find men sexually attractive, or experience any degree of the sexual desire men do, is the cold pizza theory. Basically, men will take any woman, in any scenario, because they see woman like pizza and all pizza is basically fine, even if it’s cold. (More proof that I am not a man: I do not like cold pizza, even in the literal sense.) Meanwhile, women require that specific conditions be met for them to be aroused. Using the pizza analogy, women might not even want hot pizza…if it’s the wrong crust thickness, the wrong sauce, or if it’s Domino’s.
Ergo: men like “pizza” more than women do.
