Carnal Knowledge | He admits a double standard

Ron Geraci admits he expects much more self-restraint from the women he dates than he could possibly exercise himself. The author of the recently published dating tell-all

The Bachelor Chronicles

lays it all out in a chapter titled "Humble Pleas From a Single American Male":

"Do not sleep with me unless we've had four dates. If you have no interest in dating me seriously and don't see any chance of us having a relationship, use me like the dirty [prostitute] that I am. . . . Make coffee please, too."

"Maybe I have Groucho Marx Syndrome," says Geraci, 36, referring to Groucho's famous statement that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

Is he doomed by evolution to sexual hypocrisy or is it just the baggage imposed by Western patriarchal culture?

"It's definitely an evolved sex difference," says evolutionary psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas. Human males and females are saddled with two major sources of inequality. First of all, for most of human existence there was no DNA testing, which left men, but not women, vulnerable to cuckolding, says Buss. And because human males have paternal instincts, they can be fooled into rearing other men's babies.

The evolutionary psychologists argue that preference for relatively chaste women evolved as a counter measure to this evolutionary trap.

Women didn't evolve the same distaste for men who've slept around, and if anything, says Buss, it piques women's interest in a guy when we discover other women wanted him.

Which is why Geraci can get away with admitting to the world that he's had more than a few one-night stands without hampering his still-unfulfilled quest for a wife and mother to his future children.

A native of Bellmawr, he found himself thrust into the role of dating columnist while working as an editor for Men's Health. He wrote of his own adventures and misadventures - from the woman who got away to the former lesbian who slept with him and then baked him cookies.

A tell-all book by a man could come off as smug or boastful, but Geraci offers a powerful sense of shame and humiliation that make it both revealing and hilarious.

Single men, he says, have sex for the same reason animals eat when they see food. It's the "you never know where your next meal is coming from" instinct, which also explains male behavior around buffet tables and beer kegs.

In person Geraci looks just as he describes himself in print - 5-foot-6 and a little plump but in a cute way, with a mischievous smile. For our interview he picked out a quiet neighborhood saloon near his Greenwich Village apartment.

"I wanted people to know what was in men's heads," he says. Some of it may seem superficial, but often a man's motives are noble. He's desperate to play the role of husband and provider, just not with the many women who want to have sex with him before four dates.

"I want a woman to be discriminating," he says. If she sleeps with you, it's a sign you could probably do better.

Buss found this attitude holds across cultures, though American men care about female chastity more than men in Sweden, Norway, Finland and a few other Northern European countries. But thankfully we're not quite as purity-obsessed as the guys in Iran or China.

In his studies Buss also found that men worldwide had relatively low standards when it came to casual sex. They were willing to forgo education, charm, honesty, independence, kindness, intelligence and emotional stability. The only qualities that turned men off for short-term mating were low sex drive, physical unattractiveness, need for commitment and hairiness.

Of course, a minority of guys like hairiness.

So even nice guys sleep around, but the good ones, like Geraci, take some of the responsibility, in his case assuming the mantle of prostitute himself.

In this day and age, it's the gentlemanly thing to do.