At this point, Lil Wayne can rap about anything, and it wouldn't surprise me. The first time I heard the exquisite “Every Girl,” I was a little shocked by how forward it was. But after a few minutes, I realized that this song is really just the natural extension of any rap single. It’s just more candid (and better produced). If it weren’t so explicit, I think Wayne’s latest could be 2009’s Song Of The Summer. It really is the best track I have heard in a while (and that’s including anything off the overrated Veckatimest).
I honestly believe that if the chorus repeatedly proclaimed, “I wish I could talk with every girl in the world,” then “Every Girl” would probably have bumped the insufferable “Boom Boom Pow” off the top of the charts. Then again, if the song focused on just talking with every girl in the world, it wouldn’t give such excellent insight into the evolution of the male mind.
The song features an impressive five artists, each describing how their sexual appetite knows no bounds. And yes, I am going to quote them all. Wayne keeps it simple when he says “I’ll *&%$ the whole group/ Baby I’m a groupie.” The up-and-coming Drake similarly explains, “I will *&%$ with all y’all/ All y’all are beautiful/ I just can’t pick one so you can never say I’m choosy hoes.” Jae Millz gets a little more explicit when he rhymes, “I just wanna *&%$ every girl in the world/ Every model every singer every actress every diva/ Every house of Diddy chick every college girl every skeezer/ Stripper and every desperate housewife that resemble Eva.” Gudda Gudda promises that “I swear I’m feeling all y’all/ I’m scrollin down my call log/ And I’m a call all y’all.”
Yet, the song obviously seems to have saved the best for last, with Mack Maine’s preposterous verse. Maine details how “For free suites I’d give Paris Hilton all-nighters/ In about three years, holla at me Miley Cyrus/ I don’t discriminate, no not at all/ Kit-Kat a midget if that $%# soft I break her off.” Incredible.
All in all, “Every Girl” is a dizzying display of the male sex drive. But notice how no rapper is simply requesting a large quantity of sex. None of these lotharios wants to be intimate with one (or even two or three) women many times. Instead, they desire sexual variety over quantity or quality, a fact that becomes most evident when Mack Maine admits, “I exchange V cards with the retards.”
Sorry ladies, but men don’t really want one woman an infinite amount of times, no matter how desirable she may be. Rather, they seem to prefer an infinite amount of women, each just one time. This trait isn’t restricted to blatantly honest and tattooed rappers. Rather, it’s a biological fact applicable to males of most species. The phenomenon of the male craving for sexual diversity even has a cool name (and a cooler story behind it): The Coolidge Effect.
The Coolidge Effect comes from an awesome, albeit apocryphal, anecdote concerning President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace , who Wikipedia describes as “vivacious” (she was, after all, a founding member of Pi Beta Phi). Both the President and First Lady were visiting a poultry farm. As they were touring the grounds, Mrs. Coolidge asked the farmer how he was able to produce so many eggs with so few roosters. The farmer explained that his roosters “performed their duty” nearly hundred of times each day.
"Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge," replied the First Lady.
The President, overhearing the remark, then asked the farmer, "Does each rooster service the same hen each time?"
"No," replied the farmer, "there are many hens for each rooster."
"Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge," replied the President (please, spare me your Bill Clinton jokes).
The obvious moral of the story is that men achieve better sexual performance when they are given the opportunity to mate with multiple partners rather than one partner multiple times. The empirical evidence behind President Coolidge’s principle is abundant. Male rats in an enclosed box with an array of fertile females will immediately begin having sex with the each female rat until exhausted. When finished, the available females may nudge and lick the male to continue, but he will not respond. Yet, if a new female is introduced into the box, the same rat becomes alert and will attempt to have sex with the new female. The same thing occurs in rams, cattle and sheep. Even if a female is removed and then later reintroduced in an attempt for a repeated sexual encounter, males won’t fall for it.
The Coolidge Effect is also at work in our own species. The numerous surveys on human infidelity all yield a similar conclusion: men desire more partners than women do. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss concludes that “all studies show sex differences in the incidence and frequency of affairs, with more men having affairs more often and with more partners than women.”
The pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey summed it up best in his Sexual Behavior of the Human Male: “There seems to be no question but that the human male would be promiscuous in his choice of sexual partners throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions… The human female is much less interested in a variety of partners.”
From an evolutionary standpoint, the Coolidge Effect makes sense. If a male’s desire is to have as many offspring as possible, he shouldn't want to mate with the same female multiple times. Once a female is pregnant, she becomes infertile. As a result, evolutionary psychology would predict that a male’s interest would wane after his first sexual encounter with a female. I’m sure Weezy knows what I’m talking about.
So call these rappers vulgar. Call them chauvinistic. Call them misogynistic. Just don’t call them evolutionarily misguided.
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