QC FYI: Somewhere In Between Love And One-Night Stands Is “The Booty Call”

Peter Jonason, a psychologist at the University of West Florida, decided to study the sexual phenomenon known as “the booty call”—that is, “a late night summons (often made via telephone) to arrange clandestine sexual liaisons on an ad hoc basis.”
He interviewed over 300 college students who in the last year either had been in a booty call relationship (123), in a committed relationship (97), or in a one-night stand (69) and asked how often they participated in physical acts that were primarily emotional as opposed to sexual. For example, hand-holding, hugging and kissing are emotional (used to form an intimate bond) but blowjobs, handjobs, and sex are primarily sexual (used to get off).
Here’s what he found:

“Booty call was a hybrid,” said Jonason, who is now a professor at the University of South Alabama. “We positioned it mostly in the middle [of sexual and romantic relationships], but we positioned it mostly on the side of sex.”

…Overall, emotional acts were less common in booty-call relationships compared with serious long-term relationships. On the other hand, sex acts were more common in booty-call relationships than in one-night stands, probably because the reoccurring nature of booty calls means more time for trying new things.

“It’s unlikely that a guy and a girl who meet at a nightclub tonight are going to go home and play, let’s say, dress-up,” Jonason said. “If they try something freaky, they may lose all chance of a sexual encounter with the other person.”

Surprisingly, he said, people who’d been in one-night stands reported more emotional acts than sexual acts, much like people in long-term relationships. The finding could be a result of the small sample size, or due to the revved-up nature of one-night stands.

“Emotional acts like kissing and hand-holding function as foreplay and act to escalate the relationship, in a very quick fashion, to sex,” Jonason said. “You have to get from zero to 60 in a really short time.”

Some of Jonason’s other research suggests that booty-call relationships often end when one partner pushes the other for something more committed than casual sex. Avoiding conversation and leaving right after sex can prevent those emotional bonds from forming.

So that’s why we’re willing to do freaky put-on-panties-and-throw-you-against-the-wall-sex with our booty calls but act like undersexed housecats whenever we have a one-night stand. Interesting study, but Jonason could have saved his money and learned all this at a bar any weekend. If booty-calls are a human phenomenon, it makes you wonder if our ancestors sent telegrams, smoke signals, and sorcerers to try and summon late night pieces of ass—when the donger is hungry, it refuses sleep!
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