More recently, in his now classic work The Evolution of Human Sexuality, psychologist Donald Symons confidently proclaimed that “among all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to
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males.” In a foundational paper published in 1948, geneticist A. J. Bateman wasn’t hesitant to extrapolate his findings concerning fruit fly behavior to humans, commenting that natural selection encourages “an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females.”8
The sheer volume of evidence amassed to convince us that women are not particularly sexual beings is quite impressive.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have claimed to confirm the flaccidity of the female libido. One of the most cited studies in all of evolutionary psychology, published by 1989, is typical of the genre.9 An attractive undergraduate student volunteer walked up to an unsuspecting student of the opposite sex (who was alone) on the campus of Florida State University and said, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I find you very attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About 75 percent of the young men said yes. Many of those who didn’t asked for a “rain check.” But not one of the women approached by these attractive strangers accepted the offer. Case closed.
Seriously, this study really is one of the best known in all of EP. Researchers reference it to establish that women aren’t interested in casual sex, which is important if your theory posits that women instinctively barter sex to get things from men. After all, if they’re giving it away for free, the bottom falls out of the market, and other women are going to have a harder time exchanging sex for anything of value.
As mentioned above, underlying each of these theories, as well as evolutionary theory in general, is the notion that life can be conceptualized in terms of economics and game theory. The objective of the game is to send your genetic code into the future by producing the maximum possible number of offspring who survive and reproduce. Whether or not this dispersal leads to happiness is irrelevant. In his best-selling survey of EP, The Moral Animal, Robert Wright puts it succinctly, saying: “We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we’re designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals—sex, status, and so on—often brings happiness, at least for a while.) Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive.”10
This is a curious notion of productivity—at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as ifthere were only one possible meaning of “productivity.” This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that “productivity” is what makes an animal “effective”) and echoes the Old Testament notion that life must be endured, not enjoyed. These assumptions are embedded throughout the literature of evolutionary psychology. Ethologist/ primatologist Frans de Waal, one of the more open-minded philosophers of human nature, calls this Calvinist sociobiology.
The female interest in quality over quantity is thought to be important in two respects. First, she would clearly be interested in conceiving a child with a healthy man, so as to maximize the odds that her child would survive and prosper. “Women’s reproductive resources are precious and finite, and ancestral women did not squander them on just any random man,” writes evolutionary psychologist David Buss. “Obviously, women don’t consciously think that sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive,” Buss continues, “but women in the past who failed to exercise acumen before consenting to sex were left in the evolutionary dust; our ancestral mothers used emotional wisdom to screen out losers.”11 Buss doesn’t explain why there are still so many “losers” in the gene pool today if their ancestors were subject to such careful screening for thousands of generations.
While a substantial amount of female parental investment is biologically unavoidable in our species, evolutionary theorists believe that Homo sapiens is uniquely high in male parental investment (MPI) among primates. They argue that our high level of MPI forms the basis for the supposed universality of marriage. As Wright puts it, “In every human culture in the anthropological record, marriage . is the norm, and the family is the atom of social organization. Fathers everywhere feel love for their children.. This love leads fathers to help feed and defend their children, and teach them useful things.”12
Biologist Tim Birkhead agrees, writing, “The issue of paternity is at the core of much of men’s behaviour—and for good evolutionary reasons. In our primeval past, men who invested in children which were not their own would, on average, have left fewer descendents than those who reared only their own genetic offspring. As a consequence men were, and continue to be, preoccupied with paternity..”13
For now, we’ll briefly note a few of the questionable assumptions underlying this argument:
• Every culture is organized around marriage and the nuclear family.
• Human fathers that provided for only their own children would have left far more descendants than those less selective in their material generosity.
• Note how this presumes a discrete genetic basis for something as amorphous as “preoccupation with paternity.”
• In the ancestral environment, a man could know which children were biologically his, which presumes that:
• he understands that one sex act can lead to a child, and
• he has 100 percent certainty of his partner’s fidelity.
• A hunter could refuse to share his catch with other hungry people living in the close-knit band of foragers (including nieces, nephews, and children of lifelong friends) without being shamed, shunned, and banished from the community.
So, according to the standard narrative, as male parental investment translates into advantages for that man’s children (more food, protection, and education—other kids be damned), women would have evolved to choose mates with access to more of these resources and whose behavior indicated that they would share these resources only with her and her children (indications of selective generosity, fidelity, and sincerity).
But, according to this narrative, these two female objectives (good genes and access to a male’s resources) create conflictive situations for men and women—both within their relationship and with their same-sex competitors. Wright summarizes this understanding of the situation: “High male parental investment makes sexual selection work in two directions at once. Not only have males evolved to compete for scarce female eggs; females have evolved to compete for scarce male investment.”14
It’s no accident that the man who famously observed that power is the greatest aphrodisiac was not, by a long shot, good-looking.15 Often (in what we might call the Kissinger effect), the men with the greatest access to resources and status lack the genetic wealth signified by physical attractiveness. What’s a girl to do?
Conventional theory suggests she’ll marry a nice, rich, predictable, sincere guy likely to pay the mortgage, change the diapers, and take out the trash—but then cheat on him with wild, sexy, dangerous dudes, especially around the time she’s ovulating, so she’s more likely to have lover-boy’s baby. Known as the mixed strategy in the scientific literature, both males and females are said to employ their own version of the dark strategy in keeping with their opposed objectives in mating (females maximizing quality of mates and males maximizing quantity of mating opportunities). It’s a jungle out there.