A man, by contrast, is seeking a mate who will use his sperm and his money to produce babies: Consequently, he has always had an enormous incentive to seek youth and health in his mates: Those men who preferred to marry forty-year-old women rather than twenty-year-olds stood a small chance of begetting any children at all, let alone more than one or two: They also stood a large chance of inheriting a bunch of stepchildren from a previous marriage: They left fewer descendants than the men who always sought out the youngest, postpubertal females on offer: We would expect, therefore, that while women pay attention to cues of wealth and power, men pay attention to cues of health and youth.
This may seem a startlingly obvious thing to say. As Nancy Thornhill put it, "Surely no one has ever seriously doubted that men desire young, beautiful women and that women desire wealthy, high-status men:"'' The answer to her question is that sociologists do doubt it. Judging by their reaction to a recent study, only the most rigorous evidence will convince them: The study was done by David Buss of the University of Michigan, who asked a large sample of American students to rank the qualities they most preferred in a mate: He found that men preferred kindness, intelligence, beauty, and youth, while women preferred kindness, intelligence,
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wealth, and status: He was told that this may be the case in America, but it is not a universal facet of human nature.
So he repeated the study in thirty-seven different samples from thirty-three countries, asking over one thousand people, and found exactly the same result: Men pay more attention to youth and beauty, women to wealth and status: To which came this answer: Of course women pay more attention to wealth because men control it: If women controlled wealth, they would not seek it in their spouses. Buss looked again and found that American women who make more money than the average American woman pay more attention than average to the wealth of potential spouses, not less:" High-earning women value the earning capacity of their husbands more, not less, than low-earning women: Even a survey of fifteen powerful leaders of the feminist movement revealed that they wanted still more powerful men. As Buss 's colleague Bruce Ellis put it, "Women's sexual tastes become more, rather than less, discriminatory as their wealth, power, and social status increase.'
Many of Buss 's critics argued that he ignored context altogether: Different criteria of mate preference develop in different cultures at different times: To this Buss replied with a simple analogy. The amount of muscle on the average man is highly context-dependent: In the United States young men tend to be beefier about the shoulders than in Britain, perhaps partly because they eat better food and perhaps partly because their sports emphasize throwing strength rather than agility: Yet this does not negate the generalization that " men have more muscle on their shoulders than women." So, too, the fact that women pay more attention to men 's wealth in one place than in another does not negate the generalization that women pay more attention to the wealth of potential mates than men do."
The main difficulty with Buss 's study is that it fails to distinguish between a partner chosen as a spouse and a partner chosen for a fling: Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University asked a group of students to rank various attributes of potential mates according to four levels of intimacy: When seeking a marriage partner, intelligence is important to both sexes: When seeking a sexual SEXING THE MIND
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partner for a one-night stand, intelligence matters much less, especially to men: There is little doubt that people of both sexes are sensible enough to value kindness, compatibility, and wit in those with whom they may spend the rest of their lives."
The difficulty with measuring sexual preferences is that they are compromises: An aging ugly man does not mate with several young and beautiful women (unless he is very rich indeed). He settles for a faithful wife of the same age. A young woman does not mate faithfully with a wealthy tycoon. She chooses whatever is available, probably a slightly older man with no more money but a steady job: People lower their expectations according to their age, looks, and wealth: To discover just how different the sexual mentalities of men and women are, it is necessary to do a controlled experiment. Take an average man and an average women and give each the option of faithful marriage to a familiar partner or continual orgies with beautiful strangers. The experiment has not been done, and it is hard to imagine its getting a grant. But it need not be, for it is in effect possible to do exactly that experiment by looking inside people 's heads and examining their fantasies: Bruce Ellis and Don Symons gave 307 California students a questionnaire about their sexual fantasies. Had their subjects been Arabs or English people, the study would have been easily dismissed by social scientists because any sex differences that emerged could be attributed to social pressures from a sexist background.
But there can be no people on Earth or in history so steeped in the politically correct ideology that there are no psychological sex differences as students at a university in California: Any differences that emerged could therefore be regarded as conservative estimates for the species as a whole.
Ellis and Symons found that two things showed no sex differences at all. The first was the students ' attitudes toward their fantasies. Guilt, pride, and indifference were each as common among men as among women: And both sexes had a clear image of their fantasized partner 's face during the fantasy. On every other measure there were substantial differences between the men and the women: Men had more sexual fantasies and fantasized about more
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partners. One in three men said they fantasized about more than one thousand partners in their lives; only 8 percent of women imagined so many partners. Nearly half the women said they never switch partners during a sexual fantasy; only 12 percent of men never switch: Visual images of the partner(s) were more important for men than touching, the partner ' s response, or any feelings and emotions: The reverse was true of women, who were more likely to focus on their own responses and less likely to focus on the partner. Women overwhelmingly fantasized about sex with a familiar partner:"
These results are not alone: Every other study of sexual fantasy has concluded that "male sexual fantasies tend to be more ubiquitous, frequent, visual, specifically sexual, promiscuous, and active: Female sexual fantasies tend to be more contextual, emotive, intimate, and passive."' Nor need we rely on such surveys alone.
Two industries relentlessly exploit the sexual fantasizing of men and women: pornography and the publishing of romance novels: Pornography is aimed almost entirely at men. It varies little from a standard formula all over the world: "Soft porn " consists of pictures of naked or seminaked women in provocative positions: Such pictures are arousing to men, whereas pictures of naked (anonymous) men are not especially arousing to women: "A propensity to be aroused merely by the sight of males would promote random matings from which a female would have nothing to gain reproductively and a great deal to lose. " "
" Hard porn, " which depicts actual acts of sex, is almost invariably about the gratification of male lust by willing, easily aroused, varied, multiple, and physically attractive women (or men, in the case of gay porn): It is virtually devoid of context, plot, flirtation, courtship, and even much foreplay. There are no encumbering relationships, and the coupling duo are usually depicted as strangers: When two scientists showed heterosexual students pornographic films and measured their arousal by them, they found a consistent pattern of the kind common sense would suggest. First, men were more aroused than women. Second, men were aroused more by depictions of group sex than by films of a SEXING THE MIND