What Men Want

The Puzzle of Why Men Commit:

“WHY MEN WOULD ever commit to just one woman poses a puzzle. Since all an ancestral man needed to do to reproduce was to impregnate a woman, casual sex without commitment would have achieved this goal. For evolution to produce men who desire commitment or marriage and who are willing to devote years of investment to one woman, powerful adaptive advantages to that strategy over one of seeking casual sex, at least under some circumstances, must have been present.”

And the answer to that question is:

“One solution to this puzzle comes from the ground rules set by women. Since it is clear that many ancestral women required reliable signs of male commitment before consenting to sex, men who failed to commit would have suffered on the mating market. They might have failed to attract any women at all. Or perhaps they failed to attract the more desirable women and had to settle for those lower in mate value.”

Thus, in historical contexts, women’s desire for commitment as a precondition for sex largely shaped the rules.

“Women’s requirements for consenting to sex made it costly for most men to pursue a short-term mating strategy exclusively. In the economics of reproductive effort, the costs of not pursuing a long-term mate would have been prohibitively high for most men, and men would have benefited as their odds of attracting a mate, as well as attracting a more desirable mate, increased with their willingness to commit.”

When men provide commitment, they can punch above their weight relative to when they do not. In this sense, commitment operates as a bonus that increases access to more desirable mates:

The economics of the mating marketplace typically produces an asymmetry between the sexes in their ability to obtain a desirable mate in a committed as opposed to a temporary relationship. Most men can obtain a much more desirable mate if they are willing to commit to a long-term relationship because women typically desire a lasting commitment, and highly desirable women are in the best position to get what they want. In contrast, most women can obtain a much more desirable casual partner by offering sex without requiring commitment, since high-status men are willing to relax their standards and have sex with a variety of women if the short-term hookup carries no commitment. High-status men impose more stringent standards for a partner to whom they are willing to commit.”

Which brings us to male selection criteria:

“Much of what men want in a long-term mate coincides with what women want. Like women, men want committed partners who are intelligent, kind, dependable, emotionally stable, and healthy. For men as well as for women, these qualities are linked with mates who will make excellent partners, excellent allies, and excellent parents. These qualities could also signal good genetic material and low mutation loads, that is fewer copying errors within the partner’s genome—qualities that make for healthier and more robust children.”

Beyond this, certain criteria matter more for male mate choice than for female mate choice.

“But men face an adaptive problem not faced by women, at least not as poignantly choosing a fertile partner. To be reproductively successful, the most obvious criterion would be a woman’s ability to bear children. A woman with high reproductive capacity would be extremely valuable in evolutionary currencies. Men need some basis, however, on which to judge a woman’s reproductive capacity.”

However, fertility cannot be estimated that easily.

“A woman’s fertility is not stamped on her forehead or advertised with flashing neon signs. It cannot be observed directly, and it is not imbued in her social reputation. Her family is clueless. Even women themselves lack direct knowledge of their reproductive value.”

Nevertheless, for ancestral men, youth and health were the most useful cues for estimating a woman’s fertility. How these features are recognized and evaluated is discussed below.

Youth

“It is a fact of fertility that women’s reproductive capacity declines steadily with increasing age after the midtwenties. By the age of forty, a woman’s reproductive capacity is low. By fifty, it is close to zero. Women’s capacity for reproduction is compressed into a fraction of their lives.”

It is also notable that human females are the only land-living mammals to experience menopause, resulting in a complete cessation of reproductive capacity well before the end of the lifespan.

“Among European countries, the age difference ranges from about two years in Poland to roughly five years in Greece. Averaged across all countries, grooms are three years older than their brides, or roughly the difference expressly desired by men worldwide.”

To look beyond Europe:

“In summary, contemporary men prefer young women because they have inherited from their male ancestors an evolved preference that focused intensely on this cue to a woman’s reproductive value. This psychological preference translates into actual mating decisions much of the time—although as we will see later, people can’t always get what they want.”

Physical Beauty

“A preference for youth is merely the most obvious of men’s preferences linked to a woman’s reproductive capacity. Evolutionary logic leads to an even more powerful set of expectations for universal standards of beauty. Just as our standards for attractive landscapes embody cues such as water, game, and refuge, mimicking environments beneficial to our ancestors, so our standards for female beauty embody cues to women’s reproductive capacity. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but those eyes, and the minds behind the eyes, have been shaped by millions of years of human evolution.”

To put it bluntly—and with a touch of humor—men are, from a female mate-choice perspective, success objects, whereas women are, from a male mate-choice perspective, fertility objects.

“Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman’s health and youth: features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, and good muscle tone, and features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level. These physical cues to youth and health, and hence to reproductive capacity, constitute key elements of male standards of female beauty. Because physical and behavioral cues provide the most powerful observable evidence of a woman’s reproductive value, ancestral men evolved a preference for women who displayed these cues.”

In a nutshell:

“Men who failed to prefer qualities that signaled high reproductive value—men who preferred to marry gray-haired grandmothers lacking in smooth skin and firm muscle tone—would have left fewer offspring.”

We are not the descendants of those men.

Body Shape

“While men’s preferences for a particular body size vary, one preference for body shape that is fairly invariant, the psychologist Devendra Singh discovered, is the preference for a small waist size relative to hip size. Before puberty, boys and girls show a similar fat distribution. At puberty, however, a dramatic change occurs. Boys lose fat from their buttocks and thighs, while the release of estrogens in pubertal girls causes them to deposit fat in their lower trunk, primarily on their hips and upper thighs. Indeed, the volume of body fat in this region is 40 percent greater for women than for
men.

In other words, the waist-to-hip ratio is similar for the sexes before puberty, but after puberty women’s hip fat deposits cause their waist-to-hip ratio to become significantly lower than men’s. Healthy, reproductively capable women have a waist-to-hip ratio between 0.67 and 0.80, while healthy men have a ratio in the range of 0.85 to 0.95.”

In other words, a feminine body shape—but not BMI per se—signals fertility.

“Abundant evidence now shows that the waist-to-hip ratio is an accurate indicator of women’s reproductive status. Women with a lower ratio show earlier pubertal endocrine activity. Women with a higher ratio have more difficulty becoming pregnant, and those who do become pregnant do so at a later age than women with a lower ratio. The waist to-hip ratio is also an accurate indication of long-term health status. Diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems, previous stroke, and gallbladder disorders are linked with the distribution of fat, as reflected by the ratio. The link between the waist to-hip ratio and both health and reproductive status made it a reliable cue for ancestral
men’s preferences in a mate.”

The Importance of Physical Appearance

“Because of the bounty of fertility cues conveyed by a woman’s physical appearance, and because male standards of beauty have evolved to correspond to these cues, men have evolved to prioritize appearance and attractiveness in their mate preferences.”

This leads us straight to the next topic:

Men’s Status and Women’s Beauty

“Men value a woman’s attractiveness for reasons other than her reproductive value. The consequences of women’s attractiveness for a man’s social status are critical. Everyday folklore tells us that our mate is a reflection of ourselves. Men are particularly concerned about status, reputation, and hierarchies because elevated rank has always been an important means of acquiring the resources that make men attractive to women. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect that a man will be concerned about the effect that his mate has on his social status—an effect that has consequences for gaining additional resources and mating opportunities.”

In short, both men and women prefer partners—or allies—who are themselves desired by others.

“In my study of human prestige criteria, dating someone who is physically attractive greatly increases a man’s status, whereas it increases a woman’s status only somewhat. In contrast, a man who dates an unattractive woman experiences a moderate decreasein status, whereas a woman who dates an unattractive man experiences only a trivial decrease in status.”

This phenomenon is observed globally.

“These trends occur across cultures. When my research collaborators and I surveyed native residents of China, Poland, Guam, Romania, Russia, and Germany in parallel studies of human prestige criteria, we found that in each of these countries, acquiring a physically attractive mate enhances a man’s status more than a woman’s. In each country, having an unattractive mate hurts a man’s status more than it does a woman’s.”

Men Who Achieve Their Desires

“Although most men place a premium on youth and beauty, it is clear that not all men succeed in satisfying their desires. Men who lack the status and resources that women want, for example, generally have the most difficult time attracting good-looking young women and must settle for less than their ideal. Evidence comes from men who have historically been in a position to get exactly what they prefer, such as kings, emperors, despots, and other men of unusually high status.”

High-status men are more likely to marry younger women and thus fulfill their preference for youth.

“Marriage patterns in modern America confirm the fact that the men with the most resources are the best equipped to actualize their preferences. High-status men, such as the aging rock stars Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger and the movie stars George Clooney and Johnny Depp, frequently select women decades younger. One study examined the impact of a man’s occupational status on the woman he marries. Men who are high in occupational status are able to marry women who are considerably more physically attractive than are men who are low in occupational status. Indeed, a man’s occupational status seems to be the best predictor of the attractiveness of the woman he marries. Men in a position to attract younger women often do.”

An increase in income makes the fulfillment of these preferences more likely.

“Men who enjoy high status and income are apparently aware of their ability to attract women of higher value. In a study of a computer dating service involving 1,048 German men and 1,590 German women, the ethologist Karl Grammer found that as men’s income goes up, they seek younger partners. Each increment in income is accompanied by a decrease in the age of the woman sought.”

In short, mating heaven is experienced by only a few.

“Mate preferences are not invariably translated into actual mating decisions for all people all of the time, just as food preferences are not invariably translated into actual eating decisions for all people all of the time. But men who are in a position to get what they want often partner up with young, attractive women. Ancestral men who actualized these preferences experienced greater reproductive success than those who did not.”

One essential ingredient in the formula of desired traits is still missing: fidelity.

Fidelity

“For an ancestral man to reap the reproductive benefits of marriage, he had to seek reasonable assurances that his mate would indeed remain sexually faithful to him. Men who failed to be aware of these cues would have lost out in the currency of relative reproductive success. Failure to be sensitive to these cues so as to ensure their partner’s fidelity would have diverted years of her parental investment to another man’s children. Men who were indifferent to the potential sexual contact between their wives and other men would not have been successful in the game of differential reproductive success.”

In ancestral environments, premarital chastity served as a cue to likely future fidelity.

“Our male forebears solved this uniquely male adaptive problem by seeking qualities in a potential mate that might increase the odds of securing their paternity. At least two preferences in a mate could solve the problem for males: the desire for premarital chastity and the quest for postmarital sexual loyalty. Before the use of modern contraceptives, chastity provided a cue to the future certainty of paternity. On the assumption that a woman’s proclivities toward chaste behavior would be stable over time, her premarital chastity signaled her likely future fidelity.”

In modern environments, the likelihood of fidelity must be assessed differently than in ancestral conditions.

“From a man’s reproductive perspective, a more important cue to the certainty of paternity than virginity per se is the assurance of future fidelity. If men cannot reasonably require virginity, they can choose mates for sexual loyalty or fidelity. In fact, the study of short-term and long-term mating found that American men viewed having little sexual experience as desirable in a spouse. Furthermore, men saw promiscuity as especially undesirable in a permanent mate, rating it –2.07 on a scale of –3.00 to +3.00. The actual amount of prior sexual activity in a potential mate, rather than virginity per se, would have provided an excellent guide for ancestral men who sought to solve the problem of uncertainty of paternity. Indeed, the single best predictor of extramarital sex is premarital sexual permissiveness—people who have many sex partners before marriage tend to be more unfaithful than those who have few sex partners before marriage.”

“Modern men place a premium on fidelity. When American men in the study of short term and long-term partners evaluated sixty-seven possible characteristics for their desirability in a committed mateship, faithfulness and sexual loyalty emerged as the most highly valued traits. 60 All men give these traits the highest rating possible, an average of +2.85 on a scale of –3.00 to +3.00. Men regard unfaithfulness as the least desirable characteristic in a wife, rating it a –2.93, reflecting the high value that men place on fidelity. Men abhor promiscuity and infidelity in their wives. Unfaithfulness proves to be more upsetting to men than any other pain a spouse can inflict on her mate. Women also become extremely upset over an unfaithful mate, but several other factors, such as sexual aggressiveness, exceed infidelity in the grief they cause women.”

“The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, with its promises of sexual freedom and lack of possessiveness, apparently has had a limited impact on men’s preferences for sexual fidelity. Nor has the overhyped hookup culture on college campuses today significantly changed these preferences.”

A final note on fidelity:

“A man does not relax his desire for fidelity in his wife just because she takes birth control pills. This constant demonstrates the importance of our evolved sexual psychology—a psychology that was designed to deal with critical cues from an ancestral world but that continues to operate with tremendous force in today’s modern world of mating.”

The chapter ends with an unvarnished statement about the unequal distribution of mating advantages:

“These preferences upset some people because they are unfair. We can modify our physical attractiveness only in limited ways, and some people are born, or develop into, better-looking individuals than others. Beauty is not distributed democratically. A woman cannot alter her age, and a woman’s reproductive value declines more sharply with age than a man’s; evolution has dealt women a cruel hand, at least in this regard.”

The review of this chapter can be succinctly concluded with the following statement:

“Men worldwide want physically attractive, young, and sexually loyal wives who will remain faithful to them over the long run.”

I will probably not review Chapter 4, which deals with casual sex.