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  • Chapter 5 – The Evolution of Desire

    Attracting a Partner

    “KNOWING WHAT WE desire in a mate provides no guarantee that we will succeed in getting what we want. Success hinges on providing signals that we will deliver what the partner we desire is seeking. Because ancestral women valued high status in men, for example, men have evolved motivation for acquiring and displaying status. Because ancestral men desired youth and health in potential mates, women have evolved motivations to appear young and healthful. Competition to attract a mate therefore involves besting one’s rivals in developing and displaying the characteristics most keenly sought by one’s desired partners.”

    So the core question is: how can individuals signal the possession of traits that the opposite sex desires?

    “Just as the successful angler uses the lure that most closely resembles food that fits the fish’s evolved preferences, so the successful competitor employs psychological tactics that most closely fit the evolved desires of the other sex. The characteristics that men and women value are keys to understanding the means of attracting a mate.”

    Once I took a look at The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships, where different lures for attracting a mate and their desired effects (as well as their often undesired side effects) are discussed in detail.

    “Attracting a mate does not occur, however, in a social vacuum. Desirable partners elicit strong social competition for their attention. Successful attraction therefore depends not merely on providing signals that one will fulfill a potential mate’s desires but also on counteracting the seductive signals of rivals.”

    So in the mating game, attraction involves not only self-promotion but also the denigration of rivals.


    “Derogatory tactics, like tactics of attraction, work because they exploit the psychological adaptations that predispose people to be sensitive to certain valuable qualities in possible mates, such as their resources or appearance. A man’s communication to a woman that his rival lacks ambition can be effective only if the woman is predisposed to reject men who have a low future resource potential. Similarly, a woman who tactically “slut-shames” her rival works only if men are predisposed to reject women who might have difficulty remaining faithful.”

    Derogation of rivals works only if corresponding mating preferences are present in the opposite sex.

    “The success of both attractive and derogatory tactics hinges on whether the target of desire is seeking a casual sex partner or a long-term committed mate. Consider the case of a woman who denigrates a rival by casually mentioning that the rival has slept with many men. If the man is seeking a spouse, this tactic is highly effective, because men dislike promiscuity in a potential wife. If the man is seeking casual sex, however, the woman’s tactic is likely to backfire, because most men pursuing easy sex are not bothered by a woman’s past promiscuity. Similarly, overt displays of sexuality are effective short-term tactics for women but are ineffective in the long run: such displays get men’s sexual attention but do not motivate them to invest or commit. The effectiveness of attraction, in short, depends critically on the temporal context of the mating. Men and women tailor their attraction techniques to the length of the relationship they seek.”

    Women emphasize different traits to the opposite sex depending on whether they seek a long-term partner or a short-term liaison.

    “The rules of play on the sexual field differ substantially from those of the marriage market. In long-term mating, both men and women prefer a long courtship—a process that permits evaluation of the nature and magnitude of the assets each person possesses and the costs they carry. Initial exaggerations of status or resources are revealed. Prior commitments to other mates surface. Children by former mates emerge. Prolonged assessment also allows both individuals to evaluate their mutual compatibility, which is essential for long-term mating.”

    In other words, prolonged courtship is essential for evaluating and selecting a long-term partner and is not merely a cultural artifact of the Victorian era.

    “Casual affairs truncate this assessment, dramatically increasing the opportunities for deception. Exaggeration of prestige, status, and income may go undetected. Prior commitments remain concealed. Information that damages a reputation comes too late. Casual mating, in short, is a rocky terrain where manipulation and deception can trip the unwary with every step. To compound this problem, deception usually occurs in the domains that are most important—status, resources, and commitment for women, appearance and sexual fidelity for men, and personality qualities for both.“

    Interestingly, some highly successful Casanovas seem to exploit this dynamic by convincingly signaling commitment—precisely the domain most valued in long-term mating—despite lacking genuine intent.

    “For every attractive and sexually willing woman there are usually dozens of men who would consent to have sex with her. Women can be very choosy because they have so many options to choose from. In committed relationships, in contrast, this level of choosiness is a luxury that only very desirable women can afford.”

    Generosity and Resource Display

    “Typically, men tell women that their rivals are poor, have no money, lack ambition, or drive cheap cars. Women are far less likely to derogate a rival’s resources; when they do, the tactic is less effective than when men do it.”

    “Telling a woman that the rival will do poorly in his profession or lacks ambition is highly effective in the committed mating market but relatively ineffective when it comes to competition for casual sex. These findings mesh perfectly with the preferences that women express in the same two contexts—desiring immediate resources from brief affairs and reliable future resources from enduring mates.”

    “Wearing costly clothing works equally well in both contexts. Women shown slides of different men are more attracted to men who wear expensive clothing, such as three-piece suits, sports jackets, and designer jeans, than to men who wear cheap clothing, such as tank tops and T-shirts. Clothing has this effect on women whether they are evaluating a man as a marital or sex partner, perhaps because expensive clothing signals both immediate resources and future resource potential. The anthropologists John Marshall Townsend and Gary Levy have verified that the effect of the expense and status of clothing in attracting women is robust across any sort of involvement, from merely having coffee with a man to marriage.”

    While resource signals must be tailored to the mating context, costly clothing appears to function as a effective signal across both short- and long-term contexts.

    “Displaying honesty is in fact a powerful tactic a man can use to obtain a long-term mate. This tactic conveys that the man is not simply seeking a transient sex partner. Of the 130 identified tactics to attract a female mate, three of the top ones suggest openness and honesty—acting truthful with the woman, communicating feelings to her directly and openly, and simply being oneself. All of these tactics are among the most effective 10 percent of all attraction tactics that men can use.”

    In life more broadly, honesty tends to be a good long-term strategy.

    “Because of the adaptive problem historically imposed on women by men’s dual sexual strategy of short-term and long-term relationships, tactics that allow women a clear window for evaluating a man’s actual characteristics and intentions prove to be highly attractive. Signals of dishonesty conceal those characteristics and intentions, rendering that assessment window cloudy or opaque.”

    Honesty enables more effective mate choice for both potential partners.

    “If signs of commitment are highly effective, cues that resources are already committed elsewhere undermine attraction. Roughly 30 percent of the men on the Tinder app, which is widely regarded as a short-term mating app, are married. Among the men who patronize singles bars, many are married or have steady relationships. Some have children who command large shares of their resources. These men report removing their wedding rings before entering the bars. After intensive grilling of men at one singles bar, researchers found that “12 people admitted that they were married. . . . We suspected that others were married, by somewhat rather undefinable qualities, sometimes connected with a rather mysterious withholding of various kinds of information about everyday life styles.” Because being married clearly interferes with attracting women, it becomes a liability for men who fail to conceal it.”

    Married men or men with children have fewer resources available for a new relationship.

    “University students confirm that knowledge of prior commitments hinders a man’s efforts to attract a woman. Indeed, out of eighty-three tactics that men can perform to render a rival less attractive to women, mentioning that he has a serious girlfriend is seen as the most effective one.”

    Men undermine other men’s mating efforts by mentioning that they are in a serious relationship.

    Showing Bravado and Self-Confidence

    “Displays of masculine self-confidence prove effective for men seeking to attract mates but are significantly more effective in attracting casual than committed mates. Acting conceited or macho, bragging about one’s accomplishments, and showing off are all judged by college students to be more effective for men in attracting sex partners than wives.”

    Displaying Fidelity

    “In light of men’s emphasis on fidelity in a committed relationship, displays of fidelity should be paramount in women’s tactics of attraction. Faithfulness displays, such as honesty and trustworthiness, signal that the woman is pursuing a long-term mating strategy and that she is doing so without deception and exclusively with one man.

    Out of 130 acts of attraction, remaining faithful, avoiding sex with other men, and showing devotion proved to be the three most effective tactics for attracting a committed mate. Participants rated all three over 6.5, with 7.0 indicating the highest possible effectiveness. Signals of fidelity offer a man a solution to one of the most important mating challenges he faces—the problem of ensuring his paternity in his children.

    The centrality of fidelity shows up indirectly in the tactics employed by women to derogate mating competitors. Saying that a rival cannot stay loyal to one man was judged to be the single most effective derogation tactic for a woman to use in the marriage market. Calling a rival a slut, saying she was loose, or telling others that she slept around were in the top 10 percent of effective derogation tactics.”

    The term slut is more derogatory than the term Casanova:

    “The fact that women exploit men’s desire for faithful mates to undermine their rivals is reinforced by the prevalence of derogatory sexual terms in human language. Although there are terms for men who are promiscuous, such as player, lady’s man, Lothario, and Don Juan, they are fewer in number and carry less negative valence than comparable words for women. And sometimes such terms are applied to men with admiration or envy rather than as put-downs. In contrast, John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor illustrates the range of insults hurled by women at other women. An English woman competes against a French woman by using these labels to cast aspersions on her character: harlot, whore, sow, bawd, strawgirl, tumbler, mattressback, windowgirl, galleywench, fastfanny, nellie, nightbird, shortheels, bum-bessie, furrowbutt, coxswain, conycatcher, tart, arsebender, canvasback, hipflipper, hardtonguer, bedbug, breechdropper, giftbox, craterbutt, piss-pallet, narycherry, poxbox, flapgap, codhopper, bellylass, trollop, joy-girl, bumpbacon, strumpet, slattern, chippie, pipecleaner, hotpot, back-bender, leasepiece, spreadeagle, sausage-grinder, cornergirl, codwinker, nutcracker, hedgewhore, fleshpot, cotwarmer, hussy, and stumpthumper. The French woman uses a comparably long list of counter-derogations in her native language, including bas-cul, consoeur, poupinette, briballeuse, gaure, gourgandine, saffrete, redresseuse, drue, fille de joie, champisse, and marane. In literature as in life, denigrating a competitor’s promiscuity decreases her attractiveness in the mating market.”

    Sexual Signaling

    “Most men want one benefit from casual mating: low-cost sex with attractive women. For women, therefore, explicit overtures that signal sexual availability or receptivity are exceptionally effective tactics. These include talking seductively, making a man think of having sex with her, and simply asking a man if he wants to have sex. These attraction tactics are maximally effective for women in casual mating contexts.”

    But women also sometimes lure attractive men into relationships by signaling sexual availability:

    “Signals of sexual accessibility are sometimes part of a larger strategy to lure a man into a long-term relationship. Sometimes the only way a woman can gain the attention and interest of a man is by offering herself as sexually available with no apparent strings attached. If the costs in resources and commitment are made low enough, many men succumb to sexual opportunity. Once a woman gains sexual access to a man of her choice, her proximity offers opportunities for insinuating herself, for making the man depend on her for various functions, and for gradually escalating both the benefits he will receive by staying in the relationship and the costs he will incur if he leaves her. What seems initially like costless sex without strings attached ends up being transformed into commitment.”

    The Fitness Signaling Hypothesis

    “According to Geoffrey Miller’s fitness signaling hypothesis, humor is one among an array of uniquely human abilities that convey genetic quality to a potential mate. Others include high verbal dexterity (a large and fluent vocabulary and facility with language and its nuances), intelligence, artistic ability, musicality, and creativity. Even displaying moral virtues such as honesty, cooperativeness, fairness, and conscientiousness can be signals.”

    The discussion of these signaling mechanisms in this book remains relatively brief. Other books treat this topic in greater depth.

    “Selecting an intelligent mate confers this bounty of adaptive benefits on oneself and one’s children. The genetic benefits that intelligence provides to offspring may be important as well, but it seems rash to discount how intelligence helps to solve a host of adaptive problems linked with enabling the mate selector and children to survive and thrive. Displays of morality, undoubtedly important in attracting a mate, also signal that one will be a good and generous partner, a good and fair cooperator, a self-sacrificing parent, and a high-quality long-term ally—all qualities that directly solve practical adaptive problems.”

    Beyond mere fitness indicators, intelligence and moral character function as mate-choice signals because they reliably indicate a partner’s capacity to solve practical adaptive problems over the long term.

    The Sexes at Cross-Purposes

    “Success at attracting a mate depends on more than grasping the context and the intentions of a potential partner. It also hinges on surpassing the competition. For this reason, men and women do not merely enhance their own attractiveness; they also derogate their rivals. While making themselves appear attractive by exhibiting the qualities sought by the other sex, people also denigrate their rivals by making them appear to lack these desired qualities.”

    In short-term mating contexts, deception is particularly prevalent.

    “Perhaps more than in any other part of the mating arena, in casual sex men and women suffer from the strategies of the opposite sex. Men deceive women by feigning an interest in commitment to achieve a quick sexual score. They also feign confidence, status, kindness, and resources that they lack. Women who succumb to this deception give up a valuable sexual benefit at bargain-basement prices. But women battle back by insisting on stronger cues to commitment and by feigning interest in casual sex as a means of concealing their long-term intentions. Just as men deploy tactics to sexually exploit women, women turn the tables and exploit men’s sexual desires. Some men take the bait and risk becoming ensnared in a web of hidden costs.”

    Women’s choosiness compresses the mating market: Many men fail to meet women’s minimum mate-selection criteria and are eliminated early from the mating market.

    “women’s high standards for a mate: their choosiness dramatically shrinks the effective pool of eligible men. Many men are eliminated from contention for failing to pass even preliminary screening. This leaves just a few survivors—men of reasonable social status, with adequate self-confidence and good resource potential, who are willing to commit—over whom women then compete. Those who succeed in attracting a lasting mate then face the next adaptive problem—staying together.”

    In a nutshell:

    Attracting a partner is fundamentally a problem of signaling: success depends on displaying traits the opposite sex values while simultaneously counteracting rivals’ signals. These tactics are highly context-dependent, differing sharply between short-term and long-term mating, with courtship length, honesty, fidelity, and resource commitment becoming critical in long-term contexts, and deception and sexual signaling more prevalent in short-term ones. Because mating occurs in competitive environments with conflicting interests, both sexes engage in self-promotion and rival derogation, exploiting the other’s evolved preferences and vulnerabilities. Ultimately, traits such as intelligence, moral character, and honesty function not merely as fitness indicators, but as signals of a partner’s capacity to solve practical adaptive problems over time.

  • Chapter 4 – The Evolution of Desire

    Casual Sex

    Some individuals are more open to affairs or short-term liaisons than others:

    “Although women and men alike have the whole repertoire of mating strategies—long-term mating, short-term mating, mate poaching, infidelity, and so on—there do exist somewhat stable individual differences, sometimes called sociosexual orientation. Some people are strongly inclined to long-term, high-investment mating. They want sex in the context of a loving committed relationship. Others are more inclined to short-term mating; casual sex without love or encumbering commitment feels fine to them. Whereas long-term maters search for “the one and only,” short-term maters thrive on sexual variety and tend to experience a larger number of sex partners.”

    Sociosexual tendencies are methodologically difficult to study:

    “In spite of the prevalence and evolutionary significance of casual sex, until recently most scientific research on human mating has centered on long-term mating. The typically transient and secretive nature of casual sex makes it difficult to study. In Alfred Kinsey’s classic research on sexual behavior, for example, questions about extramarital sex prompted many people to refuse to be interviewed altogether. Among those who did consent to an interview, many declined to answer questions about extramarital sex.”

    Physiological Clues to Sexual Strategies and the Mystery of Female Orgasm

    “Existing adaptations in our psychology, anatomy, physiology, and behavior reflect prior evolutionary selection pressures. Just as our current fear of snakes betrays an ancestral hazard, so our sexual anatomy and physiology reveal an ancient story of short-term sexual strategies. Important clues to that story have come to light through careful studies of men’s testes size, ejaculate volume, variations in sperm production, and a possible function of female orgasm.”

    Both in ancestral environments and today, humans cannot be characterized as an exclusively pair-bonding species.

    “Another clue to the evolutionary existence of casual mating comes from variations in sperm production and insemination. In a study to determine the effect of separating mates from each other on sperm production, thirty-five couples agreed to provide ejaculates resulting from sexual intercourse, either from condoms or from the flowback (the gelatinous mass of seminal fluid spontaneously ejected by a woman at various points after intercourse).8 All the couples had been separated from each other for varying intervals of time.

    Men’s sperm count increased dramatically with the increasing amount of time the couple had been apart. The more time spent apart, the more sperm the husbands inseminated in their wives when they finally had sex. When the couples spent 100 percent of their time together, men inseminated only 389 million sperm per ejaculate. But when the couples spent only 5 percent of their time together, men inseminated 712 million sperm per ejaculate, or almost double the amount. Sperm insemination increases when other men’s sperm might be inside the wife’s reproductive tract at the same time, as a consequence of the opportunity provided for extramarital sex by the couple’s separation. This increase in sperm is precisely what would be expected if humans had an ancestral history of some casual sex and marital infidelity.”

    This observation echoes the often-voiced claim that spending less than all of one’s time together may increase tension and passion within a romantic relationship.

    “The physiology of women’s orgasm provides another clue to an evolutionary history of short-term mating. Once it was thought that a woman’s orgasm functions to make her sleepy and keep her reclined, thereby decreasing the likelihood that sperm will flow out and increasing the likelihood of conceiving. But if the function of orgasm were to keep the woman reclined so as to delay flowback, then more sperm would be retained when flowback is delayed. That does not happen. Rather, there is no link between the timing of the flowback and the number of sperm retained.

    Women on average eject roughly 35 percent of the sperm within thirty minutes of the time of insemination. If the woman has an orgasm, however, she retains 70 percent of the sperm and ejects only 30 percent. Lack of an orgasm leads to the ejection of more sperm. This evidence is consistent with the theory that women’s orgasm functions to suck up the sperm from the vagina into the cervical canal and uterus, increasing the probability of conception.”

    Taken together, these findings suggest that men who are able to sexually satisfy their partner may have a higher likelihood of successful insemination.

    “Female orgasm may function as a selection device to choose which man will end up fertilizing her eggs, a man who is not necessarily her husband. Women are more orgasmic with regular mates who have good genetic quality, as indexed by anatomical measures of symmetry and judgments of physical attractiveness. But if they are having affairs, women preferentially choose affair partners of high genetic quality and then experience more frequent sexual orgasms in the context of their liaisons.”

    In this sense, female orgasm can be understood as a potential mate choice mechanism, biasing fertilization toward partners of higher genetic quality.

    Lust

    “For ancestral men, the primary benefit of casual sex was a direct increase in the number of offspring. Men consequently faced a key adaptive problem—how to gain sexual access to a variety of women.

    One psychological solution to the problem of securing sexual access to a variety of partners is old-fashioned lust. Men have evolved a powerful desire for sexual access to a variety of women.”

    From an evolutionary viewpoint, male lust functions as a drive toward sexual variety, which would historically have increased the likelihood of impregnating multiple partners.

    “Men reported “swiping right” on dozens or even hundreds of female profiles in the hope that a few would reciprocate. Women were considerably more selective, picking just one or a few for potential matches. Male lust, seemingly insatiable, drives men’s search for sexual variety in the modern world of Internet mating.”

    Standards for Short-Term Mates

    “Another psychological solution to securing a variety of casual sex partners is men’s relaxation of their standards for acceptable partners. High standards for attributes such as age, intelligence, personality, and marital status function to exclude the majority of potential mates from consideration. Relaxed standards ensure the presence of more eligible players.”

    In a short-term mating context, men are often looking for the easy lay.

    “Men also relaxed their standards for a wide variety of other characteristics. Out of the sixty-seven characteristics nominated as potentially desirable in a casual mate, men required lower levels of such assets as charm, athleticism, education, generosity, honesty, independence, kindness, intellectuality, loyalty, sense of humor, sociability, wealth, responsibility, spontaneity, cooperativeness, and emotional stability. Men’s relaxation of standards helps to solve the problem of gaining access to a variety of sex partners.”

    In short-term mating, men apply a different filter: not who would make a good partner, but who is most sexually available.

    “Lowered standards, however, are still standards. Indeed, men’s standards for sexual affairs reveal a precise strategy to gain sexual variety. Compared with their long-term preferences, men seeking casual sex disliked women who were prudish or conservative or had a low sex drive. In contrast to their long-term preferences, men valued sexual experience in a potential temporary sex partner, which reflects a belief that sexually experienced women are more sexually accessible to them than women who are sexually inexperienced. Men disliked promiscuity or indiscriminate sexuality in a potential wife or committed mate but believed that promiscuity was either neutral or even mildly desirable in a potential sex partner. Promiscuity, high sex drive, and sexual experience in a woman probably signal an increased likelihood that a man can gain sexual access for the short run. Prudishness and low sex drive, in contrast, signal a difficulty in gaining sexual access and thus interfere with men’s short-term sexual strategy.”

    Sexual Fantasies

    “Men’s and women’s sexual fantasies differ greatly. Studies from Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States show that men have roughly twice as many sexual fantasies as women. In their sleep men are more likely than women to dream about sexual events. Men’s sexual fantasies more often include strangers, multiple partners, and anonymous partners. Most men report that during a single fantasy episode they sometimes change sexual partners; most women rarely change sex partners within one fantasy. In Hunt’s survey, 32 percent of men but only 8 percent of women reported having imagined sexual encounters with over 1,000 different partners in their lifetime. Fantasies about group sex occurred among 33 percent of the men but only 18 percent of the women. A typical male fantasy, as one man told another researcher, is having “six or more naked women licking, kissing, and fellating me.” Another man reported the fantasy of “being the mayor of a small town filled with nude girls from 20 to 24. I like to take walks, and pick out the best-looking one that day, and she engages in intercourse with me. All the women have sex with me any time I want.”37 Numbers and novelty are key ingredients of men’s fantasy lives.”

    There are clear sex differences in both the volume and content of sexual fantasies.

    “Male fantasies are heavily visual, focusing on smooth skin and body parts, notably breasts, genitals, buttocks, legs, and mouths. During their sexual fantasies, 81 percent of men but only 43 percent of women focus on visual images rather than feelings. Attractive women with lots of exposed skin who show signs of easy access and no commitment are key components of men’s fantasies. As Bruce Ellis and Donald Symons observe, “The most striking feature of [male fantasy] is that sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of encumbering relationships, emotional elaboration, complicated plot lines, flirtation, courtship, and extended foreplay.” These fantasies reveal a psychology attuned to seeking sexual access to multiple partners.”

    In contrast to this, many female sexual fantasies tend to center on a familiar partner, often a long-term mate, and place greater emphasis on emotional connection and relational context:

    “Women’s sexual fantasies, in contrast, often contain familiar partners. Fifty-nine percent of American women but only 28 percent of American men reported that their sexual fantasies typically focused on someone with whom they were already romantically and sexually involved. Emotions and personality are crucial for women. Forty-one percent of the women but only 16 percent of the men reported that they focused most heavily on the personal and emotional characteristics of the fantasized partner. And 57 percent of women but only 19 percent of men reported that they focused on feelings as opposed to visual images. As one woman observed: “I usually think about the guy I am with. Sometimes I realize that the feelings will overwhelm me, envelop me, sweep me away.” Women emphasize tenderness, romance, and personal involvement in their sexual fantasies. They also pay more attention to how their partner responds to them than to visual images of the partner.”

    Hooking Up and Sexual Regret

    “The differing nature of sexual regret in men and women offers further evidence of men’s evolved psychology of short-term mating. Regret is a powerful emotion. We rue the mistakes we have made, a feeling that probably functions to help us make better decisions in the future. Sexual regret occurs in two domains—missed sexual opportunities (sexual omission) and committed sexual actions (sexual commission). In studies of more than 23,000 individuals, men more than women reported regretting missed sexual opportunities. These included not having more sex when younger, not having more sex when single, and failing to act on a sexual opportunity with a particularly attractive person. Women were more likely to regret sexual acts of commission, such as losing virginity to the wrong person, hooking up with a person with low mate value when drunk, and having sex with someone who was not interested in a relationship.”

    Men regret not acting, women regret acting.

    “Men report that their ideal outcome of a hookup would be more hookups in the future. Women are more likely to report that their ideal outcome would be a romantic relationship. Following hookups, women are more likely than men to report feeling “used” and experiencing depressed mood. … The overall gender differences in sexual regret and post-hookup feelings, however, provide additional clues that reveal a fundamental difference in men’s and women’s sexual psychology.”

    The Closing Time Effect and the Post-Orgasm Shift

    “Men’s shift in perceptions of women’s attractiveness near closing time occurs regardless of how much alcohol they have consumed. Whether a man has consumed a single drink or six drinks has no effect on the shift in his view of women as more attractive near closing time. The often noted “beer goggles” phenomenon, whereby women presumably are viewed as more attractive with men’s increasing intoxication, may instead be attributable to a psychological mechanism sensitive to decreasing opportunities for sexual success. As the evening progresses and a man has not yet been successful in picking up a woman, he views the remaining women in the bar as increasingly attractive, a shift that should increase his motivation to seek sex from the remaining women in the bar.”

    In this context, men can be understood as opportunistic maters, adjusting their preferences as opportunities diminish.

    “Another perceptual shift may take place after men have an orgasm with a casual sex partner with whom they wish no further involvement. Some men report viewing a sex partner as highly attractive before orgasm, but then after orgasm, a mere ten seconds later, viewing her as less attractive or even unappealing. Martie Haselton and I found that these shifts occur primarily among men who are dispositionally inclined to pursue a short-term mating strategy. They do not occur for long-term-oriented men, and they do not occur for women regardless of mating strategy. The negative shift in attraction following orgasm may function to prompt a hasty postcopulatory departure to reduce risks to the man such as getting involved in an unwanted commitment.”

    Prostitution

    The scale of prostitution across societies is remarkable:

    “Men’s desire for casual sex creates a demand for prostitution; many men, including married men, are willing to pay for casual sex. Prostitution occurs in nearly every society. In the United States, there are an estimated 1 million active prostitutes, although prostitution is legal only in some counties of the state of Nevada. In Germany, where prostitution is legal, there are roughly 400,000 part-time or full-time prostitutes. Estimates suggest 500,000 prostitutes in Mexico, 800,000 in the Philippines, 3 million in India, and 5 million in China. In all cultures, men are overwhelmingly the consumers. Kinsey found that 69 percent of American men had been to a prostitute, and for 15 percent of them prostitution was a regular sexual outlet. The corresponding numbers for women were so low that they were not even reported.”

    The Hidden Side of Women’s Short-Term Sexuality

    “The reproductive benefits to men of casual sex are large and direct, but the benefits that women reap from short-term mating were largely neglected until evolutionary psychologists began to investigate them. Although women cannot increase the number of children they bear by having sex with multiple partners, they can gain other important advantages from casual sex as one strategy within a flexible sexual repertoire. Ancestral women must have sought casual sex for its benefits in some contexts at some times, because if there had been no willing women, men could not possibly have pursued their own interest in short-term sex.

    For ancestral women, unlike men, seeking sex as an end in itself is unlikely to have been a powerful goal of casual mating, for the simple reason that sperm have never been scarce. Access to more sperm would not have increased a woman’s reproductive success. Minimal sexual access is all a woman needs, and there is rarely a shortage of men willing to provide the minimum. Additional sperm are unnecessary for fertilization.”

    So women must have had different reasons than men, in ancestral times, for seeking or being open to short-term sex.

    “One key benefit of casual sex to women is immediate access to resources.”

    “Modern women’s preferences in a lover provide psychological clues to the evolutionary history of the material and economic benefits women gained from brief sexual encounters. Women especially value four characteristics in temporary lovers more than in committed mates—spending a lot of money on them from the beginning, giving them gifts from the beginning, having an extravagant lifestyle, and being generous with their resources. Women judge these attributes to be mildly desirable in husbands but quite desirable in casual sex partners. Women dislike frugality and signs of stinginess in a lover; these qualities signal that the man is reluctant to devote an immediate supply of resources. These psychological preferences reveal that securing immediate resources is a key adaptive benefit that women secure through affairs.”

    Beyond resources, affairs can function as a way for women to evaluate potential long-term mates under real conditions:

    “Sexual affairs also provide an opportunity to evaluate potential husbands by supplying additional information that is unavailable through mere dating without sexual intercourse. Given the tremendous reproductive importance of selecting the right husband, women devote great effort to evaluation and assessment. Affairs prior to marriage allow a woman to assess the intentions of the prospective mate—whether he is seeking a brief sexual encounter or a marriage partner, and hence the likelihood that he will abandon her. An affair allows her to evaluate his personality characteristics—how he holds up under stress and how reliable he is. It allows her to see through any deception that might be present—whether he is truly free or already involved in a serious relationship. And it allows her to assess his value as a mate or to learn how attractive he is to other women.”

    Affairs also allow women to test sexual compatibility.

    “Sexual intercourse before marriage provides important information about the long-term viability of a couple’s relationship by giving them the opportunity to evaluate their sexual compatibility. Through sex women can gauge such qualities as a man’s sensitivity, his concern with her happiness, and his flexibility.”

    So beyond resources, women’s short-term mating tendencies seem to function mainly as a way to evaluate long-term mate potential:

    “Women’s preferences for short-term mates reveal hints that they use casual sex to evaluate possible marriage partners. If women sought short-term mates simply for opportunistic sex, as many men do, certain characteristics would not be particularly bothersome, such as a man’s preexisting committed relationship or his promiscuity. Women, like men, would find promiscuity in a prospective lover to be neutral or mildly desirable. In truth, however, women regard a preexisting relationship or promiscuous tendencies in a prospective lover as highly undesirable, since they signal unavailability as a potentially committed partner or the repeated pursuit of a short-term sexual strategy. These characteristics decrease the woman’s odds of entering a long-term relationship with the man. They convey powerfully that the man cannot remain faithful and is a poor long-term mating prospect. And they interfere with the function of extracting immediate resources, since men who are promiscuous or whose resources are tied up in a serious relationship have fewer unencumbered assets to allocate.”

    In a nutshell:

    “Women’s desires in a short-term sex partner strongly resemble their desires in a husband. In both cases, women want someone who is kind, romantic, understanding, exciting, stable, healthy, humorous, and generous with his resources. In both contexts, women desire men who are tall, athletic, and attractive. Men’s preferences, in marked contrast, shift abruptly with the mating context. The relative constancy of women’s preferences in both scenarios supports the hypothesis that some women see casual mates as potential husbands and thus impose high standards for both.”

    Mate Switching and Backup Mates

    “A lover may also serve as a potential replacement for a woman’s regular mate if he should desert, become ill or injured, prove to be infertile, or die, which were not unusual events in ancestral environments. Her regular mate might fail to return from the hunt, for example, or be killed in a tribal war. Men’s status might change over time—for instance, a woman married to a head man who is deposed, whose position is usurped, and whose resources are co-opted might benefit by positioning herself to replace him quickly, without having to start over again. A woman who must delay replacing her mate by starting over is forced to incur the costs of a new search for a mate while her own desirability declines. Women benefit from having other men as potential backup mates.”

    Affairs tend to serve different functions for men and women:

    “Evidence for the mate-switching function of casual sex in humans comes from several sources. Women tend to have affairs when they are unhappy with their primary relationship, whereas men who have affairs are no less happy with their marriages than men who refrain. Heidi Greiling and I conducted the second study, which revealed that women sometimes have affairs when they are trying to replace their current mate or in order to make it easier to break off with a current mate.”

    Costs of Casual Sex

    “All sexual strategies carry costs, and casual sex is no exception. Men risk contracting sexually transmitted diseases, acquiring a reputation as a womanizer or “man-whore,” or suffering injury from a jealous husband. A significant proportion of murders across cultures occur because jealous men suspect their mates of infidelity. Unfaithful married men risk retaliatory affairs by their wives and costly divorces. Short-term sexual strategies also take time, energy, and economic resources.

    Women sometimes incur more severe costs than men do. Women risk impairing their desirability if they develop a reputation for promiscuity, since men prize fidelity in a potential long-term mate. Women known as promiscuous suffer reputational damage even in relatively promiscuous cultures, such as among the Swedes and the Ache Indians.”

    Beyond the risk of STDs, a major cost for women is that men generally do not want promiscuity in a long-term partner.

    Circumstances Favorable for Casual Sex

    “The transitions between committed matings offer additional opportunities for casual sex. Upon divorce, for example, it is crucial to reassess one’s value on the current mating market. The presence of children from the marriage generally lowers the desirability of divorced people. The elevated status that comes with being more advanced in their career, conversely, may raise their desirability. Precisely how all these changed circumstances affect a particular person may be evaluated by brief encounters, which allow a person to gauge more precisely his or her desirability on the mating market.”

    Short-term relationships can be used to gauge one’s current standing in the mating hierarchy.

    “Another factor that is likely to foster brief sexual encounters—although differently for men and women—is one’s future desirability as a mate. A man at the apprenticeship stage of a promising career may pursue only brief affairs, figuring that he will be able to attract a more desirable long-term mate later on, when his career is closer to its peak. A woman whose current desirability is low may reason that she cannot attract a husband of the quality she desires and so may pursue carefree short-term relationships as an alternative to settling for someone who does not meet her standards.”

    Like the trajectory of a stock, one’s value on the mating market can dip temporarily—and in those phases it can make sense to wait for better times before committing to a long-term partner.

    Casual Sex as a Source of Power

    “Historically, the scientific study of mating has focused nearly exclusively on marriage. Human anatomy, physiology, psychology, and behavior, however, betray an ancestral past filled with opportunistic sex and affairs. The obvious reproductive advantages of such affairs to men may have blinded scientists to the benefits they had for women as well. Affairs involve willing women. Willing women seek or require benefits.”

    For both men and women, it can be unsettling to get a clear view of the other sex’s mating psychology:

    “This picture of human nature may be disturbing to some. Women may not be comforted by the ease with which men are sometimes willing to jump into bed with near-strangers. Men may not be comforted by the knowledge that their partners continue to scan the mating terrain, encourage other men by flirting, offer hints of sexual accessibility, cultivate backup mates, and sometimes cheat with impunity. Human nature can be alarming.

    But viewed from another perspective, our possession of a complex repertoire of mating strategies gives us far more power, far more flexibility, and far more control of our own destiny.”

    In modern societies, the relative anonymity of urban living reduces the reputational costs of casual sex.

    To cut straight to the chapter’s conclusion:

    “Acknowledging the full diversity of our mating strategies may violate our socialized conceptions of one-and-only bliss. But simultaneously, this knowledge gives us greater power to design our own mating destiny than any humans in our evolutionary past ever possessed.”

    The implication is that a nuanced understanding of human sexual nature allows individuals to recognize and flexibly navigate different mating strategies as circumstances change.

  • Chapter 3 – The Evolution of Desire

    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.



  • Chapter 2 – Part 3 – The Evolution of Desire

    What Women Want – Desired Traits

    Size and Strength

    “When the great basketball player Magic Johnson revealed that he had slept with thousands of women, he inadvertently revealed women’s preference for mates who display physical and athletic prowess. The numbers may be shocking, but the preference is not. Physical characteristics, such as athleticism, size, and strength, convey important information that women use in making a mating decision.”

    Physical size may matter to women in a way somewhat comparable to how breast size can matter to men. Both features are experienced as attractive by the other sex.

    This leads us to the well-known frog example:

    “The importance of physical characteristics in the female choice of a mate is prevalent throughout the animal world. In the species called the gladiator frog, males are responsible for creating nests and defending the eggs. In the majority of courtships, a stationary male is deliberately bumped by a female who is considering him. She strikes him with great force, sometimes enough to rock him back or even scare him away. If the male moves too much or bolts from the nest, the female hastily leaves to examine alternative mates. Most females mate with males who move minimally when bumped. Only rarely does a female reject a male who remains firmly planted after being bumped. Bumping helps a female frog to decide how successful the male will be at defending her clutch. The bump test reveals the male’s physical ability to perform the function of protection.”

    Bump tests can be seen as a kind of stress test—can the individual withstand pressure or attack?

    “A man’s size, strength, and physical prowess are cues to solutions to the problem of protection. My lab and others found that women judge short men to be undesirable as long-term mates.46 In contrast, they find it very desirable for a potential mate to be tall, physically strong, and athletic. Tall men are consistently seen as more desirable dates and mates than men who are short or of average height.”

    In essence: size matters.

    “Tall men date more often than short men and have a larger pool of potential mates. Women solve the problem of protection from aggressive men at least in part by preferring a mate who has the size, strength, and physical prowess to protect them.

    In addition to height, women are especially attracted to athletic men with a V-shaped torso, that is broader shoulders relative to hips.48 Interestingly, these female preferences may have exerted sexual selection pressure on men, since modern men currently show upper body strength that is roughly twice that of women. It is one of the most sexually dimorphic attributes of the human body.”

    Upper body strength appears to be a particularly attractive trait, shaped in part by female mate preferences.

    “Tall men tend to have a higher status in nearly all cultures. “Big men” in hunter-gatherer societies—men high in status—are physically big men as well.49 In Western cultures, tall men make more money, advance in their professions more rapidly, and receive more and earlier promotions.”

    Physical size is linked to social status and the ability to acquire resources.

    “Height constitutes a reliable cue to dominance in social interactions . . . shorter policemen are likely to be assaulted more than taller policemen . . . suggesting that the latter command more fear and respect from adversaries . . . taller men are more sought after in women’s personal advertisements, receive more responses to their own personal advertisements, and tend to have prettier girlfriends than do shorter men.”

    One might even speculate that, if many women were poets, a great deal of poetry would be written about large men.

    “A heavily muscled, imposingly built man is likely to accumulate many girlfriends, while a small man, deprecatingly referred to as a peritsi, fares badly. The mere fact of height creates a measurable advantage. . . . A powerful wrestler, say the villagers, is frightening . . . he commands fear and respect. To the women, he is “beautiful” (awitsiri), in demand as a paramour and husband. Triumphant in politics as well as in love, the champion wrestler embodies the highest qualities of manliness. Not so fortunate the vanquished! A chronic loser, no matter what his virtues, is regarded as a fool. As he wrestles, the men shout mock advice. . . . The women are less audible as they watch the matches from their doorways, but they too have their sarcastic jokes. None of them is proud of having a loser as a husband or lover.”

    “Barbara Smuts argues that, consequently, during human evolutionary history physical protection from other men was one of the most important things a man could offer a woman. Given the alarming incidence of sexual coercion and rape in many cultures, a mate’s protection value may well remain relevant to mate selection in modern environments. Many women simply do not feel safe on the streets, and a strong, tall, athletic mate acts as a deterrent to other sexually aggressive men.”

    From a female perspective, men are often valued as protectors, and physical weakness undermines this protective role.

    This leads to the next point:

    Good Health

    “It may come as no surprise that women and men worldwide prefer mates who are healthy.52 In the thirty-seven-culture study, women judged good health to be anywhere from important to indispensable in a marriage partner. In another study on American women, poor physical conditions, ranging from bad grooming habits to having a sexually transmitted infection (STI), were regarded as extremely undesirable characteristics in a mate. The biologists Clelland Ford and Frank Beach found that signs of ill health, such as open sores, lesions, and unusual pallor, are universally regarded as unattractive.

    In humans, good health may be signaled by behavior as well as by physical appearance. A lively mood, high energy level, and sprightly gait, for example, may be attractive precisely because they are calorically costly and can be displayed only by people brimming with good health.

    The tremendous importance we place on good health is not unique to our species. Some animals display large, loud, and gaudy traits that are costly and yet signal great health and vitality. Consider the bright, flamboyant, ostentatious plumage of the peacock. It is as if the peacock is saying: “Look at me; I’m so fit that I can carry these large, cumbersome feathers, and yet still I’m thriving.” The mystery of the peacock’s tail, which seems so contrary to utilitarian survival, is finally on the verge of being solved. The biologists William D. Hamilton and Marlena Zuk proposed that the brilliant plumage serves as a signal that the peacock carries a light load of parasites, since peacocks who carry more than the average number of parasites have duller plumage. The burdensome plumage provides a cue to health and robustness. Peahens prefer the brilliant plumage because it provides clues to the male’s health.

    Women are especially attracted to men who show two observable markers of good health—symmetrical features and masculinity. Bodies are supposed to be bilaterally symmetric, so deviations in symmetry represent errors a body made in constructing itself. These superficial errors may signal other errors made in constructing important systems, such as the immune system. Errors have two sources—genetic mutations and environmental stresses such as injuries or disease during development. More symmetrical men tend to be healthier and to experience fewer illnesses such as respiratory diseases, and women find them more attractive than their more lopsided peers.55

    Masculine features in men provide another set of health cues. These features include longer and broader lower jaws, stronger brow ridges, deeper voices, and the classic male V-shaped torso. Masculine qualities are primarily the product of testosterone production during adolescence when a male’s facial, body, and vocal qualities are forming. The problem is that too much testosterone can be bad for men, compromising their immune system and leading to shorter lives. So why do some men develop such masculine features? The theory is that only very healthy men, those with strong immune systems, can afford to produce a lot of testosterone during adolescence. Men with weaker immune systems cut back on testosterone production (not consciously, of course) to prevent compromising their already tenuous health. According to this theory, masculine features are honest signals of good health. And indeed, women find masculine features to be somewhat attractive in long-term mating, although they find these features even more attractive when choosing a casual sex partner.

    In ancestral times, four bad consequences were likely to follow if a woman selected a mate who was unhealthy or disease-prone. First, she put herself and her family at risk of contracting the disease. Second, her mate was less able to perform essential functions and provide crucial benefits to her and her children, such as food, protection, health care, and child rearing. Third, her mate was at increased risk of dying, prematurely cutting off the flow of resources and forcing her to incur the costs of searching for a new mate and courting all over again. And fourth, if health is partly heritable, she would risk passing on genes for poor health to her children. A preference for healthy mates solves the problem of mate survival and ensures that resources are likely to be delivered over the long run.”

    Given its significance, this argument warrants presenting the full set of paragraphs.

    In a nutshell, women consistently judged good health to be an important, and often indispensable, attribute in a marriage partner.

    Love and Commitment

    “A man’s possession of assets such as health, status, resources, intelligence, and emotional stability, however, does not guarantee his willingness to commit them to a particular woman. Some men show a tremendous reluctance to marry or commit.”

    “Women sometimes derogate men for this hesitancy, calling them “commitment dodgers,” “commitment phobics,” “paranoid about commitment,” and “fearful of the M word.” “

    Reluctance to commit is generally viewed as undesirable in a mate.

    “Mark and Susan had been going out with each other for two years and had been living together for six months. He was a well-off forty-two-year-old professional, she a medical student of twenty-eight. Susan pressed for a decision about marriage—they were in love, and she wanted to have children within a few years. But Mark balked. He had been married before, and divorced. If he ever married again, he wanted to be absolutely sure it would be permanent. As Susan continued to press for a decision, Mark raised the possibility of a prenuptial agreement. She resisted, feeling that this violated the spirit of marriage. Finally, they agreed that by a date four months in the future he would have decided one way or the other. The date came and went, and still Mark could not make a decision. Susan told him that she was leaving him, moved out, and started dating another man. Mark panicked. He called her up and begged her to come back, saying that he had changed his mind and would marry her. He promised a new car. He promised that there would be no prenuptial agreement. But it was too late. Mark’s failure to commit was too strong a negative signal to Susan. It dealt the final blow to their relationship. She was gone forever.”

    The Red Pill community would interpret this situation as evidence that a woman who pressures for marriage is already beginning to fall out of love.

    “Women past and present face the adaptive problem of choosing men who not only have the necessary resources but also show a willingness to commit those resources specifically to them. This problem may be more difficult than it seems at first. Although resources can often be directly observed, commitment cannot. Instead, gauging commitment requires looking for probabilistic cues. Love is one of the most important cues to commitment.”

    “Acts of reproduction, such as planning to have children, also represent a direct commitment to one’s partner’s genes. All these acts of love signal the commitment of sexual, economic, emotional, and genetic resources to one person.”

    “Since love is a worldwide phenomenon, and since a primary function of acts of love is to signal commitment of reproductively relevant resources, women should place a premium on love in the process of choosing a mate. To find out if they do, Sue Sprecher and her colleagues asked American, Russian, and Japanese students whether they would marry someone who had all the qualities they desired in a mate if they were not in love with that person.59 Fully 89 percent of American women and 82 percent of Japanese women said that they would still require love for marriage, even if all other important qualities were present. Among Russians, only 59 percent of women would not marry someone with whom they were not in love, no matter how many desirable qualities that person had. Although a clear majority of Russian women required love, the lower threshold may reflect the tremendous difficulty Russian women have in finding a mate because of the severe shortage of men in their country, especially men capable of investing resources. These variations reveal the effects of cultural context on mating.”

    In Western and Central Europe, Russian women are often stereotyped as emotionally cold.

    “Direct studies of preferences in a mate confirm the centrality of love. In a study of 162 Texas women college students, out of 100 characteristics examined, the quality of being loving was the most strongly desired in a potential husband. The thirty-seven-culture study confirmed the universal importance of love. Among eighteen possible characteristics, mutual attraction or love proved to be the most highly valued in a potential mate by both sexes, being rated a 2.87 by women and 2.81 by men (out of 3.00). Nearly all women and men, from the enclaves of South Africa to the bustling streets of Brazilian cities, gave love the top rating, indicating its indispensability for a committed mateship. Women place a premium on love in order to secure the commitment of men’s economic, emotional, and sexual resources.”

    As Geoffrey Miller has argued, mate signaling can be understood in terms of broadcasting versus narrowcasting resources. From this perspective, perceived love in a male partner signals a willingness to concentrate resources on a single mate and her offspring rather than dispersing them across multiple partners.

    “Two additional personal characteristics, kindness and sincerity, are critical to securing long-term commitment. In one study of 800 personal advertisements, sincerity was the single most frequently listed characteristic sought by women. Another analysis of 1,111 personal advertisements again showed that sincerity was the quality most frequently sought by women—indeed, women advertisers sought sincerity nearly four times as often as men advertisers. Sincerity in personal advertisements is a code word for commitment, and women use it to screen out men seeking casual sex without any commitment.”

    A lack of sincerity signals a preference for short-term mating rather than long-term commitment.

    “People worldwide depend on kindness not from strangers, but rather from their mates. As shown by the thirty-seven-culture study, women have a strong preference for mates who are kind and understanding. In thirty-two out of the thirty-seven cultures, in fact, the sexes were identical in valuing kindness as one of the three most important qualities out of a possible thirteen in a mate. Only in Japan and Taiwan did men give greater emphasis than women to kindness. And only in Nigeria, Israel, and France did women give greater emphasis than men to kindness. In no culture, however, was kindness in a mate ranked lower than third out of thirteen for either sex. Women desired kindness in a mate especially when it was directed toward them, and less so when it was directed toward other people or other women, supporting the notion that women prize dispositions in men to commit their resources selectively rather than indiscriminately.”

    Thus, unkindness is not, in itself, a desirable trait in a mate. Rather, women appear to prefer kindness that is selectively directed toward them, especially when combined with other valued traits. Kindness alone, in the absence of these traits, is insufficient.

    “Kindness is an enduring personality characteristic that has many components, but at the core of all of them is the commitment of resources. The trait signals an empathy toward children, a willingness to put a mate’s needs before one’s own, and a willingness to channel energy and effort toward a mate’s goals rather than exclusively and selfishly to one’s own goals. Kindness, in other words, signals the ability and willingness of a potential mate to commit energy and resources selflessly to a partner.”

    A highly disagreeable and self-centered individual is difficult to sustain in a long-term relationship.

    “A lack of kindness signals selfishness, an inability or unwillingness to commit, and a high likelihood that costly burdens will be inflicted on a spouse. … Unkind men tend to be condescending, putting down their wife’s opinions as stupid or inferior. They are selfish, monopolizing shared resources. They are inconsiderate, failing to do any housework. They are neglectful, failing to show up as promised. Finally, they have more extramarital affairs, suggesting that these men are unable or unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship. Unkind men look out for themselves and have trouble committing to anything much beyond that.”

    More generally, highly disagreeable individuals tend to dismiss the opinions of others as inferior or unworthy of consideration.

    “Because sex is one of the most valuable reproductive resources women can offer, they have evolved psychological mechanisms that cause them to resist giving it away indiscriminately. Requiring love, sincerity, and kindness is a way of securing a commitment of resources commensurate with the value of the resource that women give to men. Requiring love and kindness helps women to solve the critical adaptive mating problem of securing the commitment of resources from a man that can aid in the survival and reproduction of her offspring.”

    This leads straight to the topic of deal breakers:

    “The flip side of what women want is what women do not want—the proverbial deal breakers … the costs of making a poor sexual decision are typically higher for women than for men. Even the thought of tongue-kissing a sibling or parent typically evokes strong disgust in women. Alongside “beats me up,” “will have sex with other people when he is with me,” and “is addicted to drugs,” “is my sibling” is one of the most powerful deal breakers for women.

    Most deal breakers, however, are simply the inverses of the qualities that women desire—lacking resources, drive, ambition, or status; lacking intelligence; being undependable or emotionally unstable; being small, weak, or feminine in appearance; being unhealthy or asymmetrical; being mean or cruel; and lacking love specifically for the woman doing the mate selecting.”

    Thus, avoiding deal breakers is more critical than displaying exceptional qualities; the absence of fundamental traits effectively disqualifies a potential mate.

    “Men strive to control resources and to exclude other men from resources to fulfill women’s mating preferences. In human evolutionary history, men who failed to accumulate resources failed to attract mates. Men’s more powerful status and resource acquisition drives are due, at least in part, to the preferences that women have expressed over the past few million years. To paraphrase the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, “Men are one long breeding experiment run by women.” “

    Men have been shaped, in part, by female mate preferences. This naturally raises the complementary question: what do men desire? This question is taken up in Chapter Three, What Men Want.

  • Chapter 2 – Part 2 – The Evolution of Desire

    What Women Want – Desired Traits

    “Among humans, the evolution of women’s preference for a permanent mate with resources would have required [some] preconditions. … men would have had to differ from each other in their holdings and their willingness to invest those holdings in a woman and her children – if all men possessed the same resources and showed an equal willingness to commit them, there would be no need for women to develop the preference for them. Constants to not count in mating decisions.”

    It is variation among potential mates that guides mating decisions.

    Economic Capacity

    “Men vary tremendously in the quantity of resources they command – from the poverty of the street bum to the riches of Trumps and Rockefellers. Men also differ widely in how willing they are to invest their time and resources in long-term mateships. Some men are cads, preferring to mate with many women while investing little in each. Other men are dads, channeling all of their resources to one woman and her children.

    Women over human evolutionary history could often garner far more resources for their children through a single spouse than through several temporal sex partners. Men provide their wives and children with resources to an extent that is unprecedented among primates.”

    “So the stage was set for women to evolve a preference for men with resources. But women needed cues to signal a man’s possession of those resources. These cues may be indirect, such as personality characteristics that signaled upward mobility. They might be physical, such as a man’s athletic ability of health. They might include reputational information, such as the esteem in which a man was held by his peers. Economic resources, however, provide the most direct cue.”

    Social Status

    “Traditional hunter-gather societies, which are our closest guide to what ancestral conditions were probably like, suggest that ancestral men had clearly defined status hierarchies, with resources flowing freely to those at the top and trickling slowly to those at the bottom.”

    This is a noteworthy statement because it emphasizes the hierarchical flow of resources, favoring those at the top.

    “Henry Kissinger once remarked that power is the most potent aphrodisiac. Women desire men who command a high position in society because social status is a universal cue to control of resources.”

    “Women in the United States do not hesitate to express a preference for mates who have high social status or a high-status profession, qualities that are viewed as only slightly less important than good financial prospects.”

    “Women judge the likelihood of success in a profession and the possession of a promising career to be highly desirable in a spouse. Significantly, these cues to future status are seen by women as more desirable in spouses than in casual partners.

    American women also place great value on education and professional degrees in mates – characteristics that are strongly linked with social status. The same study found that women rate lack of education as highly undesirable in a potential husband. The cliche that women prefer to marry doctors, lawyers, professors, and other professionals seems to correspond with reality. Women shun men who are easily dominated by other men or who fail to command the respect of the group.”

    “Because hierarchies are universal features among human groups and resources tend to accumulate to those who rise in the hierarchy, women solve the adaptive problem of acquiring resources in part by preferring men who are high in social status. Social status gives a woman a strong indicator of the ability of a man to invest in her and her children. … Women worldwide prefer to marry up. Those women in our evolutionary past who failed to marry up tended to be less able to provide for themselves and their children.”

    The Status Game by Will Storr comes to mind here. Taken together, these passages frame mate preferences as a systematic response to social hierarchy rather than individual taste. From this perspective, status operates as a reliable proxy for present and future resource control, making it especially salient in long-term mating contexts. The emphasis on education, professional success, and dominance within hierarchies reinforces the argument that these preferences are not culturally arbitrary but reflect recurrent adaptive pressures.

    Age

    “To understand why women value older mates, we must turn to the things that change with age. One of the most consistent changes is access to resources.”

    “In a study of women’s mate preferences, one woman noted that ‘older men [are] better looking because you [can] talk to them about serious concerns; younger men [are] silly and not very serious about life.”

    “A long history of evolution by selection fashioned the way in which women look at men as success objects.”

    “young men are scrutinized carefully by both women and older men to evaluate which ones are ‘comers,’ destined to acquire status and resources, and which are likely to remain in the slow lane”

    “women who value the personality characteristics likely to lead to status and sustained resource acquisition are far better off than women who ignore these vital characterological cues.”

    This leads straight to ambition and industriousness.

    Ambition and Industriousness

    “sheer hard work proved to be one of the best predictors of past and anticipated income and promotions. Those who said that they worked hard, and whose spouses agreed that they worked hard, achieved higher levels of education, higher annual salaries, and anticipated greater salaries and promotions than those who failed to work hard. Industrious and ambitious men secure higher occupational status than lazy, unmotivated men do.”

    “Women in the study of temporary and permanent mating regard men who lack ambition as extremely undesirable … Women are likely to discontinue a long-term relationship with a man if he loses his job, lacks career goals, or shows a lazy streak.”

    “women evolved a preference for men who show signs of the ability to acquire resources and a disdain for men who lack ambition.”

    Women consistently evaluate ambition and work ethic as key indicators of a man’s capacity to acquire resources, particularly in long-term mating contexts. Consequently, men who lack ambition are perceived as highly undesirable and face a higher risk of relationship dissolution.

    Dependability and Stability

    “Among the eighteen characteristics rated in the worldwide study on choosing a mate, the second and third most highly valued characteristics, after love, are a dependable character and emotional stability or maturity.”

    “Emotionally unstable men – as defined by themselves, their spouses, and their interviewers – are especially costly to women.”

    Taken together, these findings suggest that women tend to avoid highly neurotic men.

    Compatibility

    “Successful long-term mating requires a sustained cooperative alliance with another person for mutually beneficial goals. Relationships riddled with conflict impede the attainment of those goals.”

    “Discrepancies between the values, interests, and personalities of the members of a couple produce strife and conflict.”

    “The search for the similar other provides an elegant solution to the adaptive problem of creating compatibility within the couple so that their interests are maximally aligned in the pursuit of mutual goals. … The marriage of a Democrat and a Republican or an abortion rights advocate with an abortion opponent can make for interesting discussions, but the ensuing conflict wastes valuable energy because their goals are incompatibly and their efforts cancel each other out.”

    “Perhaps more important, matched couples maximize the smooth coordination of their efforts when pursuing mutual goals such as child rearing, maintaining kin alliances, and social networking. A couple at odds how to rear their child wasted valuable energy and also confuses the child, who receives contradictory messages. The search for similarity prevents couples from incurring these costs.”

    The passages argue that long-term mating depends on sustained cooperation toward shared goals, which is undermined by conflict arising from mismatched values, interests, or personalities. Partner similarity functions as an adaptive mechanism that aligns goals, reduces friction, and conserves effort within the relationship. By minimizing conflict, matched couples are better able to coordinate child-rearing, social alliances, and other joint endeavors.

    The features ‘Size and Strength,’ ‘Good Health,’ and ‘Love and Commitment’ are discussed in Part 3 of this chapter.

    The feature ‘Intelligence’ is not discussed in this section, as it is discussed in greater depth in other sources.

  • Chapter 2 – Part 1 – The Evolution of Desire

    What Women Want

    “It is not androcentric to propose that women’s preferences in a partner are more complex and enigmatic than the mate preferences of either sex of any other species.”

    Taken broadly, human females appear to exhibit the most complex mate preferences observed across species.

    “The great initial parental investment of women makes them a valuable, but limited, resource. Gestating, bearing, nursing, nurturing, and protecting a child are exceptional reproductive resources that cannot be allocated indiscriminately.”

    From an evolutionary perspective, women’s fertility and child-rearing capacities are inherently limited and costly resources.

    “Those who hold valuable resources do not give them away cheaply or unselectively. Because women in our evolutionary past risked enormous investment as a consequence of having sex, evolution favored women who were highly selective about their mates.”

    This statement is particularly apt: “Those who hold valuable resources do not give them away cheaply or unselectively.” Misallocation carries high opportunity costs.

    “Ancestral women suffered severe costs if they were indiscriminate – they experienced lower reproductive success, and fewer of their children survived to reproductive age.”

    Choices vary in their consequences, and mate choice is among those with the highest stakes. Poor mate selection carried especially severe costs.

    “If, over evolutionary time, generosity in men provided these benefits repeatedly and the cues to a man’s generosity were observable and reliable, then selection would favor the evolution of a preference for generosity in a mate.”

    As discussed in Chapter 1, this explains how a female preference for generosity comes into being.

    “men vary not just in their generosity but also in a bewildering variety of ways that are significant to the choice of a mate. Men vary in their physical prowess, athletic skill, ambition, industriousness, kindness, empathy, emotional stability, intelligence, social skills, sense of humor, kin network, and position in the status hierarchy. Men also differ in the costs they impose on a mating relationship: some come with children, bad debts, a quick temper, a selfish disposition, and a tendency to be promiscuous. In addition, men differ in hundreds of ways that may be irrelevant to women. Some men have navels turned in, others have navels turned out. A strong preference for a particular navel shape would be unlikely to evolve unless male navel differences were somehow adaptively relevant to ancestral women. From among the thousand of ways in which men differ, selection over hundreds of thousands of years focused women’s preferences laser-like on the most adaptively valuable characteristics.”

    Men differ along many dimensions, but from an evolutionary perspective, women’s attention is disproportionately focused on variation in traits with adaptive significance.

    “The qualities people prefer, however, are not static characteristics. Because characteristics change, mate selection must gauge the future potential of a prospective partner. A young medical student who lacks resources now might have excellent future promise. Or a man might be very ambitious but have already have reached his peak. Another man might have children from a previous marriage, but because they are about to leave his nest, they will not drain his resources. Gauging a man’s mating value requires looking beyond his current position and evaluating his potential.

    Evolution has favored women who prefer men who possess attributes that confer benefits and who dislike men who possess attributes that impose costs. Each separate attribute constitutes one component of a man’s value to a woman as a mate. Each of her preferences tracks one component.”

    “In selecting a mate, women must identify and correctly evaluate the cues that signal whether a man indeed possesses a particular resource. This assessment problem becomes especially acute in areas where men are apt to deceive women, such as pretending to have higher status than they do or feigning greater commitment than they are willing to give.

    Finally, women face the problem of integrating their knowledge about a prospective mate. Suppose that one man is generous but emotionally unstable. Another man is emotionally stable but stingy. Which man should the woman choose? Choosing a mate calls upon psychological mechanisms that make it possible to evaluate the relevant attributes and give each its appropriate weight in the whole. Some attributes are granted more weight than others in the final decision about whether to choose or reject a particular man. One of these heavily weighted component is the man’s resources.”

    Overall, Buss emphasizes that mate choice involves forecasting future value, detecting reliable signals, and integrating multiple trait dimensions. Women have evolved psychological mechanisms for making such decisions under uncertainty.

    Part 2 of this chapter will examine in detail the specific traits for which women have evolved mate preferences.

  • Chapter 1 – The Evolution of Desire

    I am currently reading The Evolution of Desire by David Buss.

    I don’t really know why I hadn’t read this book earlier. Perhaps the omnipresence of screen media explains it.

    “Pain, betrayal, and loss contrast sharply with the usual romantic notions of love.”

    Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph Nesse comes to mind here.

    “Conflict in mating is the norm and not the exception.”

    In other words, tension between male and female reproductive interests is a baseline feature of mating, not a pathological deviation.

    “We never choose mates at random. We do not attract mates indiscriminately. We do not derogate our competitors out of boredom.”

    This implies the existence of a scale of desirability.

    “Taste buds sensitive to fat and sugar solve the problem of what to put into our mouths—nuts and berries, not dirt and gravel.”

    Just as taste buds sensitive to fat and sugar evolved to solve the problem of what to ingest, mating preferences evolved to solve the problem of whom to choose.

    “Nowhere do people have an equal desire for all members of the opposite sex. Everywhere some potential mates are preferred, others shunned. Our sexual desires have come into being in the same way as have other kinds of desires.”

    Mating desires in a nutshell.

    “Over thousands of generations, a preference for men who showed signs of being willing and able to commit to them evolved in women, just as preferences for mates with adequate nests evolved in weaverbirds.”

    In short, women have evolved a taste for male commitment.

    “People who possess desirable characteristics are in great demand. Appreciating their traits is not enough for successful mating, just as spying a ripe berry bush down a steep ravine is not enough for successful eating.”

    So how does one acquire and keep such a highly desired mate?

    “Keeping a mate is another important adaptive problem; mates may continue to be desirable to rivals, who may poach, thereby undoing all the effort devoted to attracting, courting, and committing to the mate. Furthermore, one mate may defect because of the failure of the other to fulfill his or her needs and wants or upon the arrival of someone fresher, more compelling, or more beautiful. Mates, once gained, must be retained.”

    And this brings us straight to the topic of “divorce”:

    “Not all mates can be retained, nor should they be. Sometimes there are compelling reasons to get rid of a mate, such as when a mate stops providing support, withdraws sex, or starts inflicting physical abuse. Those who remain with a mate through economic hardship, sexual infidelity, and cruelty may win admiration for their loyalty. But staying with a bad mate does not help a person successfully pass on genes. We are the descendants of those who knew when to cut their losses. … Just as we have evolved sexual strategies to select, attract, and keep a good mate, we have also evolved strategies for jettisoning a bad mate. Divorce is a human universal that occurs in all known cultures. Our separation strategies involve a variety of psychological mechanisms. We have ways to assess whether the costs inflicted by a mate outweigh the benefits provided. … Breaking up is a solution to the problem of a bad mate, but it opens up the new problem of replacing that mate. … But starting over after a breakup poses its own unique set of problems. People reenter the mating market at a different age and with different assets and liabilities.”

    This was a brief review of the first chapter. Other chapters will be reviewed here soon.

  • Preference for Men Who Read

    Do women like or even love men who read?

    There’s a real science of human mating out there. I’ve never read a David Buss book thoroughly from cover to cover, but to form a deep and well-founded opinion on the topic, one should probably read The Evolution of Desire or another one of his works. When I started reading it, his descriptions and explanations of where our tastes, preferences, and desires come from were truly fascinating. There’s a lot of poorly founded pop psychology on the internet and on Twitter. Before diving into any of that, it’s worth taking a serious look at The Evolution of Desire by David Buss.

  • First Book Review

    My first book review will be on Forecasting: An Essential Introduction by Jennifer Castle, Michael Clements, and David Hendry (2019)

  • This Website

    I’ll review articles and books here about once a week.