Speaking of Fantasy…What about Pornography?
As with prostitution, an overwhelming majority of consumers of pornography worldwide are men.62 Given their greater desire for sexual variety, it is understandable why men would consume more pornography and seek out sexual encounters with numerous women in pornographic photographs and videos, as they do when they contract prostitutes in search of greater sexual variety. Unlike consorting with prostitutes, however, watching pornography does not lead to actual sexual intercourse, but the Savanna Principle suggests that a man’s brain does not really know that. When men see images of naked and sexually receptive women in photographs and videos, their brains cannot truly comprehend that they are artificial images of women that they will likely never meet, much less have sex with, because no such images existed in the ancestral environment; every single naked and sexually receptive woman that our male ancestors saw was a potential sex partner. As a result, their brains think that they might have actual sexual encounters with these women. Why else would men have an erection when they view pornographic photographs and videos, when the only biological function of an erection is to allow men to have intercourse with women? If men’s brains truly comprehended that they would likely never have sex with the naked women in pornography, they would not get an erection when they watch it.
The Savanna Principle applies equally to women as it does to men; women’s brains have the same limitations as those of men. This is why women do not consume pornography nearly as much as men do, even though women enjoy having sexual fantasies as much as men do.63 Women do not seek sexual variety because their reproductive success does not increase by having sex with a large number of partners. In fact, given the limited number of children they can have in their lifetimes, the potential cost of having sex with the wrong partner is far greater for women than it is for men. This is why women are far more cautious about having sex with someone they do not know well; women tend to require a much longer period of acquaintance before agreeing to have sex than men do. The average woman would begin to consider having sex with someone only after she had known him for six months; for the average man, it only takes one week.64
So it makes perfect sense for women to avoid casual sex with anonymous strangers, and their brains cannot really tell that there is no chance that they might copulate with a large number of the naked and sexually aroused men they see in pornography. Women’s brains do not fully comprehend that they will not get pregnant by watching pornography, just as men’s brains do not know that they cannot copulate with women in pornography. Women avoid pornography for the same reason that men consume it; in both cases, their brains cannot really distinguish between real sex partners and the imaginary ones.
Q. Why Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones, but Not Lauren Bacall and Brad Pitt?
When the movie Entrapment was released in 1999, it caused an uproar among feminists because of the large age difference between the two main characters, who get romantically involved. Sean Connery was 69; Catherine Zeta-Jones was 30. Entrapment is hardly the only movie that incurs feminist wrath for the same reason. In the 1993 movie In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood is 63 while Rene Russo is 39. Feminists charge that these movies reinforce the cultural norm that women have to be young to be desirable, whereas men can be much older and still attractive to women.
To the feminists’ chagrin, however, the pattern of an older man and a younger woman in romance is not limited to movies that appeal mostly to men. The pattern is the same in the so-called chick flicks popular among mostly female audiences. For example, in the 1998 movie Six Days Seven Nights, Harrison Ford is 56 while Anne Heche is 29. In The Horse Whisperer of the same year, Robert Redford is 61 while Kristin Scott Thomas is 38. In the 1997 blockbuster As Good as It Gets, Jack Nicholson is 60 whereas Helen Hunt is 34. This movie was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and both Nicholson and Hunt won Oscars for their leading roles. Nor is this pattern of older man and younger woman a recent Hollywood trend. In the 1963 classic Charade, Cary Grant is 59 while Audrey Hepburn, who actively pursues him romantically, is 34. In The Big Sleep of 1946, Humphrey Bogart is 47, and Lauren Bacall is 22. Of course, Bogart and Bacall were married to each other in real life.
With the notable exception of The Graduate, it appears that the man is older, sometimes by decades, than the woman among couples in movies. Why is this? Why do both men and women in every generation expect and want the leading male character in movies to be so much older than his female counterpart? The conventional social science explanation relies on cultural norms and socialization. Our “culture” imposes arbitrary standards of desirability, which include being young in the case of women but not men. People in our “culture” are therefore socialized to expect attractive women in movies to be young, not old, whereas men, who are not subject to the same arbitrary standards, can be old and still sexy.
As we discussed earlier in this chapter (see “Why Do Men Like Blonde Bombshells [and Why Do Women Want to Look Like Them]?” above), there is evolutionary logic behind every aspect of ideal female beauty, including youth. With respect specifically to movies, however, there are two pieces of evidence that contradict the conventional view.
First, even though they are produced in the United States, Hollywood movies are now exported throughout the world. And block-busters in the United States almost always become commercial successes in other countries where they are shown.65 While repressive nations like China and those in the Arab world might censor the content of Hollywood movies for sexual explicitness and other taboos like homosexuality, there has not been a single case where such regimes censored or banned movies because of the large age difference between the male and the female leads. The premise of large age differences appears to be readily accepted throughout the world.
Second, while movie production throughout the world is heavily dominated by Hollywood and therefore the United States, all cultures produce literature, which often becomes the basis of movies. And it turns out that literary themes and plots in all cultures and throughout recorded history are remarkably similar.66 While we have not seen data on movies produced outside the United States, we are very confident in predicting that such movies, like the growing number of “Bollywood” movies out of India, also mostly depict romantic scenarios in which the man is considerably older than the woman, and that very few movies (or novels, for that matter) produced anywhere in the world would have the opposite type of couple as romantic leads.
If not cultural socialization, what then accounts for the popularity of romantic couples where the man is much older than the woman? From the evolutionary psychological perspective, it is a direct consequence and reflection of evolved male and female natures. Data collected from societies throughout the world show that men in every single culture prefer to mate with younger women, and women prefer to mate with older men.67 Men prefer younger women because they have greater reproductive value and fertility than older women, and women prefer older men because they possess greater resources and higher status than younger men in every human society.
Further, the older men get, the greater the age difference between them and their desired mates. Men in their twenties want women who are about five years younger than them, whereas men in their fifties want women who are about fifteen years younger. In yet another example of the “exception that proves the rule,” the only category of men who prefer to mate with older women are teenage boys.68 For them, older, not younger, women have greater fertility. In other words, regardless of their age, men always prefer to mate with women in their twenties, at the peak of fertility. Women do not show the same pattern; regardless of their age, women prefer men who are about ten years older than them.69 Since movie producers and authors are in the business of making money by producing stories that appeal to moviegoers and readers alike, it is natural that their products reflect the evolved desires of their target audiences.
It is interesting to note as an aside that while Mrs. Robinson in The
Graduate was supposed to be much older than Benjamin, being the mother of his girlfriend, Elaine; in reality, Anne Bancroft is only six years older than Dustin Hoffman. It appears that we expect the woman to be so much younger than the man in movies that when the woman is actually older than the man, even by only six years, she is considered to be “too old” for him. We should also note that, by the end of the movie, Benjamin (the Dustin Hoffman character in The Graduate) ends up with the young Elaine, not with her mother, consistent with the evolutionary psychological prediction. Sorry for the spoiler.
Q. He Said, She Said: Why Do Men and Women Perceive the Same Situation Differently?
Miscommunication and misunderstanding between men and women, created when a man and a woman perceive the same situation entirely differently, are the staple of television situation comedies and literary novels alike. A man and a woman encounter each other and have a pleasant and friendly conversation. The man is thinking that she is romantically and sexually attracted to him, while the woman is entertaining no such thought; she is simply being nice. Whether you’re male or female, you can probably think of a real situation in your own life that involved this type of miscommunication with someone of the opposite sex.
The phenomenon is not merely anecdotal or only in our personal experiences; it has been scientifically documented.70 In a laboratory experiment, a male and a female participant engage in a five-minute conversation, while, unbeknownst to both participants, a male and a female observer watch the entire interaction. After the interaction, both the male participant and the male observer rate the female participant as being more promiscuous and seductive than do the female participant or the female observer. Male participants report being more sexually attracted to their conversation partner than do female participants. So men and women can engage in or observe the same situation, but men perceive greater likelihood of sexual relationship than women do.
The failure to recognize this pervasive sex difference in cognitive biases can lead to costly mistakes, not only for individuals but for corporations and society alike. In January 1998, the American supermarket chain Safeway (not related to the British supermarket chain of the same name, which has recently been acquired by the rival chain Morrisons) started implementing the “superior customer ser vice policy,” which required all Safeway employees to look customers in the eye and smile.71 If the customers paid by check or credit card, cashiers were required to quickly scan the customer’s last name and thank them personally, as in “Thank you, Mr. So-and-so, for shopping at Safeway” while looking them in the eye and smiling.
Reflecting the unquestioned assumptions of the Standard Social Science Model, the Safeway company policy was completely egalitarian. It required both male and female employees to greet both male and female customers in the identical “friendly” manner. And the policy worked very well roughly three-quarters of the time, between a male employee and a male customer, between a male employee and a female customer, and between a female employee and a female customer. However, the policy backfired when the employee was female and the customer was male. When the female employee gazed deeply into the customer’s eyes, smiled, and thanked him by name, some male customers “naturally” assumed that she was attracted to him and started harassing her by following her around—both at and away from work. Eventually, five female employees had to file a federal sex discrimination charge against Safeway to force it to stop this policy, which the corporation did when it reached an out-of-court settlement.
Why do these problems happen? Why are men more likely to infer sexual interest in a neutral encounter than women are? Two evolutionary psychologists, Martie G. Haselton and David M. Buss, offer an explanation in their Error Management Theory.72
The Cost of Misreading the Signals
This theory begins with an observation, made earlier by others,73 that decision making under uncertainty often results in erroneous inferences, but some errors are more costly in their consequences than others. Natural and sexual selection should then favor the evolution of inference systems that minimize the total cost of errors rather than their total numbers. For instance, if a man must infer the sexual interest of a woman whom he encounters, he can make two types of errors: He can infer that she is sexually interested when she is not (false positive), or he can infer that she is not sexually interested when she is (false negative). What are the consequences of each type of error?[74]
The consequence of a false positive, thinking that she is interested when she is not, is that he would be turned down, maybe laughed at, possibly slapped in the face. The consequence of a false negative, thinking that she is not interested when she is, is a missed opportunity for sexual intercourse and to increase his reproductive success. The latter cost is far greater than the former. Thus, men should be selected to possess a cognitive bias that constantly leads them to overestimate a woman’s sexual interest.
Haselton and Buss’s Error Management Theory not only explains previously known phenomena, such as the results of the laboratory experiment mentioned above or the Safeway fiasco, but also leads to two novel predictions. First, women should underestimate a man’s romantic commitment to them, because the cost of a false positive (thinking that a man is romantically committed to her when he is not, getting pregnant by him, and then having him desert her) is far greater than the cost of a false negative (thinking that he is not romantically committed to her when he is, and missing an opportunity to form a committed romantic relationship). If a woman misses an opportunity to form a long-term committed relationship with one man, she can soon get an opportunity to form one with another man; there are other fish in the sea. In contrast, one mistake with a wrong man can burden the woman with a child and ruin her future romantic prospects for many years to come.
Second, the tendency of men to overestimate a woman’s sexual interest should not apply to their sisters’ interest in other men, because men need to perceive their sisters’ sexual interest in other men accurately so that they can protect them from unwelcome sexual advances from those they are not interested in. In other words, the cognitive bias of men to overestimate women’s sexual interest is not blind or unqualified; it is only activated in encounters with women with whom they might conceivably have sex, which exclude their sisters. Haselton and Buss’s studies confirm both of these novel predictions.
While Haselton and Buss apply their Error Management Theory exclusively to the area of mind reading between men and women (inference about sexual interest of potential mates), their insight may be applied to human behavior in other areas as well.75 For example, evolutionary social psychologist Toshio Yamagishi and his colleagues suggest that people in social exchange situations make similar (and similarly unconscious) calculations when they decide whether or not to cooperate with each other.76 They face the possibility of making two different types of errors: thinking that freeriding on others is possible without detection or punishment when it is not (false positive), or thinking that freeriding on others is not possible when it is (false negative). The cost of the former error is ostracism from the group, while the cost of the latter is the foregone benefit of exploiting others. Yamagishi and his colleagues suggest that people are less likely to commit the error of false positive when they are highly dependent on the group and cannot risk ostracism and expulsion from it.
As another example, Stewart Elliott Guthrie77 and Pascal Boyer78 use the same principle of cognitive bias to explain the emergence of religion. When something either good or bad happens to you, it might be the result of a purposeful, intentional act of someone (in other words, you have a friend or a foe that you may not know about), or it might be the result of a random event (“luck”). In deciding which it is, you can once again make two types of errors: thinking that it is a purposeful, intentional act when it is random (false positive), or thinking that it is random when it is a purposeful, intentional act (false negative). The consequence of the first type of error (ignoring a potential friend or foe) is far greater than the con
sequence of the second type of error (being a bit too paranoid or anthropomorphic). Guthrie and Boyer argue that religion and the human tendency to believe in God are byproducts of an evolved cognitive bias toward anthropomorphism. (See the section “Where Does Religion Come From?” in chapter 8 for further details.) In other words, at the most abstract level, it may be that we believe in God for the same reason that men constantly think that women are coming on to them: Because getting it wrong the other way would be much worse.
4
Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage?
THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF MARRIAGE
It is a mistake to think that marriage is unique to the human species. While, of course, some of the specific accoutrements of human marriage—such as the wedding ceremony—is unique to humans, the institution of marriage itself—the predictable and regulated patterns of matings between a male and a female—is shared by many other species, particularly birds.1 Further, some of the specifics of a Western marriage—the church wedding, marriage certificates—are not even human universals.
Because marriage is closely related to sex and mating, this is another area where evolutionary psychology has produced a large number of fascinating studies. Perhaps two of the most surprising findings of evolutionary psychology and biology (to be discussed in greater detail in this chapter) are about polygyny (marriage of one man to many women). First, despite the impression you might get from the history of Western civilization in the last millennium, humans are naturally polygynous, not monogamous, and as a result, all human societies (including the United States) are polygynous to various degrees. Second, contrary to what you might think, most women benefit from polygyny, while, conversely, most men benefit from monogamy.
Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do Page 8