Women want a provider. They want a man who seems rich, stable, and ambitious. They want to know that they and their children will be cared for. They want a man who can take charge, maybe dominate them just a little, enough to reassure them that the man is genotypically, phenotypically, eternally a king. Women's innate preference for a well-to-do man continues to this day, the evolutionary psychologists insist, even among financially independent and professionally successful women who don't need the man as a provider. It was adaptive in the past to look for the most resourceful man, they say, and adaptations can't be willed away in a generation or two of putative cultural change.
And what of the evidence for these male-female verities? For the difference in promiscuity quotas, the hardcores love to raise the example of the differences between gay men and lesbians. Homosexuals are seen as a revealing population because they supposedly can behave according to the innermost impulses of their sex, untempered by the need to adjust to the demands and wishes of the opposite sex, as heterosexuals theoretically are. What do we see in our ideal study group? Just look at how gay men carry on! They are perfectly happy to have hundreds, thousands of sexual partners, to have sex in bathhouses, in bathrooms, in the Rambles of Central Park. By contrast, lesbians are sexually sedate. They don't cruise sex clubs. They couple up and stay coupled, and they like cuddling and hugging more than they do serious, genitally based sex. There's a phenomenon called "lesbian bed death," in which some lesbian couples, after an initial flurry of heated passion, settle into a near sexless relationship, measuring their encounters by the month rather than the day or week. Here is a joke the evo psychos like: Q. What does a lesbian bring on a second date? A. A U-Haul. Q. What does a gay man bring on a second date? A, What second date?
In the hardcore rendering of inherent male-female discrepancies in promiscuity, gay men are offered up as true men, real men, deep men, men unfettered, men set free to be men, while lesbians are real women, ultra-women, acting out every woman's fantasy of love and commitment without the fuss and slop of sex. Interestingly, though, in other theoretical instances, gay men and lesbians are not considered real men and real women, but the opposite: gay men are feminine men, halfway between men and women, while lesbians are posited as mannish women. Thus, in brain studies that purport to find the origins of sexual orientation, gay men are said to have hypothalamic nuclei that are smaller than a straight man's and closer in size to a woman's, and thus they are attracted to men. Their brains are posited as being so incompletely masculinized that they are said to be comparatively poor at math, girlish rather than boyish in their native talents. Lesbians are said to have somewhat masculinized brains and skills—to be sportier and more mechanically inclined than most of their heterosexual female peers. One report in 1998 even implicated the lesbian inner ear as a source of her sexual orientation, finding it to be partly "masculinized," possibly, the researchers suggested, as a result of exposure to prenatal androgens. Young boys who like to play with dolls and tea sets are thought to be at risk for growing up into homosexual men; young girls who take tomboyishness to extremes are said to have a higher-than-average likelihood of ending up as lesbians. And so gay men are sissy boys in some contexts and Stone Age manly men in others, while lesbians are battering rams one day and flower into the softest and most sexually divested of feminine gals the next.
On the question of mate preferences, evo psychos rely on surveys, most of them compiled by David Buss. His surveys are celebrated by some, derided by others, but in any event they are ambitious—performed in thirty-seven countries, he says, on various continents and among a reasonable sampling of cultures and subcultures. His surveys, and others aspiring to them, consistently find that men rate youth and beauty as important traits in a mate, while women give comparatively greater weight to ambitiousness and financial success. In New Zealand, in China, in France, in Bangladesh—everywhere we speak in species-specific-speak. Men want a young, pretty wife, women want a mature, resourceful man. When a man is thinking about whether or not a woman is worth a significant investment of his time, surveys again come to the rescue, demonstrating that yes, men like their women to be good—madonnas, hold the latte, please. When shown pictures of women who are portrayed as either kohl-eyed temptresses or squeaky blond cheerleaders, men will choose Type A for a good time but Type B as a potential long-term partner. Surveys show that surveys never lie. Lest you think that women's mate preferences change with their mounting economic clout, surveys assure us not. Surveys of female medical students, according to John Marshall Townsend, of Syracuse University, indicate that they hope to marry men with an earning power and social status at least equal to and preferably greater than their own. This is obviously an immutable, everlasting female longing. Secretary or CEO, Cinderella wants her Rockefella.
But what happens if we go back to our favorite pure population group, homosexuals, and ask, Well, what do they choose when they choose their loved ones? Jokes about no second dates notwithstanding, gay men do couple up, in great numbers, even if they are not necessarily monogamous within their pair bond. So gay men and lesbians look for partners—but are they sex concordant or sex discordant in their mate criteria? Six of one, zilch of the other. Gay men like young, attractive gay men, while lesbians place comparatively little emphasis on their partner's beauty—yep, fits the stereotype. But do gay men have their infidelity monitors turned up high, as real men should? For real men don't want to be taken for a ride; real men have the adaptive anticuck-old module firmly in place. No, sorry, no evidence for that premise. Gay men do not express any need for their chosen partner to be loyal. And a lucky thing too, for they are natural men, aren't they, and incapable of being faithful, so a gay man who demanded as much from his mate would remain forever single. As for the ingrained female desire that her partner be a provider, a dominant, resourceful go-getter, lesbians fail completely to toe the adaptive lady line. They don't require the promise that they and theirs will be provided for. To the contrary, they are suspiciously egalitarian in their style. They don't consider a woman's income or power to be particularly aphrodisiacal, as Henry Kissinger claimed a man's power was. In their study of three different permutations of American couples—heterosexual, gay male, and lesbian—Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein found that only lesbians were able to avoid the squabbles over money that characterize so many failed relationships. Only among lesbian couples was the power balance in the relationship decoupled from each partner's income.
What does it mean if surveys show that women want a man who earns a living wage? It means that men can earn a living wage better, even now, than women can. Men still own and operate most of what can be claimed and controlled. They make up about half of the world's population, but they own somewhere between 75 and 95 percent of the world's wealth—the currency, the minerals, the timber, the gold, the stocks, the amber fields of grain. In her superb book Why So Slow?, Virginia Valian, a professor of psychology at Hunter College, lays out the extent of lingering economic discrepancies between men and women in the United States. In 1978, there were two women heading Fortune 1000 companies; in 1994, there were still two; in 1996, the number had jumped all the way to four. In 1985, 2 percent of the Fortune 1000's senior-level executives were women; by 1992, that number had hardly budged, to 3 percent. A 1990 salary and compensation survey of 799 major companies showed that of the highest-paid officers and directors, less than one half of one percent were women. Ask, and he shall receive. In the United States the possession of a bachelor's degree adds $28,000 to a man's salary but only $9,000 to a woman's. A degree from a high-prestige school contributes $11,500 to a man's income but subtracts $2,400 from a woman's—yes, subtracts, though no one knows why. The same disparity applies for overseas experience. A man who spends time abroad can expect to enhance his salary by $9,200. A woman who lives abroad can come back to a $7,700 decrement in her compensation. The most successful women in the world are more precariously positioned than comparable men. In Hollywood, the careers an
d asking price of actresses and female directors are easily derailed by the occasional flop, even when the women are superstars such as Sharon Stone and Barbra Streisand, while actors such as Kevin Costner and Sylvester Stallone can appear in dog after dog and still command the salary of plutocrats. If women continue to worry that they need a man's money to persist because the playing field remains about as level as the surface of Mars—or Venus, if you prefer—then we can't conclude anything about innate preferences. If women continue to suffer from bag-lady syndrome even as they become prosperous, if they see their wealth as still provisional, still capsizable, and if they still hope to find a man with a dependable income to supplement their own, then we can credit women with intelligence and acumen, for inequities abound and find new and startling permutations even in the most economically advanced countries and among the most highly skilled populations of women.
There's another reason that smart, professional women might respond on surveys that they'd like a mate of their socioeconomic status or better. Smart, professional women are smart enough to know that men can be tender of ego—is it genetic?—and that it hurts a man to earn less money than his wife, and that resentment is a noxious chemical in a marriage and best avoided at any price. "A woman who is more successful than her mate threatens his position in the male hierarchy," Elizabeth Cashdan, of the University of Utah, has written. If women could be persuaded that men didn't mind their being high achievers, were in fact pleased and proud to be affiliated with them, we might predict that the women would stop caring about the particulars of their mates' income. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes that "when female status and access to resources do not depend on her mate's status, women will likely use a range of criteria, not primarily or even necessarily prestige and wealth, for mate selection." She describes a New York Times story written by Donatella Lorch in 1996, called "Bride Wore White, Groom Hopes for Parole." The story is about women from a wide range of professions—bankers, judges, teachers, journalists—who marry male prisoners. The allure of the men is not their income, for you can't earn much when you make license plates for a living. Instead, it is the men's gratitude that proves irresistible. The men are happy to have the love of these women, these smart, free women, and they focus all their thoughts, attention, and energy on their wives. The women also like the fact that their husbands' fidelity is guaranteed; the longer the inmates' sentences are, the more attractive the men become. "Peculiar as it is," Hrdy writes, "this vignette of sex-reversed claustration makes a serious point about just how little we know about female choice in breeding systems where male interests are not paramount and patrilines are not making the rules."
Do women love older men? Do women find gray hair and wrinkles attractive on men—as attractive, that is, as a fine, full head of pigmented hair and a vigorous, firm complexion? The evolutionary psychologists suggest yes. They believe that women look for the signs of maturity in men because a mature man is likely to be a comparatively wealthy and resourceful man. Of course, the thesis can't be taken too far. Desmond Morris has observed that baldness isn't considered a particularly attractive state. One might predict, he said, that since baldness comes with age and a man's status generally rises with age, the bald head, gleaming in the midday sun of the veldt or the fishbelly glow of a fluorescent office light, would lure the attention of every woman on the prowl for her alpha mate. But no, he admitted, there was no evidence that baldness was adaptive, nor that women admired rather than merely accepted a thinning hairline. Nevertheless, the legend of the sexy older man persists, particularly among older men. The older male moguls in Hollywood can't stop casting older male actors in roles that have them flinging about on the wide screen like elephants in musth, and the age gap between the men and their female costars gapes ever wider, leaving nothing to the female imagination but things we'd rather not imagine. Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Woody Allen: no matter how much their faces come to resemble a bassett hound's, no matter to what extenuated proportions their cartilaginous features grow, the men are portrayed as sexy, comely, frisky, desirable, to women twenty-five, thirty years their junior, to women who are themselves considered "mature" for being older than, oh, thirty.
Do women find older men innately attractive? Is it the men's alpha status? Or could it be something less complimentary to the male, something like the following—that an older man is appealing not because he is powerful but because in his maturity he has lost some of his power, has become less marketable and desirable and potentially more grateful and gracious, more likely to make a younger woman feel that there is a balance of power in the relationship? The rude little calculation is simple: He is male, I am female—advantage, man. He is older, I am younger—advantage, woman. By the same token, a woman may place little value on a man's appearance because she values something else far more: room to breathe. Who can breathe in the presence of a handsome young man, whose ego, if expressed as a vapor, would fill Biosphere II? Not even, I'm afraid, a beautiful young woman.
In the end, it matters not the reason why older men have access to younger women. As long as they do, some of them will partake. If they need Viagra to partake, they will petition their urologists forthwith. And women will feel cheated and pissy about the disparity in options of the middle-aged. What is important to question, and to hold to the fire of alternative interpretation, is the immutability and adaptive logic of the discrepancy, its basis in our genome rather than in the ecological circumstances in which a genome manages to express itself. Evolutionary psychologists insist on the innate discordance between the strength of the male and the female sex drive. They admit that many nonhuman female primates gallivant about rather more than we might have predicted before primatologists began observing their behavior in the field—more, far more, than is necessary for the sake of reproduction. Nonetheless, the credo of the coy female persists. It is garlanded with qualifications and is admitted to be an imperfect portrayal of female mating strategies, but then, that little matter of etiquette attended to, the credo is stated once again.
"Amid the great variety of social structure in [ape] species, the basic theme ... stands out, at least in minimal form: males seem very eager for sex and work hard to find it; females work less hard," Robert Wright says in The Moral Animal. "This isn't to say the females don't like sex. They love it, and may initiate it. And, intriguingly, the females of the species most closely related to humans—chimpanzees and bonobos—seem particularly amenable to a wild sex life, including a variety of partners. Still, female apes don't do what male apes do: search high and low, risking life and limb, to find sex, and to find as much of it, with as many different partners, as possible; it has a way of finding them." In my view, female chimpanzees do search high and low and risk life and limb to find sex with partners other than the partners who have a way of finding them. As we have seen, DNA studies of chimpanzees in West Africa show that half the offspring in a group of closely scrutinized chimpanzees turned out not to be the offspring of the resident males. The females of the group didn't rely on sex "finding" its way to them; they proactively left the local environs, under such conditions of secrecy that not even their vigilant human observers knew they had gone, and became impregnated by outside males. They did so even at the risk of life and limb—their own, and those of their offspring. Male chimpanzees try to control the movements of fertile females. They'll scream at them and hit them if they think the females aren't listening. They may even kill an infant they think is not their own. We don't know why the females take such risks to philander, but they do, and to say that female chimpanzees "work less hard" than males do at finding sex is not supported by the data.
Evo psychos pull us back and forth until we might want to sue for whiplash. On the one hand we are told that women have a lower sex drive than men do. On the other hand we are told that the madonna-whore dichotomy is a universal stereotype. In every culture, there is a tendency among both men and women to adjudge women as either chaste or trampy. The chas
te ones are accorded esteem. The trampy ones are consigned to the basement, a notch or two below goats in social status. A woman can't sleep around without risking terrible retribution, to her reputation, to her prospects, to her life. "Can anyone find a single culture in which women with unrestrained sexual appetites aren't viewed as more aberrant than comparably libidinous men?" Wright asks rhetorically. Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary—if they disobey their "natural" inclination toward a stifled libido. The diagnosis of "nymphomaniac" is never made on a man. Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do, yet it is not low enough. No, there is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse that cultures everywhere have had to gird against it by articulating a rigid dichotomy with menacing implications for those who fall on the wrong side of it. There is still enough lingering female infidelity to justify infibulation, purdah, claustration. Men have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques, and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature the female libido. How can we know what is "natural" for us when we are treated as unnatural for wanting our lust, our freedom, the music of our bodies?
"It seems premature to attribute the relative lack of female interest in sexual variety to women's biological nature alone in the face of overwhelming evidence that women are consistently beaten for promiscuity and adultery," Barbara Smuts has written. "If female sexuality is muted compared to that of men, then, why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?"
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