If we stop believing that boys and men are emotional cripples and fly-by-night Casanovas who just want sex, and start believing that they’re full, complete human beings who have emotional and relational needs, imagine what might happen.18
Interestingly, even the apparent counterexample of the minority of men who purchase sex19—often taken as evidence of men’s capacity and desire for purely physical sexual activity—turns out in some cases at least to be nothing of the sort. According to University of Leeds sociologist Teela Sanders, “a significant number” of men who purchase sex habitually or exclusively visit the same sex worker.20 This seems surprising, given the natural assumption that the purchasing of sex is the manifestation of men’s evolved desire for sexual variety, unencumbered by the restrictive relational obligations, moralities, and negotiations that sex usually entails. Why buy the same woman’s sexual services twice, in a market exchange potentially as emotionally uncomplicated and uncommitted as getting one’s car washed, or buying a bunch of bananas? Yet from her interviews with these men, Sanders concludes that
commercial sexual relationships can mirror the traditional romance, courtship rituals, modes and meanings of communication, sexual familiarity, mutual satisfaction and emotional intimacies found in ‘ordinary’ relationships.21
Of course these “regular clients” are only a subset of men (and one certainly wonders how “ordinary” things seem from the perspective of the women providing these value-added sexual services). But Sanders’s work indicates that even in this potentially most instrumental sexual exchange, for some men emotional intimacy, trust, communication, and familiarity are key parts of what is desired and paid for. Similarly surprising themes and motivations also emerged in an earlier small interview study of white, middle-class men who paid for sex, which found that an “attempt to structure the objective reality to be romantic/social continued for most of the individuals throughout the encounter.” Interestingly, the researchers also reported that, in many cases, the transaction was followed, either immediately or in due course, by “a sense of disappointment and anticlimax.” As one interviewee put it, in a striking reversal of stereotypical “morning after” roles:
After the act one experiences a pang of feeling as if something is wrong because you just went through something which is not by any way, shape or form personal… there’s absolutely no communication afterwards. It’s over, finished. You are no longer of interest to the girls that you have just been with. And it’s a big anticlimax afterwards.22
Or as one thirty-one-year-old man explained to Sanders:
Sex is obviously quite an intimate act and it feels a bit funny just walking in with somebody you have never met before. Having sex with them and then walking out again. While seeing someone regularly it feels more like a proper human interaction.23
A proper human interaction. All this talk of “mating strategies”—the very term conjures up unfortunate images of people arguing around a boardroom table strewn with maps of local singles’ bars studded with flags—obscures the point that we are “set up, psycho-sexually and physically, for non-reproductive sex,” as Laden puts it.24
Once we stop viewing human sexuality through the narrow frame of simply bringing together two reproductive potentials,25 it no longer seems so obvious and inevitable that men should strive for success while women fret about looking youthful. For example, Testosterone Rex reasoning holds that only a female’s physical attractiveness is closely linked with her all-important fertility (indicated mostly by youthfulness, the physical correlates of which are taken to be more or less synonymous with female beauty). But from a purely reproductive perspective, there is good reason for women to also be drawn to good looks and dewy youth. Some Evolutionary Psychologists suggest that females have evolved a “short-term sexual strategy” in which they seek casual sexual encounters with men of good genetic stock, with attractively masculine facial and bodily features supposedly being walking advertisements for their superior genes.26 What’s more, as Hrdy pointed out some time ago, “older men… even if still potent, might deliver along with their sperm an added load of genetic mutations.”27 In line with this, recent research has established higher frequencies of “de novo” mutations (that is, those that arise for the first time in the gametes, rather than hereditary mutations) in the sperm of older men, and their contribution to genetic disease.28 Presumably, then, the younger the man, the better the state of his “good genes.” Yet despite all this, men don’t wear uncomfortable platform shoes in order to make themselves look taller, rarely hand over fistfuls of cash to pay for major surgeries to make themselves more pleasingly V-shaped, or make their chins more handsomely prominent, nor line up in large numbers to have their foreheads paralysed with Botox injections. This absence of male enthusiasm for painful and expensive physical enhancements points to the possibility that deficiencies in reproductive potential can be, and are, forgivingly overlooked when it comes to sexual attraction.
Of course, physical attractiveness is a significant factor in sexual and romantic decision making, and it’s not merely social convention that says we aren’t looking our best in our eighties. But once released from the assumptions of the old sexual selection story, it becomes more reasonable to question whether men will always care more about physical attractiveness, while women focus more on resources. As one scholar points out, data regarding the first question “have been collected, by and large, from urban, middle-class, and often college-educated participants,” who hail from “cultural and ecological environments that are evolutionarily novel: They are engaged in wage labor, involved in local, national, and global markets, exposed to mass media, and reside in relatively large populations.”29 Studies that have looked at mate preferences in small-scale societies with economies apparently more in keeping with those of our ancestral past—such as the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania30 and the hunter-horticulturalist Shuar of Ecuador31—found little evidence that the sexes place different importance on the physical attractiveness of a partner. In the latter study, for instance, while a comparison sample from UCLA showed the “typical” sex differences in the importance of physical attractiveness, no such differences were seen in the Shuar participants.
And what about the Bulgari eyewear of supposed successful human couplings: male resources? As we saw in Chapter 1, it’s a mistake to make the blanket assumption that a female’s resources and status are irrelevant to her reproductive success. They can be of critical importance in mammals, including primates. As Hrdy argues (in a statement that, with a little tweaking, one could almost imagine taking place between mother and son in the drawing room of a Jane Austen novel):
Clearly it makes evolutionary sense for males to select females not only on the basis of fecundity but also on the probability of producing offspring that survive. When intergenerational effects are likely to be important, males should also take into account female status, kin ties, or home range quality.32
It’s certainly the case that cross-cultural studies reliably find that women care more about a potential partner’s material resources.33 But as Dupré points out:
Given, first, that women in most societies have fewer resources and, second, that women often anticipate dependency on the financial resources of their mates, this is not an observation in obvious need of a deep biological explanation.34
Without doubt, early motherhood creates dependency on others. It’s exhausting, time-consuming, and hungry work. But in an evocation of the female bush crickets from Chapter 1, that enjoyed the flexibility to adapt their mating strategy to their particular “economic” circumstances,35 the greater the gender equity of a country, the smaller the gender gap in the importance of the financial resources of a partner (as well as in the importance of other preferences, like chastity and good looks).36 Needless to say, the test case of a country in which the sexes enjoy economic equality doesn’t yet exist. But even over the relatively short period between 1939 and 2008, preferences have shifted in step with a breaki
ng down of traditional male breadwinner versus female homemaker roles, note psychologists Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly.37 For men, the importance of good financial prospects, education, and intelligence in a partner has risen, while the importance of culinary and housekeeping abilities has decreased. Nor is men’s self-reported interest in these “resource values” in women mere political correctness, being mirrored by changes in marital patterns in the United States. Whereas in the past, wealthier and better educated women were less likely to marry, now they are more so. As Wood and Eagly note, this means that women now enjoy “a marriageability pattern similar to that of men.”38
In fact, we may be shortly waving farewell to the economics-inspired reproductive love story in which female Fertility Value meets male Resource Value, settles down, and maximizes reproductive success. In some cultures at least, to a far greater degree it seems that what we really want are partners similar to ourselves in these attributes. Behavioural ecologists Peter Buston and Stephen Emlen pitted the two perspectives—“potentials attract” versus “likes attract”—against each other. They asked close to a thousand U.S. college students to rate the importance in a long-term partner of the purportedly evolutionarily relevant categories of wealth and status, family commitment (presumed to be especially important to women), physical appearance, and sexual fidelity (supposedly particularly important to men in a partner).39 The students then rated themselves on those same attributes. From a potentials-attract perspective, people with a high “mate value” (that is, highly physically attractive and sexually chaste women, and men of considerable wealth, status, and family commitment) will expect more complementary reproductive “potential” from a partner. But from a likes-attract perspective, people will want their partner to be similar to themselves: a woman who considers herself physically attractive and wealthy will desire something similar in a partner; a man who considers himself faithful and family focused will seek the same. Although if the researchers had only looked for data confirming the potentials-attract hypothesis, they would have found it and drawn the traditional conclusions—the likes-attract hypothesis actually won hands down in terms of its ability to explain people’s preferences. For instance, a man’s perception of his wealth and status was associated much more strongly with the importance he placed on the wealth and status of a potential partner than with her attractiveness. Similarly, a woman’s self-perceived physical attractiveness had a much stronger effect on the importance she placed on a potential partner’s looks than on his wealth and status.40 Following a brief tour of data suggesting that more similar couples tend to have better-quality marriages, the researchers comment that their “results suggest that the emphasis should be shifted away from the standard approach that focuses on indicators of reproductive potential toward understanding how matching on a trait-by-trait basis contributes to marital stability and possibly to reproductive success.”41
A later study, it must be said, failed to see evidence of likes attracting in a speed-dating situation, despite getting it on paper—a finding that highlights the somewhat dubious value of simply asking people what’s important to them in a partner.42 However, it’s also possible that a speed-dating context may, by necessity, tend to push people towards focusing on an individual’s most readily discernible qualities. Analyses of speed-dating data have found that, for men and women alike, physical attractiveness and youth dominate as predictors of a potential date’s desirability.43 But an analysis of actual matches made through an online dating Web site in China found that likes-attract again provided a much better explanation of the data than did potentials-attract. And even though there were signs here and there of “potentials” attracting too, sometimes this happened in the “wrong” way—for instance, there was evidence that, like men, “women also use their income to get more attractive men” and that “women with [a] better education background would like also to find a younger mate, just like men do.”44
A relentless focus on “mating value,” narrowly conceived, also contrasts with an analysis of several data sets reporting what characteristics men and women find more and less important in a partner. These show that for the past seventy-five years, across a number of different countries, the most important attributes in a long-term partner for both women and men have nothing to do with youthful fertility traded for resources. These most-desired attributes, in being unrelated to a person’s reproductive worth, do not force commentators to propose what Dupré describes as “absurd evolutionary fantasies… in explanation of homosexuality.”45 These preferred characteristics do not offensively imply that the “mate value” of your wife—even if she happens to be the woman you love, the mother of your children, and the only person in the world who understands what you mean when you say someone had “‘a beard like McFie’s’ or ‘hair the same colour as that man in Hove who caught me kicking his cat’”46—is less when she’s fifty than when she was twenty years younger. They are attributes that can’t be bought, injected into you, or liposuctioned out of you. And they are also traits that have little to do with tax brackets, luxury European cars, or corner offices. Rather, they correspond to factors that reduce the chances you will want to throw a plate at your partner’s head. They are dependability, emotional stability, a pleasing personality, and love.47
DOWNEY’S REFERENCE TO A “long, slow sexual revolution” tries to capture a fundamental feature of human sexuality. It wasn’t suddenly, with the advent of the birth control pill in the last century, that human sexuality became unyoked from reproduction—that began a long time before. A broader understanding of human sexuality makes more visible the absurdity of “the tendency to argue that, in relation to sex, ‘human nature’ is what you get when you remove every human trait.” To understand human sexuality, you can’t simply “strip off everything that’s distinctly human, like language, social complexity, and self-awareness,”48 not to mention a person’s politics, economic situation, social norms, and social identities. These are inextricably part of each person’s sexuality.
University of Otago social historian Hera Cook provides a beautiful illustration of exactly this point in her rich account of the sexual revolution.49 Cook notes that in eighteenth-century England, women were assumed to be sexually passionate. But drawing on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, and sex surveys and manuals, Cook charts the path towards the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power, thanks to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, and there was less community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. And so, in the absence of well-known, reliable birth control techniques, “women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure.”50 Victorian women turned to sexual restraint to control fertility, argues Cook, “a course of desperation that could be sustained only by imposition of a repressive sexual and emotional culture, initially by individuals of their own accord, and then… upon succeeding generations.”51 Cook describes the trajectory of Victorian women’s sexuality from the midto late nineteenth century as one of “increasing anxiety and diminishing sexual pleasure.”52 Only with the increasing availability of reliable, accessible contraception in the early twentieth century was there a gradual relaxation of sexual attitudes and growing acknowledgement of the existence and importance of female sexual desire, culminating in the introduction of the birth control pill and the sexual revolution. For the first time in history, women were able to join men in sex without the risk of lifelong consequences.
Cook’s rich perspective provides a useful reminder of the sheer newness, still, of the possibility of female reproductive and economic autonomy. So shouldn’t we therefore see contemporary sexual relations as a particular point in a long, sexual revolution that is still taking place? Take, for example, the moral discomfort felt by Victorian couples that used the cervical cap as a contraceptive device. Since use of the cap suggested premeditated desire on the part of the woman, many co
uples considered insertion a “wanton act” and disapproved of it as an unfeminine “invitation to sexual intercourse,” according to one birth control manual.53 Even today, there are faded remnants of this attitude, in contemporary assumptions that female sexuality is passive and receptive, rather than the active author of its own desire: the coy female of the Testosterone Rex conception of sexual selection. But underscoring the point that a person’s sexuality is exactly that—the sexuality of a person—a growing body of research (led by Rutgers University psychologist Diana Sanchez and her colleagues) suggests that an internalized notion of female sexual passivity can affect women’s bodily sexual experience. For instance, heterosexual women with stronger mental links between sex and submission have greater difficulty getting aroused and achieving orgasm, and women who take a submissive role during sex experience less arousal (a correlation that isn’t due simply to a lack of desire affecting both behaviour and sexual excitement). Their sexual dissatisfaction, in turn, reduces their partners’ enjoyment.54
By contrast, women who endorse feminist beliefs report enhanced sexual well-being on several fronts—and not, apparently, simply thanks to the effects of those beliefs on men’s propensity to fold the laundry. Feminist women are less likely to endorse old-fashioned sexual scripts, are more likely to have sex for pleasure rather than compliance, and enjoy greater sexual satisfaction thanks to a heightened awareness of their own desire.55 What’s more, women’s feminism is good for the sexual satisfaction of their male partners too: a happy win-win situation.56 In case you missed it, it was feminism that did that. I’m just saying.
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