by Ogi Ogas
Why is the female brain designed to play it safe? Because historically, the odds of a woman reproducing are very good. In fact, today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. According to recent DNA analysis, through the history of the human race about 80 percent of the women reproduced. Only 40 percent of men reproduced. This means that plenty of men were able to have children with multiple women—but the majority of men never had any kids. Roy Baumeister observes the psychological consequences for a man:If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances . . . Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed, but if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).
For women throughout history, the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Taking chances like [sailing off into the unknown] would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. Women might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.
A woman’s social environment is also crucial. Does a woman have a network of family and friends who can help provide emotional support and assist with child care? Does this social network approve of her partner? Is a woman in a position in her career where she can take time out for a relationship and to possibly raise children? Are there any other decent men available?
For a woman, context is everything.
MISS MARPLE’S FEMININE INTUITION
The Detective Agency’s decision-making process is often experienced as “female intuition”—a gut sense that a particular guy is Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong. This is the subjective outcome of Miss Marple’s evaluation of the complex array of clues gathered by the emotional, social, and cultural detectives—combined with an evaluation of a potential mate’s physical attractiveness—to produce a simple answer to the profoundly complex question: should I or shouldn’t I?
Should I marry Tom, or wait until he gets a better job? Should I sleep with this hot guy I just met at the club, or will my friends think I’m a slut? Should I use one of my last contraceptive sponges on Enrique, or is he not really sponge-worthy? A woman’s mind is filled with difficult choices, the result of Miss Marple’s endless sleuthing. In India, women even outsource this sleuthing to a booming business of “wedding detectives” who track down hidden information about prospective husbands.
Miss Marple’s cautious detective work is responsible for the dramatic results in Hatfield and Clark’s study. Women don’t want to go to bed with a complete stranger, even if he’s attractive, because there are not enough clues to determine what he’s really like. The Detective Agency is responsible for Meredith Chivers’s findings that physical arousal is separate from psychological arousal, since Miss Marple won’t permit psychological arousal unless enough of her criteria are met, regardless of what a woman feels down below. This is also why there can be no female Viagra. Simply increasing heat and blood flow between a woman’s legs won’t sway the discerning Miss Marple.
Most of the software of the Detective Agency software is located in the conscious parts of the brain, in the cortex. This is also the part of the brain that gets inhibited by alcohol and many recreational drugs. Perhaps drinking is a fast-acting substitute for what author Lori Gottlieb calls “The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” in her book Marry Him. Gottlieb argues that women set the bar too high and urges them to settle, to not try and check off every requirement on Miss Marple’s exacting list. And this list often seems endless, as captured in a cottage industry of books for women. Leslie Parrott talks about Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. Helen Norman Wright identifies 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged. Monica Leahy makes sure the Detective Agency leaves no stone unturned by presenting 1,001 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married.
The constant, conscious swirl of thoughts in the offices of the Detective Agency is the result of wisdom inherited from millions of sexual transactions conducted by women over a period of a few hundred thousand years. The result is the most sophisticated neural structure on Earth. How can we make such a grand claim? Because the Detective Agency is nature’s most successful long-term investment planner.
As any portfolio manager can tell you, long-term investment planning is tough. The most important requirement for long-term investment success is information, especially inside information. Mutual fund managers are absolute data hounds, voraciously gathering and analyzing oceans of economic and financial data. They’re also among the most highly paid people in America.
The second most important requirement for long-term investment planning is an effective analysis of the probability of various outcomes. Mutual fund managers employ teams of mathematical PhDs, macroeconomic wizards, and number-crunching supercomputers to predict the financial future. Long-term investing is expensive, difficult stuff. But this is precisely what Miss Marple excels at.
What is the payoff for spending my precious time with this guy? Will investing in a sexual relationship with this man give me the greatest chance of success to raise healthy, happy children in the future? The Detective Agency is ultimately a highly adaptive, highly intelligent system for successful long-term investment planning in a dynamic environment, which is why it represents the pinnacle of brain evolution. The male brain solves a man’s investment planning problem using simple, quick shortcuts: go after youth and gynoid fat. The female brain is more like Warren Buffett, always taking the long-term view and adjusting to changing circumstances. The male brain is like a stockbroker who gives all his clients the same advice whether the market is up or down: invest in Google, you can’t go wrong.
This fundamental difference in desire software is reflected in the type of erotic obsessions that men and women develop. As we saw in the previous chapter, men are quite prone to developing sexual obsessions with objects, which they frequently use for masturbation. Some male fetishists require the object to be present in order to ejaculate. Women, however, rarely develop sexual fetishes for objects. They do, however, develop emotional fetishes, a condition known as objectum sexualis.
Women who suffer from objectum sexualis usually claim that they are in love with an inanimate object, such as fences, a roller coaster, or a Ferris wheel. Though they sometimes have sex with the objects, their interest usually expresses itself as a powerful emotional connection and a desire for intimacy. Sometimes these feelings culminate in a romantic ceremony. One objectum sufferer named Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer married the Berlin Wall. Another objectum sufferer, Erika Naisho, married the Eiffel Tower. After the ceremony, she changed her name to Erika Eiffel. “There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object,” she reported sadly, “the issue of intimacy—or rather lack of it—is forever present.”
It was relatively easy to summarize the main sexual cues used by Elmer Fudd. The male brain relies on a few effective visual shortcuts. But we need two chapters for the most basic sampling of the psychological cues used by the female brain.
CHAPTER 5
Ladies Prefer Alphas
Female Psychological Cues I: The Hero
A porn video has almost as many climaxes as it does scenes, but a romance novel has only one climax: the moment when the hero and heroine declare their mutual love for each other.
—Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons, Warrior Lovers
When looking for clues, Miss Marple prefers stories over visuals. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Detective Agency brain software is designed to process psychological, social, and contextual information. This kind of information is transmitted more effectively through narratives and verbal exchanges than imagery. Cons
equently, whereas men are more aroused by visual cues, women are more aroused by psychological cues. Visual cues convey information about a woman’s health, fertility, and youth—data important to Elmer Fudd. Psychological cues convey information about a man’s stability, commitment, social status, competence, and kindness—data important to the Detective Agency. One particular kind of story packs the densest compilation of psychological cues into a single Miss Marple–thrilling fantasy: the romance.
The romance novel has long been described as “pornography for women.” This is a somewhat unfair and misleading comparison. After all, would we characterize gang bang porn as “romance for men”? However, the comparison is apt in one respect. As we’ve seen in previous chapters, porn reveals the sexual cues that activate male desire. Similarly, romance reveals the sexual cues that activate female desire. “The romance novel is a chronicle of female mate choice,” assert Catherine Salmon and Donald Symons in their book, Warrior Lovers, “in which the heroine overcomes obstacles to identify, win, and marry the hero, who embodies the physical, psychological, and social characteristics that constituted high male mate value during the course of human evolutionary history.”
The basic elements of the romance novel can be traced back to the 1740 book Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. The story is told through a series of letters. Pamela follows the courtship of a fifteen-year-old servant-maid by her master, Mr. B, a nobleman. Mr. B repeatedly tries to seduce and ravish Pamela, but she refuses his advances. Eventually, she realizes she loves him. When he realizes he feels the same way, he marries her. Pamela was one of the earliest best-sellers in the English language, though it was criticized for its perceived lewdness. For the second edition, the author relied on women’s reading groups for editorial advice.
In the nineteenth century, Jane Austen took the romance to its greatest literary heights. Best-selling romance authors today include Nora Roberts, Jackie Collins, and Stephenie Meyer. But the modern structure of the romance is often attributed to the 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. This classic romance has been through forty-two printings and is still in print today. Here’s the summary of the book from its back cover:The Flower: Doomed to a life of unending toil, Heather Simmons fears for her innocence—until a shocking, desperate act forces her to flee . . . and to seek refuge in the arms of a virile and dangerous stranger.
The Flame: A lusty adventurer married to the sea, Captain Brandon Birmingham courts scorn and peril when he abducts the beautiful fugitive from the tumultuous London dockside. But no power on Earth can compel him to relinquish his exquisite prize. For he is determined to make the sapphire-eyed lovely his woman . . . and to carry her off to far, uncharted realms of sensuous, passionate love.
There are two necessary and sufficient characters in every romance novel from Pamela to Pride and Prejudice to Twilight: the hero (the “Flame”) and the heroine (the “Flower”). The hero and his romantic journey represent Miss Marple’s fantasy of an ideal partner. The romantic hero is constructed from female psychological cues, in the same way that young, busty porn stars are built from male visual cues. In this chapter, we examine the virile, dangerous, and lusty adventurers that make Miss Marple swoon. We will introduce you to the psychology of the innocent, lovely Flower in the next chapter.
But first, let’s guide you through some of these “uncharted realms of love” by reviewing the different kinds of romance stories in the Internet age.
AN EFFLORESCENT GARDEN OF ROMANCE
If you don’t read romances yourself, you probably don’t realize just how astonishingly popular they really are. According to the Romance Writers of America, romance fiction generated $1.37 billion in sales in 2008. The romance genre has the single largest share of the fiction market. More people buy romances than detective novels, thrillers, science fiction, or science nonfiction. At least 74.8 million people read a romance novel in 2008 . . . and more than 90 percent of these readers are women.
To put these numbers in perspective, about 100 million men in the United States and Canada accessed online porn in 2008—just slightly more than the number of romance readers. However, though women don’t pay for porn, they happily pay for romance. Accurate sales figures are impossible to come by in the adult industry, but there’s little doubt that online pornography generated less revenue in 2008 than romance publishing.
Sex is ubiquitous in romance, but it is not absolutely essential to the enjoyment of a novel. Many women skim through the sex scenes or skip them completely. (Sex is not essential in porn, either. As we’ve seen, a man can enjoy simple images of anatomy or non-nude photos of attractive women.) Nevertheless, the sex scene is a very important part of the romance. “The heroine’s sexual inexperience remains intact only until the hero’s wang of mighty lovin’ introduces her to the wonderment of the fizznuckin’,” proclaim Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, authors of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. “It’s part and parcel of the fantasy: the awakening to love is that much more powerful when it’s accompanied by a sexual awakening as well.”
Different subgenres and different eras of romance treat the sex scene in different ways. Much like Pamela three centuries earlier, The Flame and the Flower pushed the envelope in its depictions of sexual interactions, offering more graphic descriptions of lovemaking than had previously been seen. But these sex scenes are still rather tame compared to male-targeted erotic stories. Consider this encounter between pirate hero Captain Brandon and innocent heroine Heather Simmons:She felt his hardness searching, probing between her thighs, then finding and entering that first tiny bit. In her panic to escape she surged upward. A half gasp, half shriek escaped her and a burning pain seemed to spread through her loins. Brandon stared back in astonishment and stared down at her. She lay limp against the pillows, rolling her head back and forth upon them. He touched her cheek tenderly and murmured something low and inaudible, but she had her eyes closed and wouldn’t look at him. He moved against her gently, kissing her hair and brow and caressing her body with his hands.
The emphasis is on the characters’ emotions and interactions. Compare this to the male-targeted erotic story “Princess and the Pirates” by Hamilton_g, where the emphasis is on visual details:The Captain ran his hands over her perfect ass-cheeks, and he felt a shudder pass through her body. Gently he pulled the globes apart, opening her up to the stares of the lusting pirate crew. He pulled harder, and the lips of her hairless virgin sex parted to reveal the glistening furrow within. It was soaking wet, filled with the copious flow from her aroused pussy.
“Take a good look, men. Our little beauty may protest, but her pussy tells the truth!”
When she saw the hungry stares of more than a score of ruthless men she groaned in shame and defeat. Her most private secret place was opened to their gazes, and they could see that she was dripping wet. The inner membranes glistened, and they could see the delicate little bump of her sweet clit, sheltered in its pink hood. The entrance to her vagina was spread open, the hole barely protected by the fragile petal of her virgin hymen.
The Flame and the Flower was the first romance novel published solely as a paperback, initiating a transformation of the romance industry from hardcovers into mass-market paperbacks. These days, however, romance is no longer limited to cheap paperbacks with embarrassing covers displaying a muscle-girded Fabio and a windswept vixen locked in a gymnastic embrace—what romance author Nora Roberts called “nursing mother covers—when she’s falling out of her dress, and he has his mouth on her tit.” Romance has entered the digital age.
“The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market,” asserts one columnist for the technology news site ITworld. Major romance publishers, such as Harlequin and Avon, were quick to offer their existing titles in digital formats in the mid-2000s. Since then, romance has quickly come to dominate the burgeoning e-publishing industry. Five out of the ten most popular free e-books on Amazon are romance. The actress
Felicia Day blogs about her reading tastes on Kindle: “I’ve read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more. And no ordinary books: Pure unadulterated TRASHY-ROMANCE books! Check out my Goodreads shelf vaginal-urban-fantasy, it’s bloating to an alarming degree. It’s stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much.”
Many romance publishers and imprints, such as Ellora’s Cave, Quill, and Carina Press, now publish many of their titles only in e-book format. Women can inconspicuously download their books instead of being seen with a “nursing mother” cover on the subway. This new privacy afforded readers of e-romances has allowed e-romance publishers to take risks, especially by publishing books with spicier sex.
Though there has been a general movement toward more explicit and more frequent descriptions of sex in mainstream romance through the ’90s and 2000s, a distinct genre eventually formed in which sex was the primary component: erotic romance. Erotic romance is also known as EroRom, while e-publisher Ellora’s Cave has trademarked the name Romantica to characterize its own books. Other e-EroRom publishers include Loose Id and Total-E-Bound. Authors of EroRom stories still maintain the essential elements of romance, but include more sex scenes with more detail and more kink. But even though EroRom pushes the boundaries of female erotic literature, the books’ sensitivity to the emotional experiences of the heroine and her lover would never be mistaken for the emotionless graphic raunch of male-targeted erotica.