Right now I’m reading Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book: A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shaped the Minds of Men and Women. It is neither a pure blank-slate social-constructivist book nor a hereditarian, genetic-deterministic book, but takes an evidence-based middle ground, asking to what extent behaviors and mindset are molded by evolution and to what extent social conditioning plays a role. I won’t give a take on the book as I’m not yet finished, but it does make many arguments I’m familiar with. One of these is the familiar and well-documented claim that, based on different degrees of parental investment, men concentrate more than women on beauty when looking for a mate, while women are less interested in appearance than are men but more interested in paternal behavior, status, and wealth of a prospective mate. These are not absolute differences, of course: many men want women who will invest a lot in their offspring (we are, after all, generally monogamous), and many women want men who are pleasing to the eye. This is a difference in average preferences, not absolute ones characterizing all individuals.
Although some of this average sex difference in behavior may reflect social conditioning, its evolutionary background is likely based in part on the differential investment between the sexes in offspring: although many societies are polyandrous and monogamous, on average males still have a potentially larger number of offspring than do females. This appears to be true in many societies, as well as in our closest relatives, the apes and in most species of animals. Women, who by virtue of their reproduction (as well as by both the evolutionary and social impetus to do most of the childcare) need fathers who will do their share of parental duties and provide for the offspring. And of course men do share some of those duties, but are also more interested in casual sex and adultery—a way to spread more of their genes when they don’t invest as much in offspring.
If you want the evidence for this, read Stewart-Williams’s book or the references he cites.
Why am I pondering this? Because when I went to the library the other day, I caught a glimpse of myself in the entry door and thought, “Geez, look at that ugly old man!” Whatever attractive physical features I once had—and I was never close to being a Robert Redford—have vanished, carried away by time’s wingéd chariot. Women, too, worry about ageing, and are even more concerned about it because of a key difference between men and women: as women get older and become unable to reproduce, they become less desirable faster than do men. A man can have offspring even in his eighties, while in their early fifties most women hit menopause, which means no more kids. Since men have largely evolved to be physically attracted to women who can give them children, women try harder than do men to retain the signs of youth: hair color, plastic surgery, botox, and the like. On average, they try harder to retain physical attractiveness because it is that rather than status that is a dominant way of attracting partners—and most people want a partner.
Which brings up a tangential point: what about gay men and women? I don’t know their preferences but it would be interesting to study (and I’m sure people have) whether men attracted to other men for lasting partnerships are less concerned with looks than are women attracted to other women for partnerships.
Back to the point, which is this. It is my theory, which is mine (and likely many other people’s) that there is really no objective difference in physical attractiveness with age, in either men or women. Old men and women look different from their younger selves (I now refrain from looking in mirrors), but the beauty associated with youth and the loss in attractiveness associated with age are not anything objective (beauty never is, of course). We are simply evolved to think that those features associated with having more offspring on us are more “beautiful”, as those mindsets are the ones promoted by natural selection. This explains why women are more concerned with the physical ravages of time then are men, for their physical attractiveness to the other sex wanes faster with time. I’ve often heard older actresses say that by the time they hit forty, Hollywood no longer wants them, while that doesn’t happen so much with male actors. Why is this difference retained past the age of reproduction in women? I suppose it’s because it’s largely innate and most women didn’t live past menopause during most of our evolution.
Thus beauty is in the eye of the beholder: it is subjective, like all standards of beauty, but the subjectivity is molded in certain directions by natural selection.
I am not, of course, saying that this is good—only that much of it is natural. I do not want to commit the naturalistic fallacy here, but simply consider what aspects of our minds and behaviors might be based on genes, to what extent, and whether those evolutionary bits have been molded by natural selection.
This parallels a point I’ve made before: other aspects of our senses, like tastes, are clearly molded by natural selection. I have said, for example, that to a vulture rotten meat tastes as good as an ice-cream sundae does to us. Animals have evolved to search for food that tastes good because, over time, our senses evolve to find the food we need to grow and reproduce to be tasty. In other words, natural selextion has molded our taste buds and our brains so we prefer what is nutritious and fosters reproduction. This can be hijacked: we now eat too many fats and sweets because those substances were desirable to our ancestors as they were rare but promoted reproduction. Now they no longer do so because of the surfeit of “bad” food on tap. But our taste buds haven’t yet caught up to our health.
Why do feces and vomit repel us, smelling foul? It’s very likely that these substances were evolutionarily associated with the spread of disease, and so we evolved smell-detectors that find them repugnant. After all, dung beetles love the odor of feces!
I’ll draw one more parallel here. Anybody who thinks about it seriously must admit that male orgasms, intricate and immensely pleasurable physiological mechanisms associated with ejaculation, have evolved as a way of promoting reproduction (the evolutionary basis of female orgasms is more speculative, but there is no shortage of adaptive hypotheses). Orgasms are a way of getting men to produce offspring, just as sweetness is a way of getting us to eat sugar. And, like eating too many sweets, orgasms can be hijacked—severed from their reproductive function by condoms, chemicals, or medication. Organizations like the Catholic Church have tried mightily to try to reconnect sex and reproduction, but it is largely in vain.
I have undoubtedly written this too fast, as I just had some thoughts and wanted to get them down on paper before I forget them. I’ve considered that I’m trying to dispel my idea that I’m unattractive, and in so doing thought about physical attraction in general. And yes, I’m also reading Stewart-Williams’s book, which considers in detail this and other aspects of human (and animal) mentation and behavior.
Once you get an evolutionary mindset, all sorts of behaviors now become more interesting. That doesn’t mean we should make up adaptive stories and consider those stories to be true, but neither should we ignore possible evolutionary explanations. To explain the evolutionary basis of human behaviors and minds will be hard, as most of them evolved in the unrecoverable distant past—in our ancestors. But some of the explanations are testable, and here I must stop.
Great to hear – Stewart-Williams always has good eXtweets e.g. with graphical presentation that illustrate a simple point – then I can look further if inclined – or note it and move on, to look it up later.
He also makes these points in a down-to-Earth way, cognizant of the sharply competitive nature of knowledge as can be found … in abundance today …. in contrast to … the 20th century….🤔
Agreed — his Substack is worth checking out: https://substack.com/@stevestewartwilliams
Yes! I used a picture of myself from the 1980s in my anatomy class to illustrate the changes associated with aging even in a healthy individual. One of the students piped up, “What the hell happened?” She was not pleased with the answer, “I have healthy children and grandchildren; evolution is down with me. Don’t gotta be pretty no more.” The only way to stay forever young is to die before you get old
Ha,ha,ha!
One thing I would add about male attractiveness. For many of us females, an otherwise attractive male can suddenly become very unattractive when he starts speaking, because he betrays his lack of intelligence. Works the other way too.
You betcha. I find intelligence a primary feature in the attractiveness of women. And lack of same has always been a turn off.
When I was in grad school, a new student showed up. She really was lovely. At a department retreat, I asked her where she was from. She said that she was from Princeton. I had just spent some time at the Institute for Advanced Study, so I figured “hey, common ground”. I asked her if she knew the university at all, and she said (and I quote) “of course. It’s on the way to my favorite mall”.
That was it for me.
While what is natural isn’t always right (we evolved tendencies towards violence along with tendencies for negotiation,) trying too hard to minimize general sex differences in order to eliminate sexism is probably going to fall on the side of wrong. If Susie wants a dolly, don’t force a truck on her assuming she only picked up feminine preferences from the commercials, or that evolution is infinitely malleable. It backfires if “Be Yourself” is considered a virtue.
The same probably goes, to an extent, for cosmetics. Men value beauty. If other women are artificially enhancing their appearance, I think the only way to avoid doing so oneself is to look for a corner of culture where lipstick and mascara indicate low status. Good luck with that.
As I’ve gotten older and uglier, as I go throughout the day I find it helps to constantly mentally picture myself as being about 25 or so. Why not? As noted, there aren’t that many mirrors, and other people don’t know what you’re thinking.
Unless specifically contemplating it my default mental imgae of myself is as I was in my twenties to thirties. It’s only on those rare occasions that I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and actually pay attention to what I look like that I’m reminded that I no longer match my mental image.
I prefer to live in places where there is little lipstick or mascara and what little there is is an indication of low status.
Agreed, notions of beauty and other aesthetic qualities such as taste are subjective.
What is insufficiently appreciated is that so are notions of morality, virtue, harm, justice, fairness, et cetera — these are all subjective, where the “subjectivity is molded in certain directions by natural selection”.
[Note, that is not saying that any of those things are unimportant, dispensable or second-rate; indeed our subjective feelings, our qualia, are, in the end, the only things that are important to us.]
Don’t agree. There aren’t many studies demonstrating the objective nature of beauty — facial symmetry, hip to waist ratio, etc.
My take has always been that attractiveness is objective but attraction is subjective.
Thank ceiling cat for that!
How do you tell what is attractiveness without looking at attraction? You are saying that objective reality is determined by the degree to which it prompts a subjective reaction.
There are plenty of metrics for judging beauty: symmetry, neo natal female faces, etc. Using AI they can take an ammalgamtion of faces that are condensed into one pretty attractive face.
But how do you decide on the metric in the first place? You have to ask humans. How else could you do it?
What you’re saying is that you can objectively describe human subjective judgements. That’s true, you can. But the judgements are still subjective (that is, they are properties of human brain states).
Thanks very much for this reminder. I’ve seen SSW refer to his new book on twitter but didn’t know it was finally published.
“I’ve often heard older actresses say that by the time they hit forty, Hollywood no longer wants them, while that doesn’t happen so much with male actors.”
My favourite version of this saying, played out by some of my favourite actresses. Sorry the language is a bit rude (but not out of character for these actresses, especially Amy Schumer).
Classic!
I work in a corporate environment with a large number of women. Having gotten to know some of my colleagues pretty well, they’ve occasionally let slip their views on male attractiveness. And the upshot is…women seem to be a lot more selective than I had previously thought.
For example, I was in the room when one woman openly said that “there is not one good looking guy in this entire office.”* Now, there are at least 100 guys in the office. This sparked a mini-debate with the other women in which they were able to scrounge together perhaps 3 or 4 men that were maybe passable. I would chip in with “but what about so and so” and they’d laugh hysterically at my cluelessness.
Now, I can certainly say that me and the other guys in the office would find way more than 3 or 4 of the 100 women attractive! But this is probably correct…my wife has said similar unflattering things about the population of men at her work.
I think this hammers home to men in the modern West the importance of getting your act together in your career, your social status, and your physical fitness if you want to successfully pass on your genes. The social structures that in the past made it easier for men to get wives (arranged marriages, economic dependence of women on men) have eroded or been eliminated. In fact, this all hangs together in some way…perhaps these social structures were invented by men specifically as a reproductive strategy to deal with high female selectiveness in mates.
*I did not bother to protest “hey, what about me”. I am a middle-aged married man and therefore invisible and irrelevant to the discussion!
Similar results on female selectiveness have been found in studies of people using dating apps, where women said they found the vast majority of men on the apps unattractive, whereas men said they found most women on the apps attractive. When I mentioned this to a female colleague who taught a course on psychology of love and sex, she misinterpreted it as meaning there must be way more ugly men on dating apps than ugly women! But I’d bet that if the attractiveness of men on a dating app was dramatically increased, the women using the app would remain as highly selective and prone to rejecting them as before. Female choosiness given whatever’s on offer (think a female peacock evaluating splendiferous males) is an adaptive trait seen in many species.
Dating apps are asymmetric warfare. Most men aren’t all that much to look at. It’s not surprising that an amateur photo with some chichés under each one makes the pool look not very attractive to women who aren’t desperate (such as ones married to men like you and me!)
There’s an old medical joke where the worried doctor is speaking to a wife outside the room where he has just examined her husband. “Mrs. Jones, I really don’t like the looks of your husband.”
“Neither do I, Doctor, …but he works steady and he’s good with the children.”
Women say they want kind men with good minds and prospects, which can’t come through on a dating site. (Is that list of specs desirable to men, though? Just because she wants it doesn’t mean she can get it. If she’s now an older single woman, maybe her standards were too high for what she herself brought to the table. Hope she’s happy. Women who really do want smart, kind, generous men know all this, and don’t use dating apps. Which leaves the women who do use dating apps….
Your female colleagues overlook a key result from those studies which you have grasped. Women, including your colleagues I suspect, over-estimate their own attractiveness (hence, asymmetry) because even a six can get a high-status “Chad” (as they are known in the manosphere) to hook up with her for casual sex if he can’t find anything better on offer that night. He might cynically judge that she’ll go cheaper and still let him bed her. This causes the sixes to think they must be eights or nines. But they can’t land any of those high-status men because the Chads have their pick of all the true nines and tens they want. So you have 90% of the women competing bitterly and fruitlessly for the hottest 10% of the men. They give not a second look* to the 90% of men who are closer to their own level: men with whom they could actually make a relationship, were they to meet in traditional settings where other measures of desirability in both sexes could emerge organically. But not at work!
Dating apps are monetized resentment machines.
(*Literally: most men get not a single right swipe on their profiles, even if they pay extra to keep them at the top of the queue longer.)
Yes I’ve heard such tales. I will add this: I had a colleague who’d become recently single against his will. He was 6 foot 4, super fit, six figure income, kind and sensitive, and very good looking. And yet even after a year he couldn’t get any action from the dating app he was using. He ended up marrying a former student who contacted him after graduating.
Congratulations on your success! 😀
Very funny but it wasn’t me. I’ve been married for more than three decades now, though it seems much longer!
Peahen? (Yes, I know that gender woo has brought us female cocks.)
I note that Mick Jagger not only has great-grandchildren, but that his youngest child is younger than some of them. From which I conclude that in the meantime he has, indeed, got some satisfaction.
Yeah, but at least many (if not most, at least in the West) women make an attempt to look aa best as they can when they get olde, —— men, not so much (it takes time, money and effort)
Yes, of course. The question is why women past the reproductive stage take this trouble. One reaches a certain age where no modification of your appearance can make you look of childbearing age.
Many women just do this for themselves, it’s not always to do with finding a mate. If you feel that you look good, then it improves your mood. Feeling you look good is subjective though, I think women with long flowing grey hair look terrific and seem more confident, whereas those with obviously fake dye jobs seem to be clinging to their lost youth, which I think makes them less attractive.
None of my women’s circle are trying to look as if we are of child bearing age. Most of us are glad to be past that and feel we have earned our grey hair. If a man is only attracted to a woman because she is of childbearing age then that is not a man to be desired because his attraction to you is dependent on how you look, and looks fade.
My (still lovely) wife used to “touch up” (= color) her hair when she was in her 40’s and 50’s, presumably to extend her reproductive desirability for a few more years. (She didn’t know that she did it for that reason, but that is the evolutionary explanation.) At some point I thought that her hair color started to look fake so I encouraged her to stop coloring it, so she did. Now her hair is a mix of brown and gray and she looks great again. In her case, she gave up trying t look reproductive yet her attractiveness grew. (Of course my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. :-))
Naturalness is a form of beauty. Sigourney Weaver and Helen Mirren look more attractive than botoxed women half their age because embracing your age with dignity can be more sexy. People who mangle their faces, like Madonna, seem to be broadcasting flaws in their character and confidence.
I completely agree. Insecurity is to be pitied. I find lip fillers to be very off putting, by the way.
Although the accuracy of the biology in this post is self-evident, I can’t help thinking about how this would be received by various academics from the Ctrl-left. They would be aghast, and they would want to “correct” just about every word of it.
In my evolution class, I go on quite a bit about the evolution of sexual reproduction and sexual selection. I would certainly be fired if I taught this at Harvard, but our students are quite accepting of it about there being males and females and about the evolved differences in their mating strategies. When I ask short essay questions about this or that matter, I am often taken aback at how unflinchingly “sexist” they can seem, even to my politically center-of-the-road eyes.
Was it Redd Foxx who said beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone?
Or was it Flip Wilson?
I saw the Flipper back in the late 80s in the Newark airport sitting with a couple of associates. It made me kind of sad thinking that not many of the travelers in the concourse would even know who he was nor what a sensation (short-lived) he had been in the previous decade.
I am more optimistic about the survival of post-menopausal women through much of our civilization.
First, what could kill a woman at menopause? Certainly not childbirth, which killed many of her sisters. By definition she has survived that. She has also survived many of the slings and arrows of childhood and young adulthood, infectious diseases chiefly. (Tuberculosis was a disease of poor young women, and men, “back in the day”.) Because of the protective effect of estrogen, she won’t have a heart attack until 15 years later than the men in her society will (unless she has other risk factors such as tobacco smoking.) Breast cancer will be less likely if she has had an early first pregnancy, as women did. Even today, a woman has to live well into her ninth decade to accumulate the full lifetime risk of 1 in 8 so often quoted by the mammography industry. A post-menopausal woman is nearly invulnerable to early death.
Second, post-menopausal women are invaluable to all societies as (great-)grandmothers teaching their daughters how to raise their children in turn, and passing on the lore of organizing society including how to outwit (“manage”) the men they must share their society with. They will be nurtured and valued, more than an unmarried man who becomes too sick to work. The institution of marriage guarantees to men that the children they pay to raise will be their own. The other side of the bargain is that the husband must continue to feed, shelter, and protect his wife even after she is no longer sexually attractive to him.
Postmenopausal women I am confident survived in every society until their bodies wore out or got cancer, as ours all do.
Well, you are closer to being right than I was, with estimates of prehistoric human lifespans given that you reached reproductive age being 60-70 years according to Grok. But that still leaves the mystery of why post-reproductive women would still be more concerned with making themselves look younger when they are clearly post-reproductive. A sixty year old woman can hardly pass for one who can bear children, or so I think.
Thinking about this more, I suppose the answer is that women like to be attractive to men, and what often makes a woman attractive too men (NOT THE ONLY THING) is some hard-wired preferences of men that did not abate with age in our ancestors.
I have a hypothesis, which is mine, which is that in a parallel universe without men, women would of course reproduce by parthenogenesis but they would still wear nice clothes and make-up because it makes them feel good and it communicates other things about them. Only the fashions would be decidedly more practical.
I do not buy your hypothesis because there is no reason for it save evolution, but in your universe there is no evolution. And why wear makeup like rouge and lipstick and perfume in such a universe? I have thought of some possible reasons, but they are not nearly as credible as explanations for the sex differences we see today.
The fact that, even with today’s globalization, the type and amount of cosmetic practices varies hugely from country to country shows that most of it is probably cultural, not innate.
Jerry writes: “But that still leaves the mystery of why post-reproductive women would still be more concerned with making themselves look younger when they are clearly post-reproductive.”
I would opine that this behavior—doing what it takes to look reproductively valuable—develops as the neuronal connections in the brain mature during childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. These connections, which foster the woman’s desire to “look good,” simply stay intact for the entirety of the woman’s life.
So, the young teenager wears her all-too-skimpy bikini. The thirty-something makes herself up and dresses to the nines. The fifty-year-old colors her hair and has a bit of “work” done. (“Work” = lid-lift, lipo, and other cosmetic procedures.) And the ninety-year-old still won’t leave the house without “putting her face on” or without wearing her earrings.
I don’t think we need a unique explanation for why a post-reproductive woman still wants to look good. She still tries to look good because her brain was built that way. And there would be little if any selective benefit to changing it now.
Yes…we are loathe to give up anything we sacrificed for; in part, because it defines our own sense of identity.
Yes, probably, and my thoughts on women’s survival after menopause didn’t go far enough in addressing the question. All I got to was the prediction that they wouldn’t all be dead. I’m personally glad that most modern women seem to like being attractive to men, even if they aren’t fooling anyone into thinking they are still reproductively competent, and even if that’s not the primary reason most husbands stick around. I hope your explanation (and Norman G.’s codicil) holds water.
Edit: I wish women wouldn’t go in for cosmetic surgery, though. Not just for us, anyway.
I suspect that most gay people are evolutionarily-endowed with the same abstract criteria for attractiveness as are straight people: men will tend to seek out youth and sexual drive, women reliability and long-term stability, regardless of their orientation. I’m not a biologist, so maybe there’s a reason to suspect otherwise that I’m unaware of?
Yes, but as far as I know, gay men tend to prefer a variety of partners over long term relationships more often than do gay women, who (and I am just going by what I have heard) prefer steady and stable relationships. But you might be right when we are speaking about what gay men and women find attractive.
The paradox is that gay women have higher divorce rates than gay men.
Re preferences of gay people: from what I’ve read, gay males place even more value on sexual/physical attractiveness than heterosexuals do. Relatedly, they bemoan that, as they age, they have as much difficulty in attracting partners (for sex anyway) as heterosexual females.
By contrast, there’s reason to suspect that gay females place less value on physical attractiveness than heterosexuals do. Per Google:
I hate the term “male gaze”. But anyway, if you assume that people typically try to maximize their sexual attractiveness to the sex they are sexually attracted to, the fact that lesbians don’t go to as much effort as heterosexual females suggests that lesbians don’t put as much value on sexual attractiveness in their female partners as heterosexual males do.
Or it could be that lesbians don’t put as much value on sex, period. If you rank sexual orientations by the frequency they have sex, gay males have the most, while lesbians have the least.
Fascinating, thanks!
(Here I stop for the day.)
I think the relevant comparison is between gay men and straight men, gay women and straIght women. I mean, straight men want exactly what gay men want (in the abstract). The main difference is that straight men can’t always get what they want because women won’t give it to them, while gay men are having a ball haha.
I’m straight but live in gay Chelsea. Can confirm, they’re enjoying it all very much!
D.A.
NYC 🗽
ps VERY familiar with the in public horror of seeing an old man in a mirror. Already!
The topic of this post is one I’ve puzzled about for a long time.
I know that aesthetics – what humans consider to attractive – cannot have any more objective basis than what humans consider to be ‘good’ in a moral sense. Yet, I find it intriguing that humans and many species of birds seem to have similar aesthetic sensibilities. Take peafowl, for example. In a very real sense, peahens ‘designed’ peacock’s plumage. What’s so interesting to me is that humans find peacock plumage to be as attractive as peahens do. And this is true for many other bird species.
Yes, I know that male plumage is sexually attractive to female birds, while it is purely aesthetically attractive to humans. But ignoring that fact, it’s striking to me that what female birds consider to be most sexually attractive so often converges with what humans consider most beautiful. I mean, it’s easy to imagine female birds preferring males with plumage that humans don’t find especially attractive. Yet, despite the fact that there are zillions of different plumage patterns that they could select for, female birds seem to select for the plumage that humans also find attractive more often than you’d expect by chance alone. But what else could it be than chance?
That’s a very interesting observation!
I’d attribute it to similarities in the trichromatic visual systems of humans and peafowl, resulting in similar perceptions of vivid colors and intense color contrasts. Such strong stimuli naturally attract one’s attention whether human or peahen, though only with reproductive implications in the latter case.
Linda Litzke has her reasons for wanting to become a new woman 🙂
One thing that has not been mentioned (unless I missed it) is the change (I don’t want to use the term “evolution” in this case) of the concept of feminine beauty in western society. A few hundred years ago, women who were considered beautiful, as evidenced by renaissance paintings, were zaftig, as we say in Yiddish. In many cases, they might be considered fat by some of today’s standards. One could understand that, as certain physical characteristics were considered as healthy for childbearing. But today? It is hard for me to understand how the malnourished concept of feminine beauty is at all healthy. Especially if one reads the accounts of female models (the “influencers” of the beauty world) telling stories of how they are required to starve themselves, consuming far less calories than a healthy adult should.
What evolutionary advantage can come from this societal “ideal”?
I also want to mention plastic surgeries. Any major surgery carries risk. Where is the advantage of doing this. Is the supposed increase in attractiveness worth the medical risk for young women- or older women past reproduction age?
Standards change, but I’m not sure “weight” is the hill you want to die on. Yes, skinny is presented as desirable in magazines and perhaps by influencers, but do men want to get involved with someone who is skinny as a rail?
The calculations on plastic surgery are made by the recipient, and the risks are known but the rewards are not; they are only imagined, and even if the risks are greater, we are talking about people tapping into standards of “youth” that evolved aeons ago.
Note that most of the fashion circus is driven by women and gay men, not by heterosexual men, so no surprise that most heterosexual men aren’t into the anorexic supermodel look.
“my idea that I’m unattractive”
It depends how you define ‘attractive’. Some of the most physically attractive men are narcissists and have big egos. They can be very superficial, and that’s not attractive overall.
Women in my friend circle find kind men much more attractive. As you mentioned in your piece, women tend to look for different things in a partner than men do. A pretty guy may be good to look at, but if he can’t hold an intelligent conversation or doesn’t care about your feelings (or the feelings of ducks) then he’s not worth having.
Recently I was wondering about the idea that Jerry refers to with “Orgasms are a way of getting men to produce offspring, just as sweetness is a way of getting us to eat sugar”. How does this work at a basic philosophical level? It is as if a person is divided into at least two parts, and one part would be reluctant to have sex, so the other part creates orgasms as an incentive. Though I suspect it doesn’t quite work in this way.
I think he was riffing on “a hen is an egg’s way of making another egg”.
”many societies are polyandrous”
Is that what you meant to write? Polyandrous societies are rare in humans. Most are monogamous, or have become monogamous, but polygyny is the much more common form of polygamy.
Note that polygyny lives on if you’re a rock star or whatever. It held on longer than most people think it did, in disguise. Do you really think that those rich Victorians needed that many FEMALE servants? French-maid costume, anyone?
Interesting discussion and it brought to mind a poem by the English poet, Robert Graves called A Slice Of Wedding Cake.
Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.
Repeat ‘impossible men’: not merely rustic,
Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
How well women behave, and always have behaved).
Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.
Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.