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James Brody February 24th, 2010 02:24 PM

Charlotte Allen: Gossip about Sex

"Robert Wright introduced the reading public to evolutionary psychology in his 1994 book, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. He summarized what biologists had observed in the field: that among animals—and especially among our closest relatives, the great apes—males often fight each other for females and so the most dominant, or "alpha," male has access to the most desirable, and perhaps all, of the females. But it's the female of the species who ultimately makes the choice as to which member of the pack she will deem the alpha male. "Females are choosy in all the great ape species," Wright wrote. He also noted that, for example, a female gorilla will be faithful—forced into fidelity, actually—to a single dominant male, but she will willingly desert him for a rival male who impresses her with his superior dominance by fighting with her mate. That's because, as Darwin postulated, evolution isn't merely a matter of survival of the fittest but also of the replication of the fittest, "selfish genes," in the words of neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins. Driven by instinctual desire for offspring, male primates chase fertile females so they can replicate themselves, while female primates choose strong males on the basis of survival traits to be passed on to young ones.

Dennis Dutton's new book, The Art Instinct, makes much the same argument.


"All of this is obviously pure speculation, if imaginatively rendered and bolstered by anthropological observations of hunter-gatherer societies today. Furthermore, there is a troubling chicken-or-egg circularity in evolutionary psychology arguments: How did the female hominids know the males were trying to entertain them unless their own brains were sufficiently evolved to appreciate the effort? You can't get a gorilla to recognize Mozart or a cave painting. It's equally easy to laugh out loud at a 2007 interview Mystery gave to Salon in which he asserted that a woman's scratching the back of her hand when a man talks to her is an "Indicator of Interest" because "[T]hat area of the hand gets itchy when a girl is attracted to a man from ape days, you know—it means, 'Groom me.'" Yet evolutionary psychology offers a persuasive explanation for many things that we are supposed to pretend are culturally conditioned: that the natures of men and women are fundamentally different and that, pace Naomi Wolf and the cougar-empowerment movement, women don't get sexier as they get older, at least not in the eyes of the man sitting on the next barstool. Youth and beauty are markers of fertility. As Mystery wrote in his book, it may be sexist to say out loud, but women are well aware "that their social value can be rated largely on their looks" or they wouldn't devote so many hours to toning muscles and adjusting makeup.

"Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way—as husbands and fathers, for example—women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren't so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children's schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex. "


James Brody April 28th, 2010 04:09 PM

Re: Charlotte Allen: Gossip about Sex
Female choice probably varies with resource and cultural stability.



Read Barabasi's Linked for an introduction....


vanquisheder August 21st, 2010 10:48 PM

Re: Charlotte Allen: Gossip about Sex
Whatever we say most of the time it's always the men who've dominated. Any type of relationship which gives more importance to the word 'dominate' is bound to become unstable. We just have to be more understanding and adjustable.

TomJrzk August 25th, 2010 10:18 AM

Re: Charlotte Allen: Gossip about Sex

Originally Posted by vanquisheder (Post 7113)

I guess that depends on what is meant by "dominate". If men fully dominated, wouldn't they be sending the women out to conquer the world for them or die trying?

I think it's more like women set the criteria by which men get "attention" and women seem to me to crave those men who dominate other men.

Of course, you said "most of the time" before your "always". ;)

Verbena December 6th, 2010 09:30 AM

Re: Charlotte Allen: Gossip about Sex
There is an interesting essay by Roy Baumeister re this 'Is there anything good about men'

it's free online if you google it


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