The Queen - Matt Ridley

Most prostitutes are female for the simple reason that the demand for female prostitutes is greater than for male ones: If the existence of female prostitutes reveals the male sexual appetite in its naked-ness, then so, too, does the phenomenon of male homosexuality.

Before the advent of AIDS, practicing male homosexuals were far more promiscuous than heterosexual men: Many gay bars were, and are, recognized places for picking up partners for one-night stands.

The bathhouses of San Francisco catered to orgies and feats of repeated sex, assisted by stimulants, that boggled the mind when publicly discussed during the early years of the AIDS epidemic: A

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The Red Queen

Kinsey Institute study of gay men in the San Francisco Bay area found that 75 percent had had more than one hundred partners; 25

percent had had more than one thousand:'°

This is not to deny that there are many homosexuals who were and are less promiscuous than many heterosexuals: But even homosexual activists admit that, before AIDS arrived, homosexuals were generally more promiscuous than heterosexuals: There is no single convincing explanation of this. Activists would say that homosexual promiscuity is caused largely by society ' s disapproval: Illegitimate, "shameful" activities tend to be indulged to excess when indulged at all: The legal and social difficulty of forming gay

" marriages " mitigates against stable relationships.

But this is not persuasive: Promiscuity is not confined to those who indulge in gay sex clandestinely. Infidelity is acknowledged to be a greater problem in male gay "marriages" than in heterosexual ones, and society 's disapproval is far greater of casual than of stable homosexual relations. Many of the same arguments apply to lesbians, who show a striking contrast: Lesbians rarely tend to indulge in sex with strangers but instead form partnerships that persist for many years with little risk of infidelity. Most lesbians have fewer than ten partners in their lifetimes."

Donald Symons of the University of California at Santa Barbara has argued that the reason male homosexuals on average have more sexual partners than male heterosexuals, and many more than female homosexuals, is that male homosexuals are acting out male tendencies or instincts unfettered by those of women.

Although homosexual men, like most people, usually want to have intimate relationships, such relationships are difficult to maintain, largely owing to the male desire for sexual variety; the unprecedented opportunity to satisfy this desire in a world of men; and the male tendency toward sexual jealousy: : : : I am suggesting that heterosexual men would be as likely as homosexual men to have sex most often with strangers, to partici-pate in anonymous orgies in public baths, and to stop POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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off in public restrooms for five minutes of fellatio on the way home from work if women were interested in these activities:"

That is not to say that homosexuals do not long for stable intimacy or even that many are morally repelled by anonymous sex.

But Symons 's point is that the desire for monogamous intimacy with a life companion and the desire for casual sex with strangers are not mutually incompatible instincts: Indeed, they are characteristic of heterosexual men, as proven by the existence of a thriving call girl or "escort" industry that, at a price, supplies happily married businessmen with sexual diversions while they are traveling.

Symons is commenting not on homosexual men but on men—average men: As he says, homosexual men behave like men, only more so; homosexual women behave like women, only more so."

HAREMS AND WEALTH

In the chess game of sex, each gender must respond to the other' s moves: The resulting pattern, whether polygamous or monogamous, is a stalemate rather than a draw or a victory: In elephant seals and sage grouse, the game reaches the point where males care only about the quantity of mates and females only about the quality. Each pays a heavy price, the males battling and exhausting themselves and dying in the often vain attempt to be the senior bull or master cock, the females entirely forgoing any practical help from the fathers in rearing their children.

The chess game reaches a very different stalemate in the case of the albatross. Every female gets her model husband; courtship is a mutual affair, and they share equally the chores of raising the chick: Neither gender seeks quantity of mates, but both are after quality: the hatching and rearing of one solitary chick that is pampered and fed for many months. Given that male albatrosses have the same genetic incentives as male elephant seals, why do they behave so differently?

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The answer, as John Maynard Smith was the first to see, can be supplied by game theory, a technique borrowed from economics: Game theory is different from other forms of theorizing because it recognizes that the outcome of a transaction often depends on what other people are doing. Maynard Smith tried pitting different genetic strategies against each other in the same way that economists do with different economic strategies: Among the problems that were suddenly rendered soluble by this technique was the question of why different animals have such different mating systems:"

Imagine a population of ancestral albatrosses in which the males were highly polygamous and spared no time to help rear the young: Imagine that you were a junior male with no prospect of becoming a harem master: Suppose that instead of striving to be a polygamist, you married one female and helped rear her offspring: You would not have hit the jackpot, but at least you would have done better than most of your more ambitious brothers: Suppose, too, that by helping your wife to feed the baby, you greatly increased the chance that the baby survived: Suddenly, females in the population have two options: to seek a faithful mate like yourself or to seek a polygamist: Those that seek a faithful mate leave behind more young, so in each generation the number willing to join harems declines, and the rewards of becoming a polygamist fall with it: The species is "taken over" by monogamy:"

It works in reverse as well: The male lark bunting of Canada sets up a territory in a field and tries to attract several females to breed with him: By joining a male that already has a mate, a female forfeits the chance to make use of his skills as a father. But if his territory is sufficiently richer in food than his neighbor 's, it still pays her to choose him: When the advantage of choosing a bigamist for his territory or genes exceeds the advantage of choosing a monogamist for his parental care, polygamy ensues: This so-called polygyny threshold model seems to explain how so many marshland birds in North America became polygamous: 16

Both of these models could apply easily to humans: We became monogamous because the advantage that a junior father POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN

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could supply in feeding the family outweighed the disadvantage in not being mated to the chief. Or we became polygamous because of the discrepancies in wealth between males. "Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy 's third wife than Bozo the Clown's first?" said one (female) evolutionist:"

There is some evidence that the polygyny threshold does apply to human beings: Among the Kipsigis of Kenya, rich men have more cattle and more wives: Each wife of a rich man is at least as well off as the single wife of a poor man, and she knows it.

According to Monique Borgehoff Mulder of the University of California at Davis, who has studied the Kipsigis, polygamy is willingly chosen by the women: A Kipsigis woman is consulted by her father when her marriage is arranged, and she is only too aware that being the second wife of a man with plenty of cattle is a better fate than being the first wife of a poor man. There is companionship and a sharing of the burden between co-wives. The polygyny threshold model holds for Kipsigis fairly well. 1e