The Queen - Matt Ridley

WHY DO RICH MEN MARRY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN?

If homosexuality is determined by hormonal influences in the womb, then so, presumably, are heterosexual preferences. Throughout our evolutionary history, men and women have faced different sexual opportunities and constraints: For a man casual sex with a stranger carried only a small risk—infection, discovery by the wife—and a potentially enormous reward: a cheap addition of an

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extra child to his genetic legacy. Men who seized such opportunities certainly left behind more descendants than men who did not.

Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism: Virtually all male mammals and birds do, even those that are mainly monogamous. This is not to say that men are irredeemably promiscuous or that every man is a potential rapist, it is just that men are more likely to be tempted by an opportunity for casual sex than women: Women are likely to be different: Having sex with a stranger not only encumbered a Pleistocene woman with a possible pregnancy before she had won the man 's commitment to help rear the child, but it also exposed her to probable revenge from her husband if she had one and to possible spinsterhood if she did not.

These enormous risks were offset by no great reward. Her chances of conceiving were just as great if she remained faithful to one partner, and her chances of losing the child without a husband 's help were greater. Therefore, women who accepted casual sex left fewer rather than more descendants, and modern women are likely to be equipped with suspicion of casual sex: Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women. It is fashionable to deny such differences and to maintain that only social repression prevents women from buying explicit pornography about men or that only socially paranoid machismo drives men to promiscuity. Yet this is to ignore the enormous social pressures now placed on men and women to disregard or minimize differences between them. A modern woman is exposed to pressure from men to be sexually uninihibited, but she is also exposed to the same pressure from other women. Likewise, men are under constant pressure to be more

" responsible, " sensitive, and faithful—from other men as well as from women. Perhaps more out of envy than morality, men are just as censorious of philanderers as they are of women; often more so: If men are sexual predators, it is despite centuries of social pressure not to be: In the words of one psychologist, "Our repressed impulses are every bit as human as the forces that repress them:""

SEXING THE MIND

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But what exactly are the differences between men and women in their sexual mentalities? I argued in the last two chapters that men, for whom the reproductive stakes are higher, are likely to be more competitive with one another and therefore are more likely to end up wielding power, controlling wealth, and seeking fame.

Consequently, women are more likely to have been rewarded for seeking power, wealth, or fame in a husband than men are in a wife.

Women who did so probably left more descendants among modern women, so it follows from evolutionary thinking that women are more likely CO value potential mates who are rich and powerful.

Another way to look at it is to think of what a woman can most profitably seek in a husband that will increase the number and health of her children. The answer is not more sperm but more money or more cattle or more tribal allies or whatever resource counts:

A man, by contrast, is seeking a mate who will use his sperm and his money to produce babies: Consequently, he has always had an enormous incentive to seek youth and health in his mates: Those men who preferred to marry forty-year-old women rather than twenty-year-olds stood a small chance of begetting any children at all, let alone more than one or two: They also stood a large chance of inheriting a bunch of stepchildren from a previous marriage: They left fewer descendants than the men who always sought out the youngest, postpubertal females on offer: We would expect, therefore, that while women pay attention to cues of wealth and power, men pay attention to cues of health and youth.

This may seem a startlingly obvious thing to say. As Nancy Thornhill put it, "Surely no one has ever seriously doubted that men desire young, beautiful women and that women desire wealthy, high-status men:"'' The answer to her question is that sociologists do doubt it. Judging by their reaction to a recent study, only the most rigorous evidence will convince them: The study was done by David Buss of the University of Michigan, who asked a large sample of American students to rank the qualities they most preferred in a mate: He found that men preferred kindness, intelligence, beauty, and youth, while women preferred kindness, intelligence,

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wealth, and status: He was told that this may be the case in America, but it is not a universal facet of human nature.

So he repeated the study in thirty-seven different samples from thirty-three countries, asking over one thousand people, and found exactly the same result: Men pay more attention to youth and beauty, women to wealth and status: To which came this answer: Of course women pay more attention to wealth because men control it: If women controlled wealth, they would not seek it in their spouses. Buss looked again and found that American women who make more money than the average American woman pay more attention than average to the wealth of potential spouses, not less:" High-earning women value the earning capacity of their husbands more, not less, than low-earning women: Even asurvey of fifteen powerful leaders of the feminist movement revealed that they wanted still more powerful men. As Buss 's colleague Bruce Ellis put it, "Women's sexual tastes become more, rather than less, discriminatory as their wealth, power, and social status increase.'

Many of Buss 's critics argued that he ignored context altogether: Different criteria of mate preference develop in different cultures at different times: To this Buss replied with a simple analogy. The amount of muscle on the average man is highly context-dependent: In the United States young men tend to be beefier about the shoulders than in Britain, perhaps partly because they eat better food and perhaps partly because their sports emphasize throwing strength rather than agility: Yet this does not negate the generalization that " men have more muscle on their shoulders than women." So, too, the fact that women pay more attention to men 's wealth in one place than in another does not negate the generalization that women pay more attention to the wealth of potential mates than men do."

The main difficulty with Buss 's study is that it fails to distinguish between a partner chosen as a spouse and a partner chosen for a fling: Douglas Kenrick of Arizona State University asked a group of students to rank various attributes of potential mates according to four levels of intimacy: When seeking a marriage partner, intelligence is important to both sexes: When seeking a sexual SEXING THE MIND

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partner for a one-night stand, intelligence matters much less, especially to men: There is little doubt that people of both sexes are sensible enough to value kindness, compatibility, and wit in those with whom they may spend the rest of their lives."

The difficulty with measuring sexual preferences is that they are compromises: An aging ugly man does not mate with several young and beautiful women (unless he is very rich indeed). He settles for a faithful wife of the same age. A young woman does not mate faithfully with a wealthy tycoon. She chooses whatever is available, probably a slightly older man with no more money but a steady job: People lower their expectations according to their age, looks, and wealth: To discover just how different the sexual mentalities of men and women are, it is necessary to do a controlled experiment. Take an average man and an average women and give each the option of faithful marriage to a familiar partner or continual orgies with beautiful strangers. The experiment has not been done, and it is hard to imagine its getting a grant. But it need not be, for it is in effect possible to do exactly that experiment by looking inside people 's heads and examining their fantasies: Bruce Ellis and Don Symons gave 307 California students a questionnaire about their sexual fantasies. Had their subjects been Arabs or English people, the study would have been easily dismissed by social scientists because any sex differences that emerged could be attributed to social pressures from a sexist background.