Sex at Dawn

Women have little interest in sex, right? Despite Tiresias’s observations, until very recently, that’s been the near-universal consensus in Western popular culture, medicine, and evolutionary psychology. In recent years, popular culture has begun to question women’s relative lack of interest, but as far as the standard model is concerned, not much has changed since Dr. William Acton published his famous thoughts on the matter in 1875, assuring his readers, “The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences.. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him.”⁶

More recently, in his now classic work The Evolution of Human Sexuality, psychologist Donald Symons confidently proclaimed that “among all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to

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males.” In a foundational paper published in 1948, geneticist A. J. Bateman wasn’t hesitant to extrapolate his findings concerning fruit fly behavior to humans, commenting that natural selection encourages “an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females.”⁸

The sheer volume of evidence amassed to convince us that women are not particularly sexual beings is quite impressive.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of studies have claimed to confirm the flaccidity of the female libido. One of the most cited studies in all of evolutionary psychology, published by 1989, is typical of the genre.⁹ An attractive undergraduate student volunteer walked up to an unsuspecting student of the opposite sex (who was alone) on the campus of Florida State University and said, “Hi, I’ve been noticing you around town lately, and I find you very attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?” About 75 percent of the young men said yes. Many of those who didn’t asked for a “rain check.” But not one of the women approached by these attractive strangers accepted the offer. Case closed.

Seriously, this study really is one of the best known in all of EP. Researchers reference it to establish that women aren’t interested in casual sex, which is important if your theory posits that women instinctively barter sex to get things from men. After all, if they’re giving it away for free, the bottom falls out of the market, and other women are going to have a harder time exchanging sex for anything of value.

Male Parental Investment (MPI)

As mentioned above, underlying each of these theories, as well as evolutionary theory in general, is the notion that life can be conceptualized in terms of economics and game theory. The objective of the game is to send your genetic code into the future by producing the maximum possible number of offspring who survive and reproduce. Whether or not this dispersal leads to happiness is irrelevant. In his best-selling survey of EP, The Moral Animal, Robert Wright puts it succinctly, saying: “We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones. (Of course, we’re designed to pursue happiness; and the attainment of Darwinian goals—sex, status, and so on—often brings happiness, at least for a while.) Still, the frequent absence of happiness is what keeps us pursuing it, and thus makes us productive.”¹⁰

This is a curious notion of productivity—at once overtly political and yet presented innocently enough, as ifthere were only one possible meaning of “productivity.” This perspective on life incorporates the Protestant work ethic (that “productivity” is what makes an animal “effective”) and echoes the Old Testament notion that life must be endured, not enjoyed. These assumptions are embedded throughout the literature of evolutionary psychology. Ethologist/ primatologist Frans de Waal, one of the more open-minded philosophers of human nature, calls this Calvinist sociobiology.

The female interest in quality over quantity is thought to be important in two respects. First, she would clearly be interested in conceiving a child with a healthy man, so as to maximize the odds that her child would survive and prosper. “Women’s reproductive resources are precious and finite, and ancestral women did not squander them on just any random man,” writes evolutionary psychologist David Buss. “Obviously, women don’t consciously think that sperm are cheap and eggs are expensive,” Buss continues, “but women in the past who failed to exercise acumen before consenting to sex were left in the evolutionary dust; our ancestral mothers used emotional wisdom to screen out losers.”¹¹ Buss doesn’t explain why there are still so many “losers” in the gene pool today if their ancestors were subject to such careful screening for thousands of generations.