230 Catherine Wilson
and cultural accomplishment are left to men who are held to express their compe-
tencies and intrinsic competitiveness by these means. Statistical equality — the
equal participation of women in politics and governance, the full spectrum of eco-
nomically productive activities, and academics and the arts — is considered to be
a false ideal since women allegedly do not have time, the motivation, or the appro-
priate character traits, as imprinted in them by natural selection in competition
with other women, for full participation. This position needs critical examination.
5 REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES AND SEX ROLES“Males”, Matt Ridley remarks, “usually compete for access to females, rather
than vice-versa. There are good evolutionary reasons for this, and there are clear
evolutionary consequences, too; for instance men are more aggressive than women”
[Ridley, 1994, 13]. In a chapter ofThe Red Queenentitled “Polygamy and the
Nature of Man”, he aims to illuminate the subject of human sexual behaviour by
references to peacocks and peahens as follows: “She will do all the work... Every
time [a peacock] seduces a fresh female, he wins the jackpot of her investment
in his sons and daughters .... In more human terms, men can father another
child just about any time they copulate with a different woman, whereas women
can bear the child of only one man at a time” [Ridley, 1994, 172–3]. Though the
chapter ends with the observation that, in our species, women do in fact compete
with men, suggesting that some features or qualities of men are a scarce resource
where women are concerned — the initial passage suggests, not only that women
should be grateful that they are not as badly off as peahens, but that that men
are foregoing a “jackpot”, by not trying to seduce as many women as they can.
On one popular view, men are naturally polygamous, insofar as their fitness de-
pends chiefly on the number of women they are able to impregnate, while women
are naturally monogamous, insofar as their fitness depends chiefly on the num-
ber of offspring they can raise to maturity. Lifelong, sexually exclusive marriage
is hypothesized to be a female preference, and either polygamy or promiscuous
bachelor independence a male preference. To achieve their goals of comfortable
and effective child-rearing, women allegedly accept a service role vis-a-vis a par-
ticular man and tolerate his infidelity. To achieve their own goals of seduction and
reproduction, men in turn allegedly assume a provider role towards a particular
woman but take advantage of additional “mating opportunities”. Human males
sacrifice some degree of sexual freedom and assume some degree of responsibility,
in exchange for which females assume a somewhat wearying caretaking and main-
tenance role. Each sex is hypothesized to get most of what it wants under this
system, though stresses are acknowledged as inevitable: females are alleged to fear
desertion, males, cuckoldry.
The image of human nature depicted here is, however, misleading. It is true that
while both men and women have the same high standards for long-term partners,
valuing equally such traits as good health, kindness, intelligence, and creativity,
women’s acceptability threshold for short term sexual partners is considerably