498 Chapter 14 The Major Motives of Life: Food, Love, Sex, and work
devoted and faithful; males are drawn to sexual
novelty, whereas females want stability and secu-
rity; males are relatively undiscriminating in their
choice of sexual partners, whereas females are
cautious and choosy; and males are competitive
and concerned about dominance, whereas females
are less so.
In human beings, some of these sex differ-
ences do appear to be universal or at least very
common. In one massive project, 50 scientists
studied 10,000 people in 37 cultures located on
6 continents and 5 islands (Buss, 1994; Schmitt,
2003). Around the world, men are more violent
and more socially dominant than women. They
are more interested in the youth and beauty of
their sexual partners, presumably because youth
is associated with fertility. According to their re-
sponses on questionnaires, they are more sexu-
ally jealous and possessive, presumably because
if a man’s mate had sex with other men, he could
never be 100 percent sure that her children were
also genetically his. They are quicker than women
to have sex with partners they don’t know well,
presumably so that their sperm will be distributed
as widely as possible. Women are more sexually
cautious than men; they tend to emphasize the
financial resources or prospects of a potential
mate, his status, and his willingness to commit to a
relationship (Buss & Schmidt, 2011).
Evolutionary views of sex differences in dat-
ing and mating have become enormously popular.
Many academics and laypeople are persuaded that
males have an evo-
lutionary advantage
in sowing their seeds
far and wide, and fe-
males have an evolu-
tionary advantage in
finding a man with
high status, a good paycheck, and willingness to
commit. But critics, including some evolutionaryfemales as possible. The more females a male
mates with, the more genes he can pass along. The
human record in this regard was achieved by a
man who fathered 899 children (Daly & Wilson,
1983). What else he did with his time is unknown.
Females, according to many evolutionary psy-
chologists, need to shop for the best genetic deal,
as it were, because they can conceive and bear
only a limited number of offspring. Having such
a large biological investment in each pregnancy,
females must choose partners more carefully than
males do. Besides, mating with a lot of different
males would produce no more offspring than stay-
ing with just one. So females try to attach them-
selves to dominant males who have resources and
status and are likely to have superior genes.
In this view, the result of these two opposite
sexual strategies is that males generally want sex
more often than females do; males are often fickle
and promiscuous, whereas females are usuallyThis Kenyan man has 40 wives and 349 children. He is unusual even in his own culture, but around the world, it is
more common for men than women to have multiple sexual partners. Evolutionary psychologists think the reason is that
men have evolved to sow as many wild oats as they can, whereas women have evolved to be happy with just a few grains.About Evolutionary
Theories of SexThinking
CriTiCally© The New Yorker Collection 1995 Donald Reilly from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
“It’s a guy thing.”