The Folly of Fools (17 page)

Male choice focuses on physical evidence of fertility and fecundity—youth, waist/hip ratio (curvaceousness), breast size and symmetry, and evidence of genetic quality, as in degree of facial symmetry and femininity. Finally, males place a value on female sexual monogamy (never mind their own tendencies).

Given the large initial difference in parental investment—at its extreme, a sperm cell weighing one-trillionth of a gram and a nine-month pregnancy producing a seven-and-a-half-pound baby—it is hardly surprising that men (compared to women) place relatively greater emphasis on short-term mating relations than on long-term. This leads to a large and consistent psychological difference between the sexes regarding sex itself. Men all over the world show a greater preference for sexual variety than do women. Men desire more sexual partners over various time intervals, are more likely to consent to sex with an attractive stranger, have twice as many sexual fantasies per unit in time, and are more likely to seek out prostitutes and to lower their standards in choice of women for short-term relationships. Women more than men report being deceived about partner ambition, sincerity, kindness, and strength of feeling. Only in willingness to have sex are women seen as more deceptive than men—hardly surprising given men’s interest in sex.

Likewise, there is selection for females to simulate orgasm, but rarely a pressure (or necessity) for males to do likewise. Women fake orgasms to massage the male ego and to bring an end to unwanted sex. Some men are completely fooled, many probably at least some of the time. The real orgasm is assumed to act positively regarding sperm movement, that is, sucking it inside. It also makes future sex with the same partner more likely.

One can, in turn, measure how much either sex is upset by particular deceptions of the opposite sex. As expected, women are more upset at male overrepresentation of resources and status than vice versa. But these are minor factors. Where women really get upset is in response to two related deceptions: men misrepresenting the depth of their feelings prior to first having sex and men failing to call or contact them after sex. That these behaviors may also involve self-deception, I have no doubt. In the early’60s, when I was a young man, I was conscious of something I called “false emotion.” I would meet a woman, develop a strong attraction, wheel out my full show, feel I was in love, have sex with her two or three times, and then find the entire attraction collapsing—indeed, often turning into aversion. The false emotion of romantic love must have been generated the better to induce the sex that ended it, but I was conscious of this only after the fact. The women, of course, were bitter.

WHOSE BABY IS IT?

One of the most important issues for a man occurs nine months after a sexual act is said to produce a brand-new child, of which he is claimed to be the father. But is he? The difference is critical, related by ½ or related by 0. Sex all but guarantees maternity, of course, but it does not guarantee paternity. Men are expected to be especially likely to be concerned with problems of parentage, as indeed they are. How about our powers of perception? There appears to be no difference between the sexes in ability to recognize whether children are the offspring of a given parent, but both sexes more easily spot relatedness through the mother, and each is better at spotting relatedness when the baby is of their own sex. There is, however, a striking sex difference in
attribution
of relatedness to newborns—women and their relatives overwhelmingly comment on resemblance to the father (more so for sons than daughters) and, as expected, putative fathers may be both taken along and somewhat skeptical of the claimed resemblance. Experiments in which people’s faces are morphed onto unrelated children so as to create an artificial resemblance show that men are affected by greater self-resemblance in claiming greater willingness to adopt, pay child support, forgive after something is broken, and so on—but women are not. Many societies have jokes on the subject. In Senegal: “Better to have an ugly baby who resembles you than a good-looking one who resembles your neighbor.” In Jamaica, to give a man a “jacket” is to father a child he takes as his own. The better the jacket fits (resembles him), the happier he will be. To “cut a man a waistcoat” is to produce a perfect mimic, since waistcoats have to be individually tailored to fit properly.

How can you know for sure that the child a woman carries is genetically your own? Of course, you can’t. Some men torture themselves over the possibilities, the hours when she was not around, phone calls with old friends, whatever. But I always believed the issue was overrated, because I did not believe it was possible for me to look at a child for long and not be able (without DNA tests) to know whether it was my own. There are enough dominant genetic markers in my lineage that the truth must be there in front of my eyes. If that is really true, then we are talking at worst about nine months or so of wasted investment, a trivial cost, put to a good social purpose. Let us put the matter behind us and go on with the rest of our lives. In other words, we need not spiral off into the fatal land of jealousy, but that is alas all too common, as the following suggests.

MALE RESPONSE TO FEMALE INFIDELITY

A man’s response to signs of his partner’s infidelity in an intimate relationship seems general the world over: anger and aggression, an attempt to suppress the behavior by threatening, beating, isolating, and sometimes murdering the woman. The result often is a thoroughly frightened and dominated woman, told that any attempt to flee will be met by murder, leading to a defensive form of imposed self-deception, where the woman often comes to believe her tormentor and blames herself. Genital cutting of women (to reduce desire), foot binding (to reduce mobility), and claustration (to isolate socially) all serve to reduce female choice in advance of temptation, though I doubt they are usually rationalized this way within the societies that practice them.

The law is stacked as well. It was a historic and cross-cultural universal for “unauthorized” sexual contact with a married woman to be a crime (for both the man and the woman), with the husband as the victim. In some parts of the United States, the very sight of adultery was, until very recently, considered sufficient justification for murder—of either party—by the husband. What all this means is that extramarital sex or the mere suspicion of it can be very dangerous to the woman (and the other man). Very powerful selection pressures—murder and imprisonment, for example—may be associated with deception regarding extra-pair relations. My own (very limited) experience is that one can hardly deny from consciousness other ongoing relations, so that extra-pair relations inevitably involve conscious deception, and self-deception must at best serve self-confidence in the face of possible accusation.

Consider homicide. In many American cities, sexual jealousy is the second or third leading cause of murders, and in many societies it is the first. In Detroit, one-third of all murders in 1972 were “crime specific” (as part of a robbery, for example), but of the remaining, fully one-fifth were due to sexual jealousy. The detailed breakdown is of some interest (total N = 58). Men were four times as likely as women to instigate jealous actions leading to murder. In roughly equal numbers, men killed their partner or the other male and were almost as often killed themselves by the woman (sometimes aided by a relative of hers). Two men murdered their unfaithful homosexual lovers—no problem of uncertain paternity there! When a partner was unfaithful, women were somewhat more successful, killing one of the adulterers in nine instances while being killed by the mate in only two.

In Canada, 55 percent of all wife-beating court cases involve at least some jealousy. Men respond to possible infidelity with anger, drunkenness, threats, and sexual arousal. The last is a most interesting subtlety. In many species of more or less monogamous animals, the sight of one’s own female having sex is sexually arousing to the male. Even ducks being raped by groups of males are often re-raped by their mate immediately afterward, presumably to introduce sperm in competition with that just introduced. So it is a feature of male psychology that evidence or fantasies of mate involvement with others may be sexually arousing. I have never found the reverse to be true. Women respond to extra-pair copulations with tears, feigned indifference, and efforts to increase their attractiveness. Men get angry and drunk.

Men are, of course, prone to self-deception in evaluating their partner’s extra-pair activities. The lower their self-image, the greater their expected suspicion, if not full-blown paranoia. The lower his intrinsic quality, the greater is her temptation. Given that he is of lower putative genetic quality, she may more easily dominate him, so that he may not dare voice his suspicions for fear of being dropped entirely. A second reason men may practice self-deception arises from their own guilt. Many times I have seen men accuse their innocent partners of exactly what they themselves are up to, another case of denial and projection, the accusations presumably serving mostly as camouflage.

DECEIT AND A WOMAN ’S MONTHLY CYCLE

A woman’s biology changes in very interesting ways during her monthly cycle, with many implications for deceit and self-deception. Women are more attractive at the time of ovulation—they appear to be physically more symmetrical and their waist/hip ratio is slightly more curvaceous. They also derogate the looks of other women more than at other times in the cycle. Are they (unconsciously) comparing other women to themselves and derogating other women because they themselves are relatively more attractive when ovulating, or are they adding a degree of derogation so as to accentuate their own superior appearance when it most matters? I would imagine the latter, but the evidence is not sufficient to say.

Women appear to be more sexual in general at the time of ovulation but with a distinct bias toward more genetically attractive men and extra-pair sex. In several clubs in Vienna where partners were studied over many months, a woman was less likely to show up with her partner near her time of ovulation while displaying more skin (wearing less clothing). At time of ovulation, women’s preferences for men’s faces shift toward those that are relatively more masculine and symmetrical, signs of genetic quality but not paternal investment. (Women’s preference also shifts toward slightly darker men and less hairy ones.) If employed as a lap dancer and not on the pill, a woman earns 30 percent more per hour when ovulating than when not (excluding during menstruation, when she earns even less). If she is on the pill, then there are no differences in her earnings across the monthly cycle.

Changes across the cycle can reflect underlying subtle genetic tensions between the sexes. A particularly striking result shows that the more a woman matches her partner’s genes at critical major histocompatability loci involved in defense against parasites—which is a disadvantage in that it lowers offspring survival—the less likely a woman is to have sex at ovulation, the more often she has (verbally) coerced sex, and the more often she fantasizes about sex with another man (including prior partners) while having sex. But twelve days later, when she is not ovulating, there is no effect of gene matching on her sexual behavior and fantasies (compared with women who do not match). Men show no effects of matching their partner on the major histocompatability loci at any time. They are out of the loop.

So we expect more pressure on women to act deceptively at the time of ovulation. In this case, the woman engages in a voluntary, conscious kind of self-deception—temporary fantasy—that she is unlikely to wish to share with her partner. She may start developing a private life of fantasy that recurs each month, perhaps tempting her to more overt actions at this time in the future. In any case, a private life is carved off from her partner, acting over a few critical days every month. It would be most interesting to know whether some men notice that when their partner is most attractive to them, she is least sexually interested in them. And how do they respond, if at all?

Smell is an important part of sex. A woman’s sense of smell is more acute than a man’s, and this is especially true at her time of ovulation, where her sensitivity to certain sex-related compounds may increase a hundredfold and her ability to discriminate men’s bodily symmetry based on smell hits a peak. I am often astonished at how naive young men are regarding the olfactory dimension of life. I hear the same story from students: “I was due to meet my girlfriend later but this woman was hot for me, so I enjoyed some sex, nothing special, nothing to detract from my lady, but as soon as I saw her, it was like she knew right away something was up.” I then ask these young men whether they had thought to bathe after having sex. No, hadn’t occurred to them—perhaps this was their problem. They were living in one olfactory world, their partner in another. Of course, there may be no escape—a good student of your behavior may ask you why you just bathed at this odd time of day.

This difference in the olfactory dimension can be extended to many other aspects of mental life. Women are better at reading facial expressions, but men are better at picking out hostile images in a crowd. Sounds may be processed in different sections of the two brains, and it is a remarkable fact that in a variety of mental tasks, women’s brains tend to act more symmetrically than men’s—that is, the two hemispheres are used more equally in solving a given task. Since symmetry is so often an advantage in life and mental life in particular—for example, depth perception and location in vision and hearing both result from the use of bilateral information simultaneously—one’s initial assumption must be that women thereby gain an advantage over men. The corpus callosum connecting the brain’s two hemispheres in women is relatively larger than in men, meaning information is more easily shared and symmetrical functioning more likely.

MEN’S SELF-DECEIT ABOUT FEMALE INTEREST

Several lines of evidence suggest that men deceive themselves about women’s sexual interest in them. Women report that men are more likely to believe that a woman has greater sexual interest in him than she really has, rather than less. By contrast, women show no bias in how they rate men’s interest in them (high or low). Experimental evidence provides congruent evidence. By logic, men may gain more from such a perceptual bias than do women. They will catch more women with actual interest while making more false projections in the process. Assuming there is not much cost to the errors (the woman turns him down, he departs), the bias will give a net benefit. Of course, a reputation for overeagerness could add to the cost. This might result in a self-deceived bias toward greater interest while simultaneously thinking of oneself as “cool”—relatively restrained toward others.