Testosterone Rex

by Cordelia Fine

  28. The reason I am drawing on these data rather than, for instance, those of Schmitt (2003, 2005), ibid., is because of the benefit of looking at data drawn from probability sampling, rather than predominantly young college students who are neither representative of the entire population from which they are drawn, nor can be assumed to be able to accurately predict what kind of sexual relationships they will want in decades of their life yet to come. These limitations are discussed, for example, by Fuentes (2005), ibid.; Asendorpf, J. B., & Penke, L. (2005). A mature evolutionary psychology demands careful conclusions about sex differences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 275–276.

  29. See reference Table 3.1. Available at http://www.natsal.ac.uk/natsals-12/results-archived-data.aspx.

  30. Ibid. See Tables 3.25, 3.17, and 3.9.

  31. Ibid. See Table 3.17.

  32. Ibid. See Table 8.1.

  33. Ibid. See Table 8.2.

  34. Data reviewed in Petersen, J. L., & Hyde, J. S. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993–2007. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 21–38.

  35. See Table 8.2. Percentages for divorced, separated, or widowed women are 81 and 88 per cent, respectively.

  36. Ibid. See Table 8.4.

  37. Clark, R. D., & Hatfield, E. (1989). Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 2(1), 39–55. Instructions quoted from p. 49.

  38. Hald, G. M., & Høgh-Olesen, H. (2010). Receptivity to sexual invitations from strangers of the opposite gender. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(6), 453–458; Guéguen, N. (2011). Effects of solicitor sex and attractiveness on receptivity to sexual offers: A field study. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 40(5), 915–919.

  39. Interestingly, a slightly different picture of female interest in casual sex emerged from a magazine investigation in which a German journalist (described as being of “observably above-average attractiveness”) approached a hundred different women to ask if they would have sex with him. Not only did six of the women agree, but their willingness “was actually verified, as the requestor subsequently had sex with the women who complied.” See account in Voracek, M., Hofhansl, A., & Fisher, M. L. (2005). Clark and Hatfield’s evidence of women’s low receptivity to male strangers’ sexual offers revisited. Psychological Reports, 97(1), 11–20. Quoted on p. 16.

  40. Tappé, M., Bensman, L., Hayashi, K., & Hatfield, E. (2013). Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers: A new research prototype. Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships, 7(2), 323–344. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 was labelled “No, never” and 10 was labelled “Yes, definitely,” mean scores for the apartment request were 4.30 and for sex were 3.52.

  41. Tappé et al. (2013), ibid. Quoted on p. 337.

  42. For example, Tang-Martínez, Z. (1997). The curious courtship of sociobiology and feminism: A case of irreconcilable differences. In P. A. Gowaty (Ed.), Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections and frontiers (pp. 116–150). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

  43. Tappé et al. (2013), ibid.

  44. Burt, M. R., & Estep, R. E. (1981). Apprehension and fear: Learning a sense of sexual vulnerability. Sex Roles, 7(5), 511–522.

  45. Crawford, M., & Popp, D. (2003). Sexual double standards: A review and methodological critique of two decades of research. Journal of Sex Research, 40(1), 13–26.

  46. Bordini, G. S., & Sperb, T. M. (2013). Sexual double standard: A review of the literature between 2001 and 2010. Sexuality and Culture, 17(4), 686–704.

  47. Crawford & Popp (2003), ibid., referring to the work of Moffat, M. (1989). Coming of age in New Jersey. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Quoted on pp. 19–20. Although this study is now rather dated, a more recent qualitative study of young Australians, by Michael Flood, showed that despite a slight shift in sexual attitudes, with some concerns expressed by young men about being labelled a “male slut,” the meaning of this term did “not have the same moral and disciplinary weight of the term ‘slut’ when applied to women.” Flood concludes that the “sexual double standard remains a persistent feature of contemporary heterosexual sexual and intimate relations.” Flood, M. (2013). Male and female sluts: Shifts and stabilities in the regulation of sexual relations among young heterosexual men. Australian Feminist Studies, 28(75), 95–107. Quoted on p. 105.

  48. Crawford & Popp (2003), ibid., quoting Moffat (1989), ibid., on p. 20.

  49. O’Toole, E. (2015). Girls will be girls: Dressing up, playing parts and daring to act differently. London: Orion. Quoted on pp. 10–11.

  50. From Sutton, L. A. (1995). Bitches and skankly hobags: The place of women in contemporary slang. In K. Hall & M. Bucholtz (Eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self (pp. 279–296). Cited in Crawford & Popp (2003), ibid.

  51. Crawford & Popp (2003), ibid.

  52. Rudman, L., Fetterolf, J. C., & Sanchez, D. T. (2013). What motivates the sexual double standard? More support for male versus female control theory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(2), 250–263.

  53. Armstrong, E. A., England, P., & Fogarty, A. C. (2012). Accounting for women’s orgasm and sexual enjoyment in college hookups and relationships. American Sociological Review, 77(3), 435–462.

  54. Armstrong et al. (2012), ibid. Quoted on p. 456.

  55. Conley, T. D. (2011). Perceived proposer personality characteristics and gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(2), 309–329.

  56. Conley, T. D., Ziegler, A., & Moors, A. C. (2013). Backlash from the bedroom: Stigma mediates gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 37(3), 392–407.

  57. Conley (2011), ibid.

  58. Conley (2011), ibid.

  59. Fenigstein, A., & Preston, M. (2007). The desired number of sexual partners as a function of gender, sexual risks, and the meaning of “ideal.” Journal of Sex Research, 44(1), 89–95. There was a similar absence of a differential contribution for health risks, although these didn’t emerge as being very important in Conley’s research.

  60. Baumeister, R. F. (2013). Gender differences in motivation shape social interaction patterns, sexual relationships, social inequality, and cultural history. In M. K. Ryan & N. Branscombe (Eds.), The Sage handbook of gender and psychology (pp. 270–285). London: Sage. Quoted on p. 272.

  61. Hald & Høgh-Olesen (2010), ibid. Quoted on p. 457.

  62. See discussion in Fuentes, A. (2012). Race, monogamy, and other lies they told you: Busting myths about human nature. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  63. Zuk, M. (2013). Paleofantasy: What evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live. New York: Norton. Quoted on p. 181.

  64. Starkweather, K., & Hames, R. (2012). A survey of non-classical polyandry. Human Nature, 23(2), 149–172. Quoted on p. 167. The factors associated with polyandry are an operational sex ratio in favour of males and, to a lesser degree, adult male mortality and male absenteeism.

  65. Clarkin, P. F. (July 5, 2011). Part 1. Humans are (blank)-ogamous. Kevishere.com. Retrieved from http://kevishere.com/2011/07/05/part-1-humans-are-blank-ogamous/ on August 20, 2015.

  CHAPTER 3: A NEW POSITION ON SEX

  1. Saad, G., & Gill, T. (2003). An evolutionary psychology perspective on gift giving among young adults. Psychology and Marketing, 20(9), 765–784. Quoted on p. 769.

  2. A number of feminist biologists have noted this tendency, and identified why it is problematic. For example, Fausto-Sterling, A. (1992). Myths of gender: Biological theories about women and men. New York: Basic Books; Tang-Martínez, Z. (1997). The curious courtship of sociobiology and feminism: A case of irreconcilable differences. In P. A. Gowaty (Ed.), Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections and frontiers (pp. 116–150). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer; Zuk, M. (2002). Sexual selections: What we can and can’t learn about sex from animals. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

  3. In these cases, Tang-Martínez (1997), ibid., notes: studying the trait in one species can offer no insights into the genetic or evolutionary origins of the trait in the other species.

  4. Klein, J. G., Lowery, T. M., & Otnes, C. C. (2015). Identity-based motivations and anticipated reckoning: Contributions to gift-giving theory from an identity-stripping context. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(3), 431–448.

  5. Schwartz, B. (1967). The social psychology of the gift. American Journal of Sociology, 73(1), 1–11. Quoted on p. 2.

  6. Marks, J. (2012). The biological myth of human evolution. Contemporary Social Science, 7(2), 139–157. Quoted on p. 148, reference removed.

  7. Marks, J. (November 10, 2013). Nulture. Popanth. Retrieved from http://popanth.com/article/nulture/ on July 21, 2014.

  8. Downey, G. (January 10, 2012). The long, slow sexual revolution (part 1) with NSFW video. PLOS Blogs. Retrieved from http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/01/10/the-long-slow-sexual-revolution-part-1-with-nsfw-video/ on January 23, 2015. Downey suggests (in removed portion of quotation) that this is in fact the case for most sexual species.

  9. See, for example, Wallen, K., & Zehr, J. L. (2004). Hormones and history: The evolution and development of primate female sexuality. Journal of Sex Research, 41(1), 101–112.

  10. Gould, S. J., & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation: A missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology, 8(1), 4–15.

  11. Dupré, J. (2001). Human nature and the limits of science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Quoted on p. 58.

  12. Abramson, P., & Pinkerton, S. (2002). With pleasure: Thoughts on the nature of human sexuality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Quoted on p. 5.

  13. Meston, C. M., & Buss, D. M. (2007). Why humans have sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36(4), 477–507.

  14. For comparisons with other primates, see Wrangham, R., Jones, J., Laden, G., Pilbeam, D., & Conklin-Brittain, N.-L. (1999). The raw and the stolen: Cooking and the ecology of human origins. Current Anthropology, 40(5), 567–594. They note that even in natural-fertility human populations, “the number of mating days between births is exceptionally high.” Quoted on p. 573.

  15. Laden, G. (September 9, 2011). Coming to terms with the female orgasm. Science Blogs. Retrieved from http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/09/coming-to-terms-with-the-femal/ on January 23, 2015.

  16. Wolf, N. (2012). Vagina: A new biography. New York: HarperCollins. Quoted on p. 327.

  17. Meston & Buss (2007), ibid. See Table 10 on p. 497.

  18. Smiler, A. (2013). Challenging Casanova: Beyond the stereotype of the promiscuous young male. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Quoted on p. 4.

  19. The third NATSAL survey of men ages 16–74 indicated that 11 per cent of UK men have paid for sex in their lifetime, and 3.6 per cent in the past five years. (The comparable figure for women ages 16–44 was 0.1 per cent.) Jones, K. G., Johnson, A. M., Wellings, K., Sonnenberg, P., Field, N., Tanton, C., et al. (2015). The prevalence of, and factors associated with, paying for sex among men resident in Britain: Findings from the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL-3). Sexually Transmitted Infections, 91(2), 116–123.

  20. Sanders, T. (2008). Male sexual scripts: Intimacy, sexuality and pleasure in the purchase of commercial sex. Sociology, 42(3), 400–417. Quoted on p. 403.

  21. Sanders (2008), ibid. Quoted on p. 400.

  22. Holzmann, H., & Pines, S. (1982). Buying sex: The phenomenology of being a john. Deviant Behavior, 4(1), 89–116. Quotations from pp. 108 and 110, respectively. In about half the sample, paying for sex was reported to be motivated by a desire for companionship as well as sexual pleasure.

  23. Sanders (2008), ibid. Quoted on p. 407.

  24. Laden (2011), ibid. He is referring here specifically to females, but previously argues the same point for males.

  25. Geary (2010), for instance, writes that “The bottom line is that the preferred mates and attendant cognitions and behaviors… of both sexes evolved to focus on and exploit the reproductive potential and reproductive investment of the opposite sex.” Geary, D. C. (2010). Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Quoted on p. 211.

  26. For example, Gangestad, S. W., Thornhill, R., & Garver, C. E. (2002). Changes in women’s sexual interests and their partner’s mate-retention tactics across the menstrual cycle: Evidence for shifting conflicts of interest. Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, 269, 975–982; Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., & DeBruine, L. M. (2008). Preferences for variation in masculinity in real male faces change across the menstrual cycle: Women prefer more masculine faces when they are more fertile. Personality and Individual Differences, 45(6), 478–482.

  27. Hrdy, S. B. (2000). The optimal number of fathers: Evolution, demography, and history in the shaping of female mate preferences. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 907(1), 75–96. Quoted on p. 90. Hrdy cites Crow, J. F. (1999). The odds of losing at genetic roulette. Nature, 397(6717), 293–294.

  28. For a recent review, noting increased rate of de novo mutations in the sperm of older males, and their contribution to genetic disease, see Veltman, J. A., & Brunner, H. G. (2012). De novo mutations in human genetic disease. Nature Reviews Genetics, 13(8), 565–575.

  29. Pillsworth, E. G. (2008). Mate preferences among the Shuar of Ecuador: Trait rankings and peer evaluations. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(4), 256–267. Quoted on p. 257.

  30. Marlowe, F. W. (2004). Mate preferences among Hadza hunter-gatherers. Human Nature, 15(4), 365–376. A constructed variable that together combined looks, age, and fertility (which in particular was cited as being more important to males) yielded a higher score of importance to males than to females.

  31. Pillsworth (2008), ibid.

  32. Hrdy, S. B. (1997). Raising Darwin’s consciousness. Human Nature, 8(1), 1–49. Quoted on p. 4.

  33. See, for example, Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(1), 1–14.

  34. Dupré (2001), ibid. Quoted on p. 51.

  35. For example, Gwynne, D. T., & Simmons, L. W. (1990). Experimental reversal of courtship roles in an insect. Nature, 346(6280), 172–174.

  36. Zentner, M., & Mitura, K. (2012). Stepping out of the caveman’s shadow: Nations’ gender gap predicts degree of sex differentiation in mate preferences. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1176–1185.

  37. Wood, W., & Eagly, A. H. (2013). Biology or culture alone cannot account for human sex differences and similarities. Psychological Inquiry, 24(3), 241–247.

  38. Wood & Eagly (2013), ibid. Quoted on p. 245, references removed. See Sweeney, M. M. (2002). Two decades of family change: The shifting economic foundations of marriage. American Sociological Review, 67(1), 132–147; Sweeney, M. M., & Cancian, M. (2004). The changing importance of white women’s economic prospects for assortative mating. Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(4), 1015–1028.

  39. Buston, P. M., & Emlen, S. T. (2003). Cognitive processes underlying human mate choice: The relationship between self-perception and mate preference in Western society. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(15), 8805–8810.

  40. For example, the amount of variation explained for preference for wealth and status and physical appearance, by self-perception of those same attributes, was 23 per cent and 19 per cent respectively for women, and 19 per cent and 11 per cent for men. By contrast, the amount of variation for preference for wealth and status by self-perceived physical appearance was 6 per cent in females and 5 per cent in males. For the amount of variation in preference for physical attractiveness explained by wealth and status, this was 7 per cent for males and 5 per cent for females. In other words, while there was weak support for the “potentials attract” hypothesis, similarly sized, small correlations were also seen in the “wrong” sex.

  41. Buston & E
mlen (2003), ibid. Quoted on p. 8809.

  42. Todd, P. M., Penke, L., Fasolo, B., & Lenton, A. P. (2007). Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(38), 15011–15016. However, these data didn’t strongly support “potentials attract” either. In women, self-perceived attractiveness did correlate with the wealth and status and family commitment of the speed daters in whom they were interested, but also with healthiness and a composite measure of attractiveness and healthiness. In men, perceived wealth and status was unrelated to the self-perceived attractiveness or observer-rated attractiveness of the women they chose. However, self-perceived attractiveness was related to the attractiveness of their choices, consistent with the likes-attract hypothesis.

  43. Kurzban, R., & Weeden, J. (2005). HurryDate: Mate preferences in action. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(3), 227–244.

  44. He, Q.-Q., Zhang, Z., Zhang, J.-X., Wang, Z.-G., Tu, Y., Ji, T., et al. (2013). Potentials-attract or likes-attract in human mate choice in China. PLoS One, 8(4), e59457. Quoted on p. 7.

  45. Dupré (2001), ibid. Quoted on p. 68.

  46. Fine, A. (1990). Taking the devil’s advice. London: Viking. Quoted on p. 153.

  47. Modenese, S. L., Logemann, B. K., & Snowdon, C. T. (2016). What do women (and men) want? Unpublished manuscript.

  48. Downey (2012), ibid., emphasis removed. This tendency is sometimes explicit in Evolutionary Psychology texts that, for example, ask whether we are all “naturally restricted”; or “naturally unrestricted”; “Are women designed to be more promiscuous than men?”; or “Are men naturally more promiscuous than women?”; Do sex roles reverse or suppress women’s “innate” sexual tendencies? All quotations from p. 265 of Schmitt, D. P. (2005). Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe: A 48-nation study of sex, culture, and strategies of human mating. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(02), 247–275.