Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [19]
Of course, Trivers’s theory should come as welcome news to any women currently on the dating scene, because it means that women are firmly in control when it comes to the courtship phase of mating. Harvard anthropologist Irven Devore has even called males “a vast breeding experiment run by women.” This goes a long way toward explaining why men (particularly low-status males) have a lower life expectancy—they have to take more risks in order to pass along their genes. Women are probably reading this and thinking to themselves that all this Darwinian theorizing is great, but they don’t feel like they have much control at all. And it’s true that there are some mitigating factors. Because marriage at least theoretically implies a lifetime commitment, men are also choosy. In addition, demographics and culture can undermine female ascendancy. If women vastly outnumber men, for example, men become the scarce and precious commodity. So, in order to see the underlying control that women exert, I ask you to imagine a simple way that women could change the rules of American dating and marriage: they could refuse to have sex until they were married. No more one-night stands or even any long-term cohabitations. If this happened, all female complaints about men refusing to commit would instantly disappear. While many men are happy to date a woman for years at a time if they can still have sex, they would not be willing to do so if those relationships remained entirely chaste.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN CHEAP SPERM ARE ON THE PROWL
Since Trivers’s revolutionary essay, study after study has demonstrated the significance of the sperm/egg distinction for human behavior (and all other creatures for that matter). Let’s start with sex. Given Trivers’s theory, you would expect to find extremely different attitudes about sex, and that is exactly what researchers have discovered. For any squeamish women reading this book who would like to believe that men are not the appalling sexual predators that they sometimes appear to be, I suggest that you skip the next few pages.
Simply put, men have a much lower threshold for having sex. If you don’t believe me, let’s try a little experiment. If you are an attractive woman, walk up to a man on the street and ask him if he wants to have sex with you. Chances are he will say yes. How do I know? Researchers conducted a study of exactly this question. An attractive woman approached a man on a college campus and asked him one of three questions:
1. Would you go out on a date tonight?
2. Would you go back to my apartment with me?
3. Would you have sex with me?
Fifty percent of the men said they would go out on a date that night, which might seem somewhat low given what I have just said about parental investment theory. But remember that a date takes a certain amount of time and money with no promise of any sexual activity. Notice what happens to the numbers for the next two questions. Sixty-nine percent of men were willing to go back to the woman’s apartment, and a whopping 75 percent were willing to have sex with the woman (and that last number is probably low—the study noted that men who declined to sleep with the woman were usually apologetic and would often ask for a rain check or offer a reason, such as having a