Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [43]
3 ½
The Dating Culture, Part II
What I Learned About Dating from Sex and the City
WHILE CONSUMERISM AFFLICTS ALL OF US, OUR CULTURE has changed in ways that, looked at from the standpoint of dating, is an ongoing disaster for women. Earlier chapters focused on how evolution has shaped men and women to behave in certain ways, and almost all of that behavior qualified in one way or another as politically incorrect, so it should not come as a surprise when I say that feminism as a social and political movement conflicts with some of the most basic and deep drives of evolution. And because social and cultural change occurs with lightning quickness when compared with biological evolution, man and woman as shaped by culture exist uneasily at best with man and woman as shaped by evolution, leading to all sorts of strange lacunae in the mating dance. I have to warn female readers: The following pages are a grim catalog of how our culture is screwing with women.
WHY PRUDISH IS BETTER THAN SLUTTY
Let’s look first at sex. By most accounts, feminism has made real strides in this area. And if the movement hasn’t entirely knocked down boardroom doors, it has certainly done so with bedroom doors. Despite women’s sexual liberation, though, the double standard persists. As anyone who has spent time in an American high school knows, boys who hook up a lot are still considered studs, while girls who do the same are still considered sluts. Even with all of feminism’s advances, it sometimes seems as if the only two sexual positions for women are the Madonna or the whore. Obviously, these stark poles are a completely unrealistic picture of female sexuality, but this dichotomy may play a bigger role in our minds than we think. The world is a complex place, and scientists have found that all of us employ something called “heuristics,” which is a fancy way of saying that we carry around a few simple rules in our heads that help us make many of our decisions. For example, when we taste something bitter, we spit it out. There are very good reasons for this. Many bitter foods are poisonous, and we probably evolved a dislike of bitter foods. But we don’t go through this conscious thought process every time we eat. We don’t consider each mouthful and weigh its various properties. That would be too time consuming. So, avoiding bitter foods acts as a simple heuristic to help us get on with the actual task of eating.
It is possible that the Madonna-whore distinction serves exactly the same function because it occurs in a number of different cultures around the world. All of us know that this dichotomy is an oversimplification, but I am talking about a level of thought that is below the chatter of our conscious minds. On this deeper level, the Madonna-whore divide serves as a simple heuristic for mating, and you can see the obvious advantages from the male point of view. In the first place, any sexually promiscuous woman is going to be a greater risk for a man when it comes to the task of determining paternity. But there is an even more fundamental reason that takes us all the way back to evolutionary fitness. Remember that the woman is the holder of the precious egg. By that logic, she should be quite choosy when it comes to selecting a mate. If she isn’t, that sends a powerful message—that she is unable to secure a long-term