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Why Do Rich Men Marry Beautiful Women?

If homosexuality is determined by hormonal influences in the womb, then so, presumably, are heterosexual preferences. Throughout our evolutionary history, men and women have faced different sexual opportunities and constraints. For a man casual sex with a stranger carried only a small risk – infection, discovery by the wife – and a potentially enormous reward: a cheap addition of an extra child to his genetic legacy. Men who seized such opportunities certainly left behind more descendants than men who did not. Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism. Virtually all male mammals and birds do, even those that are mainly monogamous. This is not to say that men are irredeemably promiscuous, or that every man is a potential rapist, just that men are more likely to be tempted by an opportunity for casual sex than women.

Women are likely to be different. Having sex with a stranger not only encumbered a Pleistocene woman with a possible pregnancy before she had won the man’s commitment to help rear the child, but it also exposed her to probable revenge from her husband if she had one, and to possible spinsterhood if she did not. These enormous risks were offset by no great reward. Her chances of conceiving were just as great if she remained faithful to one partner and her chances of losing the child without a husband’s help were greater. Therefore women who accepted casual sex left fewer rather than more descendants, and modern women are likely to be equipped with suspicion of casual sex.

Without this evolutionary history in mind, it is impossible to explain the different sexual mentalities of men and women. It is fashionable to deny such differences and to maintain that only social repression prevents women from buying explicit pornography about men, or that only socially paranoid machismo drives men to promiscuity. Yet this is to ignore the enormous social pressures now placed on men and women to forget or minimize differences between them. A modern woman is exposed to pressure from men to be sexually uninihibited, but she is also exposed to the same pressure from other women. Likewise, men are under constant pressure to be more ‘responsible’, sensitive and faithful – from other men as well as from women. Perhaps more out of envy than morality, men are just as censorious of philanderers as women are; often more so. If men are sexual predators it is despite centuries of social pressure not to be. In the words of one psychologist, ‘Our repressed impulses are every bit as human as the forces that repress them.’29

But what exactly are the differences between men and women in their sexual mentalities? I argued in the last two chapters that men, for whom the reproductive stakes are higher, are likely to be more competitive with each other, and therefore that men are more likely to end up wielding power, controlling wealth and seeking fame. Consequently, women are more likely to have been rewarded for seeking power, wealth or fame in a husband than men are in a wife. Women who did so therefore probably left more descendants among modern women. So it follows from evolutionary thinking that women are more likely to value potential mates who are rich and powerful. Another way to look at it is to think of what a woman can most profitably seek in a husband that will increase the number and health of her children. The answer is not more sperm, but more money, or more cattle, or more tribal allies, or whatever resource counts.

A man, by contrast, is seeking a mate who will use his sperm and his money to produce babies. Consequently he has always had an enormous incentive to seek youth and health in his mates. Those men who preferred to marry forty-year-old women rather than twenty-year-olds stood a small chance of begetting any children at all, let alone