The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [135]
The romance novel, by contrast, is aimed entirely at a female market. It too depicts a fictional world that has changed remarkably little, except in adapting to female career ambitions and to a less inhibited attitude to the description of sex. Authors adhere strictly to a formula provided by the publishers. Sexual acts play a small part in these novels; the bulk of each book is about love, commitment, domesticity, nurturing and the formation of relationships. There is little promiscuity or sexual variety and what sex there is is described mainly through the heroine’s emotional reaction to what is done to her – particularly the tactile things – and not to any detailed description of the man’s body. His character is often discussed in detail, but not his body.
Ellis and Symons claim that the romance novel and pornography represent the respective utopian fantasies of the two sexes. Their data on the sexual fantasies of Californian students would seem to support this contention. So does the repeated failure of magazines that try to repackage the male-porn formula for women (much of Playgirl’s readership is gay men), plus the burgeoning business of selling explicit novels about promiscuous sex at airports – for men. In any bookstore, there are magazines for men, with pictures of women on the covers, promising more inside, and magazines for women with pictures of women on the covers, promising hints about improving relationships inside. There are romance novels aimed at women with pictures of women on the covers and sexy novels aimed at men with pictures of women on the covers. The publishing industry, living by the market not the prevailing ideology, has no doubts about the differences between men and women’s attitudes to sex.
As Ellis and Symons put it:
The data on sexual fantasy reported here, the scientific literature on sexual fantasy, … the consumer-driven selective forces of a free market (which have shaped the historically stable contrasts between male-oriented pornography and female-oriented romance novels), the ethnographic record on human sexuality and the ineluctable implications of an evolutionary perspective on our species, taken together, imply the existence of a profound sex difference in sexual psychology.39
This is a far more enlightened view than the peculiarly uncharitable assumption among the politically correct that the reason women are not more turned on by nudity and pornography is because they are repressed.
Choosy Men
A paradox looms. Men are promiscuous opportunists at heart and in their fantasies. Truly promiscuous opportunists would not be too choosy, one would think. And yet men care about women’s looks – more than women care about men’s looks. A sports car and an expense account can turn a frog into a prince for women, but even a rich woman cannot afford to be ugly (in these times of cosmetic surgery, she can sometimes afford the means not to be ugly). A man contemplating an affair should not restrict himself to what he considers a good-looking woman, yet he usually does. This is rather unusual. A male gorilla or sage grouse does not refuse to mate with a female because of her appearance. He takes every opportunity on offer, regardless of looks. Polygamous despots of ancient times may have been promiscuous, but they were still choosy; their harems were always recruited from among the young, the virginal and the beautiful.
The paradox is soluble. The degree to which an animal of either sex is choosy correlates exactly with the degree to which it invests in parental care. A black grouse, investing no more than sperm, is prepared to mate with anything that even resembles a female: a stuffed bird, or a model, will do.40 A male albatross, who will put all his best efforts into raising one female’s young, is elaborately suspicious and selective, striving for the best female on offer. So man’s choosiness reflects once more the fact that man does indeed form a pair bond and invest in his young, unlike some of his undiscriminating ape cousins. It is a legacy