The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [143]
Status Consciousness
Unfortunately, this theory conflicts directly with the conclusions of the last chapter. Something will have to give. For it is women, not men, that are supposed to be especially sensitive to the social status of their potential spouses. Sociobiologists argue that the reason men notice women’s looks is not as a proxy for their wealth but as a clue to their reproductive potential. Yet here we have men supposedly using women’s waists as clues to their bank balances and positively panting after infertile emaciates.
Several studies have come to the unambiguous conclusion that beautiful women and rich men end up together far more than vice versa. In one study, the physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than was her own socio-economic status, intelligence or education – a pretty surprising fact, when you consider how much people marry within their professions, classes and education brackets.15 If men are using appearance as a proxy for status, why do they not use knowledge of status itself?
Unlike female thinness, male status symbols are generally ‘honest’: if they were not, they would not remain status symbols. Only the very best con man can fake conspicuous consumption or get away for long with boasts about his prowess or rank. Thinness is altogether more tricky, because poor, low-status women once found it easier to be thin than rich, high-status women. Even today, when poor women can afford only junk food, while rich women eat lettuce, it is hard to argue that every thin woman is rich and every fat one poor.16
So the argument that links status with skinniness is not persuasive. Skinniness is a very poor clue to use to wealth and in any case men are not much interested in women’s status or wealth. Indeed, the argument is circular: social status and thinness are correlated because of a male preference for thinness. I find the explanation that men have cued in on a woman’s thinness as a clue to her status unconvincing.
The trouble is, I am not sure what to suggest in place of it. Suppose it is true that in the days of Rubens men preferred plump women and that today they prefer thin women. Suppose between the plump matrons of Rubens’s paintings and the ‘no woman can be too thin’ days of Wallis Simpson, men stopped preferring the fattest, or some half-plump ideal, and started preferring the thinnest woman available. Ronald Fisher’s sexual selection theory suggests one way in which it may have been adaptive for men to like thin women. By preferring a thin female, a human male may have had thin daughters who would have attracted the attention of high-status males, because other males also prefer thinness. In other words, even if a thin wife could bear fewer children than a fat one, her daughters would be more likely to marry well, and having married well to be wealthy enough to rear more of the children they bore. So the man who marries a thin woman may have more grandchildren than the man who marries a fat one. Now, imagine that a cultural sexual preference spreads by imitation, and that young men learn the equation thin equals beautiful by watching others behave. That, in itself, would be adaptive because it would be one way for males to ensure that they did not flout the prevailing fashion (just as females copying each other in mate choice is adaptive in black grouse). Were they to ignore the cultural preference for plump, or for thin, women, they would risk having spinster daughters as surely as a peahen would risk having bachelor sons by choosing a short-tailed mate. In other words, so long