Why men are 'pimps' and women are 'sluts' - an explanation.
No, this isn't any stupid joke about master keys and shitty locks. This is the real deal, prompted by the recent thread by some girl who was shocked (shocked!) by her boyfriend being distant after finding out that she'd slept with 50 guys in the span of 3 months. link here
Anyways, a lot of the comments were to the effect of "why is there a double standard zomg" and other fairly standard timeless questions. As someone who pretty much is an expert only in relationships and sexual subjects, allow me to explain:
Men are easy. Men are always easy. It is not hard for a woman to have sex with 50 men in the span of 3 months. Hell, an average-looking woman could probably knock off three or four guys in a single night if she put her mind to it.
By contrast, it's hard for men to have sex. Men would love to have sex with three women in one night, but it's hard to do. That's where the term "easy" comes from - a woman is "easy" when having sex with her is (relatively) not a difficult proposition. So, a guy who lays 50 women in 3 months is a "pimp", because he is doing something challenging. A woman who has sex with 50 men in 3 months isn't necessarily more sexually appealing, just more willing to have sex.
Now, the complaint that stems from this is a favorite of Redditors -- that somehow 'society' has invented this system to keep women down, to oppress women, etc.
This is bullshit. Some evolutionary psychology is helpful here: men want to impregnate as many women as possible. This mentality is evolutionarily desirable and thus has been selected for over millions of years, in the males of many many species. By contrast, human women can only be impregnated by one man at a time (and there are similar limits in other species). Therefore, she must be picky. After all, if she mates with just any old man, her offspring will be less likely to survive, and her genes will be less likely to be passed on. Thus, she picks the most fit male to mate with.
Let me repeat: For men, being promiscuous has been selected for evolutionarily. For women, being selective has been evolutionarily selected for.
But to top it off, men have evolved to prefer selective women. First, if a woman is having sex with many men, her pregnancy might not be his offspring. When he invests resources into feeding the child, he'd better be sure it's his. Second, if a woman is having sex indiscriminately, her female children will also be more likely to have sex indiscriminately, which will ultimately negatively affect his own genes' survival.
It gets even worse though! If one woman is having sex with all the men, she's monopolizing the gene pool -- she's decreasing the chance of other women having sex with fit men. And these other women want a shot too. So women themselves have evolved to dislike other women having sex with lots of men.
TL;DR: Men have evolved to be promiscuous. Women have evolved to be selective. Men have evolved to prefer women who are selective. Women have evolved to dislike women who are promiscuous.
Note - I am attaching no moral judgment to any of this. I have no problem with men who are chaste or women who are promiscuous. These are just the very deep-seated reasons why our biology compels us to think of men as pimps and women as sluts.
UPDATE: I feel somewhat compelled to defend my points, and since the criticism falls into five major camps, I'll address them here rather than in the commons.
Criticism 1: We're not animals, we're people. Sure we are. And we can overcome our biology much better than other species. But at the end of the day, our base instincts are biological. My point is that the instinct to praise a man for wanton sex and criticize a woman for the same are deeper than the sociological norm that many Redditors attribute it to.
Criticism 2: Promiscuity isn't controlled by biology Why would it not be? At the risk of appearing to fall on the wrong side of the nature/nurture divide, I don't think it's a great leap to say most of our behavior is broadly chemically motivated. (eg:The fact that we get oxytocin from cuddling makes us more likely to seek out other humans and be social.) The point is that these claims are very hard to verify with genetic analysis, specifically because we don't have access to a wide gene pool of millions of years of human evolution. But it's not a great leap to say that broadly speaking, over the course of evolution, promiscuity levels, like every.other.trait in human beings, was selected for in some way or another. It's common knowledge that on a species level, the size of the male's junk is directly related to promiscuity.
Criticism 3: Women who are promiscuous are likely to produce promiscuous male offspring too, which is good. In the prevalent evolutionary psychology model, male promiscuity and female promiscuity are two distinct genotypes. This is for the very reasons outlined above - male and female promiscuity are motivated by different physical needs and have different resource-allocation problems attached. This is, again, not a great leap.
Criticism 4: Women can't have evolved to dislike women who are promiscuous, because that's assigning values to things, which isn't biologically motivated. Maybe the mechanism is mis-worded, but the basic idea is that females who prohibit other females from becoming too promiscuous are more likely to survive. Anyways, people have biologically-based impulses that result in value judgments all the time. This berry tastes weird (it's poisoned), this milk smells bad (it's gone sour), this man is creepy (he's likely a rapist), the dark alley scares me (i'm unable to defend myself). It's in no way a stretch to think that women could develop an aversion to women who were monopolizing male sexual attention.
The Big One: Criticism 5: Evolutionary psychology is bullshit.
Maybe. But I submit that if you believe that thought and behavior has a biological basis (certainly the brain itself ought to convince you...) and you believe in evolution (not a great leap on Reddit), then you should subscribe to at least the basis of evolutionary psychology. After all, what makes evolutionary psychology different from other fields of evolutionary theory?
Here's a question. Have you seen the process of the evolution of the human eye? Of course not. We haven't found the intermediate steps in the puzzle. But because we have the evolutionary framework, we talk in terms of the selection mechanisms at work, not in terms of finding the actual genes (or even particular structures) throughout history. Same thing here - we're talking about the selection mechanisms at work, rather than the actual genes, because in almost all cases of macroevolution, we have to do that. I have no idea whether cavemen millions of years ago were promiscuous or not, just as you have no idea what particular shape the eye took when it was first developed. In fact, the best Richard Dawkins can do is point to the possible ways that the eye evolved and the evolutionary pressures that caused that evolution.
Posted Dec 11, 2009, 6:25 AM UTC · edited
Have you ever taken a biology class? You think that women have evolved to hate other women who have sex with lots of men? ARE YOU SERIOUS?
I'm also not attaching any sort of moral judgment to any of this: I just want to see your sources. Women who have promiscuous sex have offspring who also have promiscuous sex? What about her male offspring? Wouldn't they therefore be more likely to succeed? Please, quote me some sources.
While I was reading this post, I was actually yelling aloud in sheer frustration.
There are no sources, it's the same quasi-science applied to negative judgments of being gay.
The faux scientific negative judgments of homosexuality and high female sexual activity seem to be based in the sex-for-reproduction theory. I wonder what the enlightened author thinks about masturbation and hairy palms.
From a sociological standpoint, he's right on, at least when it comes to why the perception of stud vs slut exists (and he's certainly not the first person to make those observations about how we view these behaviors culturally), but once he starts playing arm chair evolutionary psychologist it gets pretty questionable.
PC denialism.
Penisworship.
What the OP is talking about is base instinctual reactions without placing a value judgment on anything. I don't see how denying the existence of evolutionary psychology helps us overcome bigotry. When you can positively identify attitudes towards sexuality in the context of evolution (gays, promiscuity, etc), you can then frame the issue by saying that since underpopulation is no longer a problem, and since birth control is cheap and effective, there is no longer any logical reason to look down on promiscuity or homosexuality. To me, evolutionary psychology provides the strongest ammo available against such prejudice.
It has nothing to do with penis worship :-(. Don't say that.
This general evolutionary theory (excluding some specific points OP made) is true in my honest opinion. Our society has definitely changed but our bodies are still the same decrepit neanderthals we always were. Evolution is slow, very slow. It will take tens of thousands of years before evolution catches up with the current rules of society.... and when that happens society will still be tens of thousands of years ahead of evolution.
Sources? Here you go:
Title: The evolution of human mating Source: 心理学报 [0439-755X] Buss yr:2007 vol:39 iss:3 pg:502
Title: The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism Source: Behavioral and Brain Sciences [0140-525X] Gangestad yr:2000 vol:23 iss:4 pg:573
Title: Gender differences in sexuality: A meta-analysis Source: Psychological bulletin [0033-2909] Oliver yr:1993 vol:114 iss:1 pg:29
Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind DM Buss - 1999 - Allyn & Bacon
Psychological sex differences: Origins through sexual selection DM Buss - American Psychologist, 1995 - psycnet.apa.org
Title: Effects of gender and sexual orientation on evolutionarily relevant aspects of human mating psychology Source: Journal of personality and social psychology [0022-3514] Bailey yr:1994 vol:66 iss:6 pg:1081
You're citing articles that don't support your argument.
Title: The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism Source: Behavioral and Brain Sciences [0140-525X] Gangestad yr:2000 vol:23 iss:4 pg:573
"Mating tactics are highly variable in both men and women and evolved to be contingent on environmental factors. Complete theories of mating strategies must account for these individual differences and contextual effects. We have proposed that these phenomena cannot be fully understood without considering the nature of the trade-offs that underlie mating decisions in humans. We suggest that good genes sexual selection, in concert with good parenting sexual selection, may have generated the variation and contextual effects associated with the short- and long-term mating tactics witnessed in both sexes.
Given the demands of biparental care during evolutionary history, both men and women were selected to use long-term mating tactics and invest in offspring. However, they were also selected to use ecologically contingent, conditional mating strategies, dedicating some effort to short-term and extra-pair mating under specific conditions. Women may have evolved to trade-off evidence of a man’s genetic fitness for evidence of his ability and willingness to invest in offspring. The specific mating tactics and preferences women adopted, however, depended on the nature and quality of their local environment. If the local environment was difficult and demanded biparental care, women placed more weight on the investment potential of prospective mates and less weight on indicators of their genetic fitness. As a result, a larger proportion of women adopted long-term mating tactics almost exclusively. If, on the other hand, the local environment was prevalent with pathogens (or signaled the importance of the genetic fitness of offspring), women placed more weight on indicators of the genetic fitness of prospective mates. In such environments, a larger proportion of women were willing to engage in short-term, extra-pair matings, allowing them to gain genetic benefits from men who provided less parental investment at the risk of losing parental investment from their primary mates. The mating tactics and preferences of women accordingly reflected the nature and quality of the environments in which they lived.
Whereas women "tracked" their environment, men tracked and adjusted their mating tactics and preferences to the behavior of women (Thiessen, 1994). If most women expected heavy paternal investment, most men (especially those who displayed less fitness) offered more and perhaps exclusive parental investment, dedicating a greater portion of their effort to long-term mating tactics and parental investment. As a result, variance in men’s mating success was reduced. If women’s "demand" for genetic benefits increased, some men (especially those advertising such benefits) dedicated more effort to short-term, extra-pair mating tactics, thereby increasing variance in mating success among men. Only a small proportion of men (i.e., those who displayed the most fitness) were able to carry out short-term tactics successfully at all times, regardless of the environmental factors to which women were responding.
Many of the unique predictions derived from this model have been supported by recent empirical data. Although our notions extend our understanding of the strategic plurality of human mating in many ways, this account of the ties between evolutionary theory and human mating strategies remains far from complete. "
I love it when people just use Google scholar, paste some sources in, and hope nobody with access will bother to check! In fact, the only thing I love more than that is when wonderful redditors like you call them on their gambit. Have an upvote, an awesome day, and keep up the good fight.
yeah and I could provide just as many sources producing the opposite. your argument has too many counters to even consider it concrete.
Yes, but you didn't.
I have better things to do with my time then look up sources for a reddit discussion thread.
Then, perhaps... do it?
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(S)he doesn't need any sources, (s)he already told you that (s)he
GUH! Listen to the expert.
TBH I couldn't even get all the way through his post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism#Sexual_dimorphism_in_humans
Has a little bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment
Gets more in depth into PI and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle
Focuses more on the investment of females.
Whether you agree with what he's saying it is quite popular in the sciences and there have been studies done supporting it.
I think our society is slowly taking over our evolutionary urges though making things really interesting. Even though people may still call more sexual women 'sluts' it's becoming much more accepting (just watch Sex in the City), so we are making progress I think.
I've already had one discussion about why people seem to despise evolutionary psychology/biology so much and didn't get terribly far, but I'd be willing to give it another go; lol.
**Edit: I don't know where he got this part...
Unless he's implying it's a learned behavior.
I don't have anything against evolutionary psychology. No wait, I do: evidence.
Unfortunately, many of the claims of evolutionary psychology (or at least what I read on the Wikipedia page) just can't really be proven. You can make a lot of compelling arguments for either side, but the bottom line is that it's very, very hard to prove that something evolved the way it did because of a few set rules.
I'm having a really difficult time wording this, so I'm going to try bullet points.
After I got a few years into my biology degree, I started analyzing all of my behaviors as a cost/benefit analysis. I thought about everything from an evolutionary standpoint. In other words, I would have been right with you. Then I started learning all of the "miracles". All of the things that science can't explain yet. I came to realize that we are working with a very primitive understanding of a lot of things. Evolutionary psychology is limited by the limitations of what we understand--and we don't know that much at all. I expect that our views of evolution and animals will change drastically in the future.
At its heart, evolutionary psychology (or at least what I read on the Wikipedia page) seems to be based on conjecture. You basically take some facts and timelines and paint a story. From the existing evidence, you could paint whatever story you want. We aren't even working with a full understanding of all of the variables involved. There are scores--SCORES--of variables that aren't accounted for in these arguments. This is the problem with a lot of science, and it's just because we're still learning.
You are assuming that evolution always selects for the best trait. This just isn't true. It's not true. The implications of this on an argument like evolutionary psychology just means that you can't prove it. You just can't prove it. Maybe we are the way we are because we're a well-oiled machine of selection--or maybe we are the way we are because of a few mistakes here and there mixed with some selection.
As someone who believes in the Red Queen theory of evolution, I'm interested to know how STIs fit into this theory. It seems that they would account for the appearance of monogamy in society: from a health standpoint, it is in your best interest to appear monogamous and committed to one partner--as it is beneficial for a woman to appear monogamous as well so that her mate will help her rear her child. But it gets more complicated! What about the different types of males? A woman wants to be impregnated by a virile stud and taken care of by a homebody--or does she? Is it safer for her to mate with the homebody?
The biggest problem with evolutionary psychology is that women's sexuality has been subverted by men throughout history (and to some extent, vice versa). This article is a very, very interesting read that should prove to you in some capacity that there is no way to tell how our current system evolved.
Personally, I can't analyze all of this information and come up with a concrete conclusion. I don't think anyone can. It dips into speculation and conjecture, and it might sound good or seem correct, but it's baseless.
Ultimately, I agree with you. Evolutionary psychology is an interesting subject to contemplate, but the biological and instinctual processes that direct our actions are complex, and I certainly have a problem with using it as a reason to judge another.
I'm of the camp that believes that free will is not an illusion, and while we all may have urges to be or not be promiscuous, or tendencies to like or dislike the promiscuity of others, it is always ultimately our own decision whether to do so. There are plenty of things that evolutionary psychology shows are useful that most people find morally abhorrent (murdering rivals & their offspring, rape, adultery) and we are easily able to resist doing. Claiming that evolution makes us act the way that we do is a way of distancing ourselves from the responsibility of deciding how to act, the old "nature made me do it." You're welcome to your opinions, but trying to convince me that yours is the most "natural" way to think isn't going to fly.
Gawd I hate the concept of free will, because those who believe in it can't explain how it's so "free" from outside influence and the physical world. In my humble opinion, many people cling to the idea of free will as the last refuge separating humans from other animals.
The denial of free will does not mean that we humans have no will at all. Your will is still capable of making choices whether it is truly free or not.
Society will hold you responsible for your actions, whether you have free will or not, or whether you were genetically disposed to your actions or not.
Forgot to address your first bullet. I think you're pointing out that altruism exists, yet isn't beneficial from an evolutionary stand point at all. There are plenty of papers talking about this (http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=Altruism+and+Evolution&aq=f&aqi=g1&oq=&fp=cbc2f75bf9d43a8f).
Not just altruism, but the brain, neurotransmitters, and hormones. We know a lot--yet very little--about how these things work and interact with each other to produce the complex system of our bodies. These are very basic building blocks that influence our behavior and our perceptions, and we know hardly anything.
I agree with you that there's no way we can be certain, but that's true of a lot of sciences, but scientists can make inferences, theories, and hypothesis (hypothesi.. hypothesises?) based on repeated studies, and when a theory successfully predicts the behavior or preference or whatever in successive studies, it gives that particular theory more credibility. Scientists try to control for certain variables, but it's near impossible to get all of them.
Best is a loaded word. I assume evolution selects for the trait that's most likely to result in reproduction.
The Red Queen theory is certainly interesting. Both theories result in a desire to mate and spread genes; one looks at it from an individual's desire and the other looks at is a way to ensure survival of a species.
Sorry if I indicated that I thought evolutionary psychology was a "no way any of this stuff could possibly wrong" science; I'm not sure any science fits that category or wants to fit that category (except maybe mathematics). Still, I think it provides some insight into our behavior and I don't think it's "baseless" as you say anymore than dark energy, string theory, or the Higgs Boson are baseless. None are proved, but people way smarter than me accept all of them.
I'm reading that last article and it's really interesting! Thanks
You see, I think the problem is that we don't even know all of the variables. It's not that we can't control for them, it's that we just don't know what happened.
I'm having a hard time again wording this, so I'm going to give you an example. In the arctic, there are fish called Icefish. Somewhere along the way, their gene for hemoglobin was ruined, so they have no hemoglobin (the O2 carrying pigment). When scientists discovered these fish, they thought that there must be some advantage to having blood without hemoglobin. They found that icefish blood was less viscous, and that was about it.
Why don't icefish have hemoglobin? Because at some point a gene mutation wiped it out--and due to a bizarre set of circumstances, they were able to survive. They live in a narrow depth range in a cold climate, which means that the dissolved oxygen content of the water is higher. There is also a series of biological chemical reactions that enables them to survive in their specific environment--but by no means do they have any advantage. They simply exist, and their setup works, so they persist. This is evolution--it does not necessarily select for traits that are more advantageous, or more likely to result in reproduction. There are many traits that just are, because they work. This is true in humans as well.
I understand the logic behind the poster's argument, but I just don't agree with him. I don't think that this method of sexual selection explains our societal constructs against women and promiscuity. There are just too many other factors at work.
I'm glad you're reading that article--it definitely is fascinating and well-researched, and I'm glad you appreciate it!
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Uh, it's evolutionary psychology, not biology.