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The old cliché that “men are from Mars,” though effective at eliciting a nod and a knowing smile, has remained impotent in changing the way the sexes regard one another. But the climate-shifting #metoo movement, captured in essence by the recent trial and conviction of Harvey Weinstein, demands greater clarity of our human nature and why men and women see sexual events so differently.
The so-called battle of the sexes has been raging since the dawn of the evolution of two distinct sexes some 600 million years ago. However, only 150 years ago Charles Darwin shed light on this battle by introducing his theory of sexual selection, which explains how changes in behavior and form result when males compete for access to fertile females and females selectively choose mate-worthy males. Fast forward to today, the same selective forces that shaped everything from plumage to provisioning and muscles to manes in non-humans are being used to understand human psychological software and the “mental apps” natural selection engineered to guide mate choice.
The sexes, it ends up, have different mental app settings when it comes to mating. In males, the reproductive gains afforded by successive and successful mating attempts led to mental apps that readily cause feelings of “oh my god, she’s hot, and I want to have sex with her.” For men, more partners meant more babies who inherited preferences for more partners leading to even more babies. But there was far less reproductive gain for women to mate in short succession with more than one male. One load of semen can fertilize an egg—an egg that then requires ten months of gestation and, at least ancestrally, two to four years of breastfeeding. As evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers noted half a century ago, the asymmetry in the minimum level of investment required by men and women to get a baby literally up and running is astounding: four years versus, what? Four minutes?
To think this hasn’t left a mark on our psychology would be foolish. Women are far more discerning when it comes to selecting a mate. While women know when a man is one hot biscuit, prior to us engaging in sex, we’ve done a back-of-the-napkin calculation of his likely ability and willingness to invest.
Much of this calculation occurs behind the scenes—it isn’t necessarily conscious. Evaluations of a man bubble up as thoughts of “he seems quite attractive, driven, and successful, and golly, I seem to have his attention” or “he seems like a lazy, account-draining parasite, and dear lord, I hope he leaves me alone.” Natural selection tinkered with the mental software in women to prefer the former—men who showed, with good probability, that they possess good health and that they’d stick around and provide resources to her and her resulting children. These are the men granted the golden ticket. But this evaluation can take time. Courtship in humans, as in other animals, functions to determine whether a woman has found a dad or a cad. If, according to the mental apps that perform this data-mining feat, a man measures up, sexual attraction circuits are a go: “we’ve found a good candidate—you’ve got the green.”
But this is lust and while differences in “go-time” settings certainly contribute to sexual conflict, it’s only half the story. What about when our sexual circuits wave caution flags at the person in front of us? Welcome to the world of disgust, another emotion at the heart of sexual conflict. Disgust is the mental app that guides culinary and copulatory decisions: What not to eat? What not to touch? And, pertinent here, with whom not to mate?
Conflict between the sexes occurs because men and women have very different disgust thresholds in the mating arena because of the different biological costs associated with reproduction mentioned above. For women, a potential sexual partner has quite a bar to clear, and for those failing to do so, attempts of sexual pursuit are often met with sexual disgust. For men, the bar for a potential mate, well, let’s just say, excavation is still underway. In my research, women tend to find sexual behavior with “unvetted” partners and partners with evolutionary strikes against them (for example, the very related, the very old, the very young, and the very dead) far more disgusting than do men. Sexual disgust is a woman’s protective force field, causing retreat from reproductively costly engagements.
And each woman has different settings, of course. One’s own condition, development, and culture affect these settings. Because of this, one woman’s nightmare could be another’s knight in shining armor. Attraction depends on many factors, one of which is one’s own attractiveness. Women who are more attractive are even more selective. They can be. But, compared to men, women are more sexually selective quite generally. Whereas for men, many interactions are recognized as potential sexual opportunities, this is a foreign concept to most (sober) women.
It’s a difficult pill to swallow that we are inherently different. But we are and it stems, in part, from our hundred-million-year evolutionary past. Our problem today is that in everyday interactions we often fail to acknowledge sex differences, particularly those in sexual disgust because we just naturally assume others share the same mental app settings we do. So when a woman goes out to dinner with a high-status male colleague (who has most definitely not passed sexual muster) because she believes he values her mind and hopes he might write her a letter of recommendation, she will find it strange when he asks his driver to take them back to his hotel rather than return her to the parking garage. But that man doesn’t find this strange. After all, a young, beautiful woman has agreed to be alone with him. What else could this mean? His circuits scream, “target acquired;” hers scream, “escape! escape now!”
With the scientific discovery of our human mental operating system, we are now in a world in which men and women can appreciate the mental apps guiding sexual behavior in the opposite sex. Men can now appreciate that mere physical presence does not necessarily signal sexual interest because there are several non-sexual apps that motivate women to interact with men. Women can now appreciate that mere physical presence might trip sexual circuits in unintended ways and that men do not share the same sexual disgust settings as women. Knowledge gives us power. Mind the apps.
