They met at Starbucks, made flirty small talk, and exchanged numbers. On their first date a few days later, she invited him back to her place—appropriately enough, for coffee. He'd barely removed his jacket when she slammed the door and pounced. "Is this just about sex?" he thought, because he was putatively looking for a good time, but was in reality seeking a relationship. He was no longer the hunter, but the hunted.
After that tryst his interest dropped quickly and steeply. But why? An opportunity to have unencumbered sex is what men want—right? Well, yes and no.
It's no moral failing to feel lust, and women throughout history have made strategic decisions to become physical quickly, and to couple with multiple males, especially when the men in question commanded either resources or good genes. That said, the blunt truth is that hooking up might be a mistake when a woman's goal is finding a long-term relationship; men tend not to marry women they label promiscuous. But in fact there are many reasons a woman might opt to hook up, and not all are about immediate sexual gratification.
Under most circumstances, men are the wooers, and if their wooing is too easy they are prone to unwittingly discount a woman's value. A man may not even realize he will ultimately penalize a woman for giving him the very thing he pressures her for. The fact that his judgment is unconscious makes it no less damning.
Some men are exceptions in that they're able to overcome the biases with which nature has encumbered them. Some men truly aren't judgmental. But the average guy will tend to dichotomize women quickly and unconsciously: She's a whore if she sleeps with him too soon (or with too many people he knows).
A man's judgments often reflect his assessment of himself as much as of the woman. A man with low self-esteem may be particularly biased against a woman who sleeps with him quickly, because he thinks other (better) men will have even easier access to her. The Groucho Marxist doctrine taps into this thinking: Any woman who would have me must be pretty desperate.
Male hypervigilance about a woman's sexual choices arises from a basic genetic self-interest. It serves to monitor paternity, since a woman who sleeps around is not a reliable vehicle for any single man's genes, according to evolutionary logic.
Why, then, do women persist in "sleeping around" or "putting out"? Like most fundamental human behaviors, there are trade-offs that would have made female promiscuity a viable strategy in many cases throughout human history.
A harsh and unpromising environment (say, few available resources and fewer good men) might warrant tenuous liaisons with several men rather than a single connection to an unreliable man. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has argued that such environments—uncertain provisions for a woman and her progeny—encouraged women to have a mixed strategy: multiple males for now, while preserving the opportunity to "switch up" if and when a more stable mate appeared.
Such behavior may in part account for the fact that ovulation is largely concealed in human females, which allows women to misrepresent or "finesse" paternity so as to accrue resources from more than one male. Concealed ovulation also encourages men to remain emotionally and physically close to their partners, in part to assure paternity even if the circumstances of conception are opaque.
After finding a potential long-term mate, a woman might decide that a virginal reputation could raise her viability. As Oscar Levant noted about Doris Day, "I knew her before she was a virgin." Granted, ancestral females had limited opportunities to reinvent themselves. Hence the need to be coy, even while engaging in promiscuous behavior.
In the contemporary world, promiscuity takes the form not just of surreptitious couplings with multiple partners; rather, it consists of sexual liaisons with no commitments desired or discussed. "Virtually everyone wants a traditional romantic relationship at some point. However, that's not necessarily a comfortable decision if reproducing and settling down aren't an immediate need," says Justin Garcia of the Laboratory of Evolutionary Anthropology and Health at Binghamton University in New York.
Even in a hookup, Garcia has found, people are still frequently looking for a relationship—in fact, about half the time. And men and women do so equally. Garcia observes that courting—say, dinner and a movie—may be dying in the high-tech instant-gratification world we live in. Instead, "hookups have become a new technique employed to garner a more traditional romantic partner."
In the modern cosmopolitan setting, the period between menarche and reproduction has grown to upward of 20 years, and the average American woman now has her first child at age 25. Such a span of reproductive freedom gives rise to novel mating strategies, including hookups, booty calls, and one-night stands.
The problem is that even as men may look to hookups as potential long-term relationships, their psychological makeup pushes them to unconsciously discount their partner as a prospect. So hookups become especially tricky for women to navigate, despite the fact that they're increasingly socially acceptable.
Metropolitan surroundings provide vast opportunities to hook up. But our emotional reactions to these options have not evolved much.
Being judgmental about promiscuity is an emotional pitfall evolution has handed men. Sidestepping it might be easier when men know what they're up against. Men certainly don't have to derive morals from biology, but they are well served by consciously knowing their biases, so they can decide more rationally.
Tags:
bias,
biases,
circumstances,
few days,
first date,
good time,
judgments,
long term relationship,
low self esteem,
mating,
paternity,
pounced,
promiscuous,
sex,
sexual gratification,
starbucks,
strategic decisions,
women
