What Do Women Want

the
expressions of our genes. What is , evolutionary
psychologists say, is meant to be, genetically speaking. This is equally true
for the fact that we all have thumbs that help grasp and for the fact
that—judging by appearances—men are the more lustful gender.
    The role of social learning, of conditioning, isn’t
given much weight by the field’s leaders. If promiscuity were considered normal
in teenage girls and not in teenage boys, if it were lauded in girls and
condemned as slutty and distasteful in boys, if young women instead of young men
were encouraged to collect notches on their belts, how might the lives of
females and males—how might the appearances that evolutionary psychology treats
as immutable—be different? This kind of question doesn’t much interest
evolutionary psychologists like David Buss, a professor at the University of
Texas at Austin and one of the field’s premier sexual theorists. He dispenses
with such challenges by amassing evidence that, all over the globe, male
randiness and female modesty are celebrated. The widespread, in his view, proves
the predetermined, the genetically encoded. Look, he has written in one of the
discipline’s academic manifestos, at the ideal number of sexual partners named
by college students as they think forward over a lifetime; research has shown
far higher figures for men than women. Look, around the world, at preferences in
mates. From Zambia to towns of Arab Palestinians to America, societies set great
value on chastity or some measure of propriety or reserve in women.
    Evidence like this piles up in Buss’s pages. And
then he adds another worldwide mating reality—that from Zambia to America,
financial prospects are prized in men—and this takes him to one of evolutionary
psychology’s pivotal conceits. Within the field, it is known as “parental
investment theory.” To the public, it may not be known by any name at all. And
by most, the theory’s components may be only hazily comprehended. Yet the
conceit has traveled from academia through the media and into general
consciousness. It has been fully embraced, deeply absorbed, become part of
common wisdom. Parental investment theory goes like this: because men have
limitless sperm while women have limited eggs, because men don’t have to invest
much of worth in reproduction while women invest not only their ova but their
bodies, as they take on the tolls and risks of pregnancy and childbirth, because
women then invest further in breast-feeding (the investment being in time, in
extra calories required, and in the postponed ability to conceive another
child)—because of this economy of input, far more pressingly relevant to our
prehistoric ancestors, to our ever-endangered forebears, than to the humans of
today, males have been programmed, since way back when, to ensure and expand
their genetic legacy by spreading their cheap seed, while females have been
scripted to maximize their investment by being choosy, by securing a male likely
to have good genes and be a good long-term provider to her and her
offspring.
    This all fits neatly with the evidence from Zambia,
Yugoslavia, Palestinian towns, Australia, America, Japan. And the theory’s stark
economic terms have a solid, incontrovertible sound. Our erotic beings, the
differences in desire we observe between the genders, are the inevitable
manifestations of evolutionary forces from eons ago. Parental investment theory
gratifies one of our urgent longings: for simple answers about how we’ve come to
be the way we are.
    But the theory’s foundation is precarious at best.
Does the fact that women are expected to be the more demure gender in Lusaka and
New York, in Kabul and Kandahar and Karachi and Kansas City, prove anything
about our erotic hardwiring? Might the shared value placed on female modesty
speak less to absolutes of biology than to the world’s span of male-dominated
cultures and historic suspicion and fear of female sexuality?
    And then, what of Chivers’s plethysmograph, which
made a myth out of appearances? What of the drives that lie concealed beneath
the surface, that crouch within the strictures? The sexual insights of
evolutionary psychology can sometimes seem nothing but a conservative fable,
conservative perhaps inadvertently but nevertheless preservationist in spirit,
protective of a sexual status quo. Women, the fable teaches, are naturally the more restrained sex; this is the inborn
norm; this is normal. And the