Isn't it reasonable to think that men have more evolutionary incentive for fucking around, for obvious reasons? I'll happily be corrected but no-one has really managed a counter argument that i've seen.
There are some reasonable arguments to be made in this regard obviously, in that childbearing is a significant, historically inescapable, inevitable, and at one point inexplicable (presumably) investment for a woman, compared to a man who can decide after the fact if he actually wants to stick around for his child or not. Woman have no choice. But many women are not huge fans of this fact. Evolution did not
need to build hardwired enjoyment into menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and childbirth - it was presumably a far simpler evolutionary route to use hormonal trickery to hijack cognitive mechanisms that might otherwise cause a woman to think "I really can't be fucked being a mother, as soon as this child is born I'm gonna kill it and get back to sleeping with whoever I want"... for example.
The shortcuts evolution takes on the route to making things happen are gonna be relevant for this lengthy attempt at a counterargument, so bear with me.
So there are complex hormonal factors involved, which while they exist in men too, to some degree, are innately more avoidable since a man can just choose to leave the scene, if he doesn't like it, and while he might feel some cognitive guilt depending on his character, the hormones involved in impregnating a woman, supporting her throughout pregnancy, childbirth, and the growth of the child, seem to operate in an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of way. Whereas a woman does not have this option as the child is physically attached to her body for 9 months, and during these 9 months she is significantly incapacitated compared to if she was not pregnant. There are facts in support of your argument - to an extent.
But the evolutionary incentive for the woman isn't to not
fuck around. It's solely to ensure the survival of her children - once she has become pregnant - and sometimes this will involve convincing a man to support her while she's pregnant - but not always. If anything, assuming proliferation of the species is the primary evolutionary goal (which it is) then there should be
just as much incentive for women to sleep around - in fact, moreso, since they are the ones who actually
get pregnant, but they are
not always fertile, and evolution did not see fit to give humans very obvious, intuitive indicators for when they are fertile. Thus, in prehistoric times especially, most of them would really have had no idea.
There are additional evolutionary incentives for men too which are often overlooked with this kind of argument, which is that if your primary evolutionary imperative is to proliferate your own bloodline, it's advantageous
to make sure that your kids
are actually born - and learn to survive after they are born. That said, in prehistoric, less puritanical times, whether the specific male who impregnated a woman was actually the one to stick around would have been pretty irrelevant, probably, because very few women would live completely isolated lives, and those few that did probably did so because they
could, and thus would have been very capable survivors.
There would have been a strong
cultural pressure at the time for the man to serve his tribe, of course - but whether or not it was actually important that he serve his tribe
by supporting women he impregnated would probably have varied. Maybe his time was better spent hunting, because he was a very skilled hunter. Maybe he was actively discouraged from trying to be a father because he really was just shit at it and the other tribe members made him stay away - or maybe the woman told him to stay away. These factors are all
cultural pressures, and it's hard to say exactly what pre-technological human tribes would have tended towards but looking at some ape species we can probably presume they were collectively cooperative, but placed far less importance on who's child was who and who's responsibility it was to look after it. There were always things to be responsible for - and shirking your assigned responsibilities that were of most value to the tribe was simply
not an option unless you wanted to chance it alone in the wilderness.
Of course, some species kill the offspring of rival males when they mate with a female who already has children, and perhaps the rival too if he stands his ground until the end. I can't remember off the top of my head if this happens in most ape species, it happens with lions I believe, but all this stuff is Googleable and it's really kind of irrelevant how much it happened. It almost definitely
did happen, humans are all very different, but a human male would generally only expend the energy to do this (and possible risk from other tribe members - maybe police, depending where we are in history) if they were pretty committed to staying with this particular woman and raising
his own kids with them. I realise I'm getting a bit side-tracked now on somewhat irrelevant tangents and this is a long post already so I'll try to wrap it up...
In short - my counter argument is simply that it's far too much of an oversimplification to say "men are hardwired to fuck around, women are hardwired to be selective". There is some truth to this statement, but it would be more accurate to say that "both men and women are hardwired to fuck around, because sex is enjoyable for both of them, but women are also hardwired to be more selective when choosing a partner to help them raise a child". However, this idea of choosing a partner
before one is actually pregnant, and being careful who you have sex with before this because you
might get pregnant, is a very recent phenomenon which is largely imposed by moralistic, organised, relatively modern societies.
It is very likely
too recent for evolution to have baked this into our psychology as an "imperative" of any sort. It would be way too much of a tangent to get into why these moral systems evolved the way they did - but, bluntly, prehistoric women (and men) would only have been vaguely aware of the connection between sex and pregnancy, and the presence of the biological father would not have been hugely relevant to the welfare of the child because of the tightly kit tribal communities they would have lived within, where they would be supported by the entire tribe, and the children would be raised by the tribe. In fact I believe it is a fairly seriously considered theory that the reason the male penis is the shape it is in humans, with a bulbous "head" that is wider than the shaft, is because this acted as a kind of "scoop", effectively shoveling out the spunk of other males who had previously "mated" with the same female, to give their own sperm the best chance of fertilising the egg. This all points to a far more sexually relaxed culture in prehistoric humanity where both men and women were fucking around with relative abandon, and this period of human history would have lasted far longer than the relatively short blink of an eye, in evolutionary timescales, that large, organised societies with rigidly defined laws and social structures have been the norm for human beings.
Arguably, longer term pair bonding and monogamy is a more valuable phenomenon in these societies than in tribal societies - partly because more humans living very close together means greater risk of disease, and sexual contact is a powerful transmission vector for many diseases other than just STDs. Equally, knowledge of the fact that sex does indeed lead to pregnancy probably triggered a kind of fear that did not exist before, relating to the importance of
who the father actually was.
The early stages of agricultural living would have been harder than a tribal, hunter gatherer lifestyle, and would have begun to erode the pervasive tribal closeness that previously existed. As family groups began to live further apart,
family became more important than tribe, and with it the importance of determining who actually
was your family.
But evolution is a slow process, and rather than bake in a strong tendency to long, happy, monogamous relationships and sex drives that facilitated this without feelings of jealousy, bitterness, unrequited love or whatever other shit into the human reward system, it was a far quicker method to stoke the fires of weird religious ideas that
mandated these arrangements, whether the humans living these lives liked it or not.
Obviously this arrangement of human societies served a purpose because here we are today in this crazy technological world of 8.5 billion humans we live in. But the most recent aspects of our attitudes towards sex come from the most recent millennia of rapid social change enabled by
culture,
not by hardwired biology. We now find ourselves at a point where technology and advances in our understanding of ourselves and our own history, and the reasons for certain cultural phenomena developing in the course of this history, that we can start to look past archaic ideas like "tradition" and examine the root causes of why certain traditions exist, and cultural mandates that were once championed despite surely causing a lot of absolute misery (numerous inescapable bad marriages, I'm sure, to mention just one thing - "shame" culture imposed on women to mention another).
I could go on, but I think hopefully I've said enough and that what I have said makes sense and serves as an adequate rebuttal to the tired trope that men want casual sex more than women - shit, no that reminds me! To bring it full circle back to the thread topic, what I have tried to painstakingly explain is that evolution does not necessarily require any given species to
want, in a cognitive, emotional sense, to do something, in order for that species to start doing something. Brains are hard to evolve, and even harder to change at a fundamental level, thus the clearly "layered" structure of the human mind where more and more complex structures simply evolve on top of each other to augment the layer below. Typically this allows animals (humans included now) to go from being
purely reactive creatures who flee from pain and suffering and seek comfort at all costs, to override this reflex and endure sometimes phenomenal hardship and suffering in order to
survive. Many, many species do things that they don't really
want to do. But the urge to
survive is so powerful and overriding that they will act in spite of pain or fear.
The question was "it seems like more men
want casual sex than women". The evolutionary imperative argument - even if it were completely true - does not satisfactorily justify this statement, because evolved
behaviours do not require that the unfortunate being conditioned to do them actually
enjoy, or truly want to do them. In humans, we call these "evolved behaviours" culture.
At certain periods in history - men have
had casual sex more than women, and at certain periods in history there has been evolutionary
pressure, which manifested as
culture and religion, for women to have less sex than men. This does not have any bearing on how much either gender
wanted to. Primarily, they
wanted to survive with the least amount of pain - and were willing to suffer to do so.
At certain periods in human history (I'm laboring the point now I know, I do apologise, I'm on speed and I haven't taken it for a while) for a woman to indulge her sexual desires would have resulted in greater suffering than was worth it to do so. The same has been true for men at points, as well - but persisting cultural biases in the present day point very strongly to the idea that, from a sexual perspective, women had it a lot worse.
semi joking lol
- not speaking to you necessarily here, OP, just anyone I happen to have triggerred by introducing politics into my answer).
