Is she worth $1000.00 an hour?Follow

What quality does this particular young lady have over someone who isn't a *****

Since when does an X on your hand mean you were/are a druggie? Did I not get that memo?

I blame evolution.

No, seriously, evolution is to blame for the impulse,

Do men honestly think women don't have the same impulse?

Anyway, almost all of these conversations ended up with the other person at some point saying something like this: Men like **** because they are evolutionarily programmed to fuck around and make lots of babies with as many women as possible. Women don't like **** because they need to catch a man to provide for her babies and keep him forever and ever. In other words, men are bad, but they just can't help it if they ***** around. Women don't get to sleep around, but isn't it nice to be inherently virtuous.

Because, I think, I politely resisted saying this in every single case, I'm going to take the liberty of doing so now: That argument is complete horseshit.

Evolutionary success is not about having the most sex, it's about producing the most fertile offspring. I'll say that again: the idea isn't to spread the most baby batter around, it's to raise the most children who themselves grow up to produce children. That's why your parents won't leave you the hell alone about making them grandparents; they aren't done until you do.

Male sleeping around simply wouldn't have cut it as an evolutionary strategy. First off, the male in question can't just sleep with any old female for evolutionary succes, he has to have sex with a woman who is fertile. Human females have concealed ovulation. Fucking around means rolling the dice each time, while staying with one woman at least through a full cycle (or two, or three - our ancestors didn't have our ridiculous abundnace of food and thus weren't as reliably fertile) meant a good shot at pregnancy.

...And that's assuming that the opportunity for Cro-Magnon or Australopithecine fucking around existed at all. Illicit sex requires privacy, and the days before bricks, mortar and loud stereos didn't provide much. Ever try to get away with something in a small town? Now try it when you live in a community of 60 breeding adults who live in thatched huts around a central camp fire. Everybody knows your business. And there's not a lot of stealing away for you-time when there's a danger of being eaten by predators. Doing things alone, for that very reason, tends to be looked on with suspicion when it happens in pre-modern societies, to the extent that it happens at all. I once read an account of an anthropologist's attempts just to go out to urinate by himself. The people he was living with couldn't figure out why he'd want to do such a dangerous thing.

I'm not saying that affairs never happened back in the mists of time, just that they would have been damn sight harder to have than we think of them. And while a single fling might have been possible if dangerous to attempt, being a rake would have been out of the question. Again, in a small community, word gets around. There aren't many evolutionary advantages in being ostracized by your clan or getting your head caved in.

Even if someone did manage to buck incalcuably high odds and impregnate more than one female at a time, he still has an evolutionary problem - the offspring have to reach adulthood and have kids of their own. His time and provisions would be split between more than one mate and more than one child, decreasing the odds of anyone getting through this completely healthy. The "faithful" male only has one child at a time, but can devote his whole energy to making sure the pregnancy goes well and both mother and child are healthy and well-provisioned. You have better odds raising well-fed children with two sides of a family for support than scrambling to split food between multiple children, some of whom may bear a stigma from having no socially sanctioned dad.

The healthy kids with family backing them up are more likely to have a prime choice of mates, and thus more likely to have healthy children of their own. Over thousands of years, it adds up.

On the other hand, women have more of an evolutionary reason to ***** around than you'd think. Theoretically, a woman who can overcome the odds, have an affair, and convince two (or more) men that they've fathered her child can raise her child with the advantages of extra provisions and extra adults looking out for it for it's entire life. Again, healthier growth, better choice of mates, more surviving offspring in the long run.

This is a truncated version of my argument, but I'll let it go - it's late.

My point is that men are not evolutionarily hard-wired to have many mates and women are not biologically "meant" to have just one. There are (or at least were) advantages to both in being faithful, and advantages and dangers to both in ******** around.

The men-get-to-sleep-around-and-women-stay-home thing isn't in the evolutionary makeup, it's just deeply embedded in the culture (and, mostly, in patrilineal cultures where it's key to know who the child's father is).

Yeah, the animal kingdom is chock full of fanciful flirtations.

The lesson here: The only truly 'true' man is the scrawny parasitic type.

Seriously though, tell me you DIDNT cry when the dad penguin's egg got away from him and froze and died in March of the Penguins.