How Evo Psych Can Improve Your Perspective on Sexual Issues

Suppose you were to decide I was right about everything I've said about evo psych. What would the implications be? I have argued that since "is" and "ought" should be clearly separated, there is absolutely no message about the desirability of changing society in line with goals we choose. Evo psych may predict that it will be difficult, but it never says we should not try. Facts about how difficult something may be should bear on how much effort we put into any particular transformation, but in some cases it's worth it anyway. Any given evo psych story might be wrong, and one way to test it is to try to change society to be in line with our modern values.

A clear example is the male tendency towards violence (on average greater than females). Everyone favors reducing violence towards others. We teach our children to channel their angry feelings into nonviolent forms. Evo psych predicts we have to do this anew for every generation of children, and boys will struggle with it more, but it is clearly worth it.

But what can evo psych do for you in your own personal life?

Several models of psychotherapy propose that our minds have separate components. Freud started it with his id, ego, and superego. For other examples, <Transactional Analysis>, while now dated, gave central place to parent, child and adult as parts of our psyche. More recently, the <Internal Family Systems Model> posits managers, firefighters, exiles, and the self. One way these approaches help is to separate some dysfunctional feelings and behavioral tendencies into an identifiable unit, respect it on its own terms, but strive to let other healthier parts govern your behavior instead.

Evo psych can be helpful in the same way. Sometimes we can identify tendencies in ourselves we are not so proud of as products of evolution, and we could package them up as components of ourselves. One advantage is that we can forgive ourselves for having such tendencies and honor them as part of our human heritage. We can skip trying to find the cause of such tendencies in our childhood, and not expect to remove them from ourselves root and branch. We can expect to feel them arise again and again. Instead, we choose to guide our behavior by the better values we have chosen.

There are a great many examples, many concerning sex. Middle-aged men will notice women in their 20s and feel a very strong attraction -- and sometimes leave their wives for a younger one. Women may feel strongly drawn to rich, muscled men in sports cars who treat other people badly. Happily married women may feel so strongly attracted to some other men they might engage in an affair. Men may notice a strong desire to have sex with women despite ambiguous consent. Women might feel a strong pull to not give their baby up for adoption even though they decided in advance that would be best for everyone. Men who really only want to have sex when their partners also really want it may nonetheless notice an ongoing strong desire to have sex more often.

We can accept any such tendency we find, recognize it as adaptive in the environment we evolved in, recognize it as not adaptive today, and then commit ourselves to living according to the modern values our best selves have adopted.

In the above examples we keep our evolutionary tendencies in check and refrain from actions our best selves would regret. But it could also lead to action. Women might decide that prostitution is a good choice for them, recognizing their innate tendency to feel bad about that and choosing to set it aside.

There is also the matter of interpreting other people's bad behavior or tendencies as rooted in their innate tendencies rather than evil intentions. Middle-aged women often notice their husbands looking at younger women. They could interpret it as their still being under the sway of an unjust patriarchal system or a pathetic attempt to deny that they are themselves getting older. They could more accurately interpret it as part of the way all men are wired -- a desire for sex with fertile women. Accepting the tendency (maybe even joking about it pleasantly) while expecting the men to stay true to them might be part of more intimacy in the marriage. Men might feel annoyed that their wives are not interested in sex anywhere near as often as they are. They are willing to do anything sexually the woman wants and have made it clear it would mean a lot to them; what's the problem? They should understand that women are wired to care deeply about when they have sex in a way that goes beyond rational considerations.

There is a misguided feminist attitude that takes this tendency to care deeply about the exact circumstances of sexual encounters and sets it up as an object of worship. <This article> takes the extraordinary position that if a man makes clear he wants any relationship to be a sexual one (a common enough position) and a woman goes along but later regrets it, she was coerced and possibly raped. The standard assumption of most monogamous couples is that neither will seek sex outside, but that they will have sex inside the relationship with reasonable frequency. Affirmative consent means that a man should always respect a woman's desires. However, if the woman is hardly ever interested in sex, that seems an entirely appropriate justification for him leaving the relationship in search of one that meets the standard. Throughout history couples have compromised in frequency of sexual relations. This feminist attitude seems to be that women should never compromise, and that any men who do not accept this new reality are, well, sexists. A likely result is a lot more men refusing to be in such relationships at all. What the analysis ignores is that most men are just wired to want sex a lot, and finding ways to accommodate that desire pretty often (though not on demand, of course) is part of compromising to make a relationship work. Thinking the man's desire for frequent sex is pathological is not a good starting point.

If a woman is raped, she might think about the motivation of the man who raped her. Feminist theory would suggest that he wanted to show his dominance over her, humiliate her, and hurt her. Evo psych would suggest that a big part of his motivation, ultimately, was a desire to father a child. There is absolutely no excuse for his action, but would a different perspective on his motivation make it easier to heal? It might be worth considering. Maybe the answer is a resounding "no", but it's for each person to decide on their own.

A lot of the evo psych tendencies I have discussed are differences between the sexes. Sex is like no other division between people. Women have sons and men have daughters, and we are intimately intertwined. Evo psych predicts differences in behavior between the sexes because of differing strategies for reproductive success. We see a great deal of it in the animal world, and evo psych has a good story to tell about many human differences as well.

Prostitution

I argued that <women are wired by evolution to hate rape>. The main reason is that they care deeply about who fathers their children and when. A woman's ideal is choosing to have sex exactly when and with whomever she chooses. This will typically be with a husband who agrees to support her and any resulting children. (Taking in mind that <women cheat sometimes>, she also might choose a secret sexual encounter in search of better genes for her children.) Also note that this woman's ideal is without dispute the only possible ethical position according to modern values.

People may marry for love these days in the West, but in other places and in earlier times, marriage was itself an economic arrangement. The woman grants a man the exclusive right to father her children and in return he supports her and those children. In the West, when love fails and divorce happens, child support reinstates this explicitly economic relationship.

An economic relationship between sex and resources introduces the concept of prostitution. This is on one end of a spectrum that goes down from economic marriage through mistresses and "kept women" to females who informally trade sex for various favors, and then to the explicitly commercial relationships of one-time sex for cash.

I want to set aside from this continuum sexual slavery, where women are forced into prostitution and would face reprisals if they left or perhaps cannot leave at all. That is rape.

The market for male prostitutes is very limited, while the market for female prostitutes is substantial. Here is a controversial claim: this situation is a way that society favors females over males. Most young females have the option to visit that continuum of prostitution at some point, though they do not need to take it. Very few males have the option.

Are there related, compensating advantages to being male? One is that a man can drift from place to place or even be homeless with very little risk of rape. That is a serious disadvantage of being female. In line with my philosophy of recognizing qualitative differences without needing to fit them into a war of the sexes, we can recognize both as valid, even if the downside of possible rape is bigger.

But if a woman remains within her community, that risk of rape is relatively low. Trading sex for support or protection is an option a woman has. A desperately poor woman could opt for prostitution, while a desperately poor man starves.

We can also put prostitution on a continuum along which female agency increases. Some might choose it given grim economic circumstances with the competing opportunities very limited. Some choose it because although they can get by OK, they can earn significant income. Eliot Spitzer's prostitutes would seem to fit that pattern. One young woman reportedly earned her semester's college tuition in just a few sessions.

If you started with a "blank slate" mentality, you could imagine women saying to themselves that when done right sex is safe regarding STIs and contraception, physically pleasant, and it is a natural human act. As long as it pays much better than most other jobs, it should be an attractive choice. And yet the same forces that make women hate rape will make them tend to hate prostitution. The woman's goal a wired by evolution is lifelong support from a man. Even $500 per hour is not on the same scale when there is no guarantee it will go on indefinitely. Her modern self might know that she is safe from pregnancy and STIs, but it does not affect her gut-level feelings that evolution has endowed her with.

It has also been proposed that in society, the bulk of women have a strong incentive to discourage their sisters from prostitution -- or to at least keep the price high. (They have an even stronger incentive to discourage women who offer sex freely.) If the only way a man can get sex is to marry and support any resulting children, he is motivated to do so. If he can get sex for a reasonable price and retain his independence, he might consider that a better deal. The "women's union" wants to curtail that option as much as possible. There is an internal logic to this story, but it seems more speculative than most evo psych. It might be a cultural adaptation.

Evolutionary tendencies are not destiny. Sometimes people can overcome them. When women who are not desperate overcome their own instincts against prostitution, and explicitly reject condemnation by society (mostly other women), it can affect society, as it takes only a small number of prostitutes to alter the sexual "market". There is a divide today within the feminist movement between those who support sex workers and those who do not. I believe the ethical thing to do is to support them in choosing their own personal destiny. Without getting into detailed policy options, I believe that legal and regulated prostitution is much better than total prohibition. If feminists want to work in parallel to reduce prostitution by way of trying to reduce the demand for it (to change men's behavior), they can.

Changing men's minds seems like a tall order. I think most men much prefer sex with women who have an intrinsic interest in it. According to <this chart>, at most 1 in 5 men in the US and northern Europe visit a prostitute even once. Those countries are rich enough that you figure most men aren't deterred by the price if they really want it. Perhaps those men do objectify women's bodies, but at 20% I would say it is a relatively minor problem. If part of support for sex workers extends to encouraging men to purchase their services, that's a slant I have never heard. But it's worth reflecting that reducing demand for prostitution reduces women's choices. Perhaps we should have a stronger safety net so fewer women are desperate, and I would support that (for men and women alike), but I can't see linking the two issues.

To summarize the effect of natural selection on prostitution, it is not at all surprising that most women would dislike the prospect and those who do enter it usually only do so when they are truly desperate or when they can command a very good price.

Limit news coverage of mass shootings

Overall gun deaths and mass shootings have very little to do with each other. I personally would favor stronger gun laws -- but not based on mass shooting incidents.

<This graphic> from 538.com describes the situation quite well.

Mass shootings are a fraction of one slender column in this big array of gun deaths. To be fair, if we restricted our attention to "clearly unjust gun deaths" then it would be a somewhat bigger piece. Two-thirds of the gun deaths are suicides. It's a good guess that a majority of the deaths from police shooting civilians are justified -- armed people who were threatening the police or others. And not all but many of the young men killed by guns are in gangs and have signed up for this possibility by joining gangs.

But with all that removed, and allowing for a few more mass deaths since 2016, it's still maybe 2% of the total for a year? The way to address the other 98% as well as that 2% might be with gun ownership restrictions. But the world's outrage is all focused on the 2%.

What we have is a media phenomenon. They are irresistibly drawn to dramatic stories of this kind, even though they will leave unreported a thousand simple one-person gun homicides. The media are drawn to it because people are drawn to watch the coverage. Crucially, a few young men in an antisocial frame of mind are drawn to watch the coverage too and inspired to get their brief moment of fame in the same way. It is a cycle that feeds on itself.

My claim is that we as a society aren't actually concerned about the number of people killed, we are concerned about the news stories. If there were fewer news stories we would be happier. We might not think that, but that's how we behave.

The way to reduce these reports (and ultimately, the violence itself, hopefully) is through the coverage and consumption of news, not the availability of guns. If we ignored issues of press freedom, we could pass a law limiting the coverage to bare bones facts and no sensationalism. We could prohibit publication of any images, still or video, as well as sensational text. Instead, just a text account of the location of the crime, number and names of victims. We seem able to suppress identities and lurid details for sexual abuse victims, maybe we could harness some of the same energy? Perhaps we could make such images illegal as we do with child pornography. Without the oxygen of publicity, such crimes would start declining.

That might be a hard sell, and press freedom really is worth a lot. But citizens could unite in expressing their opposition to news outlets carrying sensational coverage and then organize boycotts of the advertisers. Are people willing to turn the spotlight back on themselves for the role they play in these shootings? Giving ratings numbers to outlets that cover these stories sensationally is a clear cause, and a dip in ratings is the way to affect the behavior of news organizations.

Of course, with a video camera in every phone today and the viral video phenomenon, an end run around any such measures is in place. Given that, here's the hard truth about the the way to get a reduction in such news reports. It will happen if they become common enough that they're not interesting news any more. Commentators will passionately tell us that if we ever get used to such things then we're losing our very humanity. But that perspective is from within the bubble of the news mentality. If such incidents became common enough, then the news coverage would go down. The actual murder rate might go up a little, but even if it went up 50% that would be from 2% to 3% of the total, and it still doesn't mean much when the other 97% go unaddressed. And the actual good news: the rate also might go down again, as once the phenomenon is common enough to not be news, fewer perps would be motivated by the news and it could decrease without triggering the opposite reaction of "it's news again".

Have we not lost our humanity in our indifference to the other 97% of clearly unjust gun homicides? Have we lost our humanity in not responding to the inability for ordinary working people to earn a living wage? For the unavailability of health insurance? And worst of all, for the climate change nightmare that is unfolding? Maybe we have, and should ignore sensational mass shootings and focus on those things instead.

The news is a seriously flawed tool if your goal is to decide how to improve the world.

We have a need for another "news" program -- maybe more an "olds" program. I might call it "Boring But Important".

I addressed these same basic issues over a decade ago in <two> <posts> that I think are still entirely valid.

Evo psych and the burden of proof

One criticism of evolutionary psychology is that the evidence is often not very strong. We can't perform controlled experiments. Even if something is present in all cultures we have studied, the cultures could just be parallel by happenstance. So critics will call evo psych stories they don't like "just so" stories.

The assumption is that the SSSM is true by default, meaning that any human trait can be transformed if culture is changed. All we have to do is change it. Unless evo psych can provide compelling evidence, SSSMers say its story is presumed false.

SSSM does not deserve the presumption of truth, that is, that all aspects of society are malleable until proven otherwise. If we have observed both A and its opposite in a number of stable human societies, that is strong evidence that A is not strongly caused by innate factors. But what if it has been present in just about all human cultures and has not been different, as far as we know? (Complete universality is not required for an evo psych story to be true. The Heaven's Gate cult -- a sort of mini-society -- believed in universal suicide in order to reach an extraterrestrial spacecraft. Shakers believed that human should not have sex and lived in a society with no reproduction. These cases do not disprove claims that a desire to survive and a desire to have sex are innate human tendencies.)

When faced with some aspect of society that is universal in human cultures that we have observed, the SSSM does not offer any compelling reasons why it can be changed -- at least I have never read any. Evo psych explanations are at least explanations with some basis in reasoning. They should be considered on an equal footing. A great deal of the time, our conclusion will be that we simply do not know yet if there is a significant innate influence or not.

There is a big difference between "is" and "ought". Science should always be about "is". This is a pointed rejection of the postmodern view that science (along with every other form of argument or information) just serves power. That certainly can happen, but it should be argued on a case-by-case basis, pointing to the particular power that is being served and links between those who push the view and that powerful interest.

There is a strong association between SSSM as a scientific position ("is") and progressivism as a political position ("ought"). They really should be separated.

I made a <blog post>  11 years ago with quotes from Peter Singer's book, "A Darwinian Left" (1999). He makes a series of suggestions about what we should and should not assume in formulating a leftist agenda that is also in line with evo psych principles. I think the post is still worth a look.

Progressives would like to transform society in some particular way, and are engaged in a political struggle to make it happen. They would typically appeal to the SSSM scientists to say it is possible. Opponents might appeal to evo psych theories to buttress their case that it cannot be done easily.

But evo psych scientists and SSSM scientists, as scientists, should have no opinion on the matter. They should consider the attempt to change society as the source of new data. A successful and stable change that does not require exertions anew in each generation is strong evidence that the supplanted aspect of human behavior did not have an innate basis. Failure would tend to weakly support any evo psych story -- not strongly because maybe the attempt was just done wrong. There really shouldn't be a distinction between SSSM scientists and evo psych scientists. They should all be just scientists, willing to adopt whichever position the data indicates for each aspect of human society that is studied.

Suppose we consider the view that evo psych is fundamentally a tool of the right. There is little evidence suggesting many evo psych scientists themselves have right-wing views. It is true that evo psych results will tend to be conservative, arguing against the possibility of transforming society. But they will also argue against misguided if well-intentioned attempts to change society. A critical example is the ideal of people working for the collective good without any reward accruing to them personally for doing a good job. Collective agriculture has always been a failure -- often catastrophic. It also might argue against utopian schemes where all children live in one specialized facility while adults live elsewhere. Such an arrangement was tried on some Israeli kibbutzim and was not popular with mothers and was soon discarded. That suggests women want their children around them on a daily basis, and likely has an innate source.

Evo psych will also argue against changes that those on the right might wish to make as well as ones progressives might wish to make. In arguing that women are wired by evolution to hate rape, evo psych is lending support to the idea that we could not transform society so that rape is not such a big deal. That hasn't been a serious proposal publicly in the US, though it seems lots of men hold that view privately -- a likely factor in police skepticism about rape reports. It shows evo psych's results can be progressive. If we suggest that women have an innate tendency to want to not give their babies up for adoption, that argues that any attempt to force less-than-ideal mothers to do so will face serious resistance, even it we argue it's for the benefit of the child.

Evo psych is not inherently against progressive values. And its proposed explanations for innate tendencies in human behavior should be considered on an equal footing with other explanations that claim no innate source for the tendency.

Cheating potential causes male desire for more frequent sex

In my <previous post> I argued that women have evolved some tendency to cheat on their husbands.

It seems likely that this possibility also affects sexual behavior in other ways. Let's suppose that a certain frequency of sex is likely to produce a pregnancy -- let's say every other day. A woman might prefer that frequency. But if evolution has programmed a man to worry that his wife might possibly be sleeping with other men, it's in the man's interest to have sex more often. If another man's sperm might be present, more frequent sex increases the chances he will be the father. In contrast, women might have evolved to prefer less frequent sex with their husbands so that any sexy man she is having a liaison with would have a better chance of fathering her child.

What are the implications for today? Even a happily married woman should not hate herself if she feels some strong sexual attraction to other men, understanding it is part of her evolutionary heritage. If she values honesty with her partner, she would choose not to act on it. Men who discover their wives have had an affair might also reflect that it was part of her heritage to do so and it doesn't mean she does not love him or intended to deceive him.

A feminist theory for the male desire for more frequent sex (on average) including when his partner is not enthusiastic about it might I suppose include his desire to demonstrate his dominance over her. A simpler explanation is his underlying evolutionary desire to make sure he is father of her children. As with all such tendencies, the knowledge that contraception is in place and no children are going to be conceived doesn't affect the underlying tendency. Nor does male desire for frequent sex reflect actual suspicion on his part that his particular wife might cheat on him.

Men seeking to understand why their wives are not so interested in frequent sex might consider the countervailing pressures on them. The average difference in sexual interest might just remain an ongoing point of contention and compromise that does not spring from malleable human culture and will never be resolved by consciousness raising.

Women are disposed to cheat sometimes

In the <previous post> I started searching for uniquely female tendencies that were adaptive in our environment of evolutionary adaptation but are not adaptive or moral today. I suggested a reluctance to give babies up for adoption.

Here's another one: a tendency to cheat so that a baby is fathered by a "better" man but is presented to her husband as his to raise and care for.

For some context, let me emphasize that male-specific bad behavior dwarfs anything mentioned here or in the previous post. I'm not thinking in war-of-the-sexes terms. But I think finding such cases is interesting in its own right, and might possibly give some perspective on male misbehavior.

The background of this is that in most mammals, the male provides nothing but sperm. The female chooses among competing males for the one she thinks is "best" and mates with him. His good genes make it more likely that the offspring will be successful and leave descendants which include her genes. In humans, males do help raise children, and women have long-term commitments to individual men. The men with the best genes are in short supply and are likely taken by some other woman, but it is worth it to her to have a husband with just average genes who supports her children. However, a woman could get the best of both worlds if she sneaks off to have an affair with the best man (call him the "sexiest man") who fathers her child, while the cuckolded husband thinks it is his and helps her raise it. A prediction of the theory is that actual women seeking affairs outside marriage will most often choose men who are above their husband in sexiness. This and other aspects of human sexuality from an evo psych point of view are laid out in more detail in <this excellent TEDx talk>.

It's notable that in some birds the same basic situation holds, and <birds cheat>.

Something on the order of 1-5% of children in today's world are raised by a male parent who thinks he is the biological father but is not. One reason this might happen is if the woman became pregnant by rape and understandably decided not to tell her husband. Or the timing of the rape might have been such that she is uncertain whether the husband is the father or not. I suspect these cases are actually quite rare. They would not qualify as bad behavior in the way that choosing to cheat would be.

It is possible that a woman says to herself, "I'm going to get that really sexy man to father my child, and dupe my husband and he'll help raise it, bwa-ha-ha!" That would be not very nice at all. That would deserve the name "paternity fraud". A few women do it.

But evolution doesn't tend to work in such an open and obvious fashion. One reason is that it's better if she loves her husband (putting up with his weaknesses while he does help raise the children), and better if her husband believes this, and both actuality and perception are easier to maintain if she is not deliberately deceiving him.

We would expect evolution to design it to be more an impulsive decision, perhaps putting herself in the path of the sexiest man, and being carried away with the passion of the moment to accept his advances. She might feel guilty for the liaison. She might feel especially guilty if she has reason to think she got pregnant from such an encounter -- and thus have reason not to dwell on such possibilities. But it would still be an adaptive advantage in the environment we evolved in.

There was an exciting line of research suggesting that women were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovulatory_shift_hypothesis. Some feminists objected, though I saw no reason to think these findings would be harmful to women. The latest word is that this https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/ovulation-research-women-replication-crisis.html. But whether extramarital sex is coordinated with ovulatory phase or not, some babies are still conceived outside of marriage and raised by cuckolded men.

Such opportunities might not arise very often for women in earlier times or now -- a discreet, high-status man nearby willing to have sex with low probability of detection. Even with an opportunity, just how often women will let themselves give in to this innate tendency would presumably vary with time and place. When definitive paternity identification became possible with DNA testing -- or even when people understood it was a likely future development -- we might expect women to be more cautious, suppressing this evolutionary tendency. On the other hand, women today also might not feel the need to suppress if they know they are on reliable contraception.

Of course the sexiest man also had a role in such cuckolding. But evolution doesn't expect him to refuse an opportunity to mate with a willing partner.

What about husbands who cheat? It is not a parallel case in evolutionary terms. A husband who has affairs does not upset his wife's genetic interest as long as he doesn't leave her. It's of no concern to her in evolutionary terms if her husband fathers children with some other woman. This is why polygamy is a stable arrangement, however much we disapprove of it today given our modern morality, as long as the man has resources to support all his wives and children.

So, it's not much, but a tendency to cheat does look like one instance of evolution predisposing women to do something that is not in line with our modern notions of morality. Evo psych suggests that men are programmed with a tendency to do more immoral things and more often.

Any bad female tendencies? Resistance to adoption?

I said before that men have <moretendencies to be violent> than women do. Other male-specific bad behaviors are some tendency to rape or coerce sex, and some tendency to abandon middle-aged wives for younger women.

Of course women sometimes behave badly in various ways, but in most cases men behave badly in the very same ways, often with greater frequency or severity. Women may undercut other women unfairly in search of higher status, but men undercut other men as well -- sometimes with their fists.

I have struggled to come up with any tendency women have to not do the right thing (as understood by modern morality) based on evolutionary tendencies. Of course, there simply might not be any. Evolution has no requirement to be balanced or fair. "Fairness" enters evolutionary considerations very narrowly within humans and some other animals where a concern for it is likely an evolved trait that can be studied like any other.

One idea is the reluctance of women to give up babies for adoption even when they intellectually understand that the child would have a better life with someone else. If a new mother is very young, single, poor, and/or has serious emotional or psychological problems, a carefully screened adoptive couple would likely give the baby a better chance. Women are primed to take care of their babies, and in the environment we evolved in, giving a baby up so that someone else could raise it better would not have happened. A baby in a hunter-gatherer society who disappears is a dead baby and a source of enormous grief.

The clearest case is one where the mother would freely acknowledge that this isn't the best time for her to become a mother and she could do that later -- or a case where the mother already has other children. If the question is whether some troubled woman can ethically choose to raise a child or two at some point in her life or whether she should ethically give away any children she bears, that is much less clear. We intuitively feel that everyone (at least every woman) has a right to have and rear children, whatever her pluses and minuses are as a potential parent.

Society is tolerant and understanding of this strong predisposition in women to keep their babies even when it's not in the child's interest. I'm not sure why. Maybe readers can enlighten me. Maybe it's partly that committing to raising a child is a nurturing, positive thing when viewed in isolation.

Modern men are also reluctant to give a baby up for adoption, but I believe the tendency is much weaker.