The Rawness

Reminder: Don’t forget about the commenter contest.

I have to warn you, this is either going to be one of my weirdest posts, one of my most profound or both. Even if it sounds really pseudoscientific and downright preposterous at times, I encourage you to read through it and keep an open mind.

One thing I constantly hear educated black guys complain about is their experiences with black women, particularly how they constantly test them or pass them up for guys of a thuggier nature. The big complaint I hear is that black women, even those of middle class status and higher, seem to want “Tupac with a degree.” Black guys often use this as their reason for primarily dating women of other races.

Now of course most women of all races go through a “bad boy” stage, especially when they’re younger and attraction and excitement are more important to them than long-term security. One of the problems with black women though is that they tend to go overboard in this department. A bad boy to an Asian girl may be a guy who’s a liberal arts major. When black women go for a bad boys, however, a prison record and a gun are often be involved. I even found this to be the case when I was in college and hollering at educated black women. With white girls, though, the simple fact that a guy is black is often enough to confer “bad boy” status and make a guy edgy. So when a guy is faced with a choice of going for white girl and being edgy and a “bad boy” simply by being black and having a little bit of street smarts, or going for a black chick and having to be a “soldier” and risk a criminal record to impress a black chick with his edginess, it makes sense that a lot of black guys find it less stressful to date outside the race.

But I’m not writing this to excuse black men’s dating choices or condem black women, but rather to understand why this “thug lust” phenomenon is so prevalent in the black community. After doing a lot of reading on evolutionary psychology, I think I may have an answer.

One of the tenets of evolutionary psychology is that women are programmed to test men for strength and leadership. Constantly. The theory is that in prehistoric times, the world was a much more dangerous place, especially for women, who could easily be raped or killed at will. Weapons were primitive, there weren’t laws to protect rights and society was not very civilized. Women needed men that were strong and dominant to offer them protection from other men who may try to invade. For this reason, it was in a woman’s best interest to test a potential mate. If he was too weak to stand up to her and let her walk all over him, then how could he protect her and their children from other men? If he was wishy-washy in day to day activities, how could he make important decisions in a time of crisis?

Chances are, at some point in history there were not only plenty of women who were genetically predisposed to test men, but also plenty of women who were not genetically predisposed to test men. Thanks to the principles of survival of the fittest, however, the women who didn’t have the innate tendency to test their men probably chose weaker men and wound up getting their genes weeded out of existence once trouble came around and these weak men couldn’t protect them. On the flipside, the women with an innate tendency to test their men and not mate with punks were better suited for survival and ended up passing their genes to future generations of women. Thus as the human race evolved over time, women with “man-testing” genes thrived in the human population because they were beneficial to survival, while women without “man-testing” genes gradually ceased to exist because they were wiped out over time. For this reason, any woman alive today is descended from women with “man testing” genes and has these “man testing” genes too. This is why modern women constantly probe men in a million subtle ways for weakness and lack of leadership during the courtship process.

The irony is that civilization has evolved to a point where a man’s physical protection is not as necessary as it once was. Society is much more civilized, women have access to better weapons to level the playing field, policemen exist to add more protection, there are laws to protect female citizens and conquest of women and other men through brute force is not only frowned upon but actually illegal. So logically, man testing is not as necessary as it once was. However logic can’t change a woman’s genes or hundreds of thousands of years of cultural conditioning, both of which have bred her to test potential mates for leadership and strength. It is for this reason so many women are attracted to assholes. They may not be nice, but they will not stand for disrespect and will fight for their rights against other men. I also think this primal urge for men who don’t take shit plays a big role in why so many death row inmates have those women who write them love letters and are attracted to them: these men take no crap, are leaders in a bizarre way due to the fact that they refuse to conform to society’s rules and can offer a woman protection from outsiders in a way that the average, law-abiding man can’t. Even though logically a woman may know these assholes or thugs are a bad choice, biologically and culturally they’ve been bred through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to respond positively to dominant, alpha male traits on a primal, unthinking level.

Now over the past few centuries as the West has become more civilized and women have made great strides in gaining equality, Western culture has begun training women to tone down their man-testing ways. Even though the man-testing genes are still there, they seem to play less of a role in mate choice with each generation. This is why that ugly kid from Superbad and Juno can actually be a sex symbol to tweens today. Alpha traits still matter to women on a primal level, but given how safe modern Western society has become for women over the past two centuries, and how much safer society continues to become for them, it’s safe to say that testing a man for alpha status will continue to decline and become more subtle and it will be increasingly easier for beta males to thrive in the mating game.

So what does this have to do with black women and thugs? The black woman for a long time was denied the societal progress available to other Western women over the past two centuries. Unlike other women in the West, for a long time black women did not experience the same increase in status and societal protection that would allow them to feel less dependent on the protections of a mate. Europeans invaded West Africa and took black people as slaves. Once in America, the black slave woman could be violated at will by her master and his visiting friends. This was acceptable under law. Her black husband could do nothing about this, which had to be very emasculating for him. In addition, she probably gradually began to resent him for his inability to protect her, even if logically she knew there was nothing he could actually do. This dynamic likely was passed to her daughters too, who had to grow up seeing both their fathers and their mates routinely emasculated and rendered incapable of protecting them. After slavery ended, things didn’t get that much better. The Ku Klux Klan was around in the south, lynchings and other forms of racial violence were rampant, black families could be physically intimidated and wiped out at will and the black man’s emasculation continued.

Given all the hardships a black woman faced up until very recent history, it would make sense that her need to test a man would remain strong, even as this need subsided some in Western women of other races. If anything, man-testing genes may have increased over the last several hundred years in the black community due to the hardships they faced. Getting an strong alpha male probably became much more important to a black woman than to a white woman, since unlike the white woman she did not have the same alternative protections of law, status and police available to her. I imagine that black women needed man-testing genes more than any other race of women because they were more reliant on the protection of a strong man than any other race of women because they couldn’t rely on societal protections. And out of all the strong types of black men available, I figure a thug was probably the type of alpha male that made her feel the safest. A thug was probably the type of black man most likely to stand up to the white man or other dangerous blacks even at the cost of his own life. I imagine that over the course of history, evolution and cultural conditioning rewarded man-testing genes in black women much more than it did in other races of women because strong, tough men were much more vital to a black woman’s survival. I also think that history and evolution were probably more unkind to black women who didn’t test their men for strength than it was to white women who didn’t test their men.

The second most popular type of man in the West is the beta provider. He’s not as dominant, as strong a leader or as tough as the alpha male, because he’s a beta male. But thanks to his intellectual prowess and his ability to provide financial support, he becomes the next best thing to the alpha dog. He offers a different type of security. It may not be as primally attractive to a woman as a tough, dominant alpha male, but it is a very safe and secure (if somewhat boring) secondary choice. Examples of beta male providers can be your wimpy scientists, male lawyers, educated, civilized guys, sucessful metrosexuals, nerds with poor social skills but good incomes, etc. They may not have as much to offer in primal attraction and physical protection, but they make up for it in their ability to provide security in the form of financial assistance. The catch is, a beta provider can only compete with alpha males in extremely civilized cultures were society offers women a sense of physical protection through the existence of cultural norms and legal protections. This allows things like financial security and education to become as important as alpha dog status. That is why being a beta provider can be so attractive to Western women, since society allows them the luxury of choosing a man for reasons other than brutish alpha dog status. If society ever reverted back to the dangerously harsh, brutish free-for-all it used to be in the old days, the stock of beta providers would drop drastically.

Since black women didn’t have the same societal protections as white Western women, beta providers were probably a bad choice in the black community for a long time, even as the stock of beta providers was on the rise in the white community. How much good could a square, law-abiding doctor or lawyer be to a black woman in the heart of the rural, racist south? His money doesn’t have that much benefit since many white businesses wouldn’t take it and he couldn’t move to any neighborhood he wanted, even if he could afford to. If anything, his education and intellect and legitimate financial success could be interpreted as being “uppity” and not “knowing his role,” thereby making him a target and putting the family in more danger from racist whites. For all these reasons, I think that black American women have evolved to have even more man-testing genes than other women, especially in favor of men who disregard the white man and his laws. In the black community, the tables have traditionally been stacked against the beta provider black male. Money in the hands of a black man just didn’t offer that much protection and wasn’t as valuable as being tough and macho and strong.

And it only got worse once the welfare state came into effect in the 1960s. Once Lyndon Johnson introduced the Great Society, allowing single women with children to get money and housing from the federal government, this took away one of the black beta provider’s last bargaining chips: his money and house. Now a black woman could get that financial security from the government. Not just that, but if she did get together with a beta provider, she’d actually lose her free money, food, house and education because you had to be single to receive those benefits. The welfare system actually created an incentive against settling down with a beta provider. He can’t provide the primal attraction and physical protection an alpha male does, and now his presence is actually an economic liability. And since a man was no longer as needed for economic reasons, this helped raised the stock of thugs: the physical protection from racist whites and other blacks in the ghetto, the superior sexual prowess, the primal attraction that comes from his role as a “bad boy” alpha male and the tax-free, under the table financial benefits of his illegal money.

Even though society has changed greatly for black women in the past few decades and they no longer face the same level of racism or need for an alpha dog thug for survival, they still have generations of these thug-loving genes and cultural conditioning to fight against. And of course the glamorization of thug life through hip-hop probably doesn’t help things either. And this is why even as many black women move up socially and get more educated, they still have such a strong pull toward thugs.

Holla!

In Part 1, we focused on how human nature is driven by two primary drives, the drive of self-preservation and the drive to spread our genes through reproduction. In this part, we’ll focus on the role one particular aspect of our human nature, the tendency to stereotype, satisfies those two drives.

First things first, let’s be honest about one thing: we all stereotype. For example, say you were running late to attend an opera and you get lost. You see two groups of people walking by. Who would you rather stop to ask for directions to the opera hall?

This one?

Or this one?

Now what if you were asking for directions to a indie rock venue instead? Would your answer change then?

One benefit stereotyping has is to simplify our lives by helping us make split-second choices. It’s a mental shorthand for making decisions. This was especially important for our ancestors, given the dangerous conditions they lived in. Picture the time you’d waste if every time you were faced with the same specific scenario, you had to take the time to reevaluate that scenario from scratch, and how much more danger you would be in as a result.

For example, one of our ancestors faces a sabretooth tiger. The tiger attacks it, and our ancestor barely gets away with his life. Later on, he faces a different sabretooth tiger. A certain part of him is going to be wary of that tiger based on his experience with the previous tiger. He has stereotyped sabretooth tigers as bloodthirsty maneaters. This wariness will change all his future interactions with sabretooth tigers, thereby increasing his chances of surviving and living to reproduce and spread genes.

Now picture other members in the community who don’t have this tendency to stereotype. These dumbasses, no matter how many sabretooth tigers they encounter, are going to stop and wonder each time “I wonder if this fuzzy guy wants to eat me. Let me find out.” They never change their future behavior toward a tiger on account of their previous encounters with tigers. Instead of using the initial moments of encounter to run away or kill the tiger, they waste precious time making a brand new, independent assessment, giving the tiger more time to pounce on them.

It’s important at this time to discuss an evolutionary concept known as the least costly mistake. The least costly mistake says that when an organism is faced with a choice that requires risk assessment, the organism that risks the least costly mistake is more likely to be the one who survives to pass on his or her genes. Although the least costly mistake varies greatly from situation, the most costly mistake is remarkably consistent: it’s almost always death or loss of opportunity to pass on genes.

To illustrate the least costly mistake concept with stereotyping, let’s revisit the sabretooth tiger example. If the man does stereotype the tiger as a vicious killer when it turns out it’s a nice, friendly animal, what is the costliest consequence of this mistake? He’s missed out on a possible new pet maybe? He misses out on the chance to bond and play for a while with a fuzzy animal? Now if a man doesn’t stereotype a tiger as a vicious killer and it turns out it really is a horrific maneater, what is the costliest consequence of this mistake? Serious injury or death.

So which is the least costly mistake for our ancestors? Stereotyping or not stereotyping? And since natural and sexual selection tends to favor the organisms that consistently choose the least costly mistake, who has the better advantage, the organism that stereotypes or the organism that doesn’t? The ones who do stereotype obviously. And these people are going too pass along the same stereotyping tendencies to their children, while the people who don’t stereotype won’t be passing their aversion to snap judgments onto their children…because they won’t survive to reproduce. They’ll get weeded out of the gene pool.

Now most people would find no fault in stereotyping tigers. Everyone except the nuttiest PETA activist would admit that most tigers are out to get us. Stereotyping becomes more controversial in our modern society when applying stereotypes to groups that are not by and large out to get you. As shown by the fact that affirmative action continues to thrive and a black man is leading the charge for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, most whites are not as racist as some would like you to believe. And even though blacks and hispanics have higher crime rates per capita than other races in America, a vast majority of blacks and hispanics aren’t criminals. So unlike the tiger scenario, stereotyping most whites as racist or most blacks and latinos as criminals makes no sense, right? Well, it isn’t that easy.

The problem is that humans don’t weigh good events equally with bad events. As shown in The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold by Robert Levine:

[P]eople experience more pain from a loss than they do pleasure from an equal gain. We get more upset over losing $100 than we feel happy about gaining $100. This is true not only for money but for our lives in general. It’s been shown, for example, that bad emotions feel bad more than good emotions feel good: people try harder to escape bad moods than they do to prolong good mood and they remember their bad moods longer than their good ones…As one of my clinical psychology colleagues estimated it, the average person needs five good experiences to balance out a single bad one.

From an evolutionary viewpoint, a bias toward the negative makes perfect sense. Once again it comes down the survival of our species has always been more closely linked to avoiding disaster than to finding happiness. We’re primed to see threats. People pick an angry face out of a happy crowd much more quickly than they pick a happy face out of an angry crowd. Potential danger signals action needs to be taken. The only action positive events usually call for is celebration, and nobody’s ever died from forgetting to plan a party.

Focusing on the negative over the positive is another example of the least costly mistake principle. Misjudging a bad person as friendly is a more costly mistake than misjudging a good person as evil. The latter mistake will just lead to maybe hurt feelings and the loss of a potential friendship. You can possibly recover from that, and if not, fuck it, life goes on. The former mistake however can lead to serious injury and possibly death, from which there’s no recovery.

So if you’re black in the deep south in the 60s, and lynchings are a real possibility, avoiding death is a much bigger concern to you than taking the time to think of all the good white people you might be misjudging as racist. You would have had some negative experience with a white person in your life, or you would at least had had friends and family with bad experiences, and this would cause you to view all white people, fairly or unfairly, with suspicion. You waste time wondering if that white mob coming at you at night are out to lynch or out for a nighttime walk and you can end up lynched.

In his book, Larry Elder describes some disturbing trends in black crime in his book The Ten Things You Can’t Say In America. Although a majority of blacks and latinos are not criminals, they have proportionately higher rates of criminality against whites:

“Twenty-five percent of young black men are in jail, on parole, or on probation. A black man is ten times more likely to rape a white woman than a white man is to rape a black woman. Blacks account for 50 percent of the nation’s prisoners [despite only being 13% of the population]. Gang-bangers are almost inevitably black or Latino. Hurts the image, you know. Don’t think the young white woman in that elevator is oblivious. Don’t think that a white woman living in the city hasn’t seen, experienced, or had friends who experienced crime at the hands of black thugs…If Jesse Jackson himself says he’s relieved when the late-night footsteps on the street behind him belong to white rather than black feet, all bets are off.”

So it doesn’t matter that a majority of blacks and latinos aren’t criminals, or that a majority of whites aren’t violent racists. So long as the perception is out there that a higher than normal amount of criminality exists in minority communities or a higher than normal amount of racism exists among whites, humans are going to lapse into the hardwired behavior that allowed their ancestors to survive for generations: accentuating the bad, being overly cautious and applying negative sterotypes to protect themselves.

But the best thing that can come out of negative stereotyping is that it’s a symptom that alerts us to greater societal ills. Rather than just demanding that people stop stereotyping, we should instead try to understand the reasons why we’ve evolved with this tendency and try to figure out what the stereotypes are telling us. Stereotypes arise for one of two reasons: because they are true conclusions based on valid premises or they are bad or exaggerated conclusions based on bad exaggerated premises. If the stereotype is true and is negative to boot, we should focus on changing the reality of the situation for the better rather than chastising the stereotyper and forcing him to be politically correct. If the stereotype is false, than we should try to attack the faulty premises at the root of the stereotype rather than just demand the stereotyper “play nice” and be PC. But remember, if your only response to a stereotyper is to point out “Well most blacks/whites/latinos/gays aren’t like that” you’re wasting your time because our minds are programmed to give negative things five times the weight as positive things. You have to create the impression that the negative is outweighed by a vast and substantial positive majority if you want to really deter a stereotype.

Recommended Reading:

• The Power of Persuasion by Levine is so useful and has such a breadth of information that I can’t overstate its value in understanding the human mind enough. Especially when it comes to fallacies in logic and thinking, and how those fallacies get exploited.
• Larry Elder is a black conservative that gets a lot of flack for his conservative viewpoints and politically incorrect views, but he is a very sharp cat that makes very compelling and thought-provoking arguments that are worth reading, even if you ultimately end up disagreeing with him. This book, 10 Things You Can’t Say In America, is one of my all-time favorite books.

When I say that the tendency to stereotype isn’t all bad, and in fact is often a good thing, I get a lot of grief. The first thing people think is that I’m somehow anti-minority or pro-white, but everyone from a straight WASP male to a Wiccan black butch lesbian can be a victim of stereotypes. Stereotypes are not a problem exclusive to minorities, nor are minorities exempt from doing the stereotyping as well.

Like it or not, the tendency to stereotype is a part of human nature, and my view is that if a behavior or biological response is part of our human nature, it must be because it traditionally gave people an evolutionary advantage at some point in human history. When we say that a trait gave us an evolutionary advantage, what we’re saying is that it satisfied our two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction.

Take gossip for example. On the surface it may seem like a petty and ugly part of our human nature with little to no redeeming qualities. But there are many plausible theories out there that convincingly suggest the opposite, that the tendency to gossip is a tool that gives humans a huge evolutionary advantage over those who never gossip. Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language discusses the development of language and the evolutionary benefits of gossip, for example. According to Dunbar, in the days before credit reports and background checks, gossip traditionally benefited communities by spreading the word about dangerous and untrustworthy people. If you were unreliable, a thief or violent, word spread around about you and people avoided you. In this way gossip satisfied the self-preservation drive. Also, say a woman was a slut. As a man looking to carry your genes into the next generation, you would have avoided marrying a slut at all costs because in the days before DNA tests and reliable birth control, a slut can easily get pregnant by another man and tell you the baby is yours. Now you’re paying for another man’s child and not spreading your genes. So by telling you about someone’s sexual behavior, gossip helped a man with his drive to reproduce.  Those who didn’t engage in spreading or hearing gossip probably had their genes weeded out out of existence eventually.

It’s also human nature for people to be more critical of a woman for being promiscuous and unfaithful than for a man. As I explained in this earlier post, that’s because if a man slept around and impregnated several women, it optimized the drive to reproduce in two ways. First, one man sleeping with multiple women led to multiple pregnancies whereas one woman sleeping with multiple men still only led to one pregnancy. That’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Second, if one man slept with multiple women, you’d know who the father is and who the mother is in each pregnancy. If a woman slept with multiple men, especially in the days before DNA testing and reliable birth control, you wouldn’t know which man was the father. This is an obstacle in a man’s drive to reproduce and spread genes. It’s for these reasons (and others) that we still tend to be more critical of women for promiscuity than men.

For a man, on the other hand, it’s a worse blow to his reputation to not be a provider than it is to be promiscuous. That’s why most negative gossip about men revolves around being cheap, being a deadbeat dad, and being chronically unemployed or lazy. Traditionally, the danger to women when men slept around wasn’t a threat to the drive to reproduce and spread genes. As we’ve seen, men sleeping around actually optimizes that goal. The threat to a woman when men slept around was to the other drive, the drive for self-preservation, because that man may choose to take better care of the other women and her children and send a majority of his resources their way instead. In evolutionary terms, a hardworking and responsible polygamous man who takes care of all his women and children is preferable to a lazy and irresponsible monogamous man who doesn’t take care of his one family. So when you look at human nature in evolutionary terms and focus on the two drives, the natural tendency human beings have to gossip about women’s sluttiness and men’s ambition and finances make perfect sense.

It also works in reverse, if good gossip is spread about you, it increases your reputation which in turn increases your chances of survival and reproduction. This gives people an incentive to manage their reputations, follow the rules and conform to societal norms, hence another benefit gossip provides to a community.

Take something even less obvious, like the natural urge we have to tickle people, and the built-in response we have of laughing when being tickled. It may seem like a stretch, but even tickling satisfies the two drives, as seen in this NY Times article:

Tickling and laughter are universal among humans and can even be found among chimpanzees, suggesting that they serve some serious evolutionary purpose. Researchers agree that tickling plays an important role in the bonding of infants and parents. Mother tickles baby. Baby laughs and smiles. Mother laughs and smiles. They endear themselves to each other to their mutual evolutionary advantage.

But Dr. Glenn Weisfeld, a human ethologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, suggests that tickling may do much more. Tickling, he maintains, is an educational activity.

”The structures of the body that are most vulnerable to tickling are also the ones that are most vulnerable to attack,” Dr. Weisfeld said. ”We may be responsive to tickling because it gives us practice in defending ourselves.” Children laugh, he said, to encourage adults to continue this tickle schooling, in what are typically safe, practice play attacks.

These examples reinforce the view that human nature is a collection of instinctive responses and learned behaviors that give us an evolutionary advantage by helping us either survive or reproduce. Gossip helps people avoid dangerous, unreliable and untrustworthy people. By helping us socially fit in and form bonds, laughing can help us in our drives to reproduce and spread genes. By teaching us to protect vital areas, tickling can help us with self-preservation.  And the list goes on and on.

So if stereotyping is a part of human nature, what evolutionary advantages does it give us? And how does it satisfy the two primal drives of self-preservation and spreading genes through reproduction? We’ll get into that in part 2.

Recommended Reading:

• I first encountered the two human drives in reading a book by the pickup artist Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed. Pickup artists and their books often get a bad rap as being manipulative or just plain bunk, but I find them to have a lot of sound theories about evolutionary psychology in general and gender relations in particular. Mystery was the subject of the recent VH-1 show The Pickup Artist. I find his social theories to be pretty sound overall.
• This book is a great resource on the evolution and advantage of language in general and gossip in particular.
• This book is an excellent starting point for learning about evolutionary psychology, and I highly recommend it. It’s written in a really easy-breezy style and is extremely readable and layperson friendly.

Click here for Part 2 of this post.

You often hear women, especially feminists and sluts, complaining about how it’s such an unfair double standard that men are called studs when they sleep around, yet women are called sluts. It’s really not a double standard though, because both scenarios are pretty different in terms of circumstances and consequences. I can think of at least three crucial differences.

First, sleeping around is easier for women. Regardless of how you feel about promiscuity, we can all agree that a guy who manages to rack up a lot of sexual partners has to have some skills. It’s challenging for men to rack up partners, even for men with low standards. It requires a certain amount of social intelligence, interpersonal skills, persistence, thick skin, and plain old dumb luck. For women to rack up a lot of partners, however, it pretty much only requires a vagina and a pulse. So a man whoring it up and a woman whoring it up are hardly the same thing because for a woman to get a lot of partners is absolutely no challenge, hence no one respects it. It’s just viewed as a lack of self-discipline when women indulge in lots of sex partners because they can get new ones whenever they want. When men get lots of sex partners, it’s respected more because getting lots of sex partners, for men, is a challenge. This is just human nature: people gain respect for those who accomplish challenging feats while they consider those who overindulge in easily obtained vices as weak or flawed.

Second, women do more harm by sleeping around than men do. Say a man sleeps around with a bunch of different women. He is definitely doing harm to these women if he pretends to be monogamous while sleeping around with these multiple partners. He may cause them emotional pain by his promiscuity. He may cause unwanted pregnancy. He may spread venereal diseases. When women sleep around, however, they can cause not only these same ill effects but one additional crucial ill effect: the risk of unknown parentage. If one guy sleeps around with five women, each of whom is monogamous to him, and they all get pregnant, it’s a safe bet as to who the father is. If one woman sleeps around with five men and gets pregnant, it could be anybody’s baby. And if a man is tricked into raising a baby that isn’t his, he is basically investing his time, money, estate and property to provide for a child that is not carrying on his DNA into the next generations, which is a costly mistake from an evolutionary standpoint. Our two basic primal drives are to survive and to reproduce, and promiscuous women traditionally make it hard for a man to know for sure whether he is truly reproducing or simply raising another man’s child. Men stand a lot more to lose from promiscuous women than the other way around. And it’s no picnic for the child to not know who his real father is either. And it’s a mess for the women carrying on the deception as well. Or just look at any random episode of the Maury show if you don’t believe me. Considering that the DNA test and the birth control pill had not existed for most of human history, meaning that there were no reliable ways to prevent pregnancy or prove parentage, society for many centuries had a vested interest in preventing promiscuity among women and society accomplished this by creating the slut stigma. And even though the creation of birth control and DNA tests have made this less of a risk than the past, longstanding traditions and customs are not easy for society to break.

Third, men have evolutionary reasons to be programmed to sleep around. A lot of women roll their eyes when they hear that men are “hard-wired” to sleep around. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes total sense. If the two primal drives of humans are to survive and to reproduce, nothing leads to maximum reproduction like one man sleeping with multiple women. If one women slept with many men, in a nine month period, she would still only get pregnant just once. Nine months of rampant promiscuity would give the same result as nine months of highly sexed monogamy: one pregnancy. Now if one man sleeps with many women, you can get many pregnancies. The more women he sleeps with, the more pregnancies. So from an evolutionary standpoint, there are concrete advantages to men sleeping around with multiple partners rather than women.

These three reasons are probably why the longstanding tradition came about of men being rewarded for multiple partners while women get socially punished for similar promiscuity. Of course all this is gradually changing, but we’re up against centuries of tradition here, so don’t expect any dramatic reversals or anything.

Now a lot of people are going to read all this and dismissively think Oh this guy is just being a typical man and trying to justify every man’s dream: cheating and polygamy. But believe it or not, I don’t really think male polygamy is all it’s cracked up to be. Despite what most people assume, polygamy actually may benefit women more than men. Most dudes think a society of widespread polygamy (specifically polygyny, where one man can have several women) would just be a utopia of every guy sleeping with every woman under the sun. Some economists think otherwise though. The basic argument is that in a world where po

lygamy was acceptable, most of the women would be hoarded by the most successful men. As explained in this Psychology Today article:

The history of western civilization aside, humans are naturally polygamous. Polyandry (a marriage of one woman to many men) is very rare, but polygyny (the marriage of one man to many women) is widely practiced in human societies, even though Judeo-Christian traditions hold that monogamy is the only natural form of marriage…..Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group. The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males.

In societies where rich men are much richer than poor men, women (and their children) are better off sharing the few wealthy men; one-half, one-quarter, or even one-tenth of a wealthy man is still better than an entire poor man. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, “The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one.” Despite the fact that humans are naturally polygynous, most industrial societies are monogamous because men tend to be more or less equal in their resources compared with their ancestors in medieval times. (Inequality tends to increase as society advances in complexity from hunter-gatherer to advanced agrarian societies. Industrialization tends to decrease the level of inequality.)

When there is resource inequality among men?the case in every human society?most women benefit from polygyny: women can share a wealthy man. Under monogamy, they are stuck with marrying a poorer man.

The only exceptions are extremely desirable women. Under monogamy, they can monopolize the wealthiest men; under polygyny, they must share the men with other, less desirable women. However, the situation is exactly opposite for men. Monogamy guarantees that every man can find a wife. True, less desirable men can marry only less desirable women, but that’s much better than not marrying anyone at all.

Men in monogamous societies imagine they would be better off under polygyny. What they don’t realize is that, for most men who are not extremely desirable, polygyny means no wife at all, or, if they are lucky, a wife who is much less desirable than one they could get under monogamy.

So basically, women complain about how men are allowed to sleep around and they aren’t. Meanwhile men wish polygamy had widespread acceptance. And the truth may actually be that male polygamy benefits the average women more than the average man. Who’da thunk?