likely to respond positively to almost any suggestion from the merely kinky (do you find women’s shoes erotic?) to the downright disturbing (would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?).
Your attractiveness also has an effect on the sex of your children. Attractive parents have an increased chance of having a daughter (56 percent, rather than 48 percent). Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that the increase is an evolutionary attempt to maximize the advantages of looks, since those qualities are far more valued in women than men, although they have no idea what the biological mechanism is that causes attractive parents to have more female babies.
WHY YOUNG WOMEN END UP WITH OLD MEN AND NOT VICE VERSA
Up to this point, we have not discussed human personality traits, but there is a great deal of evidence that evolution has shaped these as well. Humor, kindness, empathy—all of them help attract a mate, and all have likely developed at least in part due to sexual selection. The No. 1 task that we have evolved to perform (besides simply staying alive) is to attract a mate and reproduce. Because of this, no aspect of our humanity can be separated from the process of sexual selection. So, it’s not just our intelligence that is a product of evolution. Virtually every aspect of our personality is. The question is, what personal qualities do men and women look for in one another? We’ll explore this topic more closely in chapter 5, but there is an incredibly simple answer to the question.
If you want to boil all this down to its most essential level, men look for youth and beauty in their partners, and women want wealth and status. In one study of personal ads, women mentioned financial success in their ads eleven times more than men did, and men mentioned attractiveness three times more often than women did. To illustrate how strikingly obvious this is, I want you to call to mind one of the many times you have seen a young, attractive woman with a very old but very successful man. For instance, consider 1993 Playmate of the Year Anna Nicole Smith, who was twenty-six when she married eighty-nine-year-old oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall. Not very hard to think of older men-younger women couplings, is it? Now, try to remember the last time you saw the opposite: a young, attractive man with a very old and very successful woman. It’s not so easy to think of examples of that.
In a completely unsurprising confirmation of this observation, studies show that beautiful women end up with rich men far more often than beautiful men end up with rich women. Seeing an older man with a younger woman is commonplace and merely takes to a logical extreme a man’s desire for a young partner and a woman’s desire for a financially successful man, but an older woman with a younger man violates those norms. There is no cultural reason why this should be the case. Our shock can be traced directly to how evolution has shaped us.
Looks are so important to men that, according to one study, the physical attractiveness of a wife is a better indicator of a man’s occupational status than any of her other qualities: better than her intelligence, her socioeconomic status, or her education. Another study has shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl is, the more likely she will marry up (the more sexually active an adolescent girl is, the less likely she will marry up). All of this is not an indication of American shallowness. David Buss has researched thirty-seven cultures around the globe and has found that these preferences show up in every single one of them. In fact, non-Western cultures tend to place an even greater value on female attractiveness because it is a valuable indication of physical health in an environment rife with parasites and other health problems.
Before women judge men too harshly, though, they should recognize that men’s obsession with
Your attractiveness also has an effect on the sex of your children. Attractive parents have an increased chance of having a daughter (56 percent, rather than 48 percent). Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that the increase is an evolutionary attempt to maximize the advantages of looks, since those qualities are far more valued in women than men, although they have no idea what the biological mechanism is that causes attractive parents to have more female babies.
WHY YOUNG WOMEN END UP WITH OLD MEN AND NOT VICE VERSA
Up to this point, we have not discussed human personality traits, but there is a great deal of evidence that evolution has shaped these as well. Humor, kindness, empathy—all of them help attract a mate, and all have likely developed at least in part due to sexual selection. The No. 1 task that we have evolved to perform (besides simply staying alive) is to attract a mate and reproduce. Because of this, no aspect of our humanity can be separated from the process of sexual selection. So, it’s not just our intelligence that is a product of evolution. Virtually every aspect of our personality is. The question is, what personal qualities do men and women look for in one another? We’ll explore this topic more closely in chapter 5, but there is an incredibly simple answer to the question.
If you want to boil all this down to its most essential level, men look for youth and beauty in their partners, and women want wealth and status. In one study of personal ads, women mentioned financial success in their ads eleven times more than men did, and men mentioned attractiveness three times more often than women did. To illustrate how strikingly obvious this is, I want you to call to mind one of the many times you have seen a young, attractive woman with a very old but very successful man. For instance, consider 1993 Playmate of the Year Anna Nicole Smith, who was twenty-six when she married eighty-nine-year-old oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall. Not very hard to think of older men-younger women couplings, is it? Now, try to remember the last time you saw the opposite: a young, attractive man with a very old and very successful woman. It’s not so easy to think of examples of that.
In a completely unsurprising confirmation of this observation, studies show that beautiful women end up with rich men far more often than beautiful men end up with rich women. Seeing an older man with a younger woman is commonplace and merely takes to a logical extreme a man’s desire for a young partner and a woman’s desire for a financially successful man, but an older woman with a younger man violates those norms. There is no cultural reason why this should be the case. Our shock can be traced directly to how evolution has shaped us.
Looks are so important to men that, according to one study, the physical attractiveness of a wife is a better indicator of a man’s occupational status than any of her other qualities: better than her intelligence, her socioeconomic status, or her education. Another study has shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl is, the more likely she will marry up (the more sexually active an adolescent girl is, the less likely she will marry up). All of this is not an indication of American shallowness. David Buss has researched thirty-seven cultures around the globe and has found that these preferences show up in every single one of them. In fact, non-Western cultures tend to place an even greater value on female attractiveness because it is a valuable indication of physical health in an environment rife with parasites and other health problems.
Before women judge men too harshly, though, they should recognize that men’s obsession with
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