Hearts have as many changing moods as the face has expressions. To capture a thousand hearts demands a thousand devices.
—OVID, The Erotic Poems: The Art of Love
KNOWING WHAT WE desire in a mate provides no guarantee that we will succeed in getting what we want. Success hinges on providing signals that we will deliver what the partner we desire is seeking. Because ancestral women valued high status in men, for example, men have evolved motivation for acquiring and displaying status. Because ancestral men desired youth and health in potential mates, women have evolved motivations to appear young and healthful. Competition to attract a mate therefore involves besting one’s rivals in developing and displaying the characteristics most keenly sought by one’s desired partners.
In this coevolutionary cycle, psychological mechanisms evolve in one sex to solve the adaptive problems imposed by the other sex. Just as the successful angler uses the lure that most closely resembles food that fits the fish’s evolved preferences, so the successful competitor employs psychological tactics that most closely fit the evolved desires of the other sex. The characteristics that men and women value are keys to understanding the means of attracting a mate.
Attracting a mate does not occur, however, in a social vacuum. Desirable partners elicit strong social competition for their attention. Successful attraction therefore depends not merely on providing signals that one will fulfill a potential mate’s desires but also on counteracting the seductive signals of rivals. Humans have evolved a method for running interference that is unique in the animal kingdom—the verbal derogation of competitors. Damaging a rival’s reputation with a put-down, a slur, or an insinuation is part of the process of successfully attracting a mate.
Derogatory tactics, like tactics of attraction, work because they exploit the psychological adaptations that predispose people to be sensitive to certain valuable qualities in possible mates, such as their resources or appearance. A man’s communication to a woman that his rival lacks ambition can be effective only if the woman is predisposed to reject men who have a low future resource potential. Similarly, a woman who tactically “slut-shames” her rival works only if men are predisposed to reject women who might have difficulty remaining faithful.
The success of both attractive and derogatory tactics hinges on whether the target of desire is seeking a casual sex partner or a long-term committed mate. Consider the case of a woman who denigrates a rival by casually mentioning that the rival has slept with many men. If the man is seeking a spouse, this tactic is highly effective, because men dislike promiscuity in a potential wife. If the man is seeking casual sex, however, the woman’s tactic is likely to backfire, because most men pursuing easy sex are not bothered by a woman’s past promiscuity. Similarly, overt displays of sexuality are effective short-term tactics for women but are ineffective in the long run: such displays get men’s sexual attention but do not motivate them to invest or commit. The effectiveness of attraction, in short, depends critically on the temporal context of the mating. Men and women tailor their attraction techniques to the length of the relationship they seek.
The rules of play on the sexual field differ substantially from those of the marriage market. In long-term mating, both men and women prefer a long courtship—a process that permits evaluation of the nature and magnitude of the assets each person possesses and the costs they carry. Initial exaggerations of status or resources are revealed. Prior commitments to other mates surface. Children by former mates emerge. Prolonged assessment also allows both individuals to evaluate their mutual compatibility, which is essential for long-term mating.
Casual affairs truncate this assessment, dramatically increasing the opportunities for deception. Exaggeration of prestige, status, and income may go undetected. Prior commitments remain concealed. Information that damages a reputation comes too late. Casual mating, in short, is a rocky terrain where manipulation and deception can trip the unwary with every step. To compound this problem, deception usually occurs in the domains that are most important—status, resources, and commitment for women, appearance and sexual fidelity for men, and personality qualities for both.
The battle for casual sex is joined by both sexes, but not equally. The fact that more men than women seek casual sex partners creates a hurdle for men because there are fewer willing women. Women therefore tend to be more in control in short affairs than in the marital arena. For every attractive and sexually willing woman there are usually dozens of men who would consent to have sex with her. Women can be very choosy because they have so many options to choose from. In committed relationships, in contrast, this level of choosiness is a luxury that only very desirable women can afford.
Attracting a committed or casual mate requires display. Just as weaverbirds display their nests and scorpionflies display their nuptial gifts, men and women must advertise their assets on the mating market. Because men’s and women’s desires differ, the qualities they display must differ.
Generosity and Resource Display
The evolution of male strategies for accruing and displaying resources pervades the animal kingdom. The male roadrunner, for example, catches a mouse or baby rat, pounds it into a state of shock or death, and offers it to a female as her next meal, but without actually handing it over.1 Rather, the male holds it away from her while croaking and waving his tail. Only after the birds have copulated does he release his gift to the female, who uses it to nourish the eggs that the male has just fertilized. Males who fail to offer this food resource fail in the effort to attract females.
Men, too, go to great lengths to display their resources to attract mates. The mate attraction studies conducted by my lab identified dozens of tactics that men and women use to attract a mate. We asked several hundred students from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan to describe all the tactics they had observed in others or had used themselves. Their examples included bragging about accomplishments, talking about their importance at work, showing sympathy for the problems of others, initiating visual contact, and wearing sexy clothes. A team of four researchers reduced the larger set of more than 100 actions into 28 relatively distinct categories. The category “display athletic prowess,” for example, included actions such as working out with weights, impressing someone by twisting open difficult jars, and talking about athletic successes. Subsequently, 100 adult married couples and 200 unmarried university students evaluated each tactic for how effective it is in attracting a mate, whether it is more effective when employed in casual or long-term relationships, and how frequently they, their close friends, and their spouses employ it.2
One of the techniques employed by men is to display their tangible resources: showing a high earning potential, flashing a lot of money, driving an expensive car, telling women how important they are at work, and subtly revealing their accomplishments. Another technique men use is to deceive women about their resources by misleading them, for example, about their career expectations, or exaggerating their prestige at work. Like the male roadrunner offering up his kill, men offer women resources as a primary method of attraction.
Men also derogate their rivals’ resources. Typical behavior includes spreading false rumors about a rival, making fun of a rival’s appearance, scoffing at a rival’s achievements, and telling others that a rival has a sexually transmitted disease. All of these actions would fall into one of the 28 categories classified by our research team. For example, the category of “derogating a competitor’s intelligence” includes making the rival seem dumb, telling others that the rival is stupid, and mentioning that the rival is an “airhead.”
Men also counteract the attraction tactics of other men by derogating a rival’s resource potential. Typically, men tell women that their rivals are poor, have no money, lack ambition, or drive cheap cars. Women are far less likely to derogate a rival’s resources; when they do, the tactic is less effective than when men do it.3
Timing plays a key role in determining the effectiveness of different types of resource display. Immediate displays of wealth—such as flashing money, buying a woman gifts, or taking her out to an expensive restaurant on the first date—prove more effective for attracting casual sex partners than long-term mates. In bars, where opportunities for imparting resources are limited, men frequently initiate contact with prospective sex partners by offering to buy them drinks.4
Generosity with resources is critical in both casual and committed mate attraction. Giving a waitress a large tip, for example, indicates not just the possession of wealth but also the critical willingness to share it. One study found that men contributed more to charity when they were being observed by women, but not when being observed by men.5 Women’s charity contributions, in contrast, did not vary across different observer conditions. Men benefit by showing generosity with resources because women are turned off by signs of stinginess in all mating contexts.6
Showing the potential for having resources by exhibiting studiousness at college or describing ambitious goals to a woman is more effective for attracting long-term mates than casual sex partners. Derogation tactics also reveal the importance of timing. Putting down the financial potential of a rival is most effective in long-term mating. Telling a woman that the rival will do poorly in his profession or lacks ambition is highly effective in the committed mating market but relatively ineffective when it comes to competition for casual sex. These findings mesh perfectly with the preferences that women express in the same two contexts—desiring immediate resources from brief affairs and reliable future resources from enduring mates.
Wearing costly clothing works equally well in both contexts. Women shown slides of different men are more attracted to men who wear expensive clothing, such as three-piece suits, sports jackets, and designer jeans, than to men who wear cheap clothing, such as tank tops and T-shirts.7 Clothing has this effect on women whether they are evaluating a man as a marital or sex partner, perhaps because expensive clothing signals both immediate resources and future resource potential. The anthropologists John Marshall Townsend and Gary Levy have verified that the effect of the expense and status of clothing in attracting women is robust across any sort of involvement, from merely having coffee with a man to marriage.8 The same men were photographed wearing either a Burger King uniform with a blue baseball cap and a polo-type shirt or a white dress shirt with a designer tie, a navy blazer, and a Rolex watch. Based on these photographs, women stated that they were not at all open to dating, sex, or marriage with the men in the low-status clothing but were willing to consider all these relationships with men wearing the high-status attire.
The importance of resources to attraction is not limited to Western cultures. Among the Sirionó of eastern Bolivia, one man was a particularly unsuccessful hunter. He suffered a loss of status and had lost several wives to men who were better hunters. The anthropologist A. R. Holmberg began hunting with this man, gave him game that others were told he had killed, and taught him how to kill game with a shotgun. Eventually, as a result of the man’s increased hunting prowess, he “was enjoying the highest status, had acquired several new sex partners, and was insulting others, instead of being insulted by them.”9
The power of imparting resources is no recent development. Ovid observed precisely the same phenomenon 2,000 years ago, testifying to the long-standing nature of this tactic over human written history: “Girls praise a poem, but go for expensive presents. Any illiterate oaf can catch their eye provided he’s rich. Today is truly the Golden Age: gold buys honor, gold procures love.”10 We still live in that golden age.
Demonstrating Commitment
Displays of love, commitment, and devotion are powerful attractions to a woman. They signal that a man is willing to channel his time, energy, and effort to her over the long run. Commitment is difficult and costly to fake, because commitment is gauged from repeated signals over time. Men who are interested only in casual sex are unlikely to invest this much effort. The reliability of commitment display as a signal renders it an especially effective technique for attracting women.
The mate attraction studies confirm the power of displaying commitment in the long-term mating market. Discussing cohabitation or marriage signals that a man would like to integrate the woman into his social and family life, commit his resources to her, and perhaps have children with her. Offering to convert to her religion shows a willingness to accommodate to her needs. Showing a deep concern for her problems communicates emotional support and a commitment to be there in times of need. The 100 newlywed women we surveyed all reported that their husbands displayed these signals during their courtship, confirming that they were highly effective when used.
One strong signal of commitment is a man’s persistence in courtship. It can take the form of spending a lot of time with a woman, seeing her often, dating her for an extended period of time, calling her frequently on the phone, and texting or emailing her frequently. These tactics are highly effective at attracting long-term mates, with average effectiveness ratings of 5.48 on a 7-point scale, but only moderately effective (4.54) at attracting sex partners. Furthermore, persistence in courtship proves to be more effective for a man than for a woman because it signals that he is interested in more than casual sex.
The effectiveness of sheer persistence in courtship is illustrated by a story told by one newlywed: “Initially, I was not interested in John at all. I thought he was kind of nerdy, so I kept turning him down and turning him down. But he kept calling me up, showing up at my work, arranging to run into me. I finally agreed to go out with him just to get him off my back. One thing led to another, and six months later, we got married.”
Persistence also worked for a German university professor. While returning to Germany by train from a professional conference in Poland, he started talking to an attractive physician, twelve years his junior. The conversation became animated as their attraction for one another grew. The physician was on her way to Amsterdam, not Germany, and before long the station where she had to change trains was upon them. The physician said good-bye to the professor, but he insisted on helping her with her luggage and carried it to a station locker for her. As his train pulled away from the station the professor berated himself for failing to seize the moment. He decided to take action. At the next station he got off and boarded another train back to where he had left the physician. He searched the station in vain—there were no signs of her. On foot, he searched all the stores and shops surrounding the station. No luck. Finally, he went back to the station and planted himself in front of the locker into which he had loaded her luggage. When she eventually returned, she was surprised to see him and impressed by his persistence in tracking her down. A year later she left her native Poland to marry him in Germany. Without tenacity, the professor would have lost her irretrievably. Persistence pays.
Displays of kindness, which also signal commitment, figure prominently in successful attraction techniques. Men who demonstrate an understanding of a woman’s problems, show sensitivity to her needs, act compassionately toward her, and perform helpful deeds succeed in attracting women as long-term mates. Kindness works because it signals that the man cares for the woman, will be there for her in good times and bad, and will channel resources to her. It signals long-term romantic interest rather than purely sexual interest.
Another tactic for revealing kindness is to display nurturance toward children. In one study, women saw photos of the same man in three different conditions—standing alone, interacting positively with a baby, and ignoring a baby in distress.11 Women were most attracted to the man when he acted warmly toward the baby and were least attracted to him when he ignored the baby in distress. When men, however, were shown analogous photos of a woman standing alone, showing positive feelings toward a baby, and ignoring a baby in distress, their attraction to her was identical in all these contexts. Showing nurturance toward the young is apparently an attraction tactic that is effective mainly for men and works by signaling a proclivity to commit to and care for children. Showing warmth toward a cute puppy or kitten might have similar effects.
Men also signal their commitment by showing loyalty and fidelity. Signs of promiscuity, in contrast, indicate that the man is pursuing a purely sexual mating strategy. Short-term strategists typically distribute their attentions and resources over several women. Out of 130 possible ways for men to attract a mate, women regard showing fidelity as the second most effective action, just a shade behind displaying an empathic understanding of the woman’s problems.
Because fidelity signals commitment, an effective tactic for denigrating a rival is to question the rival’s sexual intentions. When a man tells a woman that his rival just wants casual sex, for example, women are turned off to that rival for committed mating. Similarly, saying that a rival cheats on women and cannot stay loyal to just one woman is highly effective at decreasing a rival’s long-term attractiveness to women.12
Displays of love provide another sign of commitment. A man can attract a woman by doing special things for her, showing a loving devotion to her, and saying “I love you.” Men and women rate these actions as among the top 10 percent of all tactics for attracting a woman for commitment. Demonstrations of love convey cues to long-term intentions.
Whereas signals of commitment prove highly effective in attracting long-term mates, creating an illusion of commitment can be effective in attracting and seducing a woman. Men looking for casual liaisons compete by mimicking what women desire in enduring mateships. This tactic is especially potent when women use casual sex to evaluate prospective husbands. Women are more receptive, even in the short term, to men who appear to embody their ideals in a long-term mate.
Some men exploit this tactic to attract women as casual sex partners. The psychologists William Tooke and Lori Camire studied exploitative and deceptive attraction tactics in a university population.13 From a nomination procedure parallel to the one used in the attraction studies, they assembled a list of eighty-eight ways in which men and women deceive one another in the service of attracting a mate. Participants reported misleading the other sex about career expectations, sucking in their stomachs when walking near members of the opposite sex, appearing to be more trusting and considerate than they really were, and acting uninterested in having sex when sex actually loomed large in their thoughts.
A singles bar study produced similar results. Four researchers spent approximately 100 person-hours sitting in singles bars in Washtenaw County in Michigan, writing down each attraction tactic they witnessed. Through this procedure, they observed 109 attraction tactics, such as sucking seductively on a straw, offering to buy someone a drink, sticking out one’s chest, and staring at someone’s body. Then a different sample of 100 university students evaluated these tactics for their probable effectiveness at attracting them when employed by a person of the other sex. Women stated that the most effective tactics for attracting them would be displaying good manners, offering help, and acting sympathetic and caring.14 Mimicking what women want in a husband by showing kindness and sincere interest, in short, is also an effective technique for luring women into brief sexual liaisons.
The deception study found that men use several tactics to deceive women about their intentions. Men pretend to be interested in starting a relationship when they are not really interested and act as if they care about a woman even though they really do not. Most men are fully aware that feigning commitment is an effective tactic for short-term sexual attraction, and they admit to deceiving women by this means. Men using Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps admit that they pretend to be open to being in a relationship even though their real interest lies in racking up large numbers of short-term sexual conquests. One man who estimated that he had hooked up with thirty or forty women over the past year through dating apps admitted, “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more . . . and I just don’t.”15
As the biologist Lynn Margulis notes: “Any animal that can perceive can be deceived.” “Deception consists of mimicking the truth,” comments the biologist Robert Trivers in describing how the technique works. “[It is] a parasitism of the preexisting system for communicating correct information.” Whenever females look for investing males, some males deceive about their willingness to invest. Certain male insects offer females food, only to take it back after the copulation is complete.16 They then use the same resources to court another female. For females, this strategy poses the problem of detecting deception, discovering insincerity, and penetrating disguise. One of the human solutions to this problem is to place a premium on honesty.
Displaying honesty is in fact a powerful tactic a man can use to obtain a long-term mate. This tactic conveys that the man is not simply seeking a transient sex partner. Of the 130 identified tactics to attract a female mate, three of the top ones suggest openness and honesty—acting truthful with the woman, communicating feelings to her directly and openly, and simply being oneself. All of these tactics are among the most effective 10 percent of all attraction tactics that men can use.
Because of the adaptive problem historically imposed on women by men’s dual sexual strategy of short-term and long-term relationships, tactics that allow women a clear window for evaluating a man’s actual characteristics and intentions prove to be highly attractive. Signals of dishonesty conceal those characteristics and intentions, rendering that assessment window cloudy or opaque.
If signs of commitment are highly effective, cues that resources are already committed elsewhere undermine attraction. Roughly 30 percent of the men on the Tinder app, which is widely regarded as a short-term mating app, are married. Among the men who patronize singles bars, many are married or have steady relationships. Some have children who command large shares of their resources. These men report removing their wedding rings before entering the bars. After intensive grilling of men at one singles bar, researchers found that “12 people admitted that they were married. . . . We suspected that others were married, by somewhat rather undefinable qualities, sometimes connected with a rather mysterious withholding of various kinds of information about everyday life styles.”17 Because being married clearly interferes with attracting women, it becomes a liability for men who fail to conceal it.
University students confirm that knowledge of prior commitments hinders a man’s efforts to attract a woman. Indeed, out of eighty-three tactics that men can perform to render a rival less attractive to women, mentioning that he has a serious girlfriend is seen as the most effective one.
Signals of commitment help men to attract women because they signal that they are pursuing a long-term sexual strategy. These displays communicate that his resources will be channeled exclusively to her.
Revealing Physical Prowess
Men display physical and athletic prowess in modern times as part of their tactical arsenal for attracting women. Newlywed and undergraduate couples alike report that men display their strength roughly twice as often as women and display athletic prowess roughly 50 percent more often than women as part of their courtship tactics. Furthermore, displays of strength and athleticism are judged to be significantly more effective for attracting mates when used by men. Flexing muscles, playing sports, mentioning feats of athletic prowess, and lifting weights all figure more prominently in men’s attraction tactics. College students’ evaluations of derogation tactics reveal that displays of physical and athletic prowess are significantly more effective for attracting casual sex partners than for attracting spouses. Perhaps this is why men are more likely to show photos of themselves revealing upper torso shots with bulging biceps and six-pack abs on hookup sites like Tinder than on more serious dating sites like eHarmony or OKCupid. The derogation tactics that stand out as more effective in casual contexts than permanent ones include putting down a rival’s strength and athletic ability. Mentioning that a rival is physically weak, outshining a competitor in sports, and physically dominating a rival are more effective short-term than long-term tactics. These studies support the common observation that male athletes, especially star players, enjoy success at attracting women for casual sex.
Among the Yanomamö, a man’s status is heavily determined by his physical feats, which include chest-pounding duels, ax fights, combat against neighboring villages, and physically vanquishing rivals. The status gained through physical prowess translates into greater sexual access, which historically was a key route to greater reproductive success. Indeed, men who have demonstrated their prowess through killing other men (unokai) have more wives and more children than same-aged non-unokai men.18 Physical and athletic displays, in short, have always been powerful attractors in traditional and modern societies alike.
Showing Bravado and Self-Confidence
Displays of masculine self-confidence prove effective for men seeking to attract mates but are significantly more effective in attracting casual than committed mates. Acting conceited or macho, bragging about one’s accomplishments, and showing off are all judged by college students to be more effective for men in attracting sex partners than wives. The effectiveness of bravado and confidence is reflected in a story told by a woman in a singles bar:
I was sitting at a corner table talking to my girlfriend and sipping on a gin and tonic. Then Bob walked in. He acted like he owned the place, smiling broadly and very confident. He caught my eye, and I smiled. He sat down and started talking about how horses were his hobby. He casually mentioned that he owned a horse farm. When the last call for alcohol came, he was still talking about how expensive his horses were, and said that we should go riding together. He said, “In fact, we could go riding right now.” It was 2:00 a.m., and I left the bar and had sex with him. I never did find out whether he owned horses.
Self-confidence signals status and resources.19 Among newlyweds, for example, men scoring high on self-confidence earn significantly more money than men with lower self-confidence. Self-confidence translates into success in finding sex partners. A woman at a singles bar put it this way: “Some guys just seem to know what they are doing. They know how to approach you and just make you feel good. Then you get those nerds . . . who can’t get anything right. They come on strong at first, but can’t keep it together. . . . They just hang around until you dump them by going to the rest room or over to a friend to talk.”20 Women distinguish false bravado from real self-confidence, and they find the genuine article more attractive. Men high in self-esteem tend to approach physically attractive women and ask them for dates, regardless of their own physical attractiveness. Men low in self-esteem, in contrast, avoid approaching attractive women, believing that their chances are too slim.21
Self-confidence is responsive to feedback. In singles bars, men rebuffed by women in their first few attempts produce successively less confident approaches. Rejection produces a downward cycle of resentment, hostility, and sometimes a cessation of all tactics. One man in a singles bar commented after a third woman had rebuffed him, “You need steel balls to make it in this place.” Apparently the psychological pain and lowered confidence experienced by rejected men cause them to reevaluate their sexual techniques, lower their sights to women who have lower appeal, and wait until circumstances are more favorable for further attempts.22
Another tactic is to feign confidence. According to the deception study, men boast and brag to make themselves appear better, act more masculine than they really feel, and behave more assertively around women than they really are. Men strut for a reason—to increase their odds of succeeding in sex.
Not all displays of bravado and confidence are directed toward attracting the opposite sex. They are also directed toward other men in an attempt to elevate status and prestige within the group. College men exaggerate the number of their sex partners, mislead others about how many women express a desire for them, exaggerate their own sexual skills, and act braver than they really feel. These are tactics of status competition. Men compete for position, resources, and signs of elevated prestige. If a man can obtain the deference of other men by elevating his position in the sexual domain, his status typically translates into greater access to desirable women.
The fact that men select this tactic primarily in casual mating contexts provides circumstantial support for the sexy son hypothesis. Men who display their bravado and sexual conquests signal to women that they are sexually attractive to women in general. Like the peacock displaying his plumage, these strutting men may be more likely to have sons who are attractive to women in the next generation, assuming some heritability to these proclivities.
This display of bravado is sometimes exploited by other males. To attract females, for example, male bullfrogs sit at the edge of a pond and emit loud, resonant croaks. Females listen carefully to the chorus of male sounds and select one to move toward. The louder and more resonant the croak, the more attractive it is to females. The larger, healthier, and more dominant the male, the more resonant his croaks. The dominant male strategy, therefore, is to emit the loudest and most resonant croaks possible. Sitting silently near a dominant male is a smaller, weaker male. He emits no croaks and attracts no attention. But as a female approaches the dominant sounds, the silent male darts from his hiding place, intercepts her, and quickly copulates. This strategy, called a satellite or sneak strategy, illustrates the exploitation of dominant males by less dominant males who cannot compete directly.23
Humans also use this strategy, which is humorously depicted in the Woody Allen film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). The scene opens with men dressed up as sperm who are fighting with each other over access to an egg. The macho male sperm battle furiously. When they have defeated each other and all lie down exhausted, a small sperm played by Woody Allen steps out cautiously from behind a curtain where he has been cowering and proceeds to hop onto the egg.
Men also sometimes use this sneak strategy, as we found in studies of mate poaching. We asked fifty men and fifty women which strategies they would use to attract someone who was already mated with someone else.24 One of the most frequently used tactics is pretending to be friends with the couple and then switching into mating mode when the opportunity arises. Once in close proximity, mate poachers encourage rifts in the couple’s relationship: “I don’t think your partner appreciates you”; “You are too good for him”; “I think you deserve someone better, someone who treats you like the princess you are . . . someone like me!”
A less common male poaching tactic is to feign femaleness. Among the sunfish in the lakes of Ontario, for example, a small male mimics a female and enters the nesting site of the dominant male. This mimicry reduces the odds of being attacked. Once inside the territory, however, the small male quickly fertilizes the eggs that have already been deposited by the females, cuckolding the dominant, territory-holding male. A rare tactic among humans is to feign homosexuality so as not to incur the suspicion of the dominant man and then attempt to have sex with the woman when he is not around. Nonetheless, it is interesting that a few college men report having observed it. In general, pretending to be nonthreatening as a potential mate poacher—for instance, by pretending to be a friend of the man or pretending to be already committed to another woman—is more common. Like bullfrogs and sunfish, humans occasionally use sneaky strategies.
Enhancing Appearance
Just as men’s successful tactics for attracting women depend on women’s desires in a mate, women’s attraction tactics depend on men’s preferences. Women who succeed appear reproductively valuable by embodying physical and behavioral cues that signal their youth and physical attractiveness. Women who fail to fulfill these qualities lose a competitive edge.
Because men place a premium on appearance, competition among women to attract men centers heavily on enhancing their physical attractiveness along youthful and healthful lines. Bolstering this practice is the cosmetics industry, which is supported mainly by women; although men are spending increasing amounts on cosmetic products, women still outspend men roughly nine to one. Women’s magazines include an avalanche of advertisements for beauty products. Men’s magazines, in contrast, advertise cars, electronics, and alcoholic beverages. Advertisements in men’s magazines that promise appearance enhancement are typically for muscle-building products or for deodorants and shower gels with scents advertised as being attractive to women.
Women do not compete to signal accurate information. Rather, they compete to activate men’s evolved psychological standards of beauty, which are keyed to youth and health. Because flushed cheeks and high color are cues that men use to gauge a woman’s health, women rouge their cheeks artificially to trigger men’s attraction. Because smooth, clear skin is one of men’s evolved desires, women cover up blemishes, use moisture cream, apply astringents, and get facelifts. Because lustrous hair is one of men’s evolved desires, women highlight, bleach, tint, or dye their hair, and they give it extra body with conditioners, egg yolks, beer, or weaves. Because full red lips trigger men’s evolved desires, women apply lipstick skillfully and even get injections to enlarge their lips for the “bee-stung” look. And because firm, youthful breasts stimulate men’s desires, women obtain breast implants and wear push-up bras.
Women report using makeup to accentuate their looks twenty times as often as men. Women go on diets to improve their figures, get new and interesting haircuts, and spend over an hour a day on their appearance—twice as much time as men spend on theirs. They lie out in the sun or go to tanning salons to achieve a healthy-looking glow. Appearance enhancement for attracting a mate is twice as effective for women as for men.25 In contrast, men who devote excessive attention to enhancing their appearance can hurt their competitive chances; people sometimes infer that they are narcissistic or self-absorbed.26
Women do more to improve their appearance than meets the eye. They use deceptive tactics to manipulate their appearance. They wear false fingernails to make their hands appear longer and their fingers more elegant; wear heels to accentuate leg length, bum protrusion, and calf shape; wear dark clothing and vertical stripes to appear thinner; apply spray tan to appear sun-kissed; pull in their stomachs or cinch their waists to enhance their waist-to-hip ratio; wear body-shaping undergarments like Spanx to appear leaner and firmer; wear padded bras to appear bustier; and highlight their hair to appear more youthful.
Women are well aware of the importance of appearance on the mating market. After interviews with women in singles bars, researchers reported that many of them “said that they went home from work before going out to the bars to do a whole revamping.” Often, before going out for the evening, they would take a bath, wash their hair, put on fresh makeup, and go through three changes of outfits before selecting one. “Primping for us counts more than for guys—they don’t need to worry about their looks as much.”27 The ability to make men’s heads turn signals a highly desirable mate and evokes advances from more men. This effect enlarges the pool of men and, in turn, gives women a greater ability to choose high-mate-value men.
Women do not merely strive to improve their own looks; they also disparage the looks of other women. Women in the derogation study mentioned that their rivals were fat, ugly, and unattractive, had “thunder thighs,” and had shapeless bodies. Making fun of a rival’s appearance is more effective for women in the sexual marketplace than in the marriage marketplace. And it is more effective for women than for men in both short-term and long-term mating contexts.
Women derogate other women’s appearance both to the desired men, to other women in their social circles, and directly to the rivals themselves. One woman in an upscale hotel bar described her tactic of looking at a rival’s hair and, without saying anything, taking out a hairbrush and handing it to her. Her rivals sometimes got up and left the bar. Often the practice succeeded in driving away her competition. Damaging the self-image of a rival is one way to clear the field.
Making public one’s disdain for another woman’s appearance enhances the effectiveness of this derogation tactic. One man from a fraternity reported being ridiculed mercilessly by his brothers after it became known that he had sex with a particularly unattractive woman. Men discovered having sex with unattractive women suffer social humiliation and lose status in the eyes of their peers.28
Since physical attractiveness is an attribute that is easy for men to observe directly, these findings raise an interesting puzzle: Why would derogatory verbal comments about other women work when men can gauge attractiveness with their own eyes? Derogation works in part by guiding men’s perceptions of women. Women can draw attention to flaws that are otherwise not noticed or salient, such as heavy thighs, a long nose, short fingers, close-set eyes, or an asymmetrical face, and make them salient. No human is without imperfections. Drawing attention to them magnifies their importance, especially if attention is drawn to efforts to conceal or disguise a weak spot. Women also exploit the fact that our judgments of attractiveness are influenced by other people’s judgments.29 Knowing that others find a woman unattractive causes a downward shift in our view of her appearance. Moreover, knowing that other people in our social environment do not believe that a woman is attractive actually renders her a less valuable asset as a mate. Even in a context with easily observed qualities, such as physical appearance and stature, there is plenty of room for the effective use of belittling tactics.
Modern cosmetology exploits women’s evolved psychology of competing for mates, and women who do not make effective use of methods to enhance their appearance hurt their chances at attracting valuable mates. This situation has created a runaway beauty competition in which the time, effort, and money expended on appearance have reached levels unprecedented in human history. Women in all cultures alter their appearance, but perhaps none as much as those in the West, which has the technology to exploit women’s desire to appear attractive through visual media unavailable to more traditional societies. The cosmetics industry does not create desires so much as it exploits the desires that are already there.
The journalist Naomi Wolf has described advertisements as creating a false ideal, which she calls “the beauty myth,” in order to subjugate women sexually, economically, and politically. The beauty myth is presumed to have taken on causal properties, undoing all the accomplishments of feminism in improving conditions for women. Some argue that the surgical technologies of breast implants and facelifts are designed to medically control women.30 They contend that the diet, cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery industries combined, totaling more than $53 billion a year, are motivated by the desire to subjugate women. Standards of beauty, the argument goes, are arbitrary—capriciously linked with age, highly variable across cultures, not universal in nature, and hence not a function of evolution.
These naive arguments fly in the face of the scientific evidence. Myths cannot have causal force; only the individuals who embrace myths can. Power structures cannot have causal force; only the individuals who wield power can. Wolf’s account of the beauty myth is terribly unflattering to women. It implies that women are passive pawns with no preferences of their own and no individuality, buffeted and brainwashed by forces like power structures, myths, and men conspiring to subjugate them.
In contrast, an evolutionary psychological perspective reveals that women have far more autonomy and choice in their deployment of attraction tactics than proponents of the beauty myth would have us believe. Women who seek a lasting mate, for example, have at their disposal a wide range of tactics, including displays of loyalty, signals of common interests, and acts of intelligence. Women purchase beauty products not because they have been brainwashed by the media, but because they have determined that using beauty products will increase their power to get what they want. Women are not unsuspecting dupes manipulated by the forces of Madison Avenue, but determine through their preferences which products they will consume—products that they perceive will enhance their value as a mate, friend, or group member.
Advertisements, however, do damage women. Women are bombarded with exploitative, photoshopped images that depict ideals unattainable by most women. These magnify a woman’s focus on appearance and at the same time fail to highlight the deeper personal qualities that are also critical to men’s desires, such as intelligence, personality, social skills, and compassion. The cosmetics industry exploits women’s evolved concern over appearance and then increases their insecurity by elevating the standards of attractiveness to which women aspire with images of a deluge of seemingly flawless, world-class models that are in fact deceptively photoshopped. This duplicity increases the apparent beauty of other women—their competition—and may lower women’s self-esteem. It may also distort women’s and men’s understanding of the actual mating pool and mating market.
All women today are unique, distinctive winners of a 5 million year beauty contest of sexual selection. Every female ancestor of the readers of these words was attractive enough to obtain enough investment to raise at least one child to reproductive age. Every male ancestor was attractive enough to attract a woman to have his child. It is worth keeping in mind, when confronted with a sea of troubles in the mating game, that every one of us is an evolutionary success story.
Displaying Fidelity
In light of men’s emphasis on fidelity in a committed relationship, displays of fidelity should be paramount in women’s tactics of attraction. Faithfulness displays, such as honesty and trustworthiness, signal that the woman is pursuing a long-term mating strategy and that she is doing so without deception and exclusively with one man.
Out of 130 acts of attraction, remaining faithful, avoiding sex with other men, and showing devotion proved to be the three most effective tactics for attracting a committed mate. Participants rated all three over 6.5, with 7.0 indicating the highest possible effectiveness. Signals of fidelity offer a man a solution to one of the most important mating challenges he faces—the problem of ensuring his paternity in his children.
The centrality of fidelity shows up indirectly in the tactics employed by women to derogate mating competitors. Saying that a rival cannot stay loyal to one man was judged to be the single most effective derogation tactic for a woman to use in the marriage market. Calling a rival a slut, saying she was loose, or telling others that she slept around were in the top 10 percent of effective derogation tactics.31
This tactic can backfire if a man is seeking casual sex. Mae West once noted that “men like women with a past because they hope history will repeat itself.” Men seeking short-term partners typically are not bothered by promiscuity in a woman and in fact find it mildly desirable, since it increases their chances of success. Calling another woman promiscuous therefore does not have the intended effect of dissuading men who are pursuing a brief sexual encounter. Women who mistakenly gauge a man’s mating goals can fail in their quest to render their rivals undesirable.
The fact that women exploit men’s desire for faithful mates to undermine their rivals is reinforced by the prevalence of derogatory sexual terms in human language. Although there are terms for men who are promiscuous, such as player, lady’s man, Lothario, and Don Juan, they are fewer in number and carry less negative valence than comparable words for women. And sometimes such terms are applied to men with admiration or envy rather than as put-downs. In contrast, John Barth’s The Sot Weed Factor illustrates the range of insults hurled by women at other women.32 An English woman competes against a French woman by using these labels to cast aspersions on her character: harlot, whore, sow, bawd, strawgirl, tumbler, mattressback, windowgirl, galleywench, fastfanny, nellie, nightbird, shortheels, bum-bessie, furrowbutt, coxswain, conycatcher, tart, arsebender, canvasback, hipflipper, hardtonguer, bedbug, breechdropper, giftbox, craterbutt, piss-pallet, narycherry, poxbox, flapgap, codhopper, bellylass, trollop, joy-girl, bumpbacon, strumpet, slattern, chippie, pipecleaner, hotpot, back-bender, leasepiece, spreadeagle, sausage-grinder, cornergirl, codwinker, nutcracker, hedgewhore, fleshpot, cotwarmer, hussy, and stumpthumper. The French woman uses a comparably long list of counter-derogations in her native language, including bas-cul, consoeur, poupinette, briballeuse, gaure, gourgandine, saffrete, redresseuse, drue, fille de joie, champisse, and marane. In literature as in life, denigrating a competitor’s promiscuity decreases her attractiveness in the mating market.
The importance of context is also shown by the attraction tactic of acting coy or unavailable. Appearing indifferent to a person one likes and playing hard to get are judged to be more effective for women than for men. Furthermore, these forms of coyness are more effective for women in the context of long-term as opposed to casual mates.33
This outcome meshes perfectly with the sexual strategies of both women and men. The coyness tactic works for women seeking committed mates because it signals both desirability and fidelity. Men think that if a woman is easy for them to get sexually, then she may be easy for other men too. College men, for example, point out that women who are easy to get are probably desperate for a mate and might also have an STI—signals of low desirability and high promiscuity.34
Another study found that playing hard to get is most successful as a mate-attracting tactic when it is used selectively, that is, when a woman is hard to get in general but is selectively accessible to a particular man.35 For example, a woman might publicly spurn the advances of all men except the specific man she wants. This signals that he is getting an excellent bargain on the mating market and, importantly, that she is likely to be faithful in the long run. Successful women convey being discriminating without turning off the particular man they desire. The effectiveness of playing hard to get as a long-term attraction technique stems from providing men with two key reproductive assets: desirability on the mating market and a signal that he alone will have sexual access.
When a woman has a long history of casual sex, it may be difficult to appear faithful, loyal, and devoted. Mate-attracting tactics are not deployed in a social vacuum, and people are keenly interested in transmitting information about the sexual reputation of others. Gossip columnists, talk show hosts, and their audiences dwell on who is sleeping with whom, savoring salacious details. Reputations sullied are difficult to repair.
In the small social groups in which humans evolved, damage to reputation was likely to have been lasting. Concealing sexual information from others in a small group is virtually impossible. Among the Ache of Paraguay, for example, everyone knows who has slept with whom, so there is little room for deception. When a male anthropologist queried Ache men about who had slept with whom, and a female anthropologist did likewise with Ache women, there was perfect correspondence between their accounts.36 In modern Western culture, with its great mobility and anonymous urban living, there is considerably more room for rehabilitating one’s reputation and starting fresh in a new social environment where one’s past is unknown. Having a history of promiscuity in the modern world no longer precludes the subsequent use of signs of fidelity to attract a mate.
Sexual Signaling
Most men want one benefit from casual mating: low-cost sex with attractive women. For women, therefore, explicit overtures that signal sexual availability or receptivity are exceptionally effective tactics. These include talking seductively, making a man think of having sex with her, and simply asking a man if he wants to have sex. These attraction tactics are maximally effective for women in casual mating contexts.
Men in singles bars corroborated these findings. When they evaluated 103 mate-attracting tactics for their effectiveness, they singled out the actions of a woman making direct eye contact, looking at him seductively, brushing up against him, running her hands through his hair, puckering her lips and blowing kisses, sucking on a straw or finger, leaning forward to expose her chest, and bending over to accentuate her curves. In sharp contrast, women judged these same actions when performed by men to be a great turnoff. The more overt the sexual advances by men, the less attractive women find them. On a 7-point scale, men placed a woman’s action of rubbing her chest or pelvis up against a man at 6.07—the second most effective act of all 103 acts, exceeded only by simply agreeing to have sex with the man. Women, however, placed a man’s use of such an action at only 1.82, suggesting that it is highly ineffective. So-called dick-pics, sent by some men in the erroneous belief that they will turn a woman on, in fact repulse most women.
Women also sometimes sexualize their appearance. Men in the single bars studied stated that a woman’s wearing sexy, revealing, tight clothes; wearing a shirt with a low-cut back or a low-cut front; letting the strap or shirt slip off her shoulders; wearing a short skirt; walking with a hip swivel; and dancing provocatively all placed in the top 25 percent of the tactics most likely to attract them. A study by T. Joel Wade and Jennifer Slemp similarly found that the most effective flirtation tactics for women include touching, dressing in revealing clothing, moving closer, kissing on the cheek, and rubbing against the man.37 Effective nonverbal seduction tactics for women in Lisbon, Portugal, included wearing tight skirts, wearing low-neck blouses, and exposing legs through short skirts or wearing attention-getting black or red nylons.38 Women who sexualize their appearance and behavior succeed in evoking approaches from men.
The power for women in sexualizing their appearance is further shown by a study of clothing style and skin exposure. Men and women watched photos of the opposite sex in which models differed in the amount of skin exposed and the tightness of their clothing. After each image, people judged the model’s attractiveness as a dating partner, marital partner, and sex partner. Men found women in tight-fitting and revealing clothing more attractive than fully clothed women as dating partners and sex partners, but not as marriage partners. Women, in contrast, judged men in tight-fitting and revealing clothes to be less attractive than fully clothed men in all conditions, probably because these men were signaling that they were primarily interested in casual sex.39
Women’s sexualization of their appearance becomes quite overt in singles bars. Researchers Natalie Allon and Diane Fishel report that women “often walked around the room, standing tall, protruding their chests, holding in their stomachs, stroking their own arms or hair—they seemed to exhibit themselves on public display.” Sometimes a woman’s sexy looks are so effective that they crowd out all other male thoughts. Allon and Fishel describe one woman who was very thin, attractive, and large-breasted:
She often tended to say things that were scatterbrained and she had a nervous giggle. Her talk and her erratic laughter seemed quite secondary in the singles bar, as most men who talked to her were preoccupied with her chest and the way she displayed her chest by twisting and turning. Some men commented to us that they hardly heard what this woman said—or for that matter, even cared what she said. Such men seemed to prefer to look at this woman’s chest than to listen to her.40
Initiating visual contact also proves to be a highly effective tactic for women who seek to attract a sex partner. Looking intensely into a man’s eyes and allowing him to see her staring are judged to be among the top 15 percent of effective tactics women can use to attract short-term sex partners. In contrast, this tactic proves only moderately effective in attracting committed mates, scoring near the midpoint of the 7-point scale.
A woman who initiates visual contact signals good odds of sexual success. In one study, a man and a woman were videotaped interacting.41 After a brief period of time, the woman looked into the man’s eyes and smiled at him. Men and women witnessed the videotape and then made judgments about the woman’s intentions. Men interpreted eye contact and smiling as signs of sexual interest and seductive intent. Women who observed the same actions by other women interpreted them as signs of friendliness rather than seductiveness. Clearly, eye contact and smiles are often ambiguous—sometimes they signal sexual interest, and sometimes they do not—but men are more likely to err in the direction of inferring sexual interest, exhibiting a male sexual overperception bias. That is, when confronted with ambiguous cues, men over-infer sexual interest when it is often not actually there (see Chapter 7 on error management theory).
While women convey sexual availability as a tactic, they also question the sexual availability of other women as a means of derogating them. When a college woman derogates a rival in a short-term context, she mentions that her rival is merely a tease, indicates that her rival leads men on, and tells the man that her rival is frigid. All of these acts of derogation imply that the other woman will not be sexually available to the man and that he is likely to waste his time and energy if he pursues her as a casual partner.
Women also call their sexual competitors prudish, priggish, or puritanical. Questioning the sexual accessibility of rivals is an effective female strategy, because unavailable women are costly for men who seek casual sex—they risk channeling time and resources toward dubious prospects.
Some ways in which women question a rival’s sexual accessibility, such as calling a competitor a tease and saying that she leads men on, seem extraordinarily clever, because at the same time such remarks do not imply that the woman is loyal, faithful, or a good long-term prospect. Rather, they imply that she uses an exploitative strategy of feigning sexual approachability, perhaps to obtain resources and attention, but then fails to deliver. Furthermore, saying that a rival is frigid or prudish implies that she is a problematic casual sex partner without implying that she is also a desirable long-term mate, because men also dislike sexual coldness in both mating contexts. Tactics that simultaneously derogate a rival’s short-term and long-term value on the mating market are especially effective.
Mae West once commented, “Brains are an asset, if you hide them.” That may indeed be true for casual sex. Women sometimes act submissive, helpless, and less intelligent than they really are to attract short-term mates. Women report pretending to be helpless, letting the man control the conversation, acting dumb, acting “ditzy,” and pretending to be meek and submissive. A woman’s submissiveness conveys to a man that he need not expect hostile reactions to his advances.42 Subservient signals implicitly give men permission to approach. Since men are more likely to initiate approaches, signs of submissiveness and helplessness lower barriers to approach. Acting submissive elicits approaches from a larger number of men, expands the pool of potential mates, creates greater opportunities for choice, and ultimately increases the quality of the mate obtained.
Acting submissive, helpless, or dumb may also signal that the man will be able to control or manipulate the woman easily for his own ends. A woman’s apparent helplessness may signal ease of sexual exploitation—sex without the cost of commitment.43 The stereotype of the “bubble-headed blonde” may be misleading; this public presentation is intended as a strategic signal of approachability or even sexual accessibility rather than of actual intellectual ineptness. Women sometimes present the allure of vulnerability for their own strategic purposes.44
Signals of sexual accessibility are sometimes part of a larger strategy to lure a man into a long-term relationship. Sometimes the only way a woman can gain the attention and interest of a man is by offering herself as sexually available with no apparent strings attached. If the costs in resources and commitment are made low enough, many men succumb to sexual opportunity. Once a woman gains sexual access to a man of her choice, her proximity offers opportunities for insinuating herself, for making the man depend on her for various functions, and for gradually escalating both the benefits he will receive by staying in the relationship and the costs he will incur if he leaves her. What seems initially like costless sex without strings attached ends up being transformed into commitment.
Women sometimes bait men with sex. Because men’s psychological adaptations orient them so vigilantly to short-term sexual opportunities, women can exploit them as a first step toward luring them into a committed relationship.
The Fitness Signaling Hypothesis: Humor, Creativity, Art, Music, and Morality
Because women prefer mates who have a good sense of humor, men should display humor in their tactics of attraction.45 Humor has many facets, two of which are humor production (making witty remarks, telling jokes) and humor appreciation (laughing when someone else produces humor). In long-term mating, women prefer men who produce humor, whereas men prefer women who are receptive to their humor.46 Precisely why do women value humor in a mate? One theory is that displaying humor signals interest in initiating and maintaining a mating relationship.47 This theory predicts that humor signals long-term intentions and commitment cues toward a specific person. Making someone laugh and appreciating their humor convey excellent mind-reading abilities, perspective taking, playfulness, verbal adeptness, mutual compatibility, and good long-term mate potential. Not everyone is convinced, however, that humor is really important in mate attraction. The comedian Jimi McFarland noted: “One of the things women claim is most important in a man is a sense of humor. In my years as a comedian, I’ve learned that they’re usually referring to the humor of guys like Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Russell Crowe. Apparently, those guys are hilarious.”
Another theory proposes that humor is a cue that its user possesses good genes, a fitness indicator signaling excellent functioning of complex cognitive skills unimpaired by a high mutation load.48 According to Geoffrey Miller’s fitness signaling hypothesis, humor is one among an array of uniquely human abilities that convey genetic quality to a potential mate. Others include high verbal dexterity (a large and fluent vocabulary and facility with language and its nuances), intelligence, artistic ability, musicality, and creativity. Even displaying moral virtues such as honesty, cooperativeness, fairness, and conscientiousness can be signals. The fitness signaling hypothesis draws an analogy with the peacock’s tail—the tail is flashy, cumbersome, and costly, but only peacocks in the best condition, those with the highest fitness, can afford to produce these mesmerizing displays. High mutation and parasite loads, for example, dull the plumages’ luminescence. Peacocks do no investing in peahens, nor do they aid offspring, so the only benefits these males can provide are good-quality genes. Females who sexually select males with the best genes bear offspring who are healthier in the next generation, have sons who inherit qualities that will make them attractive to females, and have daughters who inherit the female sexual preference. That is, the daughters will, in turn, choose mates with genes that confer high fitness on their own offspring.
The fitness signaling theory builds on the work of prior evolutionists, such as the geneticist R. A. Fisher and the biologist Amotz Zahavi. For fitness signals to be reliable and honest, Zahavi argues, they must be costly to produce.49 If they were easy and metabolically cheap to generate, then every individual would do so. It is precisely their costliness that makes them honest signals of genetic quality. Miller argues that the same logic applies to creative, artistic, musical, and intellectual displays in the context of courtship. These abilities confer no direct survival benefit, but do convey cues to genetic quality. They evolved, Miller contends, through a process of mutual mate choice in which men and women both exhibited high levels of choosiness in selecting mates. And indeed, men and women are quite similar in their intelligence, musical abilities, creativity, and many other qualities.
Although humans have unquestionably evolved through mutual mate choice, as I have argued throughout this book, and the genetic quality of mates is undoubtedly part of that picture (for example, the sexy son hypothesis), critics of the fitness signaling hypothesis have identified some problems with this explanation for the evolution of music, art, humor, and so on. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, argues that there are no specific adaptations for art, music, literature, and the like. Rather, they are nonfunctional by-products of adaptations that evolved for other purposes and allow humans to take pleasure in “shapes and colors and sounds and jokes and stories and myths.”50 Creating paintings that mimic the color patterns present in fruit, for example, can pleasurably activate an adaptation of color vision designed for locating ripe fruit. Pinker argues that music is “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties.”51 So rather than being costly fitness signals that are displayed for mate attraction, human artistic and musical abilities may simply be by-products of adaptations that evolved for other functions.
Another criticism of the fitness signaling hypothesis is that some of the qualities it is designed to explain, such as intelligence and morality, do have compelling adaptive functions beyond merely serving as cues to genetic quality. Consider intelligence, which is linked with good resource acquisition skills, good parenting skills, prescience in forecasting danger, good health practices, and capacity to acquire and skillfully use cultural knowledge. Selecting an intelligent mate confers this bounty of adaptive benefits on oneself and one’s children. The genetic benefits that intelligence provides to offspring may be important as well, but it seems rash to discount how intelligence helps to solve a host of adaptive problems linked with enabling the mate selector and children to survive and thrive. Displays of morality, undoubtedly important in attracting a mate, also signal that one will be a good and generous partner, a good and fair cooperator, a self-sacrificing parent, and a high-quality long-term ally—all qualities that directly solve practical adaptive problems.
A third set of problems with the fitness signaling hypothesis centers on its testability and its ability to lead to new discoveries previously unknown. The hypothesis runs into trouble in explaining sex-differentiated qualities. If both men and women are choosing the same fitness indicators, why do women value humor production in potential mates, for example, while men value humor appreciation in potential mates? Some critics argue that the fitness signaling hypothesis is an after-the-fact explanation for phenomena that are widely known—that people tell jokes and find things funny, display moral qualities in public, devote seemingly wasteful time producing music and art, and so on. They contend that it has not led to novel empirical discoveries, one of the key criteria for evaluating scientific hypotheses. Nonetheless, the fitness signaling hypothesis does focus greater attention on genetic quality in mate selection, which historically has been relatively neglected. And it might turn out to be an important addition to the theoretical tools that evolutionary psychologists possess to explain the complexities of human mate attraction.
The Sexes at Cross-Purposes
Success at attracting a mate depends on more than grasping the context and the intentions of a potential partner. It also hinges on surpassing the competition. For this reason, men and women do not merely enhance their own attractiveness; they also derogate their rivals. While making themselves appear attractive by exhibiting the qualities sought by the other sex, people also denigrate their rivals by making them appear to lack these desired qualities.
Perhaps more than in any other part of the mating arena, in casual sex men and women suffer from the strategies of the opposite sex. Men deceive women by feigning an interest in commitment to achieve a quick sexual score. They also feign confidence, status, kindness, and resources that they lack. Women who succumb to this deception give up a valuable sexual benefit at bargain-basement prices. But women battle back by insisting on stronger cues to commitment and by feigning interest in casual sex as a means of concealing their long-term intentions. Just as men deploy tactics to sexually exploit women, women turn the tables and exploit men’s sexual desires. Some men take the bait and risk becoming ensnared in a web of hidden costs.
But offering sexual enticement poses risks for women. To suggest sexual availability is, without question, the most effective way for a woman to lure a man into a casual relationship. But because men dislike signs of promiscuity in a long-term mate, the sexual strategy that works so well for the woman in the short run often backfires if she is seeking a committed mate. Because men use similar strategies in both contexts, they can determine at a later stage, with more information in hand, whether they want the woman as a short-term or long-term partner. Women often have more to lose if they make errors in sexual strategies.
Men and women both are alert to deception at the hands of the opposite sex. Women sometimes hold out sexually, seek demonstrations of intentions and investment, and penetrate possible deceptions. Men conceal their emotions, disguise their external commitments, and remain uncommunicative and noncommittal. They try to abscond with the sexual benefit without paying the cost of commitment.
The ratio of available women to men affects the prevailing tactics used to attract a partner. The typical ratio in online dating sites like Tinder and Hinge, for example, favors women, because many more men than women are seeking short-term sex partners. Women looking for a brief encounter can exercise a great deal of choice. The sex ratio imbalance pressures men to best other men with better lines, better deceptions, and better simulations of the criteria that women impose. The losers typically outnumber the winners, and many men strike out.
Where the sex ratio is reversed and there are many more available women than men, the balance of power shifts to men because they can more easily attract women for casual sex. This imbalance is especially great today on college campuses and among college-educated individuals. More women than men attend college, and women are less likely than men to select a mate who is less educated than they are. This combination creates a surplus of educated women in the mating market. The rise of Tinder and other hookup apps and dating sites reflects the advantage that educated men have on the short-term mating market today.52 For women seeking long-term mates, these unfavorable conditions tax their attraction tactics and make sexual competition among them fiercer.
This trend is exacerbated by women’s high standards for a mate: their choosiness dramatically shrinks the effective pool of eligible men. Many men are eliminated from contention for failing to pass even preliminary screening. This leaves just a few survivors—men of reasonable social status, with adequate self-confidence and good resource potential, who are willing to commit—over whom women then compete. Those who succeed in attracting a lasting mate then face the next adaptive problem—staying together.