This seemingly bizarre bit of
human behavior, like most others, makes much more sense when you look at it from the
perspective of
evolutionary psychology. The basic thing to keep in mind is that both
men and
women want to have as many offspring as possible, and, just as importantly, they want offspring with traits that will allow the offspring to
reproduce successfully. Now, men and women must employ rather different strategies, because of several fundamental
biological differences:
- A women can have only a very limited number of children in her lifetime; a woman has a limited number of ovaries, she can only bear one child every two to three years, and in pre-civilized times (which is the environment we're discussing when we're dicussing human evolution), women have a strong tendency to die in childbirth. Men, on the other hand, have an essentially limitless supply of sperm; a man can (to put it bluntly) impregnate as many women as he can get his dick into.
- While pregnant with or rearing a child, a woman is essentially unable to provide for herself and the child.1 The best situation, then, is for a woman to have an unencumbered man to provide for her and for a child which he has an interest in supporting.
- This is important: a woman can always be sure that a baby is hers; she's there when it pops out of her. A man can never be absolutely sure that a baby is his (pre-civilization, remember).2
So, the best strategy for a male to use is basically to sleep with anyone he can. On the other hand, a woman has to choose very carefully whom she lets
impregnate her. A woman wants
3 to have children with men who can impregnate lots of women (so her child, if male, will get genes which let him impregnate lots of women), but men who can impregnate lots of women tend not to stick around to support her and the child. So a woman wants a
long-term relationship with one type of man, while sleeping with a different type of man. On the other hand, a man wants to make sure that he isn't supporting some other man's child, which is what is likely to happen if his woman
sleeps around a lot.
See where this is going? Men like
sluts becuase they can sleep with them, but they don't like sluts because they can't control them. And women like
asshole guys because they have genes which allow them to reproduce a lot, but don't like assholes because they are less likely to support the woman and child. There you go.
Bear in mind that things get unbelievably more complicated when take people out of the savannah and put them in a complex society. However, I think that this framework still allows us to explain a lot of seemingly completely irrational behavior.
Also, I didn't really come up with all of this myself; I'm basically repeating arguments I saw on a Discovery Channel show on evolution and human sexual behavior a few years ago. If anyone knows the name of this show, it would be nice if they would /msg me so I can give credit where credit is due.
1. No, I'm not saying that women are inferior to men or that women can't survive without men or that it's inherently wrong to raise a child out of wedlock or any of that crap. Civilization mov
es at a much, much faster rate than biological evolution, and conditions have changed quite a bit since we as humans got the behavioral tendencies that we're stuck with. Time for more evolution.
2. Actually, there are a few mechanisms in place whereby a man can be a little certain of a child's paternity. Newborn babies, whether male or female, resemble their father more than their mother,
and the maternal side of the family will tend to comment on this more than the paternal side, since they're the people with a stake in convincing the man that the kid is his. Watch for this the next t
ime you have a baby.
3. In case you're confused, keep in mind that whenever I say that someone "wants" something, I don't mean that the person wants it in a conscious way; I mean that evolutionary pressures tend to cause people to act in such a way.