Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (8 page)

In the 1950s, 60% of women lost their virginity to the man they were engaged to or had married. Today, that figure is just 1%. One in five women born in the West or Europe since 1960
is childless—prior to 1960, women who could conceive did so, as there was little contraception available—and over 2 million women now get divorced every year in China. A woman in her twenties today is just as likely to have a condom in her purse as a lipstick. Women who are now looking for sex are usually looking for a boost to their self-esteem.

By age thirty, the majority of young women have had three or more sexual partners. These women used their twenties to discover who they are, not to settle down and raise a family. Most women’s magazines target women in their twenties with questions about their sexuality and techniques. There is rarely a women’s magazine around that doesn’t feature the word “sex” or “orgasm” on its cover, and women’s toilets now have condom machines. Yet television soaps still have a courting couple married within six episodes, suggesting that the validation of love and romance is marriage. The dilemma confronting women today is that most men have hardly changed at all and don’t match up to the men portrayed on television and in the movies. Many men still hold attitudes and have values that are similar to those of their fathers and forefathers and are unwilling to come out of their masculine comfort zone of work and sport.

Current media hype tells young women that it’s OK to participate in what was previously known as promiscuity, yet at the same time, today’s women are also interested in or obsessed with permanent relationships and can’t seem to get enough of celebrity couples like Posh Spice and David Beckham and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

The women who are leading today’s sexual revolution, however, are not women in their twenties; they are women in their forties. They have a career that was established in their thirties and usually have children who are older and more independent. Many women have decided that they no longer need marriage and that being stuck in a boring and loveless relationship is not for them.

Traditional marriage offered women social status and a level of security because until the 1970s, most families were headed by male breadwinners, so women received a financial benefit. Traditional marriage no longer provides women with these things because they can now gather their own resources and achieve their own status, and a marriage can end overnight.

In addition to the new social circumstances today’s women find themselves in, understanding how ancestral women evolved gives insight into how today’s women think, react, and value their relationships. Women always put love before anything else in their life, and they measure their success and self-worth by the strength of their relationships. Men, on the other hand, measure their own success and self-worth by their achievements and accomplishments. Ancestral women evolved as the carers and lovers of men because they needed the security
men offered for food, protection, and survival, and this was the trade-off. A woman who could not get a man to love her might be rejected from the cave and be at the mercy of enemies and wild animals. Women loved and nurtured their children so they could successfully raise the next generation of gene carriers. Some males didn’t return from the hunt or from wars, so women needed to give and receive love from the other females; they needed a support group for their survival.

This was their way of life for hundreds of thousands of years, and this situation has changed only overnight, in evolutionary terms. For the first time the introduction of the contraceptive pill allowed women to have the choice to work or have children. The women’s movement of the 1960s gave women the opportunity to think and act independently and make their own decisions. The equal opportunity charge in the 1980s and 1990s brought women to new positions of power and influence. Nevertheless, the mind of the twenty-first century’s independent, self-reliant, self-supporting woman is still plagued by the primal feeling of wanting to have a man in order to feel secure and fulfilled. This primal urge thrusts insecurity, self-doubt, and guilt on the new-age woman, and she has no idea what’s causing it. And herein lies the problem—it’s taken around a million years for the hardwiring in a woman’s brain to evolve the responses she is feeling today, but the changes to her place in the world have occurred in little over fifty years. Her biology is now at odds with her environment.

Researchers are finally uncovering the real things that women want in their men, and these things are not always what today’s women claim they want. What twenty-first century women really want in men are the same basic things that their ancestral mothers wanted in theirs—good hunting skills and the resources needed to successfully provide food and protect them and their young. As a result, today’s women want men who have money, education, a sense of humor, status, and authority—all of which indicate good resources. This is why women are attracted to men who are ambitious, intelligent, hardworking, motivated, and respected by others.

Ancestral women wanted men who were taller, older, had V-shaped torsos, and were physically coordinated—all signs that showed their ability to hunt and protect. Even in our politically correct, supposedly equal twenty-first century, women still prefer a man to have a nicely developed chest and shoulders—but not too big, because he could be egotistical or selfish—and a six-pack of abs would be a wonderful bonus. These are things that would be useful to hunt and catch a wild buffalo or to carry heavy things or kill spiders and are mostly irrelevant to the daily lives of twenty-first century men.

Women’s attraction to these physical attributes shows how their brain hardwiring is still seeking the exact same things their ancestors demanded.

So, in a word, women want men with
resources
. Most importantly, a woman is attracted to men who will share those resources with her and her children.

It was discovered in 2009 that other female primates also favor males who share their resources. Cristina Gomes and her colleague
Christophe Boesch
from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany studied chimps in the Tai Forest Reserve in the Ivory Coast and found that chimpanzees enter into “deals” whereby they exchange meat for sex. They observed the male chimps as they hunted and monitored the number of times they copulated. The males that shared their meat with females that were not “in heat” doubled the number of times they mated with those females. This increased the probability of fertilizing the females, and the females thereby increased their overall food intake.

Dr. Gomes said this study finally revealed the link between good hunting skills and reproductive success among primates.

But it takes time for a woman to evaluate whether a man has these resources. It could take three dates, three weeks, or three months. This is why women fall in love more slowly than men, and because of higher oxytocin levels, they also fall deeper. Forget the concept of the metrosexual man who gets his hair and nails done, cries during
Titanic
, and likes to talk endlessly about his love life. He makes a great friend but not a solid life partner. The absolute bottom line is, women want men who can provide
resources
.

Having resources is the prime criterion for attractiveness in a man, the most powerful of all ancient female motivational preferences. It has been shown to be as strong as women’s inbuilt fear of snakes and heights.

Dr. David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, heads the area of Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology. In his groundbreaking work on human mating, he conducted the biggest ever cross-cultural examination of people’s preferences for a mate when he sampled the responses of 10,047 people in thirty-seven cultures. He covered modern and primitive cultures and cultures that practiced socialism, communism, capitalism, monogamy, polygamy, and all religious beliefs. He found that across the board women valued a mate’s resources twice as highly as men do. His research confirmed what all other tests since the 1930s have shown: Women value a man’s financial prospects as being twice as important as men value a woman’s financial prospects.

Women have always needed to be able to identify cues to a man’s resources or his potential to acquire them. Buss also tested 1,491 Americans using the same tests and got the same results as the tests carried out in the 1930s—women value a man’s resources. We studied 1,295 ads in the personal columns of magazines and newspapers and found that women list resources as a desired trait in a partner eleven times more often than men do. Whereas men asked for health and youth in women, women sought resources and “sincerity,” which translates into commitment of his resources to her.

Women are attracted to high-status men because status is a clear sign of a man’s ability to control resources. That’s why it’s common to see a champion boxer whose face looks like road kill surrounded by young, attractive women. Not necessarily smart women either, but young, attractive ones—that is, good potential gene carriers. Think Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion.

All surveys conducted on male and female mate-selection preferences show how women consistently give a high rating to a man’s status, prestige, power, position, and financial prospects, whereas men rate these attributes as low when selecting a female mate.
²
Women see these attributes as highly
desirable in a long-term partner, but they are less important in a casual sex partner. These studies also found that women place high value on education as an indicator of resources, confirming the truth in the old cliché that women prefer to marry doctors and lawyers. In other words, he has no resources now, but he will have them soon. Buss found that women in every culture rate a potential mate’s resources significantly higher than men do, ranging from 38% more important to German women, to 63% more important to Taiwanese women, and to 87% for Indian women.

Women everywhere complain that there are few eligible bachelors available. Yet every café, restaurant, disco, club, and office building employs unattached males to whom these women are blind. This is because the female criterion for “eligible bachelor” is a man who has sufficient resources—or the potential to get them—to provide for her and her offspring, and few women believe they will find him serving coffee in a café, so they tend not to even notice him.

In 2008, evolutionary psychologist Dr. Thomas Pollett from Newcastle University and coresearcher Professor Daniel Nettle conducted research that found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance and resources. They found that the wealthier a man is, the more frequently his partner has orgasms. Pollett and Nettle surveyed 1,534 Chinese women with male partners and analyzed the in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income, and other factors.

They found that 121 of these women (7.9%) always had orgasms during sex, 408 women (26.6%) had them often, 762
women (49.7%) sometimes had them, and 243 women (15.8%) orgasmed rarely or never. These figures are very close to those of women in European and Western countries. They also found that the frequency of women’s orgasms increased with the income or wealth of their partners. Although a number of other factors also affected women’s orgasm rate, money was the most powerful one.

These findings are consistent with what we reported in
The Definitive Book of Body Language
. We discussed women’s orgasm rate relative to a man’s body symmetry and attractiveness, and the Pollett-Nettle study shows how a man’s resources are an even more powerful force than his appearance.

Pollett, Nettle, and David Buss all believe female orgasms evolved to allow women to bond emotionally with high-quality males by signaling to a man that she is highly sexually satisfied, and therefore unlikely to seek sex with other men, and so he should invest in her and her children. The bottom line is that men with more resources are more desirable mates and cause women to experience more orgasms.