Short Cuts: Episode I 
Human Mate Selection Is a Many-Splendored Thing
David Buss has a grand unified theory about the evolution of desire. His research has identified 115 love acts, 147 things you can do to upset or annoy the opposite sex, and 237 reasons to copulate. But can that help me find romance?
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The flight to Rochester went smoothly enough. I had loaded up my roller bag with turtlenecks and plenty of spare batteries and booked a room in the same Radisson where Buss himself was staying. Stalking a person is never terribly comfortable, but Buss was obliging, even going so far as to agree to meet for a drink the night of our arrival. There in the hotel bar, I hoped, he would dispel my confusions. “Female choice” may work for peahens, but it didn’t exactly fit with my understanding of how women had been mated for most of human history; at best, it seemed like a recent development. And as far as preferences were concerned, had subjects of the International Mate Selection Project admitted to what they really preferred? Even if they had, did the preferences motivate actions consistently enough to drive natural selection?
My questions wouldn’t be answered that night, though. Because of a snowstorm somewhere over Middle America, Buss was forced to reschedule his flight, and so I was left to nurse a glass of plonk in solitude. Nor would I have a chance the next day. Buss arrived in the afternoon, rumpled and without a warm coat, and was hurried from rescheduled event to rescheduled event. And the subject of his lecture that evening was not even mate selection; it was murder, another focus of his research. (Homicide, Buss has concluded, is an adaptive solution triggered in certain specific contexts; as evidence he points to the near universality of homicidal fantasies.) Nevertheless, my sights were still trained on mating. At the end of the murder talk I bought my own copy of The Evolution of Desire, and that night, in the comfort of my hotel room, with its adjustable bed and profusion of pillows, I riffled through its pages. Consistent with the back cover’s promise of a “unified theory” of love and sex, the book ran the gamut, from casual sex to long-term relationships, jealousy to menopause, infertility to “women’s hidden sexual strategies.” Intriguing as that last topic was, I zeroed in on chapter five, “Attracting a Partner.” First came strategies that men use to attract women (namely “Displaying Resources,” “Displaying Commitment,” “Displaying Physical Prowess,” and “Displaying Bravado and Self-Confidence”), followed by a review of women’s “attraction tactics.” I snapped to attention, plumped my pillows, opened my notepad.
“Enhancing Appearance” was tactic number one. Women must look young and attractive or else “lose a competitive edge.” So we females wear makeup, get implants, and pursue those elusive lustrous locks: “Women highlight, bleach, tint, or dye their hair, and they give it extra body with conditioners, egg yolks, or beer.” (A ray of hope: I had not yet tried yolks or beer.) However, these cosmetic interventions serve better to win short-term paramours, the book explained. “Women who seek a lasting mate,” I was reassured to learn, “have at their disposal a wide range of tactics, including displays of loyalty, signals of common interests, and acts of intelligence.”
This wide range of tactics—here is what I needed! Sadly, that was the last mention of them. Also cataloged were the strategies of playing hard to get or putting down other women who might be rivals. Then came the strategy of making sexual overtures: According to a study of men in bars, some good strategies were rubbing your chest or pelvis against a man, looking at him seductively, puckering your lips and blowing kisses, sucking on a straw or finger, and/or bending over to accentuate your curves. I made a note of it: Suck on finger. Finally, acting “submissive, helpless, or dumb” can sometimes help a woman lure a man under the pretense of no-strings-attached sex. If she is wily enough, she can then insinuate herself into the man’s life and dupe him into a commitment in spite of himself.
I shut the book and turned on my laptop. There was an e-mail from my little sister, who lives in Los Angeles and who had lately plunged into the Internet-dating fray; a guy she had seen a few times was coming over the following evening to play the word game Boggle. (She’s a big Boggle fan—in fact both a big fan of Boggle and a fan of a variant with a larger letter grid sold under the name Big Boggle.) She was, she wrote in her message, a little apprehensive about how things would go. I thought about the evolutionary advice I might give her—put beer in her hair, insult other women, act stupid, blow kisses over the Boggle set, rub her pelvis against her date while sucking on her finger—but in the end I just wished her good luck.
The next day, I followed Buss to Philadelphia, where he gave another talk, on “Sexual Conflict in Human Mating,” at Villanova University. This one I’d been looking forward to, for there’s nothing like a broad, sweeping title to make you believe something’s in it for you. (Not at all conforming to the picture of the narrowly focused academic, Buss will never deliver one of those talks on, say, “Seasonally Dependent Patterns of Allergies in Six Women from Fiji.”) The day was altogether easier than its predecessor. The Pennsylvania cold nipped but didn’t stab, and there was time to spare. At a leisurely lunch Buss traded recollections with a deadpan psychologist colleague who, like Buss himself, had gone to Berkeley for graduate school. The talk was later that afternoon, in a basement classroom, where students were seated in rows behind fixed tables. They seemed to pay close attention, perhaps because they were as keen as I was to have their romantic lives explained by an expert.
The first slide was of an iceberg. What is known about sexual conflict, Buss announced, is just the very tip. We were back to sexual selection, my Darwinian bugaboo—but with a twist. For while it may seem obvious that male-female conflict is a significant force in the dynamics of mating, such conflict didn’t figure largely into classical sexual selection theory, which emphasized traits that help males compete and females choose. Theorists of evolution have since recognized that selection may be driven by the clash between a male’s and a female’s interests, what Buss called a “sexually antagonistic coevolutionary arms race.” Just as parasites evolve to outwit a host’s immune defenses and the host’s defenses counter-evolve, a behavior in one sex that puts the other at a disadvantage may, over the long evolutionary haul, provoke a countering tactic. So men lie about the depths of their affections to get women into bed; women become better at detecting lies. Men attempt to coerce women; women develop ways to protect themselves from coercion.
A little ways into his presentation, Buss paused to tell a favorite joke. “I’m sorry, I’ve been painting a bad picture of men,” he said. “One postdoc student of mine, after I was done presenting all these data on men, she said, ‘David, I have a hypothesis that can explain all your data.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Men are slime.’”
Indeed, it’s not hard to see why evolutionary psychologists have from time to time been accused of waving the banner of science over things your grandmother might have told you about the opposite sex. Invoked in this talk were the same male and female types that Buss has alluded to in other work: randy men and fastidious women (though not, it should be said, chaste maidens; “short-term mating” and “extra-pair copulation” have become well-recognized components of women’s mating strategies). For Buss, whether or not his version of relations between the sexes conforms to your grandmother’s is beside the point; his mission has been to measure the differences in men’s and women’s sexual psychologies and to weave them into a broader theory, or set of theories, that can generate falsifiable predictions. In his conflict lecture, as in his later investigations of mating, he placed a more elaborate frame around the original preferences, casting them in the light of—there was that word again—strategies. There were short-term and long-term strategies and counterstrategies and counter-counterstrategies, every man or woman a kind of cyberneticist of the heart. Meanwhile, the underlying grandmaternal picture hadn’t changed much: Men are more desiring, women choosier.
But with sexual conflict the very topic before us, and the possibility of coercion having been mentioned, I again wondered in what sense women had “chosen.” And if women had in fact been coy and discriminating, what had led us to be that way? For it’s not as if Trivers’s theory of sexual selection requires females to be sexually stingy; other species behave differently. A primatologist, Sarah Hrdy, was one of the first to point this out back in the seventies; her studies of langurs showed the females to be quite sexually promiscuous—a counteradaptation, she theorized, to defend against the threat of male infanticide, since a male who had copulated with a mother in the past was less likely to kill her infant. So much for passive, discriminating females. More recently, a biologist named Patricia Adair Gowaty has argued for a model in which the rivalry between males and females to control the means of reproduction is seen as the basis not for uniform behavioral traits but for the ability to adjust to varying environments. It’s been demonstrated in crickets, guppies, and frogs, among other species, that as a female’s probability of survival drops, she becomes less and less choosy about her mate.
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