Love, Lust and Homo Sapiens

By Caryl Rivers, Rosalind C. Barnett is a senior scientist at Brandeis University and Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Their book, "Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs," was published in August by Basic Books. and Rosalind Barnett, Rosalind C. Barnett is a senior scientist at Brandeis University and Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Their book, "Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs," was published in August by Basic Books.
February 13, 2005

    Are women less desirable to men if they are high achievers at work? Do men prefer the "step and fetch it" subservient woman to the one with career aspirations? Two studies receiving major media attention say that the answer is yes. Not surprisingly, this "bad news for smart women" scenario fueled headlines.

    "They're Too Smart for These Guys," the Chicago Tribune declared. "Glass Ceilings at Altar as Well as Boardroom," the New York Times announced.

    Columnist Maureen Dowd, picking up on the studies, asked whether the feminist movement was "some sort of cruel hoax," writing that "the more women achieve, the less desirable they are."

    In truth, the evidence for this notion is flimsy -- ambiguous questions put to tiny sample groups including, in one study, 18- and 19-year-old men with little workplace experience. And yet this latest theory about male-female relationships already seems to have become part of a new conventional wisdom. Gone is love's rapturous "old black magic." The replacement theory posited by evolutionary psychology holds that the human mating ritual is driven by a collection of hard-wired instincts and impulses that nature has parceled out to males and females in proportions largely relating to species survival.

    Among evolutionary psychology's truisms:

    * Women are by nature coy, modest and monogamous.

    * Women with many partners are unnatural, while men are inherently promiscuous. Natural selection instructs men to "spread their seed" widely.

    * Women want successful men to provide for them, and older men generally have more resources than younger men. Women would run right past Brad Pitt if he was a struggling actor instead of a rich and famous one, and fall into the arms of a gray-haired but wealthy swain.

    * Men lust after very young, baby-faced, presumably fertile women. University of Texas psychologist Davis Buss makes this claim in "The Evolution of Desire," and pop culture revels in this notion.

    There's a simple appeal to this worldview, as demonstrated by the mainstream media's salivation at such "evidence" as CEO Jack Welch cheating on his second wife with a younger editor at the Harvard Business Review. Unfortunately for this theory, new research suggests that evolution casts males and females far less stereotypically than the evolutionary psychologists imagine.

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