Sexual Strategies: A Journey Into Controversy

When I began my scientific exploration of human sexual strategies in 1981, I sensed that the work would be controversial. Mix the ingredients of sex, evolution, and sex differences, and emotions start to run high. Humans don’t seem especially well designed for dispassionate intellectual discourse about any of these topics when they are considered alone, much less when they are combined. When people universally feel so strongly about a topic, however, and when scientific findings are greeted with fear and loathing, it’s a pretty sure sign that one is on to something important. During my undergraduate and graduate training in psychology, from 1971 to 1981, there was no such thing as evolutionary psychology, no one studied human mating strategies, and sex differences were believed to be trivial or nonexistent. The dominant theories of the field emphasized social learning, socialization, and arbitrary social roles—all precursors of social constructionism. If there was a nature to humans, according to mainstream assumptions, it was that humans had no fundamental nature. People were plastic, formless, passive receptacles whose adult form was achieved solely by input that occurred during development—input from media, parents, teachers, peers, and the dominant interests of those in power. Aggression, I was told, was learned and therefore could be unlearned. Whether participants in psychological studies were male or female was not even reported in many published articles, until the American Psychological Association added a rule sometime in the 1970s to require it. Even those reporting the sex composition of their participants rarely analyzed their data to see whether men and women might differ. Those few differences that were so obvious that they could not be swept under the rug—differences in physical aggression and in spatial rotation ability—were attributed to socialization and to arbitrary “gender schemas ” that could be eliminated and replaced with alternative gender-free schemas. One of my graduate school mentors, Dr. Jeanne Block, was featured in a TV documentary