Ably dissected by Echidne, Figleaf and Amanda Marcotte.
Highlights:
- Echidne notes that studies that support common gender/racial stereotypes tend to be held to a lower standard of evidence.
- Figleaf notes that despite ev-psych bloviating “more sexual partners” does not actually equate to “more reproductive success” in the age of reliable contraception, and there may in fact be a direct link between the modern availability of contraception and the pool of women willing to have casual sex generally, not just with rich men.
- Amanda tangentially notes that right-wingers are not wrong about the fact that reproductive rights lead to more sexual freedom, they’re “just wrong to be such whiny, resentful, begrudging babies about it”.
- This paragraph from Amanda about one of the never-ending just-not-getting-it aspects of pop ev-psych (emphasis mine):
You know, I won’t even disagree that men who have more wealth and show it off more probably have more sexual partners. You could prove that over and over and over again. You can do it in cross-cultural studies. But you haven’t done a damn thing to prove that it’s instinctual instead of socially induced behavior, no matter how many times you do it, or how many cultures you bring in. Because no matter what you do, you’re just comparing apples to apples, or in this case, patriarchies to patriarchies. Unless you can include non-existent cultures that have complete liberation for women and complete economic equality, all you’re proving is that in cultures where one sex is at an economic disadvantage to the other, the sex with the economic advantage can leverage it on the dating market. That’s it. You’ve proven that women don’t make as much money on average as men, which any feminist or government statistician could have told you.
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{ 7 comments }
What about all those women with inherited or aquired wealth? How do they compare with rich men?
And you have left out the sexual attraction of male hunks with no money.
Not to worry.
@ john cramer:
Those are indeed very good questions. I wonder why the researchers on the study that is being critiqued didn’t bother to ask them?
I also wonder what else the researchers controlled for. In our society, income seems to be positively correlated with atheism, with thinness and with health status; negatively correlated with marriage; and, for all we know, it could be positively correlated with sexual assertiveness as well.
Yes, well. What the researchers did and did not control for becomes a rather redundant question when you look at Echidne’s demonstration of how they mismanaged some of the fundamental statistical parameter allocation before they even did their calculations.
This study should never have made it through peer review on purely technical grounds, let alone the implicit assumptions made in their abstract which are never acknowledged let alone controlled for.
Hi Hoyden, thanks for the mention!
A minor quibble though: even before (modern) contraception multiple partners don’t equal more reproductive success for promiscuous men. At least not inside the gigantic set of pop Ev-Psych assumptions about women being “evolved” to require male breadwinners so they can stay home and raise children. Because by (Ev-Psych) definition children fathered by love-em-or-leave-em types will be proportionately less likely to survive to childhood.
Of course there might be *other* common social-group organizations (oh, say, the related groups of women who typically provide up to 90% of total calories consumed by hunter-gatherer groups) that would have made it less perilous for men to pursue a multiple-partner strategy and still reproduce successfully. But disappointment awaits the Ev-Psycho who proposes that because… if it made reproductive success easier for promiscuous males then neither would it penalize promiscuous females either… and there goes all their research “proving” that women are “evolved” to be monogamous.
So… if there’s not an *evolutionary* case for promiscuous males vs. monogamous females then… gee, maybe it’s a (subvertable) *socially constructed* and, oh, maybe *maintained through violence* reason why men have (historically) been more able to pursue multiple partners while women have (historically) had better survival rates through monogamy. But that would be called “anthropology” not “evolutionary psychology” and, minus the excuse of “my genes made me do it” such structures wouldn’t be off limits to criticism or deconstruction.
Thanks again,
figleaf
figleaf, great exposition of the mutually contradictory premises that pop ev-psych has constructed regarding sexual stereotypes. The cognitive dissonance is quite astonishing, isn’t it?
“What about all those women with inherited or aquired wealth? How do they compare with rich men?”
Yes, excellent question. I wonder if they studied women who earn significantly above average whether they’d find they still go for men with teh moneyz. I suspect not. My partner earns significantly less than me.
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