The publication of Robert Trivers’ paper didn’t just mark a watershed in the way scientists understood sexual behaviour, but in how the everyday woman and man in the street understood it too. Sexual selection theory, revamped for the twentieth century, rapidly became a tool to explain women’s and men’s relationship habits. Bateman’s theories, once almost forgotten, were transformed into a fully-blown set of universal principles, cited hundreds of times and considered solid as a rock. On that rock now rests an entire field of work on sex differences.
