A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

by Heather E. Heying

As women have increasingly engaged in reproductive strategy three, the short game, sex has become more mundane and easier to source. Contra the messaging of sex-positive feminists, engaging in this short game diminishes the sexual power of women. When people of both sexes are routinely seeking frivolous, no-emotional-connection sex, they are creating conditions in which everyone is behaving like men at their (second) worst. It’s not as bad as rape, obviously. But it’s not as good as strategy one, either. Society sliding toward this third reproductive strategy for both men and women is a variation on the Sucker’s Folly—the tendency of concentrated short-term benefit (sexual pleasure) not only to obscure risk and long-term cost, but also to drive acceptance even when the net analysis is negative (in reducing the chances of finding love and all that flows from it). Furthermore, women often don’t intuit that there are two distinct male strategies (aside from rape), and so are often advertising toward men engaged in strategy three, the one that looks for one-night stands, while actually angling for men interested in strategy one. Hotness is a manifestation of sexual strategy three gaining primacy. Beauty, by comparison, is a manifestation of the first sexual strategy, the one that’s in it for the long term. Hotness fades fast with reproductive potential. Beauty fades far more slowly. We are due for a major renegotiation of the deal between the sexes. We cannot go back, and must...