Despite the fact that Bateman had only tested Darwin’s theory on fruit flies, he felt confident that his conclusions could be extrapolated to far more complex organisms, like human beings. He proclaimed that a dichotomy in sex roles, namely ‘an indiscriminating eagerness’ in males and a ‘discriminating passivity’ in females, was the norm across the animal kingdom. ‘Even in a derived monogamous species (e.g. man) this sex difference might be expected to persist as a rule,’ Bateman concluded. These fixed sex roles, Bateman proposed, were underwritten by anisogamy. A female’s reproductive success
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