The Evolution of Human Sexuality Quotes

“The ultimate reproductive fact—that males stand to benefit from copulating with any fertile female (if the risk is low enough), whereas females do not stand to benefit from copulating with many males (no matter how low the risk)—is most directly expressed in the proximate psychological fact that the typical male is at least slightly sexually attracted to most females, whereas the typical female is not sexually attracted to most males.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“Women appear to seek extramarital sex when they experience some deficit—sexual, emotional, or, perhaps, economic—in their marriage, or perceive another man as being superior to (not merely different from) their husbands. Indeed, wives' adultery may be more often a byproduct of their husbands' desire for variety than their own: a husband's desire may cause him to neglect his wife sexually or emotionally, and his infidelity may trigger a retaliatory affair.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“First, the notion must be abandoned that women are simply repressed men waiting to be liberated: large numbers of women will not be appealed to by the slavish mimicking of men's magazines. Selection has not only not favored a female propensity to become sexually aroused by the sight of males, but very likely it has disfavored this propensity. Selection has, however, favored female abilities to discriminate visually, and to be sexually interested in, males who evidence fitness. Sexual arousal—primarily via touch—may eventually result from this female interest.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“The male's desire to look at female genitals, especially genitals he has not seen before, and to seek out opportunities to do so, is part of the motivational process that maximizes male reproductive opportunities. There is no corresponding benefit for females in wanting to look at male genitals, hence selection has not favored female impulses to become sexually aroused by the sight of male genitals or to seek out opportunities to look at them. If females tended to be sexually aroused by the sight of male genitals, men would be able to obtain sexual intercourse via genital display; but the deliberate male display of genitals to unfamiliar women is understood to be a kind of threat, whereas a similar female display is understood to be a sexual invitation. Although the practice of covering the genitals with clothing is almost universal, the underlying reasons for concealing male and female genitals probably are different.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“Unlike polygyny, polyandry is extremely rare among human societies, is not common among any known hunter/gatherer peoples, and probably was virtually absent throughout most of human evolutionary history.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“In the West, as in all human societies, copulation is usually a female service or favor; women compete for husbands and for other relationships with men, not for copulation (when prostitutes compete for customers they are competing for money, not copulation). This competition is artificially magnified in Western societies because, by custom and by law, polygyny has been almost eliminated.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“The intractably male nature of pornography is problematical for those who wish to see men and women as in some fundamental sense sexually identical. Individuals who believe that human sexuality is basically a male sexuality, and thus imagine that sexually liberated women will act and feel as men do, must cope first with the evidence that while many women respond sexually to pornography in an experimental setting, few apparently are motivated to seek it out, and second with the evidence that sex differences in sexual arousal to depictions of nude members of the opposite sex seem to be as substantial as they ever were.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“The evidence suggests, then, that for millions of years hominid males and females pursued substantially different reproductive "strategies" and typically exhibited very different behaviors: throughout most of human evolutionary history, hunting, fighting, and that elusive activity, "politics," were highly competitive, largely male domains. It is not a simple question of high female parental investment and male competition for females: males and females invested in different ways. Not only did males hunt while females gathered, but, if warfare was often over land and other scarce resources from which the winning males' offspring benefited, male fighting was in part parental investment; that is, like hunting and gathering, fighting and nurturing were part of the human division of labor by sex.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“While de facto monogamy is the general rule among humans, the overwhelming majority of human societies are classified as "polygynous" because some men have more than one wife; there can be little doubt that among preliterate humans the male variance in reproductive success is greater than the female variance.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“Much of the human cerebral cortex is devoted to the complexities of language and tool-use. Humans are genetically adapted to learn to speak a natural language, but the differences among natural languages apparently are trivial compared with their fundamental similarities in structure and ontogeny. There is no evidence that variations in natural languages have any adaptive significance, hence the human capacity to learn a variety of languages is best considered an incidental byproduct of linguistic ability.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“Females rarely can increase their reproductive success by copulating with many males, but they have a great deal to gain by copulating with fit males and a great deal to lose by copulating with unfit males. If a male is unsuccessful in a mating encounter he has lost almost nothing, even if he has inadvertently mated with a female of a different species, whereas a female often risks months of time and a great amount of energy in attempting reproduction; a reproductive failure is much more costly for her than it is for a male. Since it is adaptive for a male to pretend to fitness whether or not he is fit, it is adaptive for a female to be resistant to courtship—thereby evoking further and stronger displays—in order to discriminate genuinely fit males and perhaps to incite male-male competition.”
― Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality