A Mind of Her Own Quotes

“Men’s concern with status differentials has implications for their intimacy with friends. Because an element of competition always exists between them, men are wary about self-disclosure to other men.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Over hundreds of thousands of years, extraverts and introverts have not differed in their average reproductive output (although they might have differed at any one time or place in our evolutionary history). We can conclude that, while there are personality differences, there is no one “personality” that is inherently more adaptively successful than any other.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Female short- and long-term mating strategies may be another candidate for this kind of frequency-dependent selection. Some women adopt a restricted sexual practice which enables them to evaluate the likelihood that the male will commit to long-term investment as a partner and parent. Others, who look for gene quality in their male partners rather than investment, will be prepared to have intercourse after only a short delay with attractive men. The dynamic that holds the strategies in equilibrium is their relative frequencies. As the number of unrestricted women rises so do the number of “sexy sons” that they produce and hence the value of selecting for good genes diminishes. But as the number of restricted women begins to rise in response, the competition amongst them increases and advantages begin to accrue to women who do not waste time and effort searching for providing fathers.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“It is women who act as the gatekeeper in terms of the frequency of sex. For example, it is women, not men, who decide at what point in a relationship sexual intercourse will take place and that point is later than men typically want.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“For most men, most of the time, monogamy is a safe compromise between the wild bonanza of polygyny (achievable only by an elite few) and the reproductive death of complete mating failure.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“The genetic arms race suggests that men want the drama of fast-track sex without personal consequences and that women take a longer view incorporating protracted parental commitment.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Paternal investment is costly and it closes down a man’s opportunities for short-term and cost-free alliances. Most importantly, if he selects an unfaithful partner he runs the risk of a lifetime investment in another man’s child. Men, under monogamy, are as choosy as women and high on their list of desirable qualities comes fidelity—which he can only estimate by the ease with which other men have gained sexual access in the past. So men, as the saying goes, may want a wife who is “a whore in the bedroom”—as long as she is their whore and nobody else’s.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“But even today, young women cannot afford to shrug off a reputation for promiscuity and attempts to turn the double standard on men simply provokes laughter. Sexual conquests enhance rather than detract from a young man’s reputation—his past desirability to women increases his future success with others.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Women’s higher parental investment means that they represent a limiting resource for men and it is for this reason that men’s interest in having sex frequently and with many partners is higher than that of women. In terms of maximizing reproductive success, women prioritize successful reproduction and care of offspring, rather than copulation number. An assisting male partner enhances this by enabling her to raise more than one child at a time. A woman who provides sexual access without expecting continued support is likely to be popular with men (at least in the short term) but extremely unpopular with women because she reduces the going rate for sex.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“There is ample evidence that it is women who suppress women’s sexuality more than men do. Despite feminist arguments about male patriarchal control, a range of psychological, sociological, and anthropological studies suggest quite the opposite.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Between the ages of 15 and 25 a woman reaches her maximum attractiveness.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Women who opt for short-term relationships can garner the best genes at the cost of paternal care; women who opt for long-term relationships may have to sacrifice some genetic quality in order to secure resources and commitment. “Unrestricted” women who pursue short-term relationships find symmetrical men more attractive and care more about a man’s appearance. When forced to choose between dating an attractive man who is not very loyal versus a loyal man who is averagely attractive, unrestricted women choose the former while restricted women choose the latter.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“A woman’s first line of defense against mate poaching is to strengthen her bonds with her male partner by lavishing care and attention on him, and by making herself more attractive. If that fails, she may resort to derogating her rival’s appearance and desirability.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Women, far more than men, deceive the opposite sex by alterations to their appearance such as wearing make-up, painting their nails, getting fake tans, and wearing tight clothing.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Make-up is in short designed to mimic youth, correct asymmetries, and signal sexuality.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Women select short-term sexual relationships when men cannot improve their children’s survival, when there are too few men, or when their upbringing has signaled that men are unreliable investors in their progeny. Short-term relationships for women often amount to serial monogamy in response to a population of males, none of whom can or will provide sustained economic and emotional commitment. And if she can maintain her attractiveness in the face of her increasing age, decreasing looks, and the handicap (from a prospective partner’s viewpoint) of already born children, she can also gain the advantage of genetic diversity and perhaps better genetic quality in her children. But the most secure and stable route is to attract a male who will commit, providing the long-term assistance and resources that she needs to raise multiple offspring simultaneously. Unfortunately that idea has occurred to other women also and she is in a competitive market-place. The currency of the marketplace is what men want in a female partner. To trade successfully, she must advertise her assets by showing that she has more desirable qualities than her female rivals.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“The evidence is clear that women more than men are relationship special­ists. Women’s interpersonal sensitivity has been examined by looking at the ability to read non-verbal information from other’s behavior such as posture, vocal inflection, and facial expression. Many studies have examined sex dif­ferences in accuracy and the results clearly favor women.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Men like other men who share the same interests so that they can focus their activities and discussions on things that are satisfying for both of them. Women are less concerned with common interests than with common character.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Men’s competition colors their sense of identity and their relationships with others. Too much intimacy with other men can be dangerous—it reveals vulnerability that weakens their claim to autonomy and gives away information that might later be used against them. Men crave closeness with other men and achieve it often, but they do so without revealing their private feelings—this they reserve for women with whom they need not compete. Men’s relationships are more like alliances in which they support one another and share their interests, but always with an element of wariness.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Unlike objective cognitive risk appraisals, fear does not work on probability estimates such as likelihoods or odds. It works on an emotional all-or-nothing principle: fear is sensitive to “the possibility rather than the probability of negative consequences”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind Of Her Own: The evolutionary psychology of women

“The remarkable thing is that body shape, as an avenue of female competition, has taken on a life of its own. It has escaped from its roots in men’s actual mate preferences. Despite this, many feminist writers have identified men as the chief culprits responsible for alienating women from their own bodies.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“The sexual revolution of the 1960s to 1980s changed women’s sexual behavior more than men’s yet it is women not men who report regrets and doubts about the increased permissiveness it brought.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“In youth, skin cells are replaced every two weeks but, as we age, the cycle slows down. The cells on the surface of the skin remain there longer and begin to look dull and tired. Natural oil production decelerates and collagen and elastin, which give the skin elasticity, break down, especially after menopause. Pockets of fat beneath the skin’s surface become thinner. The overall effect is a face that is wrinkled, sagging, and boney.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Too many women means that men are in a good market position to enforce their preferred reproductive strategy and that strategy is likely to be one that minimizes paternal investment in favor of maternal investment.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Men’s increased sex drive, their preference for a larger number of sexual partners, and their willingness to drop their standards in order to procure short-term mates all testify to men’s polygynous (if repressed) urges. Mothers fare better when they receive assistance in childrearing. This assistance is chiefly economic with men being far less involved in hands-on care of children. In the environment of evolutionary adaptation, men provided meat which augmented the calories that women themselves were able to provide by foraging.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“The fact that women work is no reason to suppose that they have altered their personalities. From an evolutionary point of view, the oddity is that there have been historical periods when women did not work. Without the calories that women provided through gathering tubers, vegetables, and honey, families would have starved. What marks our present-day environment as special is not the fact of women working but of women having to leave their children in order to do so.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“When things go wrong, girls and women turn to their friends for emotional empathy and advice. Women provide a sympathetic ear and are more focused on supportive listening than on problem solving. Men react to stressors by distracting themselves or putting the problem out of their mind: “A problem shared is a problem doubled” seems to typify their view. To men, unburdening to a friend not only advertises an inability to solve their own problems but entails divulging errors of judgment—weaknesses that gave rise to the problem in the first place.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“If gender differences are arbitrary, it is a curious coincidence that they follow such a similar pattern around the world. Even if sex differences were driven by differential parental treatment, we would still want to ask why a trait is considered more desirable for one sex than another. If they were driven by selective imitation, we would still want to ask why children might show a preferential and untutored interest in the behavior of their own sex. If driven by gender schema, we would need to ask why sex-specific conformity is so attractive to children. If driven by the division of labor, we still need to explain the preference of men and women for different social and occupational roles. Social constructionist and environmental theories explain the transmission of gendered status quo - but without asking where it came from.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Where we can open up new opportunities for women’s self-expression, enjoyment, and achievement we should do it because it is morally right. But that is very different from saying that gender has no biological basis and that the nature of men and women is wholly constructed by society. The problem with such a position is that it fails to address the issue of why sex differences take the particular form that they do.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women

“Nobody can seriously doubt that environmental factors modify the expression of sex differences. The problem with socialization theories is that they ask the environment to do all of the work. They fail to recognize that the environment is acting on an evolved organ—the mind. Of course, forces such as reinforcement, imitation, cognitive schema, and conformity all modulate our actions. The pleasure of social approval, the ability to learn through observation, our internal representations, and the desire to be like others—these are part of human psychology everywhere. The question is whether these processes alone can explain the origins of the cross-cultural differences between male and female. Altering reinforcement contingencies for sex-typical behavior can temporarily change it: boys and girls will show cross-sex play where the environment is manipulated to encourage it and social approval is contingent on it. But when that intervention is removed, children revert to the same-sex preference that characterizes children everywhere.”
― Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women