When Men Behave Badly Quotes

“Feminist scholars rightly stress the importance of power in sexual conflict. It must be recognized, however, that men’s motivations for power, status, and resources exist in part because women have preferred to mate with men who possess power, status, and resources. Neglecting this part of the causal origins of sexual conflict will impede efforts to alter it.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Men need to understand the sexual over-perception bias that afflicts their mating minds. They should know that, most of the time, the women smiling at them are merely being friendly or polite, not signaling sexual interest.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Online pornography allows individuals to explore creative sexual possibilities they never knew existed but also creates entirely unrealistic expectations for real life sexual interactions.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Which men are most likely to be controlling? Those who are lower in mate value. These men ramp up heavy mate guarding because they believe they have lucked out in attracting a desirable woman and believe that she will be difficult or impossible to replace.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Male sexual jealousy is the leading cause of the murder of adult women, accounting for between 50 and 70 percent of all such homicides.8 Police know this. When women are murdered, the prime suspects are boyfriends, husbands, ex-boyfriends, and ex-husbands. Although jealousy sometimes motivates women to murder, only 3 percent of murdered men are killed by their romantic partners or exes, and many of these female-perpetrated homicides are women defending themselves against a jealously violent man.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Both sexes typically get extremely upset at cues to both sexual and emotional infidelity, as they should—people sometimes fall in love with those with whom they have sex and conversely have sex with those with whom they become emotionally involved. So researchers asked: What would upset you more: (A) Imagining your partner having sexual intercourse with someone else? Or (B) imagining your partner falling in love with someone else? This method revealed large sex differences, with the majority of men, roughly 60 percent, selecting sexual infidelity (A) and most women, roughly 85 percent, selecting emotional infidelity (B).”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“sexual jealousy, once considered by psychologists to be pathological or a character defect, is in fact a supremely important emotion motivating mate-retention solutions. Adaptive in the evolutionary sense of leading to greater survival and reproductive success, of course, does not mean morally good.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Using one's own sexual mind as an infallible guide for inferring the sexual minds of others is an error.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Identifying evolutionary origins of nefarious behavior in no way justifies or excuses it.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“From the moment of conception, when the one tiny sperm joins the nutrient-rich egg, women are already contributing much more than the man.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“The key point is that men who have success in attracting women are typically more likely to use coercion, and those who are less successful are less likely to use coercion. These findings refute the evolution-based mate-deprivation hypothesis of rape.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“A male approaches a female and begins to flirt. She is not aware that he has slipped her a drug that renders her unconscious. He then takes her body to his home, positions her correctly, and has sex with her while she is knocked out. If you’ve read about Bill Cosby, this may sound familiar. You may be surprised to learn that this is one of the mating strategies of the funnel-web spider, Agelenopsis aperta.44 These male spiders have evolved a strategy of anesthetizing females who are reluctant to mate using a chemical cocktail.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Scelza also discovered that cultures differ dramatically in how much parental investment men typically devote to their children. In cultures with heavy male parental investment, men showed an even stronger endorsement of sexual infidelity as more distressing than emotional infidelity; more than 90 percent in those cultures, such as the Himba, chose sexual infidelity as more jealousy inducing. The more investment men make, the more important it becomes for them to ensure that they are the actual genetic fathers, at least from an evolutionary perspective. In short, cultures vary in how jealous men get about a partner’s sexual infidelity, but it’s not random or arbitrary cultural variability. It is theoretically predictable variability based on how much men invest in their children, which in turn corresponds to the costs they would incur by investing in a child who might just be their rival’s.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“How common is resource infidelity? One survey of a thousand individuals in New York City revealed that 40 percent of married women and 37 percent of married men had a secret bank account.12 A Harris survey found somewhat lower numbers, but nonetheless 31 percent admitted lying to their spouse about some aspect of finances—58 percent of those who did hid cash, 30 percent hid a bill, 15 percent hid a bank account, 11 percent lied about earnings, and another 11 percent lied about debt.13 Another study found that 80 percent of respondents admitted to hiding money from their spouse.14 Regardless of the exact numbers, which vary from study to study, sample to sample, and method to method, financial infidelity is clearly not uncommon.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Interestingly, married women in their early thirties are most likely to have an affair, perhaps reflecting a motivation to switch mates while their desirability is high and they are still fertile. Additional lines of evidence support the notion that infidelity serves a mate-switching function. First, women who initiate affairs are much more likely to suffer from marital dissatisfaction than women who do not. This might seem blindingly obvious, but the same studies show that men who have affairs do not, in fact, differ from those who abstain from affairs in their levels of marital happiness. Second, women are much more likely than men to become emotionally involved with, and to fall in love with, their affair partners. Roughly 79 percent of women report doing so, in contrast to only 30 percent of men.9 Moreover, women are more likely to cite emotional involvement as a reason for the affair. Men are more likely to cite pure sexual pleasure. These critical sex differences point to dramatically different functional reasons for male and female infidelity. For women especially, they point to the mate-switching function; for men, the desire for sexual variety.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“A woman’s mate value even varies over the monthly ovulation cycle. Subtle changes in women’s attractiveness reflect the ovulatory phase. Their skin glows a bit more, their waist-to-hip ratio becomes slightly lower, and their voices rise a bit, all qualities found to enhance perceptions of female beauty. The fact that women become more exacting in their mate preferences at precisely this time in their cycle might reflect an adaptation to monitor their own mate value and adjust their standards accordingly.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Gazelles have evolved an antipredator adaptation known as stotting.20 Stotting is a behavior in which the gazelles leap into the air, lifting all four legs simultaneously, land more or less on the same spot, and then bounce-leap on all fours several times. Gazelles stot only when they detect cheetahs. The tactic serves two possible functions. First, it alerts the cheetahs that they have been spotted and communicates that the hungry predators have lost the element of surprise—one of their key weapons. Second, it signals to the cheetahs that the gazelles are in excellent physical condition. It is as though the stotting gazelles are saying: “I am so athletic, so nimble, so fleet of foot, that you won’t be able to catch me. You are better off going after more catchable prey.” Stotting works. Cheetahs rarely go after gazelles after watching them stot.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“One colleague captured the conflict that can ensue by expressing frustration after several years of unhappy dating: “Why am I being pestered by guys I don’t care about, but the men I’m genuinely attracted to seem to show little interest in me?” I told her that she is an 8 chasing after 10s but being pursued by 6s. It dawned on her that pursuing men just outside of her mate-value range was the source of her misery.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Differences in desirability create havoc in at least two fundamental ways. The first centers around misperceptions. A man who is a 6 but thinks he’s an 8 will be utterly irritated when the woman who’s an 8 whom he’s trying to chat up rejects his advances. Although women and men both can err in their self-perceived mate value, research shows that men are more likely than women to be overconfident in a variety of domains”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Within each sex, however, there exist large individual differences. Some men and women have a strong desire for no-strings casual sex; others opt for monogamy with their “one and only.” Some women and men practice the art of deception in the mating game; others opt for honest courtship. Some people remain sexually faithful; others have affairs whenever the opportunity arises. Some sexually harass co-workers with impunity; others are appalled at workplace misconduct. Because of these profound individual differences within each sex, all statements about sex differences in this book carry the always-necessary qualifier of “on average.” I trust that the reader will understand this point and infer this qualifier in each instance throughout the book to free the writing of the technically correct but cumbersome insertion of the repetitive phrase “on average.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“More astonishing was the discovery that 99 percent of the female profiles turned out to be fake, created by Ashley Madison to give the illusion that an abundance of attractive married women used the site. In reality, although there were 20 million men actively using the cheating site, only 1492 women, less than 1 percent of the total user base, actively used the site.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Most sexual predators are people we know in settings we normally inhabit -at a party of a friend, at the department of a date, or in the sanctuary of our homes.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Female choice about when, where, with whom, and under which conditions they consent to sex is the deepest and most fundamental component of women's sexual psychology. It is a fundamental human right. Although men have coevolved strategies to undermine it, that freedom of choice should never be compromised.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“The modern proliferation of porn consumption, in short, has escalated both conflict between the sexes and the harms of female-female competition. The technology behind porn is modern. The sexual psychology it exploits is evolutionary ancient.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“One way to curtail men's proprietary mindset is to empower women -a trend that started with first-wave feminists who ushered in women's right to vote and continues today with women's increasing access to their own resources-.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“One way to curtail men's proprietary mindset is to empower women -a trend that started with first-wave feminists who ushered in women's right to vote and continues today with women's increasing access to their own resources.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“It is a source of power to recognize that women hold the reins in this evolutionary equation, and their mate selections, in principle, have the power to undermine male control and create greater equality between the sexes.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Just as modern science has created novel vaccines and drugs to eliminate many "natural diseases", with enough knowledge we can create personal, social, and legal environments that curtail or suppress the components of male psychology that contribute to sexual coercion.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“Within-species sexual conflict arms races are analogous to arms races between predators and prey.”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault

“It would be a mistake to view human responsiveness to social norms as somehow separate from our evolved psychology. We are a rule-following species. A core part of our evolved psychology is to decipher social consensus, conform to group opinion, and adhere to social imperatives. Throughout human evolutionary history, people lived and died by their social reputations. Violating social rules, and especially sexual rules, brought shame to violators and sometimes reputational damage to their entire families. We care deeply about how we are perceived by others. As the evolutionary economist Robert Frank notes, “We come into this world with a nervous system that worries about rank.”15”
― David M. Buss, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault