Why Women Have Sex (33 page)

Food is one of the best lures for obtaining extramarital sex partners, and a man often uses game as a means of seducing a
potential wife. Failures in this respect result not so much from a reluctance on the part of a woman to yield to a potential husband who will give her game, but more from an unwillingness on the part of the man’s own wife to part with any of the meat that he has acquired, least of all to one of his potential wives.

Siriono women who become extramarital-affair partners often refuse to have sex with their paramours unless a regular supply of meat is delivered. Wives, however, supervise the main meat distribution, so that if part of a husband’s catch is missing, they suspect their husband of carrying on an affair, provoking jealousy, outrage, and efforts at mate guarding. In the never-ending battle of the sexes, Siriono men try to circumvent their wife’s mate guarding by sending a chunk of meat to their mistress through an intermediary before returning home with the main bounty.

Siriono women’s sexual attraction to men who provide meat is dramatically illustrated by the case of a man who was an unsuccessful hunter. He suffered low status, experienced “hunting anxiety,” and had lost a previous wife to a man who was a better hunter. The anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg felt sorry for him, so he gave him meat, and taught him how to hunt game using a shotgun. Before long, the man’s status had risen considerably and he attracted a wife and several new sex partners. He also gained confidence and began to insult other men rather than being the butt of their insults.

These sexual economics occur repeatedly in nearly all well-studied traditional societies. Among the Hadza of Tanzania, a man “may find it difficult to marry a wife, or, once married, to keep a wife, if he is unsuccessful in hunting big game.” Similar patterns occur among the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Sharanahua of eastern Peru, and the Yanomamö of Venezuela. Men are quite aware that women find meat provisioning to be sexually attractive. They use meat to attract long-term and short-term sexual partners, and they use meat to poach the mates of other men. One Yanomamö man described a potential rival to the anthropologist Raymond Hames: “He’s not even a man [referring to his lack of hunting prowess]. She will leave him and come with me because he can’t hunt
and I can.” From an evolutionary perspective, it is often a mutually beneficial exchange.

In modern Western cultures, these sorts of direct exchanges tend to be far less common, or at least less explicit. Nonetheless, sexual economics sometimes continues to influence why women have sex within marriage. The exchange of sex may not be for economic resources per se, but rather for reciprocal favors. In a therapy session, one woman described how she had a much lower sex drive than her husband but she agreed to have sex with him because he agreed to cut the lawn and take the garbage out—equally aversive tasks in her eyes!

The resources a husband brings in, or fails to bring in, can affect a woman’s sexual motivation. A woman in our study said that her husband’s performance at work influenced her inclinations to have sex:

My husband receiving a promotion and raise at work is a good indicator that we will be having sex. Perhaps it’s a sort of reward for him, and also—he does look more attractive to me when he generates big bucks. I don’t think it’s so much the money as it is his accomplishment, that he is a winner in other people’s eyes.

—heterosexual woman, age 48

But the motivation can also go the other way—increasing a woman’s inclination to have sex with men other than her husband. Although women are motivated to have affairs for a variety of reasons—a husband’s infidelity, his lack of interest in sex, verbal or physical abuse—one that also ranks high in research conducted by the Buss Lab is the failure of the husband to hold down a job. In these circumstances, the affair is most often motivated by a desire to switch mates, trading up to a partner better able to provide.

Sexual economics arises within marriages in yet another way—women’s sexual refusals. Women who lack economic resources themselves and who are dependent on their husbands for financial support report feeling that they are less willing to refuse their husband’s sexual advances, compared to married women who have their own source of income. Women who have resources have more power both to act on
their sexual desires when they have them and to opt out of sex with their husbands when they lack sexual desire.

Sexual economics play out across cultures in many forms. On the mating market, women accrue significant power as a result of men’s sexual psychology—their desire for sexual variety, their sex drive, their sexual overperception bias, their persistent sexual fantasies, and a brain wired to respond to visual stimulation. As the valuable resource over which men compete, women can, and some often do, exercise that power to exchange their sexual resources for benefits, including food, gifts, special favors, grades, career advancement, or entrée into the movie business. In some of these exchanges, there is no sharp line demarcating honest courtship, seduction, and prostitution. Nonetheless, there is a world of psychological distance between prostitution, which is explicitly quid pro quo, and honest courtship, where gifts are typically prized for their symbolic value as an indicator of commitment or the esteem in which the woman is held.

If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it’s because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that’s the most revolutionary insight of all.

—Erica Jong (b. 1942)

 

A woman’s self-esteem affects, and is affected by, her sexuality, her sexual experiences, and her sex appeal. Self-assurance is sexy. Blissful intimate episodes boost confidence. There are deep psychological connections between our sex lives and our sense of self in both sexes. Among men, for example, research reveals that those who experience a bout of impotence, or erectile dysfunction, suffer a tremendous blow to their self-esteem. There’s an adaptive reason for this link: Failure to perform
sexually, historically, would have jeopardized a man’s reproductive success. Conversely, few things raise a man’s self-esteem more than a fresh sexual conquest of an attractive woman. Among women, evolution has forged adaptive links between esteem and sexual success. Sometimes these links, as we will see, can go awry in the modern world.

Although some standards of female beauty are culturally variable—such as the preference for relative slenderness or plumpness—many are universal. Features that have universal sex appeal include clear, smooth skin, plump lips, clear, large eyes, good muscle tone, sprightly gait, symmetrical features, and a low waist-to-hip ratio—all of which are associated with fertility. Studies of how women feel about their bodies reveal that their body esteem, unlike that of men, is closely linked with their overall sexual attractiveness, as well as to their specific body attributes such as waist, thighs, and hips. Because a woman’s appearance provides such a bounty of cues to her fertility, men have evolved mate preferences that, perhaps unfortunately, give tremendous importance to a woman’s physical appearance. In some ways, it is a psychological fact of life that women are sometimes treated as sex objects, just as men are sometimes treated as status objects.

On the positive side, having sex can provide women with a rush of confidence. One woman in our study experienced a boost from sex that lasted for days:

I had sex with someone who I felt close to because I was feeling alone and lonely. This man was kind and loving to me always and it made me feel better to have him with me, in bed, for a night. We had amazing sex and he would do anything I asked, always. I felt more confident and certainly sexier (as a woman) the following days. It helped boost my self-confidence a great deal.

—heterosexual woman, age 39

At times women describe having sex because they believed doing so would improve their low self-esteem:

To be honest, the reason I have slept with five out of the six men I have in my lifetime was because they were out of my league. I have
a weakness for [when] someone who is nice looking, employed, and of average intelligence likes me. Usually only toothless, ugly creepy guys like me.

—heterosexual woman, age 24

When it works, seeking sex for esteem can give women tremendous benefits—a boost from mood-altering hormones such as oxytocin; the assurance of her value as a human being; the confidence to trade up to a better partner; and a sense of sexual power in a world that sometimes tries to take it all away.

In times of feeling less confident—overweight, unattractive, etc.—it has been nice to know that someone else found me attractive and “wanted” me.

—heterosexual woman, age 23

In part because of the evolutionary roots of women’s sexual attractiveness, self-esteem is greatly influenced by how women feel about their bodies.

After finally losing enough weight where I . . . felt comfortable and sexy in my own skin, I saw my best male friend and he was blown away by my appearance. So I flirted extra, and was [more] friendly . . . and more aggressive [than usual], and let him know that after the bar we would be going to my apartment.

—predominantly heterosexual woman, age 22

What determines how a woman feels about her body, however, is not always objective. Although it is true that a woman’s body image is affected by her actual physical characteristics—including weight and body shape—researchers have found that it is also greatly influenced by her own personal perceptions about her body and what it should look like. In fact, for women who are dissatisfied with their bodies—an alarming 55 percent of both married and single women in North America—their
expectations of what their bodies should look like contribute more to their dissatisfaction than do their actual body characteristics.

Concerns about body image exist in women of all ages. In a nationwide survey of thirty thousand individuals ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-four, 55 percent of women expressed dissatisfaction with their bodies. Among adolescent girls, body image is adversely affected by exposure to beauty magazines. Among women in their late fifties and older, body image tends to be linked more to their health than to how their bodies compare with the latest winner of
America’s Next Top Model
. There are also cultural differences in how satisfied or dissatisfied women tend to be with their bodies, with media-saturated Western countries expressing more dissatisfaction. Even within the United States, studies find cultural differences: Black women were much more satisfied with their bodies than were women of other races or ethnicities.