Cum seducem femeile

What do women find attractive in men? Many writers who have addressed this issue have concluded that female preferences are so diverse and idiosyncratic as to defy systematic explanation. I will argue, however, that general principles guiding female mate preferences can be discerned at the appropiate level of abstraction and that the evolution-based concept of *mate value* provides a useful heuristic in this endeavor. Men differ in mate value. In reproductive terms, they are not equally valuable to women as mates. Consider for exemple, a woman who can choose between two husband, A and B. Husband A is young, healthy, strong, successful, well liked, respected by his peers, and willing and able to protect and provide for her and her children. Husband B is old, weak, diseased, subordinate to other men, and unwilling and unable to protect and provide for her and her children. If she can raise more viable children with Husband A than Husband B, then his mate value can be said to be higher. Over evolutionary time, ancestral females who had psychological mechanisms that caused them to find males of high mate value more sexually attractive than males of low mate value, and acted on this atraction, would have outreproduced females with opposite tastes. This differential reproduction would continue until such mechanisms became universal and species-tpical in women. This logic leads on to expect that a man's sexual attractiveness to women will be a function of traits that were correlated with high mate value in our natural environment: the environment of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer. Natural selection should have designed evaluative psychological mechanisms (information-processing rules or algorithms)in women that assess such traits and give rise to sexual and romantic attraction in response to them.

The crucial questions is, what traits would have been correlated with high male mate value in our natural environment? Three possible answers are as follows: 1. The willingness and ability of a man to provide for a woman and her children. Unlike ales from most other mammalian species, who invest litle in provisioning mates and offspring, human males can and do provide valuable economic and nutritional assistance to supplement what women can provide for themselves and their children. To the extent that males in the Pleistocene differed in their propensity an ability to provision their mates and children, and to the extent that this variation was signaled by observable cues, selection would have shaped female choise to favor males who displayed such cues.

2.The willingness and ability of a man to protect a woman and her children. Because of their smaller stature and lesser strength, women and especially children are potential victims of violence from both humans and nonhumans predators. One valuable kind of assistance males can offer their mates is protection from the negative acts of others, as well as from predation. To the extent that males in the Pleistocene differed in their propensity and ability to protect their mates and their children, and to the extent that this variation was signaled by observable cues, selection would have shaped female choise to favor males who dispalyed such cues.

3.The willingness and ability of a man to engage in indirect parenting activities such as teaching, nurturing, and providing social support and opportunities. Many other acts, aside from protection and provisioning, contribute to the well-being of one's children and their eventual success in reproducing. Providing one's children with knowledge and skills, intervening on their behalf in situations of social conflict, and generally shaping conditions in ways that facilitate their health, growth, and success are dimensions of male behaviour that would have a powerful impact on a woman's reproductive success. To the extent that males in the Pleistocene differed in their propensity and ability to nurture their children, and to the extent this variation was signaled by observable cues, selection would have shaped female choise to favor males dispalyed such cues.

STATUS

Status refers to an individual's relative position in a social group; it is a measure of where one stands among one's peers and competitors. Even in hunting and gathering societies, status variations are substantial. In general, the higher a male is in status, the greater his ability to control resources in both a sign and reward of status, natural selection could be expected to have favored evaluative mechanisms in women designed to detect and prefer high-status men. Forming mateships with such men could greatly enhance a woman's survival and reproductive potential through (a) elevation of her own social status, b. immediate material and nutritional benefits, and © long-term access to social economic resources.

Fragment din cartea The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture

de John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Jerome H. Barkow, Bruce j. Ellis.