Once upon a time, when we all lived in small hunter-gatherer groups on the African veldt, hominids who could come up with the most ingenious stories about how miserable they were on the veldt apparently got laid more often than their more prosaic rivals.
So they had more descendants, who are us, and we tell ourselves stories about how all our present miseries can be explained because we are no longer living the life we were adapted to on the veldt.
It is easy to mock evolutionary psychology, but sometimes it comes up with interesting or at least improbable results. The latest issue of the journal Evolutionary Psychology has come up with a classic of the genre: the discovery that women have better orgasms when their lovers are rich, handsome and have a good sense of humour.
This is based on a survey of 54 female undergraduates at Albany University in New York state. Women who were in a steady relationship with a man were asked exhaustively about their sex lives and their partners’ qualities. They reported that they had on average 3.57 sexual encounters a week, with 1.37 orgasms per encounter at an average intensity of 3.28 (on a scale of 1 to 5 ascending). The authors write that their primary hypothesis is that partner characteristics indicative of good genes would lead to higher orgasm frequency and intensity for heterosexual partners.
The trouble is that the measures used don’t always measure genetically determined qualities. For instance, these undergraduates reported more orgasms with partners who were attractive, self-confident and had greater family incomes. This tells us very little about the genes of the men who are lucky enough to be born to rich parents. “Income potential is no doubt also related to … intelligence, determination and focus,” the authors add.
This is gobsmacking. Some evolutionary psychologists are convinced that success as a hunter of antelopes demanded the same skills as are required for a successful career in accountancy today. But anyone who pays any attention to the world will notice that the way to grow rich in America today is to be born to rich parents, something that is often entirely destructive of intelligence, focus and determination. Who needs that boring stuff when they have a trust fund?
The only unquestionably genetic factor in all this was whether the man had broad shoulders or not. The broader the shoulders, the more often he was enjoyed. Apparently, men with broad shoulders are also rated as having more attractive faces.
The authors do address, right at the end, the really obvious objection to all these correlations: although they claim that the possession of certain attractive qualities makes women enjoy mad passionate sex with men, it’s just as possible that a woman who has just had great sex might misjudge the attractive qualities of the man involved.
“It seems, unlikely,” they write, “that how often women experience orgasm would affect ratings of their partner’s family income, nor would orgasm frequency be expected to increase the width of his shoulders or influence how they rate his intelligence, sense of humour, muscularity, creativity, focus, etc.”
Actually, nothing seems likelier to me. If women are anything at all like men, they are far more likely to proceed from wonderful sex to the conviction that their partner is really clever than the other way round.
But let’s suppose for a moment that the survey is reliable. In that case, there is one simple take-home moral. Never, ever, forget to list a good sense of humour among your attributes on a dating site. You know now what it really means.
