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pornographic self-displays of any number of
lesser female celebrities. The opposing argument begins, too, with Freud, with
the sections of his writing that render women as having, by nature, “a weaker
sexual instinct,” an inferior erotic capacity, and passes through post–World War
I advice books like one informing that, unlike just about all males, “the number
of women who are not satisfied with one mate is exceedingly small.” From the
forties and fifties, there is the story of Alfred Kinsey, whose research funds
were revoked when, unforgivably, he turned from cataloguing the sex lives of men
to publishing Sexual Behavior in the Human Female .
Then, from the late sixties, there is the bestselling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex delivering emotional
law: “Before a woman can have sexual intercourse with a man she must have social
intercourse with him.” And finally there is the confluence between strains of
contemporary thought: between the virginal edicts aimed mainly at girls and
young women by evangelical Christianity, the waves of panic and sexual
protectionism that overtake secular culture when it comes to girls but not boys,
and the widely believed—and flimsily supported—thesis of evolutionary psychology
that, relative to men, who are hardwired to hunt for the gratification of sex,
women are rigged by their genes to seek the comfort of relationships.
    This confluence is telling. In subtle yet essential
ways, Victorian thinking about women and sex isn’t so alien to our era. And
science—evolutionary psychology—is an unlikely conservative influence.
Mainstream evolutionary theory nimbly explains our physiological traits, from
our opposable thumbs to our upright posture to the makeup of our immune systems.
By contrast, evolutionary psychology, a field that has bloomed over the last few
decades, sets out to use the same Darwinian principles to illuminate the
characteristics of the human psyche, from our willingness to cooperate to our
inclinations in one of the discipline’s main areas of investigation, sex. The
ambitions of the field are enticing and elusive, enticing because they hold out
the promise that Darwin’s grand logic can provide us with an all-encompassing
understanding of ourselves, and elusive because the characteristics are so
intricate and may have been created mostly by culture rather than inherited on
our chromosomes. Evolutionary psychologists put absolute faith in the idea that
our patterns of behavior and motivation and emotion are primarily the
expressions of our genes. What is , evolutionary
psychologists say, is meant to be, genetically speaking. This is equally true
for the fact that we all have thumbs that help grasp and for the fact
that—judging by appearances—men are the more lustful gender.
    The role of social learning, of conditioning, isn’t
given much weight by the field’s leaders. If promiscuity were considered normal
in teenage girls and not in teenage boys, if it were lauded in girls and
condemned as slutty and distasteful in boys, if young women instead of young men
were encouraged to collect notches on their belts, how might the lives of
females and males—how might the appearances that evolutionary psychology treats
as immutable—be different? This kind of question doesn’t much interest
evolutionary psychologists like David Buss, a professor at the University of
Texas at Austin and one of the field’s premier sexual theorists. He dispenses
with such challenges by amassing evidence that, all over the globe, male
randiness and female modesty are celebrated. The widespread, in his view, proves
the predetermined, the genetically encoded. Look, he has written in one of the
discipline’s academic manifestos, at the ideal number of sexual partners named
by college students as they think forward over a lifetime; research has shown
far higher figures for men than women. Look, around the world, at preferences in
mates. From Zambia to towns of Arab