Rules of the Game (24 page)

If she's not wearing any rings, add the following:

By Thomas Scott McKenzie

In the book report on
Mastering Your Hidden Self
, we learned that everyone is shaped by his or her environment, experiences, beliefs, and expectations. In
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
by Matt Ridley, we learn that we're also shaped by millions of years of evolution.

Understanding the evolutionary nature of attraction and mating, as well as the correlations in the animal kingdom, is essential in understanding our own sexual strategies.

According to Ridley, the most powerful tool we've evolved when it comes to meeting women is our mind: “Most evolutionary anthropologists now believe that big brains contributed to reproductive success either by enabling men to outwit and outscheme other men … or because big brains were originally used to court and seduce members of the other sex,” he writes.

Many men tend to think that women in their particular city or country are different and require a unique seduction strategy. Not only is this not true today, according to the experiences of tens of thousands of students, but it's not true evolutionarily as well. Wherever you go, the game largely remains the same.

“Until very recently the life of a European was essentially the same as that of an African,” Ridley writes. He explains that both groups hunted meat and gathered plants, made tools from the same materials, utilized complex languages, and raised children in similar manners. Advances such as metalworking, agriculture, and written language, he continues, “arrived less than three hundred generations ago, far too recently to have left much imprint… There is, therefore, such a thing as universal human nature, common to all peoples.”

He cites a study involving more than a thousand subjects in thirty-seven countries. The statistical evidence revealed that “men pay more attention to youth and beauty, women to wealth and status.”

These universal principles of selection exist not because human beings around the world are shallow but because they want to bear as many offspring as possible and have their offspring survive. Thus, according to Ridley, the male obsession with beautiful women is not so much about form as it is about function: “Prettiness is an indicator of youth and health, which are indicators of fertility.”

Even the saying that gentlemen prefer blondes, Ridley claims, goes back to a correlation between blondeness and youth.

Men have it easier than women in the looks department. “In a survey of 200 tribal societies, two scientists confirmed that the handsomeness of a man depends on his skills and prowess rather than his appearance,” Ridley writes.

Study after study has shown that women are attracted to personality, dominance,
and status. “In a monogamous society, a woman often chooses a mate long before he has had a chance to become a ‘chief,' and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on past achievements,” Ridley writes. “Poise, self-assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverance, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition—these are the things that cause men to rise to the top of their professions. And not coincidentally, these are the things women find attractive.”

In other words, if you exhibit the right traits for success, some women will take a chance on you even if you're currently unemployed.

One of those traits is body language. Ridley describes an experiment where scientists recorded an actor doing two fake interviews. “In one, he sat meekly in a chair near the door, with his head bowed, nodding at the interviewer, while in the other he was relaxed, leaning back and gesturing confidently,” he writes. “When shown the videos, women found the more dominant actor more desirable as a date and more sexually attractive.”

Ridley points out that peacocks are among the few birds to gather together in groups for sexual selection. Scientists call this gathering a lek. “The characteristic of the lek is that one or a few males, usually those that display near its center, achieve the most matings. But the central position of a successful male is not the cause of his success so much as the consequence: Other males gather around him.”

Elsewhere in the chapter, Ridley writes that in experiments with guppy fish, when a female is allowed to see two males—one courting a female, the other not—she later prefers the male who was with the female, even if the courted female is no longer present.

Female competitiveness and social proof—the idea that individuals emulate what they see others in their peer group doing—seem to be effective, even in the animal kingdom.

The instinctual goal for female animals is to find a mate with the genetic makeup necessary to be a good provider or a good father. Male animals, on the other hand, have a goal of locating as many wives and mothers as possible.

The reason for these disparate goals is
investment
. The gender that invests
the most in children (by carrying a fetus for months, for instance) is the one that has the least to gain from extra mating. On the other hand, the gender that invests the least in children has the most extra time to spend searching for additional mates.

These different goals lend a scientific authority to something every man who's entered a singles club immediately learns: Males compete for the attention of females.

Ridley continues, “The male's goal is seduction: He is trying to manipulate the female into falling for his charms, to get inside her head and steer her mind his way. The evolutionary pressure is on him to perfect displays that make her well disposed toward him and sexually aroused so that he can be certain of mating.”

Ridley examines the mating habits that revolve around peacock tails, deer antlers, swallow tailfeathers, and the colors of butterflies and guppies. The bottom line is that “females choose; their choosiness is inherited; they prefer exaggerated ornaments; exaggerated ornaments are a burden to males. That much is now uncontroversial.”

For many women, high heels, push-up bras, tight clothing, and waxed body hair are just part of being fashionable and attractive. If you want to be successful with women, you have to be willing to carry a similar burden. It may feel unnatural or uncomfortable sometimes, but wearing clothes that distinguish you from the herd conveys confidence, leadership and individuality (as long as the clothes aren't wearing you). As Ridley puts it, “There is no preference for the average.”

Ridley argues that our different attitudes toward sex are determined by consequences. Historically speaking, casual sex for a man was a fairly low-risk activity with a huge potential payoff: “a cheap addition of an extra child to his genetic legacy,” as Ridley puts it. “Men who seized such opportunities certainly left behind more descendants than men who did not. Therefore, since we are by definition descended from prolific ancestors rather than barren ones, it is a fair bet that modern men possess a streak of sexual opportunism.”

Conversely, women faced massive risks when it came to casual sex. In the generations before reliable birth control, a married woman could be left with a pregnancy and potential revenge from her husband. If she was unmarried,
then she could be doomed to a life of spinsterhood. “These enormous risks were offset by no great reward. Her chances of conceiving were just as great if she remained faithful to one partner, and her chances of losing the child without a husband's help were greater. Therefore, women who accepted casual sex left fewer rather than more descendants, and modern women are likely to be equipped with suspicion of casual sex.”

Ridley points to interesting studies that further support his theories on promiscuity, citing research estimating that 75 percent of gay men in San Francisco have had more than one hundred partners (25 percent have had more than one thousand), while in contrast most lesbians have had fewer than ten partners in their lifetime.

One interesting conclusion suggested by Ridley's book is that human beings are naturally monogamous, but they're also naturally adulterous.

Though Ridley says that women are less inclined toward casual sex, that doesn't mean they aren't promiscuous. But their promiscuity often has a purpose. For examples, Ridley looks to the animal kingdom—specifically to the phenomenon of adultery among colonial birds.

Like many human beings, female colonial birds divide men into two different categories: lovers and providers. “When a female mates with an attractive male, he works less hard and she works harder at bringing up the young,” Ridley writes. “It is as if he feels that he has done her a favor by providing superior genes and therefore expects her to repay him with harder work around the nest. This, of course, increases her incentive to find a mediocre but hardworking husband and cuckold him by having an affair with a superstud next door.”

Ridley closes his discussion of this topic with a crude summary of the hunter-gatherer rules that he claims still exist deep in the minds of women: “It began with a woman who married the best unmarried hunter in the tribe and had an affair with the best married hunter, thus ensuring her children a rich supply of meat. It continues with a rich tycoon's wife bearing a baby that grows up to resemble her beefy bodyguard. Men are to be exploited as providers of parental care, wealth, and genes.”

One of Ridley's more interesting asides concerns studies on male and female arousal.

Men are generally aroused by visual images; hence the success of pornography and
Maxim
. But what is the equivalent of pornography for women? His answer: romance novels, which have hardly varied for decades.

What turns women on in romance novels, however, isn't their descriptions of dashing men or lurid sex. Sex in romance novels, he explains, “is described mainly through the heroine's emotional reaction to what is done to her—particularly the tactile things—and not to any detailed description of the man's body.”

The point is that women are aroused through emotional reactions, and the key to these are words and touch. So to become a master seducer, you must become a master of language and the female body.

According to another study of heterosexual men and women, men are more aroused by group sex, while women are more aroused by heterosexual couples. Yet both heterosexual women and men are aroused by lesbian scenes, while neither is aroused by male homosexual scenes. So if you're one of those men who thinks that sending a woman a close-up naked picture of his abs or his genitalia is going to turn her on, think again.

The Red Queen
explains how our mating choices are the result of evolutionary and biological pressures exerted over thousands of years, providing scientific proof for the social improvement strategies discussed, such as dressing sharp, demonstrating value, raising social status, displaying personality, and projecting confidence.

Even the idea that your friends will give you a hard time as you improve is cited in this book as a normal evolutionary result of your success: Males want to destroy competitors, even the ones they secretly want to emulate.

And, finally, if you want to improve your confidence, Ridley says you're doing the right thing by going out and working to craft the perfect approach.

“We measure our own relative desirability from others' reactions to us,” he writes. “Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher.”