Humans Appear Wired for Short or Long-Term Mating, But Not Both

Geplaatst op 03-02-2023

Hallelujah, it’s nice to be backed up by science!

Longtime readers of HUS will recall a time when Red Pillers came to the site in droves. The central tenet of their belief system can be summed up as: All Women Are Like That (AWALT). The concept is applied to every unsavory character defect imaginable when it comes to sex and relationships.

I was consistently challenged to defend against Red Pill claims:

80% of women have sex with 20% of men.
Women are feral, sexually voracious, selfish and unfaithful during ovulation.
All college women eagerly hook up with douchebags.
The fickle and immoral strategy of “Alpha Fux, Beta Bux.”

In which a woman “rides a carousel of alpha cock” before settling down and marrying an unattractive beta male provider.

All women are sluts if you know how to “game” them.

After researching and writing about these topics for several years, I reached two key conclusions:

Hookup culture is a function of mistaken beliefs about what other people are doing. In reality, casual sex has not increased in generations, and only a small minority seek it in college.
That minority, which I have estimated at 10-20%, has a profoundly different mating strategy from the rest of the population.

A new study, Stay or Stray? Evidence for alternative mating strategy phenotypes in both men and women, supports the theory that there are two distinctly different mating phenotypes in the population.

“While it has been widely suggested that males divide into two mating types (‘cads’ versus ‘dads’) and there is some evidence for a genetic basis for this distinction, this study is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to provide quantitative evidence on their proportional distributions in natural populations. More importantly, it is the first to suggest that a similar partition may also exist in females.”

This is a Red Piller Killer – neither women nor men alternate short- and long-term mating strategies opportunistically.

“We observed what appears to be a cluster of males and a cluster of females who are more inclined to ‘stay,’ with a separate cluster of males and females being more inclined to ‘stray’ when it comes to sexual relationships,” says study co-author Rafael Wlodarski, an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford.

…This study is the first to show statistically that both men and women exhibit two reproductive phenotypes of varying proportions. This would seem to provide a principled explanation for the fact that humans always appear midway between monogamous and polygamous species on all anatomical indices of mating system.”

The researchers looked at both behaviors and genetics. The SOI (Sociosexuality Inventory) was completed by 595 British and American individuals. Additionally, 2D: 4D hand ratios were measured for 1,314 subjects. (A low ratio of index finger to ring finger indicates increased prenatal exposure to testosterone, which correlates to a short-term reproductive phenotype.)

The populations were clearly clustered in the “stay” and “stray” groups:

“Put together, the datasets showed that 57 per cent of men were more likely to be promiscuous, and 43 per cent faithful. This balance inversed among women — 47 percent fell within the ‘stray’ category and 53 per cent in ‘stay’.”

The 10-20% that I estimate in the casual sex camp are at the higher end of the “stray” group. Here is a graph of the results. As you can see, Brits are more unrestricted than Americans are, confirming that culture and environment do play a role:

The solid line represents the “stay” group while the dashed line is the “stray” group. Note that each of the groups has a bell-curve distribution, and the two groups overlap around the midpoint. This is in keeping with prior research on the SOI. There are considerable differences in behavior and attitude between the top and bottom quintiles:

Table 2. Comparison of Top and Bottom Quintiles on Self-Reported Behavioral Correlates of the Sociosexuality Scale Scores in Percentages (2000)*

	Women Bottom	Women Top	Men Bottom	Men Top
Had sex with someone the same day you met	6	59	12	78
Got pregnant, or got someone pregnant, before marriage	9	32	8	31
Had sex after having a lot to drink	25	77	34	88
Was unfaithful to a steady partner	3	48	5	63
Had sex with two people in a 24 hour period	1	29	2	50
Ever had a sexually transmitted disease	4	19	4	24

Kristen Sollee, writing at Loveawake free dating site, concluded, “There goes the whole “guys need to spread their seed” argument.”

From a strategy standpoint, the critical thing is to make very sure you’re not pairing off with someone of vastly different orientation from your own. Speaking very conservatively, half of men are solidly in the “stay” cluster. Take your better half from the better half.

Let the seed spreader have his female equivalent – they are genetically made for each other. As long as they stick to their own kind, no harm no foul. But do not under any circumstances think you can pull that R out of STRAY. This is about wiring, and dating is a lot less complicated when we respect real differences within each gender.