Evolutionary psychologist David Buss begins one of his previous books, The Murderer Next Door (2006), by telling about the grim fate of Sheila Bellush, the ex-wife of Texas multimillionaire Allen Blackthorne.
"Blackthorne was, as news accounts said, a man who had everything. He’d made a fortune in the medical-equipment business; he was handsome, and he had married again after he and Sheila Bellush divorced—his fourth marriage—to a beautiful woman with whom he had two children. Sheila had also remarried, to Jamie Bellush, but she was haunted by an intense fear that Blackthorne might try to kill her. Their divorce had been nasty, and she had won custody of their two daughters in a horrible battle. For years he had continued to harass her, even after his remarriage. She even told her sister: “If anything ever happens to me, promise me that you will see that there’s an investigation. . . . And find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story.” So afraid did she become that one night she gathered up her family—her two daughters by Blackthorne, and quadruplets she had by her new husband—and fled from her home in San Antonio. They moved to Sarasota, Florida, and Sheila was so afraid that she didn’t even give her own sister her new address.
With all that distance between her and Allen Blackthorne, Sheila finally began to feel safe. It was a fatal mistake. Within months, she was murdered at her home in the middle of the day, and her quadruplet babies were found crying and covered with their mother’s blood. Sheila’s thirteen-year-old daughter discovered her mother dead in the kitchen, her face shot and her throat slit. When the daughter was asked by the police, “Do you know who might have done this?” she replied, “Yes, I know who did it, but he didn’t do it himself. He probably hired someone to do it.” “Who?” “My father did it. My father—Allen Blackthorne.”
Allen Blackthorne now makes his home in the state prison in Huntsville, Texas. He was convicted of hiring a young thug to drive the fourteen hundred miles from Austin to Sarasota to murder his ex-wife."
Did Allen Blackthorne act completely irrationally? Yes, and no, according to David Buss' reasoning. Yes, because he committed an awful crime, which bereaved his children of their mother and sent him to prison for life. No, because his actions followed a certain evolutionary logic.
David Buss described that logic in detail in The Murderer Next Door: Men who could retain their mates did better in the evolutionary game than those who could not. To threaten a wife with almost certain death if she leaves is a very unpleasant, but often effective way to keep her. If she chooses to leave anyway, then she will be of no use to her former partner. Rather than letting her mate with other men and produce children who will compete with his biological children, she will be better dead than alive for him. For those reasons, in an ancestral environment without a police force, it could actually be beneficial for a man to go through with his threats and kill his former mate, according to Buss' theory. Both because that made his threats more credible and because he reduced competition in the next generation. This especially applies to men who know they will not be able to replace the lost partner with a new, equally attractive partner. Modern men who murder their current or former partners tend to be both much older and less attractive than the women they murder, according to The Murderer Next Door.
In When Men Behave Badly (2021), David Buss develops this line of reasoning into a broader context. Men and women have, on average, a bit different mating goals. That sometimes leads to mating strategies that inflict costs on members of the opposite sex. Murder is the most extreme of those behavoirs, but rape, partner battering, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual deception and infidelity are much more common. While The Murderer Next Door presents a theory of the tragic outliers, When Men Behave Badly focus on more mundane forms of bad behavior that afflict most people at some stage of their lives. David Buss' explicit aim is to decrease these forms of cost-inflicting behavior:
"My hope is that this knowledge will benefit everyone who has suffered from sexual conflict and who cares about its victims, and that it will ultimately help us to reduce the occurrence of sexual conflict and heal the harms it creates."
Buss maintains that there are several male reproductive strategies. Some consist of what we would today call bad or even criminal behavior. Some are good and honest strategies, which, according to Buss, gives us something to build on. We have instincts for several different mating strategies and David Buss' message is: Let us be aware of them, so we can pick the good ones and avoid the bad ones.
Buss cautiously claims that his book is about average men and women and not about sexual minorities, because research is lacking. Modern ideas like gender identity are absent from the book. When Men Behave Badly is a book about sexual majorities instead of sexual minorities.
The question too often arises: Why do women who claim to fear rape still behave so carelessly? Why can't they just avoid following a man home if they are not sure they want to have sex with him? Why do they have to be intoxicated together with men they they don't want to have sex with? Why can't they just wear their burka when they go out?
David Buss has got the answer: Because it costs. Not spending time alone with men costs mating opportunities: When women compete for the same men, the desirable men will most often choose those who act like they aren't afraid of them. Women's attempts to avoid sexual violence costs women opportunities to mate, to work, to socialize. Buss brilliantly describes why individual women will need to take risks, and some of them will have bad luck and err on the wrong side.
But why are women often upset also by entirely non-violent sexual advances? Why do they complain about unwanted suggestions and sexual harassment, when they could just say no to offers they don't want to take? David Buss has the answer to this question too: Because it costs. Rebuffing a man's advances might anger him, provoking him to retaliate. In the worst case, he could become violent. He might take revenge in a way that hurts a woman's professional chances or social life. For that reason, women mostly try to be as polite as possible when they rebuff unwanted sexual advances. This has the downside that women are not as clear as possible when they say no. Some women will inevitably err on the side of politeness, get assaulted and be told it was their fault because they couldn't rebuff their aggressors clearly and firmly enough.
Buss' description of younger women's problems with sexual advances is really good. Better than all other texts I have read on the topic, including explicitly feminist ones, which is quite an achievement considering that David Buss is a middle-aged man himself. His description of women's sexual psychology is, however, not that good. It is so polite that it misses all the quirks that make psychology interesting.
David Buss is not alone in this. While male sexual psychology has been thoroughly studied and thought over, female sexual psychology largely remains in the dark. To a large degree out of exaggerated sensitivity: Frankness is a cousin to brutality. The result is, however, that the same anachronistic picture of how women ought to be is repeated over and over again, without any deeper thought. From its birth in the late 1970's, mainstream evolutionary psychology has maintained a picture of Woman as a free agent who evolved to make wise choices on a difficult market throughout history. A few writers, most notably Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, have pointed out that women probably didn't evolve under freedom, but that still seems to be a minority view.
David Buss clearly follows the mainstream narrative on human female evolution. Especially his chapter about how women evolved defenses against rape is based on the assumptions that
David Buss cites a professor who liked to claim: "Men are one long breeding experiment run by women." But Buss doesn't cite any ethnographic study that supports this claim, like if it weren't the least controversial. That is strange. Everybody knows that in non-modern societies, and also in several current non-Western societies, women very often don't have much hope of choosing their mates themselves. Why assume that the parts of history we don't know about were totally opposite to the parts of history we know about?
Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon studied the Yanomamö horticulturalists in the rainforest of Brazil and Venezuela for more than 30 years. Among the Yanomamö, girls were married off by approximately the age of 12. They were often severely abused by their husbands and had very little say about who they would marry. Many of them, 17 percent in the lowland areas, were forced to change husbands when they were abducted by men of another tribe. Not all of them were unhappy about that, because sometimes the new husbands were less abusive than the former. In his book Noble Savages, Chagnon wrote:
"Not much scientific attention has been given to the role that brutality and battering of women probably played in human behavioral evolution [...]. Even sociobiological theory, now frequently called evolutionary psychology, seems to have a very Eurocentric flavor to it—implying that women in the Paleolithic wanted or sought basically the same kinds of things that women today want: a handsome man with lots of material resources; a man who has no other wife; a man who won't philander and will put all his efforts into being faithful to the wife and invest heavily in her offspring; a man with good genes; a man who has prestige and commands power. Most of the data behind such beliefs were collected from female college students from middle- and upper-class homes, not from Stone Age women. This view that we can project such contemporary attitudes into the past is probably also somewhat Rousseauian because it assumes an equality of the sexes that likely did not exist in historical environments but is approximated to varying degrees on contemporary large college campuses. The Yanomamö women I interviewed seemed to want only to be free from beatings and severe punishment by their husbands, who sometimes only “suspected” them of the deeds for which they were being mistreated."
Chagnon more or less stated that for women who are beaten with clubs, stabbed with machetes and shot with arrows, not being beaten with clubs, stabbed with machetes and shot with arrows is such a high priority that they don't have very much to say about their other preferences. David Buss argues that since it would be really good for a woman to make the right mating decisions, women who insisted on their right to make their own decisions should have been favored by evolution. But that is only relevant if women were allowed to make mating decisions at all to any important degree.
David Buss claims that not being raped is important for women and always was and for that reason it is important to make men rape women less. Who would like to argue against that?
Well, I would. For two reasons:
To be fair, David Buss does not imply in any way that rape victims should be blamed for not resisting. He explains that "tonic immobility" could be an adaptation for survival when resistance seems futile. However, that explanation only relieves victims who experienced tonic immobility from guilt. It thus places a burden on rape victims to assess whether it really was tonic immobility they experienced, or merely common indecision.
David Buss is right that women in general have a very negative perception of rape. But there is also more to the story that he doesn't mention.
Buss cites a study where participants got to hear an audiotape of a woman who told about four sexual experiences. One consensual and non-violent, one consensual and violent, one non-consensual and non-violent and one non-consensual and violent. While participants listened, their rate of physical sexual excitement was measured.
Most men were most sexually aroused by the non-violent and consensual episodes. Men who admitted to have committed rape, on the other hand, were equally excited by every episode. Buss concludes that there seems to be a subset of males who lack the normal aversion against sexual violence against women. However, the same researcher, Martin Lalumiere, later also compared men with women. Then the researchers found that women were almost equally sexually aroused on a physical level by stories about consensual and non-consensual sexual encounters. If we put the evidence together, women reacted much more like self-confessed male rapists than like ordinary men.
A number of studies from the 1970s onwards shows that it is extremely common for women to have erotic fantasies about being raped. In Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are (2017), Seth-Stephen Davidowitz cites research from pornographic site PornHub about what kind of pornography people search for. Pornhub's research showed that female viewers are far more interested in violent pornography than male viewers. 25 percent of searches for straight pornography by female users explicitly asked for distress for the female part and 5 percent typed things like "rape" or "forced" in the search window, although the site doesn't allow such videos.
In summary, there seems to be something fishy with female rape defenses. Not that they don't exist. Women obviously take precautions, also costly precautions, to avoid sexual assault. But female rape defenses don't seem as straightforward as David Buss and mainstream evolutionary psychology would like to have it. It seems more like women have both developed defenses against sexual violence and mechanisms to deal with sexual violence when it happens anyway.
Why would there be any advantage in accommodating non-consensual sex? The answer is: Because most sex in history was non-consensual compared to today's standards. The idea that every woman has the right to veto every sexual act at any time with every person in the world has only been wide-spread for a few decades.
Why would women develop mechanisms to accommodate non-consensual sex? The answer is simple: For most of history most sex offered to women was non-consensual compared to today's standards. A woman who wanted to procreate was more or less obliged to find ways to accept non-consensual sex. The option to just say no was not really an option at all.
When David Buss writes about the social costs of rape in history, he writes about the cost of rape by a non-husband. But if we think about it, the most common rapist throughout history must have been a legal husband. Being raped by a non-husband has probably, on average, been bad for women's reproductive interests. But how about being raped by a husband one didn't choose? Would it be wise, in an evolutionary sense, to withstand a husband's advances?
Imagine it yourself: You are 13 years old. You hope for a future with children and grandchildren (almost everyone in your society does). It is your wedding night, in bed with a man you didn't choose yourself. He is not attractive the way you dreamt of. You don't like the way he smells. Now he obviously thinks that he is going to penetrate you, which, besides, hurts like hell. What do you do?
If you take alternative A, you will be true to your feelings. But how about the children and grandchildren? If the man doesn't like you, he might become angry and violent. If he possesses the normal male aversion towards sexual violence, he might be put off by your resistance and go out and seek other women, which is likely to decrease his investment in you and your future children.
Anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote a book called Nisa - The life and works of a !Kung woman, where a middle-aged woman of the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari desert tells her life story. The book contains a real-life, and very tragic example of marital rape. Nisa had a daughter, Nai. In accordance with !Kung custom, Nai was married off in her early teens, just before she had her first menstruation. A short time into the marriage, Nai resisted her husband's sexual advances. The husband became angry and threw Nai to the ground so she broke her neck. Nai died after a few days. Her family was awarded the paltry payment of five goats to compensate for the loss of their daughter. The !Kung are considered to be unusually gender-equal compared to other primitive peoples. Unlike among the Yanomamö mentioned above, it is not normal for a man to stab his wife with a machete. But they still marry girls of about 14 off to adult men they haven't chosen themselves.
Ideally, a woman who wants grandchildren should accommodate a husband's advances, which she can't escape anyway, while fiercely withstanding other men's rape attempts. But can nature really fine-tune emotional responses to distinguish between legal rape and illegal rape? Given the fact that husbands often were strangers on the wedding night, that seems like a very difficult trick for nature to achieve.
Husbands can come closer to a rape-monopoly over their wives if they jealously protect them against other men. They have every reason to do so. A husband has even more reason than his wife to make efforts to protect the wife against sexual predators. Think about it: A stone-age woman has been given in marriage to a man she didn't choose herself. A man who is also a first cousin (cross-cousin marriage is common among primitive peoples). The woman gets raped by a man who is not her husband and also not her cousin. Who wins and who loses from this, in an evolutionary sense?
The woman herself risks physical injury or sexually transmitted disease. That is on the minus side. She risks bearing the child of a man she didn't choose. She also risks losing investment from her husband if he gets to know about the rape, since his paternity certainty is weaker than before.
On the other hand, the woman didn't choose her husband either: nothing says that a husband imposed on her has better genes than a non-husband imposed on her. Getting raped even has a certain, if low, probability of being evolutionary beneficial for her: Her husband might have low-quality genes or genes that are too similar to hers. She actually might get a healthier child with a rapist than with her cousin-husband. David Buss states very clearly in the book that at least in current society, most rapists are not losers with low-quality genes, but rather successful men with Dark Triad personalities. Cynically speaking, a woman might benefit genetically from being raped by a man who passes his genes to a son who can also become a successful rapist in the future, siring many grandchildren.
For the woman's husband, on the other hand, there are no pluses if his wife gets raped. There are only minuses. He loses in paternity certainty and risks bringing up another man's child. He also risks being seen as weak by other men if the rape becomes known in the community and he fails to take revenge, which is a further threat against his security and his ownership of his wife or wives. The same is true for all his close relatives. For his parents and siblings and cousins (except the wife-cousin), there are only disadvantages if his wife gets raped.
This means that the husband and his relatives should be even more motivated to prevent the woman from being raped than the woman herself. In every known bigger civilization, a large part of what we call gender oppression consists of measures to force women to take stronger precautions to avoid extra-marital sex than the women themselves would like to. Acting in a way that pleases her husband is usually good for a wife's genes. But it is even better for the husband's genes. A huge apparatus of slut-shaming is needed in order to make women stay cloistered, veiled or constantly supervised. Although women mostly like to offer their husbands paternity certainty, they normally don't volunteer to restrict their living space as much as their husbands would like them to.
Women like to choose their sexual partners. There is no question about that. But in the parts of history we know about, free partner choice was not the default option for women, it was more of a bonus that sometimes occurred. For that reason we should assume that women evolved to assert their right to choose when they had any opportunity to choose, but also to make the best of a bad situation when they didn't have the opportunity to choose.
If that is the case, women have not evolved to make good decisions; they have evolved to make the least bad decisions under difficult circumstances. Thus, modern women are prone to “make the best of a bad situation”-responses whenever they feel danger or outside pressure. If women evolved towards clearly stating their own wishes only in non-threatening situations, decisions whether to have sex or not need to be made in non-stressful situations in order to be truly consensual.
Even if David Buss has another view of female evolutionary history, I think he wouldn't disagree with this conclusion. His message throughout the book is: Let's be aware of our instincts so we can be nicer to each other.
Buss not only asks this from men, but also from women: He suggests that women should question their preference for high status men. In an ancestral environment when a harsh winter could mean death, it was fully logical to desire a man who controlled more resources than others. But in current society, marrying up risks putting women in unfavorable situations:
"One answer lies with the malleability of women’s mate preferences. Women prioritize many qualities in mating besides status and resources—kindness, intelligence, reliability, emotional stability, good health, sense of humor, and adaptability. Can women elevate these preferences to supersede those of a man’s resource-holding potential? Can women override their sexual attraction to powerful men, thereby severing the causal link to men’s power-seeking drives? These are open questions, but I know of one woman who consciously changed her mate preferences after suffering from two abusive relationships with high-status men who felt entitled to cheat on her. She is now happily coupled with a lower-status man who treats her like a queen. It is a source of power to recognize that women hold the reins in this evolutionary equation, and their mate selections, in principle, have the power to undermine male control and create greater equality between the sexes."
With the knowledge from The Murderer Next Door fresh in mind, the first thing that comes to my mind is: Don't women who marry down risk their lives and health, because their unattractive partners will never let them go? David Buss doesn't explicitly answer that question himself, but his general advice is: Watch out for the Dark Triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy.
In summary, David Buss's essential points are:
With When Men Behave Badly, David Buss has suggested a way forward in a question that is often overtly (and overly) politicized. When it comes to the details, especially concerning female desire, more research is needed. But the concept that we need to understand ourselves in order to make the world a better place, is certainly a way forward.