Sex therapists, of course, need no introduction. Evolutionary psychologists are academics who study the brain in the context of human evolution -- which is to say, the brain as an organ shaped and formed in the millennia before a little thing called polite civilization was invented. The underlying assumption here is that modern man is a just a polished-up and presentable version of the brutes that we humanoids were for eons. The essential urges and motivations are the same as ever. Don't let the tie and jacket fool you.
Evolutionary psychologists seem like the perfect people to debrief in this situation because, unlike just about everyone else, they seem thoroughly unshocked.
"There's nothing mystifying about any of this," says Todd Shackelford, an evolutionary psychologist and professor at Florida Atlantic University.
Shackelford walks through the basics of the evolutionary psychology catechism: For millennia, the whole point of males' often-risky efforts to achieve power, resources and prestige was to translate status into sex with more women. You run the tribe, you get dibs. That's the way it worked in hunter-gatherer cultures, most of which, Shackelford says, were polygamous. Nearly all men, in every age, wanted sex with multiple partners, but only the leaders could (a) attract additional partners and (b) have the resources to provide for them. |
