On the surface, you would be tempted to think that this was just a funny and fun take on cheating. Let me assure you that it was my intention to use humour yes, but I also did a lot of research to draw conclusions and to arrive at positions.
It is for this reason, I thought it best to provide you with the why, and not just the how. Yeah I know i said differently at the beginning of the book, but as i have repeatedly told you, pay attention.
At birth, a female human has about 300,000 eggs. These eggs age with her body. and are expelled every month after she hits puberty. This happens until she menopauses and after that time, the eggs are either non-viable or they have been completely depleted.
In contrast, at puberty, a male human being starts producing millions of sperm every day. He can continue to do this until well into old age, or even till death.
Simply put, men cheat more than women because they can.
Evolution has programmed human beings (and every other organism on Earth) to propagate their genes. Because women have a limited number of eggs in their lifetime, and because men have a virtually unlimited number of sperm, each sex has evolved different strategies to maximize their reproductive fitness.
For women, that means choosing a man who is both physically fit and psychologically committed enough to expend resources to provide and protect his offspring. For men, though, the most effective reproductive strategy is to put their sperm in as many women as possible.
We pause now for some important caveats:
1. Evolution influences our inclinations, but it doesn't dictate our choices.
2. Human beings don't have sex to have children all the time. Most of the time, we have sex because sex is so fucking good (and you will never come across a statement more "literally true" than that).
3. These strategies evolved in a prehistoric environment, when there wasn't condoms, the pill, or even porn (except for those sexy rock carvings with the huge boobs and butts – forget that crap about "fertility symbols" – primitive man probably used to get nagged by his woman, too, for looking too much at those figurines).
4. Humans are among the mere 4 percent of mammals who have exclusive sexual relationships.
So, in the ancestral history of every person now alive, there were men who sowed their seed in as many fields as they could, and women who chose men, who, even if they did that, still provided for and protected their children.
But we also know from evolution that our ancestral mothers did their fair share of cheating, as well. If they hadn't, human males and females wouldn't be so close in size because, in any species where the males have exclusive mating rights to several females (as with seals and gorillas) the males are always much larger than the females.
So human females cheated where such a strategy meant more resources plus good genes for their offspring (hence the modern-day stereotype of the rich housewife having hot sex with the pool boy). The Falwell's could surely attest to this.
Weird fact: girls in polygamous societies are shorter than girls in monogamous ones.
Of course, it's hard to know exactly how much people cheat. Some surveys from the United States say that just over 22 percent of married men admit to having cheated at least once, and just about 14 percent of married women. One data set from Britain found that 30 percent of women had cheated on their spouses, and the data was solid because it was based on DNA tests of their children, which showed that the men were raising offspring they hadn't fathered.
The interesting part was that the highest ratio of outside paternity was among the working-class women – 30 percent – but just one percent among upper-class women. This doesn't mean that rich women horn less, just that they're smarter about getting knocked up. In the US, estimates went up to 20 percent, but Americans probably do less DNA tests.
Even so, it is likely that women of lower status in a society, are more likely to have more sexual partners or to cheat. The opposite is true of men. The higher a man's status – the more money or fame he has –the more likely he is to cheat, simply because he has more women coming on to him. Or, if we centre the matter around the man, men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to cheat. Since you can't measure that, however, women should be aware that good-looking men are more likely to be unfaithful. Cough , couch, Bill Clinton
Of those men who don't cheat, it's not necessarily because they're inherently more faithful or more in love – if you've learned one thing from this book, it's that love and cheating aren't necessarily connected. Faithful men simply don't have the opportunities or they think the consequences wouldn't be worth the trouble. This is mostly the case in societies which have high rates of equality, though. In cultures with large gaps between the haves and have-nots, polygamy and infidelity is higher, because a lot of women prefer even 10 percent of a rich or good-looking man than 100 percent of a poor ugly one.
Recommended readings
Why Beautiful People have More Daughters. Alan Miller and Satosh Kanazawa. New York: Perigee Books, 2007.
Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes? Jene Pincott. New York : Bantam Dell, 2008.
How the Mind Works. Steven Pinker. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.
