final version 30.9.03
Elina Haavio-Mannila, J.P. Roos, Anna Rotkirch
Do rich men have most sex?
Gender, capital and sexual activity
in four countries
To Ulla Björnberg
As is well known, Darwin showed that
male intrasexual competition and female heterosexual choice were the driving
forces of sexual selection, which is a special variant of natural selection.
Darwin stressed that males compete for sexual access to females by displaying
signs of resourcefulness, fitness, and other valued abilities. In species where
males do not participate in child rearing, male sexual seduction is all about
‘showing off’. The classic examples among animals are the male peacock=s tail and mammoth’s tusks, which
both are extremely impractical and even hampering. They appear to contradict
natural selection in the sense of adaptations to the ecological environment,
but become understandable from the perspective of sexual selection. Females
developed a preference for long tails or huge tusks and males consequently
excelled in these attributes because they served as fitness indicators,
instruments that help to judge the partner’s qualities. Such fitness indicators
can be physical, psychological or material. They must be permanent, costly,
difficult to acquire and hard to fake. (Darwin 1871; Buss 1996; Cronin 1991.)
For all species, the
willingness to discriminate in the choice of sexual partners is dependent on
the cost of reproduction (Trivers 1972). If the individual does not take part
in the rearing effort, it has no need to be very selective. By contrast, if it
will be rearing its offspring for several years and will preferably need a
partner to participate in the effort, it will be more selective in the choice
of the partner.
Human sexual choice is
more complicated than the mammoths’, as men also participate in childrearing,
albeit to a varying degree and usually significantly less than women (Björnberg
1998). When looking for long-term sexual partners, both men and women value
kindness, reliability, and commitment. Respect gained from others is also a
good sign of sexual value. Here, sexual selection is reciprocal – both partners
strive to charm, seduce and eventually make the other commit him- or herself.
Physical attributes are important, but so are signs of material well-being,
good social networks, and emotional and intellectual abilities. It may even be
that our brains originally developed as part of this two-way mating game. In
this view, the brain’s ultimate reason of existence was not to work and
produce, as the classical explanation goes, but to enjoy and seduce. You need
big brains in order to tell jokes, make compliments, and confide in each other,
as well as in order to evaluate and assess these jokes, compliments and
confidences (Miller 2000).
Concerning short-term sexual
relations, however, evolutionary theory predicts more gendered sexual
strategies (a term that refers to general behavioural patterns but does not
exclude personal, social and cultural variations.) Women are cross-culturally
on average relatively selective and favour partners with impressive fitness
indicators such as social status, strength and bravery. Being rich and famous increases the
attractiveness of both sexes, but is more highly valued in men than in women.
(Campbell 2002, 103 and 179.) Men are on average less selective than women and
favour especially youth. This is true also in societies where contraceptives
have cut the original evolutionary link between intercourse and pregnancy. Our
evolved emotional dispositions continue to operate even today, and often
unconsciously. For instance, women on average report feeling more sexual desire
at the period of ovulation (Hrdy 1999, 220).[1]
Humans form monogamous relationships but are also, as evolutionary theory puts it, a “mildly polygynous” species. In most human societies, men with social and economic power have had more wives and mistresses. Because our sex ratio is nearly 50-50, this meant that the men with least social and material assets ended up without any wives or mistresses. Evolutionary theory thus predicts a polarisation between men with regards to the number of sexual partners and marriages: some have much and some have none. Women have a more equal intrasexual distribution, as practically every woman can find a male who wants to mate with her if she accepts him, and most women also find a long-term heterosexual partner if they are not too choosy.
Already these
traditional evolutionary premises of human sexual behavior - monogamy but some
degree of polygyny – provide complicated sociological outcomes. Thus feminists
disagree on which arrangement is more ‘pro-women’: monogamy, which is the best
way to tie husbands (and his relatives) to marriage and child rearing (Hrdy
1999, 252), or polygyny in a liberal society, in which women choose their sexual
partners more freely and can rear their children in a community of female
friends and maternal relatives (Hurley 2002; for the loyalties of matri- vs.
patrilineal relatives see Sarmaja 2003.) Contemporary Nordic societies show
signs of both arrangements.
Recent primatological
findings have further complicated the picture, especially with regards to
female sexual choice. Contrary to classic assumptions, dominant male apes do
not always have greater sexual success (in terms of copulations) or greater overall
reproductive success (in terms of numbers of surviving grandchildren). The
empirical evidence of ape communities is so far inconclusive, ranging from no
correlation to quite high correlation between dominance and paternity. One
study claimed that the causal relationship may be the opposite, so that leaders
do not become attractive but attractive males become leaders. Thus some female
Macaque apes favoured young males before
they reached the status of alpha males. (Campbell 2002, 66-67.) Female ‘infidelity’
is also much more common than assumed. A few years ago, the first DNA paternity
tests among chimpanzees showed that over half of the infants were sired by
males outside the community - a fact the human researchers and probably also
the dominant males had been totally unaware of (Hrdy 1999, 85).
In our view, family sociology could engage
with evolutionary theory through empirical studies of how sexuality and
families are formed under various socio-economic and cultural conditions.
Surely, the task is no longer to quarrel over what is ‘biological’ and what is
‘social’, but to describe the rich kaleidoscope of ways in which innate
dispositions are activated, transformed and realised under various conditions
(Laland and Gillian 2002; Roos and Rotkirch 2003).
It is also important to
stress that even if something can be said to be ‘natural’ in the sense of being
a genetically transmitted disposition, it does not follow that this would be
socially or ethically justified. Evolution is in itself ‘witless’ and has no
inherent teleological or moral agenda (for a feminist discussion of this, see
Zuk 2000). Our evolved physiology also easily leads to maternal pain and death
during childbirth, but although this is natural it is not ideal. The naturalist
fallacy that equates natural with desirable is unfortunately very common among
both lay people and sociologists (see e.g. the discussion on results showing
that men on average desire more partners than women: AThe idea that male promiscuity is
hardwired and therefore ‘normal’ drew swift and furious criticism@ (www.msnbc.com/news/946836.asp).
In
this paper, we test the evolutionary prediction that power and status are
important criteria of sexual selection of males, especially concerning
short-term relationships in contemporary
Northern European societies. We are also interested in whether
increased gender equality in a society reflects itself in more similar gendered
sexual strategies, so that female social status would affect women’s sexual
selection. The main emotional dispositions that evolved during prehistoric
times cannot be expected to have changed radically during the last hundred or
fifty years. However, these dispositions may be more or less environmentally
sensitive. For instance, the disposition of finding women in the beginning of
their reproductive life to be most sexually attractive is apparently not very
sensitive to environmental factors and is universally found in all cultures. By
contrast, the disposition to discriminate between children according to sex
differs with social prospects: in a society where boys have worse marriage
prospects than girls, parents treat girls better (even if their articulated
ideology may favour sons) (Cronk 1990). Thus the dispositions to correlate
wealth and power with sexiness do not need to be strongly tied to the male sex.
There may exist a general ‘power is sexy’-disposition, that easily accommodates
to incorporate women when a society has more women in positions of power.
However, the question is not so much ‘are women in power sexy?’ (we know many
think they are) but ‘what kind of partners do women in power want?’ If a
society’s gender equality leads to increased similarity in sexual strategies,
then women in power should both want and find more sexual partners, or men in
power should want less partners. Previous research suggests that women in
power, just like other women, prefer partners who are socio-economically their
equal or superior and thus select quite heavily among possible pretenders (Buss
1996). We will question this conclusion by looking at how gender is related to
reported sexual strategies and power in four different regions.
The data: six surveys from four
countries
This chapter is based on survey data
gathered in the 1990s in four regions of the Baltic Sea Area: Sweden, Finland,
Estonia and the city of St. Petersburg in Russia. The data consists of
representative surveys of adult populations in Sweden in 1996 (N=2,810),
Finland 1971 (2,152), Finland in 1992 (2,250) and 1999 (N=1,496; the two data
sets are combined), Estonia (1,034) and St. Petersburg 1996 (2,080). People
were interviewed face to face and/or filled a structured survey questionnaire
(Kontula & Haavio-Mannila 1995; Lewin et al. 1998; Haavio-Mannila 2003).
One
tumbling stone for empirical assessments of evolutionary predictions has been
the difficulties in operationalising ‘dominance’ or ‘social status’ in modern
societies. For instance, social status is usually measured as level of
education or income (Freese 2000). This excludes e.g. the leaders of local
communities or subcultures. Our article does not escape this problem, although
we try to approach ‘power’ in a multidimensional way. We have operationalised
sexual success as the number and quality of sexual partners and relationships
and selected four variables to be explained: (1) number of sexual partners
during lifetime, (2) having had parallel relationships, (3) finding intercourse
pleasurable, and (4) satisfaction with sexual life as a whole. The variables
which supposedly predict sexual activity are different types of capital or
power: (1) economic, (2) social and (3) cultural capital.
Information on economic capital - monthly income after taxation - was unfortunately available only from Finland. In 1971, it consists of family income, in the 1990s of the individual income of the respondent. Cultural capital was defined on the basis of three categories of general education: low, medium and high. Social capital was measured on the basis of the present occupation and in Petersburg also on the basis of type of employer. Thus it here comes close to and partly intertwines with economic capital. The classifications varied in different countries.
In Sweden a three level social
group classification was available (cf. Lewin et al. 1998).
I academics, free
professions, higher functionaries, landowners etc.
II middle class, functionaries,
craftsmen
III workers and
assisting personnel
The Finnish social groups were
in 1971 defined on the basis of the following question: “It is customary to say that people belong to
different social groups or classes. Which of the following groups do you
consider yourself to belong to?” The seven categories listed in the
questionnaire were combined into four as follows:
I upper or leading
social group, upper middle class
II lower middle
class
III working class
IV farmer (classes
III and IV are in some cases combined)
In Finland 1992, there was an
open-ended question on present occupation. The replies were coded on the basis
of the occupational classification by Statistics Finland 1987 into three social
capital groups:
I Upper white
collar employees, other entrepreneurs than farmers
II Lower white
collar employees
III Workers,
farmers
In 1999, the Finnish social
grouping was based on the question: “Into which of the following groups do you
consider yourself to belong on the basis of your occupation?” The six
alternatives listed were combined into three in the same way as in 1992.
In Estonia, the economically
active respondents were divided into three groups:
I White collar
employees
II Other
entrepreneurs than farmers
III Workers,
farmers
The 22 occupational categories
in the St. Petersburg study were combined into three occupational status
classes as follows:
I Upper non-manual
occupations: engineers, specialists in natural and humanistic sciences and
fields, medical personnel (physicians, dentists, pharmacists, veterinarians),
researchers, teachers, people working in arts, leisure, sports and media,
directors, and entrepreneurs
II Lower non-manual
occupations: technicians, nurses, office workers, workers in justice and
administration (militia, solders, fire workers)
III Manual work
occupations: sales, traffic, factory, service and farm workers
In addition, type of employer
(state – private enterprise) was used as an indicator of social capital in St.
Petersburg.
Age affects sexual activity in the
obvious way that younger people are sexually more active than older people
regardless of their social position. Age is also in itself related with income
and social power. We have therefore checked the relationship between the number
of partners and economic and social position in the age categories from 35
upwards, but the results remained the same as among all respondents. In the
Figures shown here, data has been adjusted for age.
Empirical results
In the empirical part of this
chapter, we look at the effects of economic (income), social (occupational
status, in St. Petersburg also type of employer) and cultural (education)
capital on the reported numbers of sexual partners, parallel relations,
enjoying intercourse, and sexual satisfaction.
The examination of the number of
partners in different income categories (Finland only) showed clear
relationships between the number of partners and economic capital in the 1990s.
The higher the income group, the more partners the respondent reported having,
and this was especially clear concerning men. The average number of partners of
male respondents ranged from twelve in the lowest income group to eighteen in
the highest group (Figure 1). In the case of women, who reported fewer
partners, there was a similar tendency. However, women in the highest income
category reported fewer partners than those in the next highest. (But we should
remember that men tend to exaggerate and women to underreport the number of
their sexual partners, Kontula and Haavio-Mannila 1995, 93-94).
Figure 1. Number of Sexual Partners According to Income in Finland[2]
In Finland, the influence of income
was stronger in the 1990s than in 1971. This is probably partly explained by
the fact that in 1971, the question referred to household income whereas in the
1990s it referred to personal income.
Effect of Social Capital
Next we look at the influence of
social capital, here measured as occupational status, on the number of
partners. In 1971 in Finland, workers reported most sexual partners (Figure 2).
In the 1990s, by contrast, the number of partners of women rose systematically
from the lower occupational status group to the higher status group. Among men
there was a curvilinear relationship: lower white-collar men reported the
highest number of partners.
Figure 2. Number of Sexual Partners According to Social or Occupational Status in Finland
In Sweden, the relationship between
social group and the number of partners was linear (Figure 3). In the lowest social group Swedish men
reported on average 13 and women 6 partners, in the middle group 14 and 7 and
in the highest group 17 and 8 partners, respectively.
Figure 3. Number of Sexual Partners
According to Social Group in Sweden
In Estonia,
there was a slight difference in the reported number of partners between male
workers and entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and male white collar workers, on
the other (13 and 16 partners) (Figure 4). Female entrepreneurs reported a
higher number of partners (8) than female workers and employees (6). In St.
Petersburg, there were no statistically significant differences in the number
of sexual partners between the three occupational groups. The tendency was that
the number of partners increased with growing occupational status (Figure 5).
Figure 4. Number of Sexual Partners Figure 5. Number of Sexual Partners
According to Occupational Status According to Occupational Status
in Estonia in
St. Petersburg
This homogeneity between occupational groups in St. Petersburg was
elaborated by classifying the economically active respondents on the basis of
type of employer: (1) people working for state, governmental or municipal
enterprise or office, (2) people working in a private enterprise or company
previously owned by the state and (3) private enterprises never owned by the
state. This gave a clear correlation as people working in the private sector
reported more sexual partners than those working for the state (Figure 6).
Being employed in the Russian private sector can be presumed to indicate both
higher wages and higher social prestige than having a state employer.
Figure 6. Number of Sexual Partners According Type of Employer in
St. Petersburg
Effect of Cultural Capital
Next we explore the effect of cultural capital, measured as level
of education, on the number of partners in the four regions. The number of
sexual partners increased linearly with education in Sweden and among Finnish
women in the 1990s (Figure 7). Finnish men with middle level of education
(especially those who had attended vocational college) reported the highest
number of partners. In Estonia and St. Petersburg, there were no significant
differences between the educational groups.
Figure 7. Number of Sexual Partners According to Education
In sum, the number of sexual
partners correlated clearly with direct indicators of economic capital
(personal income in Finland or type of employer in Petersburg). It also
correlated to some degree with occupational and educational groups, with the
exception of the Finnish surveys where workers or middle class men reported the
highest numbers of sexual partners. There were clear gender differences, but
more capital increased the number of sexual partners for both men and women,
although sometimes with the exception for the women with most capital.
Economic resources also clearly
correlated with reported parallel (extramarital) sexual relations, especially
those of men. The experiences of having had parallel relations were studied in
slightly different ways in the different research sites. From Sweden and from
Finland in 1971 we have data on parallel relationships during lifetime. The
Finnish data from the 1990s and the Estonia and St. Petersburg data cover
reported infidelity during the present marriage or cohabitation.
Higher income entails more parallel
relationships both for men and women.[3]
In the 1990s, the proportion of reported infidelity of Finnish men rose from
twenty percent in the lowest income group to fifty in the highest one. For
women it rose from ten to twenty, respectively (Figure 8). In 1971, the trend
was very strong for men but also visible among women.
Figure 8. Parallel Relations during the Present Marriage or Cohabitation According to Income in Finland
Effect of social capital
Of the different occupational groups
in Finland, white collar men reported more parallel relations than workers and
farmers (Figure 9). Among women, the differences between occupations were much
smaller and a clear rising trend was evident only in the 1990s.
Figure 9. Parallel Relations According to Social or Occupational Status in Finland
In Sweden, social group differences
in reported parallel relations were also significant both among men and women
(Figure 10). Only 32 percent of men and 17 percent of women in the lowest group
reported having been unfaithful in their lifetime, in the highest group, the
respective percentages were 48 and 31. In Estonia, occupational status did not
predict statistically significantly parallel relations. Male employees and
entrepreneurs had parallel relations slightly more often than male workers and
farmers (Figure 11). Among women, entrepreneurs again scored higher than the
others.
Figure 10. Parallel Relations during Figure 11. Parallel Relations
Lifetime According to Social during the Present Marriage
Group in Sweden or Cohabitation According
to Occupational Status in Estonia
In St. Petersburg, occupation
(worker, lower and upper employee) was not statistically significantly related
to having had parallel relations (Figure 12). Women of the upper occupational
groups tended to report extramarital affairs slightly more often than the lower
status women but this association was reversed among men. When we looked at
type of employer, there was a clear correlation, as people employed in private
businesses reported most parallel relations (Figure 13).
Figure 12. Parallel Relations during the Figure 13. Parallel Relations during the
Present Marriage or Cohabitation Present Marriage or Cohabitation
According to Occupational Status According to Type of Employer
in St. Petersburg in
St. Petersburg
In the Russian
data, there is an interesting gender discrepancy concerning parallel relations.
Men with the lowest and women with the highest amounts of social capital
reported most parallel relationships. The gender gap in parallel relations is
thus largest in the lowest occupational group and smallest in the highest one.
Higher amounts of social capital appeared to favor more similar behaviour of
men and women.
As in the case of sexual partners,
women working in private enterprises in St. Petersburg most frequently reported
parallel relations. Working class women in originally private enterprises
(which had never been a state-owned) exceptionally often reported extramarital
relations, but also many upper employees working in these firms had had
parallel relations.
In most areas studied, a higher
level of education increased the likelihood of reporting parallel relations
(Figure 14). The exceptions are St. Petersburg and Finland in 1971, where men
with middle level of education most often reported parallel relations.
Figure 14. Parallel Relations during the Present Marriage or Cohabitation (Sweden: During Lifetime) According to Cultural Capital
In sum, the reported number of parallel
relationships was clearly related to economic, social and educational
indicators in most cases. Like with the number of partners, direct economic
indicators showed clearer correlation between status and sexual activity than
our occupational and educational indicators did. This was especially evident in
Russia, where the level of education often refers to achieved social situation
during the Soviet times, while the current type of employer revealed more about
the respondents’ actual social situation.
Pleasure from
Intercourse and Satisfaction with Sexual Life
With regard to sexual satisfaction, the country differences were
considerable. People in Estonia and St. Petersburg found intercourse less
pleasurable and were much less satisfied with sexual life than people in
Finland and in Sweden (where only overall satisfaction was studied). This is
due to differences in living standards and in the access to sexual education
and contraceptives between the two Nordic and the two post-socialist countries
(Haavio-Mannila and Rotkirch 1998).
In Finland,
experiencing intercourse as pleasurable and being satisfied with sexual life as
a whole was most characteristic in the higher middle income groups of both men
and women (Figure 15). Thus the richest people were not always as pleased with
sexual life as the next highest groups.
Figure 15. Sexual Satisfaction According to Income in Finland
Effect of Social Capital
In Finland in the
1990s, male white-collar employees enjoyed intercourse and particularly sexual
life in general more than male manual workers and farmers (Figure 16).
Interestingly, the 1971 data gave no male occupational difference for reported
pleasure in intercourse (all three occupational groups estimated 4.4). The
women gave slightly lower estimates in 1971 than in the 1990s (3.9, 4.1 and 4.3
and 4.0, 4.2 and 4.3, respectively). Women white collar employees found
intercourse more pleasurable than women workers while there was no significant
occupational difference in the satisfaction with sexual life as a whole among
the Finnish women. In 1971, the results for overall satisfaction with sexual
life were identical with those in the 1990s.
Figure 16. Sexual
Satisfaction According to Occupational Status in Finland in the 1990s
In Sweden, satisfaction with sexual life was lowest in the middle social
group and in all groups slightly higher for women than for men (Figure 17).
(Experiences of intercourse were not studied in Sweden.)
Figure 17. Sexual
Satisfaction According to Social Group in Sweden
Figure 18. Sexual
Satisfaction According to Occupational Status in Estonia
In St. Petersburg, occupational
differences in sexual satisfaction were very small but clearer when we checked
for type of employer. Russian men working in private
business reported more pleasure from intercourse and were more satisfied with
sexual life than those in state employment (Figure 19).
Figure 19. Sexual Satisfaction According to Type of Employer in St. Petersburg
Generally, finding intercourse pleasurable increased with education
(Figure 20). Nevertheless, in Finland in 1971, men in the middle educational group
were most pleased with intercourse. The overall satisfaction with sexual life
of men did not show any clear correlation in Sweden but grew linearly with
education in Estonia and St. Petersburg. The reported sexual satisfaction of
St. Petersburg women decreased with higher levels of education (for a
discussion of this surprising finding, see Haavio-Mannila and Rotkirch 1998).
Figure 20. Sexual
Satisfaction According to Cultural Capital
Thus reported sexual satisfaction correlated with educational level in
Estonia and St. Petersburg but not in Sweden and Finland. In all areas, social
status increased sexual pleasure but not overall satisfaction for women.
Discussion
Do rich men have more, or even most, sex? On the basis of this analysis,
the answer is a clear ‘yes’. Also in contemporary Northern European societies, sexual success correlates well with male
economic and social power. This was very clear in the case of reported
parallel relations and overall sexual satisfaction and to a lesser extent
evident with regards to reported numbers of sexual partners and reported
pleasure in intercourse. In some cases, the middle or upper middle groups
reported more sexual activity. Especially entrepreneurs proved to be quite
entrepreneurial also in their sexual lives. The Estonian and especially the St.
Petersburg material showed less socio-economic differences overall than the
Swedish and Finnish data did. In the Russian case, this prompted us to look at
the type of employer, which proved to be much more revealing than stated
occupation and education.
In this article, we wanted to take a first step in
opening the discussion between Nordic sex research and evolutionary theory. It
is worth noting that the results are not as self-evident as one may think (‘of
course rich people have more of everything’). Classical sociological theory
does not predict that power and sexual activity go hand in hand. Quite the
contrary – according to the ‘promiscuity thesis’ which already Edvard
Westermarck (1912) criticised but which remains wide-spread, primitive people
and less educated classes are characterised by unrestrained, wild sexual
behaviour, while culture and civilisation teaches the upper classes
sophistication and measure. Also psychoanalytical theory, which is often been
incorporated into sociological views of the human being, predicts that talented
and successful men would sublimate their desires, that is, work more and have less sex. True, feminist
theory has been more sensitive to the idea that social and sexual power are
somehow intimately linked, and has especially focussed on the abuses of
socio-sexual power by male elites. With the aid of evolutionary theory, we can
broaden the scope to include also consensual and mutually enjoyable sex and
also better grasp how crucial female sexual choice has been for male power
aspirations.
Obviously, the comparisons made here would all deserve deeper exploration and
methodological considerations. Even if the evolutionary predictions made in the beginning
were generally confirmed, we have not taken into account possible alternative
explanations, concerning for instance class-specific sexual morality and
occupationally related travel opportunities. Our results do not contradict
evolutionary theory but they are not enough to prove it, either. Such a task
would require more sophisticated empirical data. Darwinian theory actually distinguishes
between lack of power and elite positions, not with gradual median differences.
In ape communities the difference between alpha males and others is very great.
The data most appropriate for our purposes should actually come from samples in
which small elites (leading businessmen and -women, politicians, intellectuals
etc.) are overrepresented and in which they can be expected to honestly tell
about their sexual escapades. Now we can assume that we have too few
representatives of real elites and the elite respondents may belittle their
sexual activities.
The
variables occupation and education were not always correlating with sexual
success. This may be a problem of operationalisation, as mentioned in the
beginning, but may also pose a substantial challenge to evolutionary
predictions. In several cases, middle and lower middle status people scored
quite high points of sexual activity. This may be due to social and life course
factors – for instance, we know that the most educated people start their
sexual life later than those with less education (Kontula 1991). It also points
to the need of more ethnographically oriented research, where social status is
really measured in its live setting.
What
about the relations between gender equality and gender differences in sexual
strategies? The differences in gendered
sexual strategies were significant in all measured variables, as predicted
by evolutionary theory. However, they were clearly smaller in the Nordic countries, while they were much bigger in the
private than in the state sector in Russia. This supports the thesis that
general social equality increases similarity of sexual behaviour among women
and men (cf Kontula and Haavio-Mannila 1995).
Classic evolutionary
theory predicts that highest status
females would have less sexual partners and parallel relations than
middle-range females, as there are simply very few men who meet their selection
criteria, and also as female sexual activity is supposed to be less tied to
social status (and more to e.g. outlook and personality). In some cases, our
results supported this view. For instance, men’s general satisfaction with
sexual life was more dependent on income and social group than women’s, and
women’s income stopped correlating with their numbers of sexual partners for
the richest. But contrary to this assumption, status often increased women’s sexual activity proportionally about as much as that
of men. For instance, with the exception of Estonia, higher status women
also reported having more parallel relations. The gender differences thus
follow two distinct patterns: either the male curve is linearly growing while
the female curve is ‘curbed’ at the upper end; or the male and the female
curves are both linearly growing. The second pattern resembles gender
differences in aggressive behaviour, where men and women have similar curves,
only with consequently higher average rates for men than for women. Anne
Campbell (1999) has explained this finding by stipulating general human
dispositions for competitive and aggressive behaviour, which in women are
inhibited and tempered by specific psychological mechanisms. To the extent that
our results show similar gender differences for sexual behaviour, it suggests
that gender in sexual emotions and strategies may also be more a question of
degree than of kind.
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[1] While human sexual selection in a limited sense concerns only heterosexual and possibly reproductive sex, our evolved sexual preferences, dispositions and sexual strategies are obviously involved also in other types of love and sexual relationships such as homosexuality. The evolutionary origins of homoerotic relations may be related to sexual selection in a larger sense, involving social and kin selection. (Miller 2000, 217-219.)
[2] The income classification refers to the 1990s. The Finnish marks used in the 1971 survey are roughly equivalent in their real value with
the Finnish marks in the 1990s.
[3] The percentages in the Figures are calculated from the married or cohabiting respondents. If single persons are included in the base, the results are about the same.