In the course of hitting the nail on the head about sex and aging, Joanna Cake also perfectly outlines why the Unified Field Theory of pop Ev-Psych is so wrong radar won't find it.

If you are in a relationship, Sex and Menopause is a subject which needs to be dealt with as a couple. Many marriages will be affected by the female's surge of testosterone prior to her Menopause which can leave her temperamental and sexually insatiable - and this is particularly noticeable (and often rather annoying) when her man begins to become aware of a gradual lessening of libido at the same age. But it's the mood swings and hot sweats that can really get a girl down. Bad tempered outbursts, hot sweats, lack of sleep, the feeling that we have no identity of our own accompanied by the female equivalent of a raging hard-on. It's not a good mix and is the basis for a female midlife crisis.

Source: Having My Cake and Eating It Too

'Member how EPs always say men "evolve" behavior one way while women "evolve" exactly the opposite?  Through entirely different forms of selective pressure based on entirely different optimized reproductive strategies?

Try telling that to a 45-year-old woman who's 55-year-old husband's drinking, smoking, and eating habits have started catching up with him!

For that matter, in my (at least so far!) 2nd- and 3rd-hand experience try telling that to a 55-year-old man who's 45-year-old wife's years of eating right and hitting the gym three times a week have kept her healthy and seems to be "constantly" (i.e. more often than he's comfortable with) hitting him up for sex when mostly he'd rather cuddle or watch TV.

The behavior of older heterosexuals is surprisingly similar to the behavior of teens and 20-year-old college students exhaustively monitored by pop Ev-Psych professors... only with the sexes reversed.

Now if you were to tell me there was a general evolved behavior that humans manifest when they experience more urge to have sex than their partner, or when faced with more pressure to have sex from their partner then I'd say sure, sounds great!

I just don't think you can build a sex-specific evolutionary case that explains how men's and women's behaviors morph, in matching fashion, as we age.

Note: Satoshi Kanazawa used the generic catchphrase "black" in the post I'm about to discuss.  Since it's not clear from his context whether his racism was directed at people of African, or African-American origin, or even just anyone with skin he determines to be darkly pigmented, in this particular I'm just going to use his terminology and say "black."

Usually when anybody types the words "Satoshi Kanazawa" my eyes start to glaze over. For obvious reasons. When I see him he's cited approvingly my blood also boils, but that's been happening less and less, so mostly when I see him referenced I just move on.

But last he became so extreme that even Psychology Today (the Cosmopolitan Magazine of science journalism) woke up enough to yank one of his posts. (After altering the title from Kanazawa's original "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" to "Why Black Women Are Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" because that made it better.)

And now it sounds like (finally!) his employers at the London School of Economics might have been moved to action -- if not for his overt racism, sexism, and homophobia then at least for his really capricious methodology.

So anyway, there having been such an awesome uproar this time I had to take a look. And... yeah, he's pretty special that guy.

You sort of have to admire his serenely confident but argumentatively gratuitous shot that while “black women are on average much heavier than non-black women” that’s not why black women are uglier. Oh no, he's scientifically controlled for that so they're still just ugly even when you take into account that they're fat.

Next he blithly asserts that blacks on average are stupider (have lower intelligence) than all non-blacks… but that’s not why, quoth he, black women are uglier. Oh no, because, see, even though black men are just as stupid as black women they’re still significantly more attractive than non-black men. (Or, one supposes from his amended version, black men are rated more attractive. Which I guess is supposed to be less racist.)

But wait! Maybe they’re not gratuitous structural arguments: he may have brought them up by way of eliminating the factors most favored by his superficial racist stereotypes to get to his more fundamental ones: “well, you’d think black women were uglier because blacks are fatter and stupider but no, even filtering out their fatness and stupidity black women are still ugly.

Oh, and then there's this lovely bit!

[B]ecause they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

He says that black male attractiveness eliminates as a reason the “fact” that since blacks “have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, blacks have more mutations in their genomes than other races.” And, you see, purer races prefer lower “mutation loads.” But once again, despite those preferences (and, don’t forget, men’s seed-spreading willingness to screw anything that moves… er… to make lower genetic “investments”) and all those icky mutations make black men “if anything, more attractive.”

(Speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that were Kanazawa of black heritage he'd instead have have concluded not that rather than having more “mutations” blacks have robust genetic diversity, which instead would be superior to those icky “inbred” races with their “evolved” aversion to replenishing their degenerate gene pools. He could even use same "objective" statistics to back back up that claim! But I digress.)

(Also speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that black people have more “mutations” because, as you say Rob, “black” is only a race in the sense that “black” people have darker skin, with the result that while “black” people descended from populations recently indigenous to north Africa, south Africa, central, east, and west Frica, south Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, parts of India, and so on are, yeah, a $@^%@ of a lot “older” and racially “mutated” since some of them are likely more genetically similar to what ever relatively genetic monoculture Mr. Kanazawa calls homeland than they are to each other. But I digress again...)

But nope, nope. Instead he says he's factored that out too: “mutations” don’t make black women uglier either. In fact, says he,

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently.

Yup, that’s probably the only other thing that could possibly explain the difference. (If he'd said they had less oxytocin we could all go home.)

It’s also the point at which he stops being a racist asshole using raw statistics and becomes a… free-wheeling racist homophobe "evolutionary psychologist" of the sort that gives evolutionary psychology a really bad name.*

See testosterone, Kanazawa believes, makes everybody look more manly. And black women have more testosterone. Which makes them look more manly. And it's looking manly that makes them ugly.

And so by inference that makes anyone who’s attracted to black women Teh Gay Takei. And, as we all know, Teh Takei is an evolutionary dead end. So all right-minded, offspring-maximizing men recognize that black women are ugly: QED.

And does he present any graphs or charts to back up these assertions? No. Does he bring up any counterarguments? Not at all. Does he cite any prior research? Nope. Does he cite anyone else's research? Not that either.  And does he bring up any other possible reasons why black women might be singled out as less attractive?  Not a bit.  Did he even stop check his arithmetic to make sure that, you know, the data he was using says what he wanted it to?  Evidently not(!)

Nope, nearly all the preceding crap is just Kanazawa being an unencumbered racist doing what racists are really good at doing -- selectively using the tools of a still-emerging field of science to advance his foregone conclusions. He happens to use evolutionary psychology much the way early 20th-Century racists and classists used Darwin to advance "social Darwinism," the way Dick Army, Paul Ryan, and Brian Caplan use economics to advance their defense of the status quo, the same way Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray use statistics to defend segregation, and just the same way Donna M. Hughes uses feminism as sheeps clothing for her neoconservatism.

With any luck, though, this time next year Kanazawa will be publishing from The Spearhead or National Vanguard and working lecturing at Bob Jones University or Liberty University. Which, his nominal Darwinism notwithstanding, should welcome him with open arms.

* I.e. he starts pulling shit out of his ass and saying "it must be evolved because it gives me such a woodie" and leaving it at that. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't objectionable in principle -- it would be hard to argue that nothing about human behavior has been influenced by natural selection. And most practitioners are actually fairly moderate people and many of them are outright Unitarian, Birkenstock-wearing, old-school liberals. And as far as I know none of them actually like, let alone admire Satoshi Kanazawa. But! Up till now he's been the closest thing to a Carl Sagan EP has had. And... yeah... how's that been working?

While talking about how it's often pretty relevant for researchers to know where a woman is in her menstrual cycleEmily Nagoski nevertheless keeps things in perspective.

[T]he literature on something like sexual interest across the menstrual cycle is far from definitive: while on the one hand there seems to be a small peak in many women’s sexual activity around ovulation, there’s a much more pronounced peak around the weekend. Context is a crucial component in understanding women’s bodies.

Source: Sex Nerd

In other word does it matter? Yes. Does it matter enough to be the holy grail some researchers make it out to be? You tell me.

Actually, while I think the main reason ev psychs and sociobiologists spend so much flinkin' time obesssing about women's levels of horniness has a lot to do with the paradigmatic inability to get that women are sexual creatures "just like people are," I have to admit that a more objective reason is that women's hormone levels are just a lot easier to track.  They take a whole month to cycle!  You can keep pretty much up to date with women's cycles by collecting pee once a day.  Or even just daily diary entries.  Women already frequently chart things like periods and ovulation.  And there's lots of collateral studies one an surf data from, what with them being kind of intimately related to fertility or infertility, maternity, menarche and menopause, and so on.

I'm pretty sure the main reason ev psych and, for that matter, a lot of real scientists spend very little time thinking about men's levels of horniness is because a) men are considered the baseline normal against which women's libidos are measured and b) healthy men are assumed to be horny all the time so why bother?  And also, given that on average researchers have tended to be straight men, eww, who could possibly be interested in horny men?  But I have to admit that a more objective reason is that men have definite hormone cycles but they cycle daily.  Which makes tracking them a heck of a lot harder more difficult: collecting hourly urine samples is doable but, um, distracting for most people.  Especially if what you're trying to track are libido peaks.

None of that means that where women are in their cycles is completely irrelevant.  Just that it's important to keep track of why there might be such disproportionate differences in available research.

Sooo....

If I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I might spend all my time pondering how it's just seed-spreadingly natural for men to want to be polygamous.

Oh, silly, me.  Actually if I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I wouldn't ponder any such thing.  I'd take it as axiomatic -- requiring no proof beyond "makes sense to me" -- and cheerfully use that axiom to prove anything else that popped into my little brain. When pressed by people with a modicum of gender-studies in their background I'd blithly breeze by way of explanation that hogamous-higamous, men are polygamous.

The other axiom I'd posit would be that women just don't like sex in the first place, and that therefore they're grudgingly going to aim to have it as infrequently as possible, preferably with as few men as possible.  And explain that with higamous-hogamous, women are monogamous.  Oh, and bitches too.  Oh, or if they didn't match my axiom, whores.

In evolutionary biology, on the other hand, it's more common to actually ponder whether there might be a reproductive benefit or cost underlying any inclination towards something like monogamy.

Something like this tidbit, via from Holly of Self-Portrait as, who says --

...low fertility rates among Mormon polygamists. My favorite bit:

the more women partnered with a man, the fewer children each of those women had. Exactly why is not clear. Like the Soay rams, men may simply not have had the stamina.... The failure of the Utah polygamy experiment should therefore not be seen as that surprising.

Source: Self-Portrait as

Reading the article it sounds like, in fact, on average, women in polygamous marriages tend to have approximately one fewer child for every fellow "sister wife."  And no, that's not a stretch.  Stories of sultans or Mormon patriarchs notwithstanding, most polygamists have somewhere closer to two to four wives, meaning a one-child per fellow wife isn't going to put anyone in negative numbers.

Anyway, EPs and sociobiologists tend to go on, and on, and on, about how men can fertilize bazillions of women in a lifetime while women's "investment" of pregnancy, lactation, and staying home in the cave-kitchen limits their reproductive potential to a relative handful.  And they brass on about how that means men are "naturally" likely to collect wives and partners willy-nilly whereas women are going to just as "naturally" be all gate-keeper-y and discriminating.

Which never made much sense to me -- in the real, non-Flintstones version of "the state of nature" related groups of women with satellite groups of men seems pretty common, and those groups of related women are usually able to collectively gather and trap enough to feed themselves and most of the men.  So while women might tend to care about fathers, and be interested in having men in their lives, and definitely interested in the meat and other foodstuffs men tend to hunt and forage for.  So in pure reproductive survival terms that's never seemed like a good enough reason to "evolve" a preference for monogamy.

If I were to going to assume that women are "naturally" monogamous, though, and if I were further inclined to go looking for facile sociobiological explanations for why that might be, then the likelihood that getting rooked into polygamy creates a material reduction in women's reproductive potential ought to be just about all I'd need to start making that case.

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Getting back to the original article, the reference to Soay rams is about a variety of sheep that do the whole alpha male head-butting fights over harems thing... but basically run out of sperm.  In comments someone pointed out the tendency for women to ovulate in sync.  That would tend to put a pretty heavy limit on men's ability to productively "spread his seed" in his own "harem."

Which in turn leads me back to the suspicion that "collecting" wives is probably a relatively recent function of property accumulation rather than some sort of "on the savannah" biological adaptation.

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Note that whereas women (and females of other species) are evidently reproductively harmed by polygamy, there wouldn't necessarily be the same issues with polyamory, either overt or covert.  So whereas men might be concerned about "cuckoldry," women (in polygamous marriages anyway) would positively benefit from it.  But in monogamy?  Not so much -- which at the very least ought to be a monogamy selectivity-stabilizer for men. (Don't hold your breath waiting for a pop sociobiologist to bring that one up.)