What’s your opinion on sex and infidelity? Your answer can vary wildly depending on where you live, how you’ve been raised, and your social circles. The bedroom has always been off-limits in polite discussions, but this time we’re challenging you to deep-dive into the issue with us.

In this episode, Alexander McCaig sits down with David Buss, who is considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology. The pair have a comprehensive discussion on what it means to be monogamous, the evolution of sexual psychology, and the institutions we’ve built that enshrine our shared perspective of what a perfect relationship should be.

Do We Experience Desire Differently?

One theory David Buss discusses in this episode is that sexual violence against women happens because we do not understand our desires. David Buss explains that women and men have different sexual psychologies. 

It’s certainly a controversial opinion—but one David Buss is firm on defending. 

For example, the amount of time you let elapse before seeking sex, or the emotionl investment required before seeking sex—these are differences that recur over time and differ largely between the two sexes. 

In this case, men eventually evolve and adapt to influence or manipulate women, and women do the same thing. It’s a co-evolutionary arms race.

Analyzing Evolutionary Psychology in Modern Cultural Institutions

How effective are our cultural institutions in defending values we consider important to a healthy monogamous relationship? For example, it is illegal to marry two people in the United States—and yet, infidelity rates are high. According to Alfred Kinsey, an estimated 50% of infidelity rates are committed by males, while 26% are committed by females.

This indicates that people do engage in what David Buss calls, “serial mating.”

There are many ways to understand how we institutionalize or normalize our evolved psychology. One way is to look at the cultural institutions that reflect it. Another is that because mating is inherently a competitive process, mates are always in short supply.

This can be observed in countries where there are vast differences in male-female population. When a society has more men than women, violence committed by men and rape rates tend to go up. And according to David Buss, it’s also a place where polygamous culture can be a problem.. For example, cultures here one man can have four wives creates a large pool of young males who do not have sexual access to females. As a result, these repressed feelings become bottled up and explode in sexual violence. 

This doesn’t just happen out of a desire for sexual variety, but also for things that David Buss calls “mate value discrepancies.” If one person pursues another who is significantly more attractive than him, they will get angry when their attempts are unsuccessful. But even if the pursuit is a success, the mate value discrepancy means that she has opportunities to trade him up for someone better. As a result, she is more likely to leave him or be sexually unfaithful.  This can also hold true if the man is deemed as more attractive than the woman.

Empowering Women By Understanding Sexual Psychology

If you are alive today, you are an evolutionary success story. And one interesting point about our species is our mating system, which calls for a long-term commitment. This arrangement only occurs in about three to five percent of mammalian species. 

David Buss theorizes that due to the tremendous amount of commitment that goes into starting a family, males have evolved sexual jealousy. This is otherwise known as male sexual proprietariness, coined by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. This jealousy machinery is designed to keep partners faithful and to ward off rivals. 

With this in mind, David Buss believes that his book can be valuable for women because it outlines predictors of when they might be in a dangerous situation as a result of male sexual jealousy. Verbal insults, isolation, and obsessively monitoring her time are statistical predictors that a man will engage in physical violence. This, in turn, can also be a form of sexual violence, because it curtails her ability to choose when, where, and with whom she has sex.

Pretending that the two sexes are identical just continues to perpetuate sexual violence. Understanding how our mindset and psychology has evolved with regards to sex helps us put our desires into perspective. When we have a better grasp of how it affects us, we can help promote safe relationships, particularly for women, and continue to respect their capacity to choose. 

Sexual violence against women is at the core of the issue. It also takes on more forms than we think. Deception on internet dating, conflict within relationships, stalking in the aftermath of a messy break-up, intimate partner violence, financial infidelity, sexual infidelity, revenge porn…all of these occurrences, David Buss argues, is united when the partner seeks to bypass female choice. This also happens to be the first law of mating.

While we should celebrate how we are products of a large and complex ancestral system, we also need to acknowledge the problems in sexual psychology that may have made our existence possible in the first place. We owe it to ourselves, to our children, and to future generations.

Face-to-Face With Sexual Double Standards

Sexual double standards go beyond the sexes. It’s not just about whether it’s “more justifiable” for men to cheat than women. David Buss believes that one exists between the self versus the partner as well. 

For example, he poses this interesting thought experiment, where the audience is invited to put themselves in the shoes of a married man: would it be okay if I were sexually attracted to my neighbor’s wife? What about if my wife is attracted to the neighbor’s husband?

“We engage in a lot of moral hypocrisy in the sexual domain, where the morals that we espouse publicly are those, often, for other people to follow, and we don't always follow them ourselves,” David Buss explained.

Alexander McCaig calls for listeners of this episode to reflect on whether they’re experiencing a psychological imbalance. If you’ve condemned someone for having multiple sexual partners, but believe that you yourself have good reason to, then it may be a sign for you to reassess how you think about sexuality. 

People need a natural understanding that attraction is well within the bounds of our biology. However, it does not necessarily mean that this attraction warrants jealousy. After all, one interesting aspect of relationships is that even in happy ones, men and women still have the capacity to find other people sexually attractive.

Lust, Intimacy, Love in the Online Space

The dramatic proliferation of online dating and digital pornography is presenting a new challenge to our sexual psychology.

Previously, we would only ever have access to a few dozen potential mates in our entire lifetime. Now, we can leaf through thousands or millions of options through internet dating sites and applications. In addition, technologies like virtual sex, sex dolls, and sex toys are becoming increasingly realistic. 

Even here, the differences in our sexual psychology is evident. For example, pornography differs depending on whether it is meant to be viewed by a male or female audience. 

“With males, for example, it's multiple partners, it's no context, no emotional involvement. It's basically, woman comes into the room, sex starts happening right away. Whereas women's pornography, there's more context, plot, emotional involvement, psychological investment, and so forth,” David Buss explained.

Alexander McCaig raises the concern that the dopamine hit created by pornography can make it difficult for people to see how these interactions and relationships are built with hard work and effort in the real world. 

Due to the convenience, people are spending more time on online pornography. This means that sexual relationships have declined in real life, and marriage rates as well. What do these trends point towards, and is it something we should celebrate?

Closing Thoughts

Changes in the way we love, bond, and attach to people take one set of mechanisms. Changes in desire for sexual variety and sexual psychology as a whole are an entirely different set. It’s time we open up to our partners and to ourselves about how we truly feel. Let’s break free from living a proverbial life of quiet desperation.

We owe it to ourselves and to our loved ones to be more open about such a human part of ourselves. 

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