The ambivalent nature of female desire

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'"

This Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is said to have said to his disciple Marie Bonaparte. 

Freud was not alone. To this day, people disagree strongly over what women desire. On the one hand, we have the classical evolutionary psychologists, who claim that women want commitment and resources for their children while men strive for cheap reproductive opportunities. Anthropologist Donald Symons, with his 1979 book The Evolution of Human Sexuality, is one of them. In that book, Symons describes women as rather tidy creatures who don't care much for sexual variety and who are also not sexually jealous the way men are.

On the other hand we have the view that under the surface, female sexuality is much less orderly. Journalist Daniel Bergner's book What Do Women Want (2013) represents this point of view. Bergner cites a study that says that women lie about their sexual feelings and behaviour out of shyness. He also extensively interviews Meredith Chivers, a researcher who measures women's physical sexual responses and has found that those physical responses do not at all correspond to what women are commonly thought to desire. 

Studies have been made to confirm the common sense observation that females are much less interested than males in casual sex. Other studies (1,2) have been made to show that the previous studies were wrong and when stripped of social constraints and security concerns female sexuality is not that different from male sexuality.

Which side is right?

Both sides are right!  

The two views of female sexuality clearly contradict each other. And still, both are right. Female sexuality is in itself contradictory and ambivalent, because it evolved in at least two different species. Human female sexual desire is probably so old, that parts of it evolved in our pre-human ancestors.

About five million years ago, humans, chimpanzees and bonobos did not exist. Instead there was a common ancestor to all three species. We don't know what it looked like because it left no fossils. But educated guesses, from very educated people like primatologist Richard Wrangham, says that there are good reasons to assume that it looked much like a chimpanzee.¹ Chimpanzees and gorillas look very much alike, much more alike than chimps and humans. Still, 13 million years of evolution separate gorillas and chimpanzees. This is a sign that the looks of the apes of central Africa did not evolve much for 13 million years. Also, early hominins had very chimpanzee-like skulls.

We know even less about how our common ancestor behaved. But we can be rather sure that it did not behave like a human. Orangutans spinned off about 16 million years ago. Gorillas about 13 million years ago and chimpanzees about 5 million years ago. None of those apes have males that invest in their offspring. The orangutan is solitary, gorillas have small harems and chimpanzees and bonobos live in promiscuous multi-male multi-female groups. So it is very unlikely that our common ancestor had the same mating-pattern as humans. It is much more likely that it was similar to our current primate cousins.

Desire in the shadow of murderers

Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas, have one thing in common: They kill each other's children. Among gorillas it is systematic. About one in seven gorilla children will be killed by male gorillas, according to data from primatologist Diane Fossey's observations. That is many enough for the average gorilla female to have an infant killed during her lifetime. Infants are killed by males without harems of their own. When a child is killed by a male, the child's mother tends to choose to become the partner of the killer male. It sounds odd, since gorilla females are very devoted mothers, but there is a certain logic in it. If the female stays with her former partner, her next child will probably also be killed. The killer male has shown his potential, while her current partner has shown that he is in decline. It is better to side with a winner.²

Infanticide also occurs among chimpanzees, although less regularly and predictably. Newborns are especially vulnerable, so pregnant chimpanzee females tend to go on "maternity leave" away from the group in order to give birth. Chimpanzee females are highly promiscuous. They actively seek out numerous partners when they have their ovulation swelling a week every month. They have a good reason to do so: To obscure paternity so the males can not be sure that a future child is not theirs. Killing one's own child is a bad thing to do, so females try to make as many males as possible believe that they might have fathered her child. 

All this means that for a female chimpanzee, mating with as many males as possible reduces the risk of infanticide. And not only that. Mating with the most violent, unpleasant males reduces the risk the most. It is impossible to know how it feels to be a chimpanzee. But there are good reasons to guess that the feeling that makes female chimpanzees actively seek to mate with numerous violent males is what humans call horniness. 

Becoming human 

Humans are not chimpanzees. We chose another path where males started to monopolize females and support them with resources. In many human societies, females have very little say in this process. In other societies, females exert some choice. The common denominator is that males offer some provision and protection to their children and the mothers of those children.

Compared to chimpanzee females, human females face very different challenges. For a chimpanzee female, obscuring paternity is an important task. For human females, ensuring paternity is an important task, for two different reasons:

1. Males will be more willing to invest if they have a high degree of paternity certainty. 

2. Males injure or kill females they suspect of infidelity. Not only in rather advanced societies with laws, but also in primitive societies. For example, among the Yanomamö of the Amazon rainforest, about 10 percent of females were killed by humans. Those humans were not seldom jealous husbands. 

Given these presumptions, spontaneous horniness seems to be more of a disadvantage than an advantage for a human female. In societies where males oppress females, females will have sex whether they are horny or not and horniness can get them killed. In societies where females have some ability to choose their own partners, those who choose the high-investing, loyal males are at an advantage. In both types of environment, females have an incentive to be a bit sexually restrained and wait for the males who are willing to pay the right price. Females who like the sex more than the bribe are in danger of having sex with males who don't pay. And that's a very bad strategy, evolutionarily speaking.  

The power of inhibitions

Ideally, the human female should have evolved a total switch when she stopped being ape and started being human. From being horny by the sight of violent, unpleasant males, to being (moderately, neatly) horny by the emergence of a potentially devoted father. But evolution is seldom ideal. Especially not if selection pressure is low due to females being coercively impregnated anyway at rather even rates. 

I strongly suspect that a lot of the desire structure from the old infanticidal days has been retained in modern human females. Instead of evolving new desires for the right things to desire, I think we took a shortcut and instead evolved inhibitions against the wrong things. Instead of selecting for human females with a strong sexual desire for high-investing males, evolution may have selected for females with inhibitions against entering new sexual relations in general. 

The high degree of inhibitions current human females hold imply that feeling bad from doing the wrong thing has been a winning evolutionary strategy. It would of course have been great if natural selection had rewarded us for having sex with few and devoted partners instead of punishing us for having sex with many and uncommitted partners. But evolution is, unfortunately, not there to make us have great sex but rather to make us procreate. Sometimes these two goals overlap, sometimes they don’t. 

Ape-old feelings

I believe the existence of inhibitions has allowed human females to retain a number of very old sexual feelings. Ape-old feelings. The human condition made those feelings weaker and patched them over with inhibitions. But deep inside human females still have remains of their promiscuous chimpanzee desires and they still have masochistic desires toward violent males who treat them badly. 

Women did not evolve away from their ape-ish desires. Instead they evolved to want other things than they desire. What Do Women Want is the most misnamed book of the last decade. That book is very little about what women want and very much about what women instinctively desire, but do not actually want. 

If we hope for a consistent answer to the question of what women want, we are condemned to be disappointed. Female desire is not consistent because evolution is not consistent. Had female desire been necessary for human procreation, evolution would most likely have evolved a whole new set of female desires. But female desire was only occasionally what decided the outcome of human procreation. Gender oppression made sure that females would procreate no matter their opinion. A few inhibitions against the greatest pitfalls took human females most of the way toward successful reproduction. 

Human history and gender oppression may have tricked women of sexual peace and happiness. But evolution is not over yet. Although I have no data to prove it I believe that women who enjoy married life well enough have more children than their less sexually satisfied sisters (at least in the Western world). Give us a few more centuries of female choice and evolution may select a bit more for individuals who feel happiness and pleasure. 

1. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males, 1997, pages 45-49

2. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males, 1997, page 146-151.