Cue the Beatles . . . or, in my case, recollections of the large poster on the wall of my classroom in Deng Xiaoping’s China, exhorting students to practice the Three Loves: “Love the party! Love the country! Love socialism!” (I hope I’m not giving the Obama administration any ideas.) What is this thing called love, and where are we going with it?
Back to the Old Stone Age, quite possibly. There has been a theory buzzing around for a year or so in the human sciences, backed by some research data, along the following lines:
Before the rise of agriculture 10,000 or so years ago, when human beings lived in small hunter-gatherer groups, men and women treated each other in a fairly egalitarian sort of way, but innate male-female differences in traits like recklessness (more in men) and emotional responsiveness (more in women) were freely and fully expressed. Mating was based on straightforward mutual affection, constrained only by incest taboos and tribal solidarity, but complicated, no doubt often fatally, by love triangles. Then . . .
With agriculture came the higher-density, better-organized, hierarchical, and more constrained societies with which we are familiar. The sexes were less egalitarian in the way they treated each other. (Think of Chinese foot-binding.) On the other hand, paradoxically, innate male-female personality differences were squished down by all that social pressure: men constrained to be less reckless, women less emotional. Mating was way constrained: Think of the plots of Romeo and Juliet and La traviata, or the poor lass at number 222 here. The older, freer, wilder ways of mating lived on in myth and folk memory—think of the plot of Tristan. Now . . .
Modern post-industrial society is taking us back to the Pleistocene. Once again we are egalitarian in our treatment of each other; but our inner Mars and Venus are freer to express themselves without restraint than in those laced-up millennia of agricultural-industrial patriarchy. (Think of the plot of Fatal Attraction.)
John Tierney covered this theorizing in the science section of the New York Times last September. (The science section is the sole reason for hoping that the Times survives its financial troubles.) He quotes David Schmitt of Bradley University:
“Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was ‘unnatural’ in many ways,” Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. “In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots,” he argues. “That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men’s, and to a lesser extent women’s, more ‘natural’ personality traits to emerge.”
Note that phrase “to a lesser extent.” Dr. Schmitt thinks it’s men who are doing most of the changing.
You get the same impression from the University of Iowa study that FuturePundit reports on, and links to, here (with a good discussion following in FuturePundit’s comments thread). The Iowa study covers male and female mating preferences under 18 headings (“ambition,” “similar political background,” “good looks,” etc.), with statistics going back to 1930 for comparison.
In the 1930s male respondents were seeking a dependable, kind lady who had skills in the kitchen. Chastity was more important than intelligence.
Now, guys look for love, brains, and beauty—and a sizable salary certainly sweetens the deal. Men ranked “good financial prospect ” No. 12 in 2008, a significant climb from No. 17 in 1939 and No. 18 in 1967. . . . Chastity—which men ranked at No. 10 in 1939—fell to dead last in 2008.
I’m a bit surprised to learn that our grandfathers didn’t think more highly of chastity. These respondents are all college students, though. In the 1930s that would have skewed the respondent sample towards the better-off, who perhaps were less prudish than the still-proletarian sons and daughters of the immigration Great Wave. That chastity has completely lost its market share among male preferences is anyway not surprising. What would be the point of preferring it nowadays?
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