Why are Females Promiscuous?

Why have  female humans been promiscuous and how can we tell?

Evolutionary biologists know that this has been the case. Women have always been mildly promiscuous throughout human evolutionary history. How do they know this? Read on!

There are no real mating behaviour records left in the fossil record evidence or remnants of past prehistoric settlements and the like. So how do we know that women have not been sexually exclusive to their partners throughout human evolutionary history? It turns out that clear evidence of women’s promiscuity has been found!

To find the evidence we must look at the female’s partner in evolutionary history-The Male.

Boys will be boys, and men will be the way they are, despite the many ways our society tries to make them change. But women’s promiscuity has nothing to do with how men behave except in the obvious fact he/she needs a partner to be promiscuous with.

Men, especially, are designed by evolution to be attracted to sexual novelty and to gradually lose sexual attraction to the same partner in the absence of such novelty. This the Coolidge Effect.[i]

You want an inconvenient truth? : Human beings are clearly evolved for sex lives featuring multiple simultaneous sexual relationships.

But how can we tell that females are also biologically mildly promiscuous?

If you want to know what women have been up to, look at men’s genitals I: (The testicles)

From Psychology Today-The first piece of evidence is the relative size of the testes. Across species, the more promiscuous the females are, the larger the size of the testes relative to the male’s body weight. This is because when a female copulates with multiple males within a short period of time -- in other words, when she is promiscuous -- sperm from different males must compete with each other to reach the egg to inseminate it. This process is known as “sperm competition.” One good way to out compete others is to outnumber them. Male gorillas, whose females live in a harem tightly controlled by one silver back male and therefore do not have many opportunities for extra-pair copulations (“affairs”), have relatively small testes (0.02% of body weight) and produce a very small number of sperm per ejaculate (50 million). They don’t have to produce a lot of sperm to impregnate their females because their sperm are not likely competing with anyone else’s.

 

On the other extreme, male chimpanzees, whose females are highly promiscuous and do not attach themselves to any single male (in other words, they don’t have “pair-bonding”) have relatively large testes (0.3% of body weight) and produce a very large number of sperm per ejaculate (600 million). So, compared to gorillas, chimpanzees have testes 15 times as large, and produce 12 times as many sperm per ejaculate. They have to, if they have any hope of outnumbering sperm from other males and inseminating the egg before them.

 

 

On this scale, humans lie somewhere between the gorilla and the chimpanzee, but closer to the former than the latter. Men’s testes are about 0.04% to 0.08% of their body weight, and the approximate number of sperm per ejaculate is 250 million. So women have been more promiscuous than gorilla females in their evolutionary history, but not nearly as promiscuous as chimpanzee females. The evidence of women’s promiscuity throughout evolutionary history is in the relative size of men’s testicles. Men would not have such large testicles and produce so many sperm per ejaculate had women not been so promiscuous. But then, their testicles would have been much larger and they would have produced even more sperm per ejaculate had women been more promiscuous.

If you want to know why females have an evolutionary advantage through promiscuity  look up www.catlb.org/esr/writings/promiscuity.htm  The Biology of Promiscuity by Eric S Raymond (click on link.) Fair to say not only is it pleasurable but diversity of offspring gives certain evolutionary advantages.

We are psychological fossils.     Women and men are the product of an extraordinary and long evolutionary process. Behaviours and traits that we exhibit are often embedded in our very genes. They leave their mark on our physiology , physical and mental makeup.

Women and men have urges and needs some not fully understood. This of course does not excuse bad behaviour, just because something is natural does not mean it is right! (Naturalistic fallacy)  Just because it is natural to be promiscuous does not mean it is right.

Naturalistic fallacy,       the notion that what is natural is inherently good or right…      

Some people think that just because it is right according to their code of morals means that it is natural and inherently right.  (Moralistic fallacy) Thus the Christians belief in Sunday as the holy day means that it is natural (good or right) to observe it.

 

Moralistic fallacy,           the notion that what is good or right is natural and inherent…

The plight of individual humans is interesting caught as we are in an evolutionary spider’s web of interlocking inherited behavioural and naturalistic tendencies. Superimposed upon which is societies need to impose order and control.

 

Sometimes behaviour is neither right nor wrong it is just behaviour...

John Condliffe’s new manuscript is Daughters…It is at the editing phrase now some of the ideas are from that manuscript.

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[i]In biology and psychology, the Coolidge effect is a phenomenon seen in mammalian species whereby males (and to a lesser extent females) exhibit renewed sexual interest if introduced to new receptive sexual partners,[1][2][3][4] even after refusing sex from prior but still available sexual partners.