I once lived and studied in an closed educational-setting in a particular country and observed that the mixed-gender setting there also served as a controlled experiment on relations between the sexes.
There was a group of attractive girls whom every guy asked out. However, they refused every offer because each of them had their feminine eye on the “alpha male” in the place. As a result, the leader-of-the-male-pack would date one of the girls and then move to another. And he would do so time and time again. The girls did not seem to mind. They were content to “wait their turn” with the top prospect rather then “settle” with a so-called lower-status guy.
I remembered this anecdote when I read this New York Times blog post on evolutionary psychology on the status of men:
While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.
This is not surprising when you look at history and human nature (as my observation in the school showed). First, polygamy was rampant in societies that were either primitive or not rooted in traditions that preached monogamy like (later) Judaism and Christianity. And the men who obtained the most wives were those who would be deemed the “alpha males” — those who were rich or powerful or educated or influential.
Of course, it must be said that many women did not have a choice in the matter. If Genghis Khan — from whom 16 million people are descended today — had wanted to take a woman as another wife or concubine, I doubt either her or her family would have refused the warlord. Still, the fact remains that the girl likely did not mind. In a war-torn, violent, famine-ridden, medieval world, who would not jump at the chance for the security granted by the chief alpha-male in most of the world?
Still, the end result of such a sexual culture was that only a few men had “access” to most of the women. Now, from a practical — or even economic — standpoint, there is nothing wrong about this in practical terms. It’s a function of evolution and improving society — after all, those men who were short or weak or poor or dumb would not have a chance to pass on their genes. But such cultures are inherently immoral because each person needs to find a so-called soul-mate to benefit both himself and the world, and any societal analysis based only on economics treats people as things rather than as moral creatures with souls. (My reasons are based in Jewish mysticism, but I will leave that for another post.) Suffice it to say that it is a tragedy for any person to live and die alone.
I once heard a metaphor for the dating world. I cannot find the source, so I will paraphrase it here:
Imagine that you are in a room full of twenty people — ten men and ten women. Everyone has a number on their forehead so that only everyone else (and not him) can see it. One man and one woman have a ten, one man and woman have a nine, and so on all the way to one. A bell rings, and everyone is instructed to join with the highest number possible in five minutes.
Everyone rushes to the man and women with a “10” on their foreheads. That pair realizes that they must each have a high number, so they will only partner with someone whom they see that has another high number. So those with the lesser numbers must sort down from nine to eight to seven until they reach a match. In the end, nearly everyone ends up with a number equal to himself.
Later Judaism — and Christianity, in particular — recognized this fact and viewed monogamy as the societal (and religious) ideal. Here is the reason:
(w) (m)
10 ————– 10
9 —————- 9
5 —————- 5
1 —————– 1
In a society in which only one person can marry one person, nearly everyone will end up with someone — and who will usually be equal to himself in terms of dating market-value. Everyone is fairly happy. Think about it — didn’t the head cheerleader and football captain (or something similar) usually end up together in high school?
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