Men want to have sex with as many women as possible, and give them no support.

Women want to have sex with the highest status men available (as women perceive status, which is similar to the way a small evil child raised by cannibal head hunters perceives status), and be supported by men.

A prisoner’s dilemma problem, the war of the sexes, ensues.

If both freely pursue their interests, we get a defect/defect equilibrium, where a small minority of men have casual no strings attached sex with the large majority of women, and a these women sleep with only one man at a time, but sleep with one man after another, trading partners in an unending struggle to get a better male, or get a better position on his booty call list. This bad female behavior is exacerbated by the male tendency to give the newest woman the highest position on his boot call list. Women get the sex they want until they approach the end of their fertile years, but children don’t get fathers. Since producing fatherless children places a large burden on women, most women do not have children until used up on the cock carousel and approaching the end of their fertile years.

To enforce a cooperate cooperate equilibrium, mating choice has to restricted, denying men access to women, and women access to men. In order that men have the incentive and the power to restrict female sexual choice women have to be owned by men. Men and women have to be stuck with each other. Men need to own women, except that they cannot sell, rent out, abandon, or give away a well behaved woman that they have had sex with.

Iterated prisoner’s dilemma has a good solution if the number of iterations is large and has no definite end, but this is not the case with mating behavior, because a woman’s fertile years are short. The progressive scenario where woman sleep with one man after another until they find “the one” and then live happily ever after is prisoner’s dilemma with a large and indefinite number of iterations resulting in cooperate/cooperate, but the actual outcome is that they sleep with one man after another until they start to get desperate.

Rollo Tomassi, in his excellent book “The Rational Male”, starts out by criticizing “oneitis” – criticizing male disinclination to defect. If you defect on women harder and faster than they defect on you, women will defect on you less, not more. It is a successful and effective male adaptation to female emancipation. It works. He also criticizes mate guarding, because ineffective mate guarding is counterproductive, and effective mate guarding is illegal. Hard to do effective mate guarding without substantial social support – which certain religious communities have, but most of us do not. That effective mate guarding is difficult and illegal is extremely distressing to males.

Tags: fertility