What do women want? If only men knew. The rules of courtship have always managed to bewilder even the most seasoned of Don Juans.
But in the realm of science, uncertainty just won’t do. And researchers, studying animals as varied as birds, fish, frogs, and yes, even humans, are providing a glimpse into what makes females tick.
Females were once seen as demure and passive observers of male aggression, an idea held afloat by the polite sexual mores of yesteryear.
But by the 1960s, it could not be denied that females were in fact choosing males as much as males were “winning” females. “The really interesting thing, was that in general, females exercised a choice along very predictable lines,” said Deborah McLennan, a U of T zoology professor, last week in an academic seminar.
Bigger males. Larger horns. More coloured plumage. The realization that females were doing a great deal of the choosing was not surprising. A female may only produce a handful of eggs in her lifetime (a woman will only menstruate some 500 times in total), whereas a man is capable of producing a veritable galaxy of sperm. A female must choose wisely in who she mates with, whereas a male’s best bet is to simply mate with as many females as will let him.
McLennan studies courtship behavior in the threespine stickleback, a small freshwater fish. Males attract females by dancing in a see-sawing motion. The most successful males are almost always the most vigorous. “Then there are these poor little loser males who come up to the female and sort of hover, and go zig…zag, and by this time the female is saying ‘I’m out of here.'”
But why the attraction to more vigorous courtship? “The intensity of courtship is actually a very accurate reflection of a whole bunch of things about [the male’s] health,” she said. In the world of evolution, where procreation is the goal, healthy males who produce and possibly care for healthy offspring carry a high premium.
Now more attuned to female courtship behavior, researchers are making some new discoveries. It turns out, for example, that females are a lot more promiscuous then we once thought.
It was known prior to the 1980s that territorial male birds, when given the chance, would copulate with females whose mates were off patrolling their territory. What were once thought to be forced copulations, however, weren’t that at all: females were in fact actively courting passing males of higher quality. While scientists used to consider a huge proportion of birds to be monogamous, it is now known that 90% of avian species partake in such “extra-pair copulations.”
“All those questions we’ve been asking about why there are so many monogamous birds, guess what? They aren’t,” said McLennan.
So where does this leave humans? Not far behind, apparently. While studying the transmission of a genetic disease, one British study inadvertently discovered that 33 per cent of the husbands were not biological fathers of their child. The number rises to 50% in chimpanzees, humans’ closest relative, where babies are often conceived by chance encounters between passing troupes.
And just like the avian birds, women in questionnaires show heightened attraction to more “masculine” men (pronounced cheekbones, wider jaws) during peak times of fertility-the very time women are more likely to visit singles’ bars and entertain fantasies with Mr. Right.
“Women tend to have higher standards [at this time]…just like the female birds who were courting higher ranked males than their mates,” said McLennan.
But the ultimate trump card for men? Scent. “On all the surveys [researchers] have done…women are very attracted to odor,” said McLennan. “Nice” and “smart” men rank second.
It is unknown what evolutionary advantage smelly men have over non-smelly men, but symmetry may offer a clue. Some studies link facial symmetry with the attractiveness of a man’s odor. McLennan rejects many such studies for now, however, citing shoddy statistics and small sample sizes.
So what do women want? Like all things in life, it’s not so simple. “What women want is a complex interaction of a whole bunch of things that have to do a lot with what they already have, [and] who they already are,” said McLennan.
