“In some domains, women are more sexually selected than men; one could say in these cases that women have the larger “peacock’s tail.” An example can be found in the domain of physical attractiveness. Women are typically rated as better looking than men, by both men and women. The difference is plausibly a consequence of the fact that, although both sexes care about good looks in a mate, on average, men care somewhat more. This means that, since this sex difference first evolved, there has been a somewhat stronger selection pressure on women than men for physical attractiveness — the opposite of what we find in peacocks.”

— Steve Stewart-Williams

(p. 149)
The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013)

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Steve Stewart-Williams 63

1971

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“A danger in emphasizing mean values for each sex is that these values may be projected onto all or most normally developing men and women. The mean may be treated as a description of the typical group member, despite the fact that the majority of individuals fall above or below it. Psychologists do make some effort to stress that means cannot be attributed to all members of any group, as evidenced by the fact that we often append the phrase “on average” to our descriptions of mean differences. But is this enough? Consider again the robust sex difference in willingness to engage in casual sex: The mean SO [sociosexuality] score for men is higher than that for women. What does this tell us, though, about individual men and women? It clearly does not tell us that all men are interested in casual sex and that all women are not. However, given the degree of overlap between the male and female distributions, it also does not tell us that a large majority of men are more interested in casual sex than a large majority of women. That is, it is not accurate to say even that “men are typically more interested in casual sex than women, but there are of course exceptions.””

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Here is what the data that the means are drawn from actually tell us:
Men and women can be found at virtually every level of interest in casual sex. At the right-hand tail of the distribution, only a small number of people are strongly interested in casual sex; however, of these people, more are men than women. At the left-hand tail, only a small number of people are strongly <I>dis</I>interested in casual sex; however, of these people, more are women than men. Most people — men <I>and</I> women — fall somewhere in between. If you were to choose one man and one woman at random, it would be somewhat more likely that the man would have higher SO. However, you wouldn't want to bet your life savings on it. Around a third of the time — i.e., closer to 50% than to 0% — the woman would have higher SO.
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

“Just as our tools evolved culturally to fit our hands, so too our social roles evolved culturally to fit persisting aspects of the human mind. Roles that jar too violently with human nature are unlikely to persist for long, at least without the application of significant social force. If this is correct, it raises the possibility that some social roles might have evolved culturally to fit traits that, although found in both sexes, are more common in one than the other. This is emphatically not to say that there are some male roles and some female roles. But it is to suggest that there might be some social roles that suit more men than women, and others that suit more women than men — not just because of evolved physical differences but because of evolved psychological differences as well.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 261

“Some have argued that lesbian sexuality-meaning here simply women having sex with women not men-solves the problem of gender by eliminating men from women's voluntary sexual encounters. Yet women's sexuality remains constructed under conditions of male supremacy; women remain socially defined as women in relation to men; the definition of women as men's inferiors remains sexual even if not heterosexual, whether men are present at the time or not.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

Sexuality, Pornography, and Method: "Pleasure under Patriarchy" (1989) Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 pp. 314-346

“Topologically, men and women are identical. Some things are just larger and more developed in one than the other and positioned differently.”

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 6 “Objective Knowledge” (p. 266)

“When we look at the pay of men and women who do work equal hours, two discoveries are quite astonishing:
--When women and men work less than 40 hours a week, the women earn more than the men;
--When men and women work more than 40, the men earn more than the women.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 79.

“The distinction between central and peripheral claims is applicable to many aspects of human sexuality. Consider, for instance, the emotion of jealousy. Evolutionary psychologists place a strong emphasis on sex differences in this domain. The standard claim is that men are more worried by a partner’s sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity, whereas women are more worried by a partner’s emotional infidelity… [However] the overwhelming trend is that most men and most women are extremely upset by both sexual and emotional infidelity. This suggests that the central EP claim regarding jealousy should be “Human beings evolved to experience jealousy in romantic relationships” rather than “Men and women evolved different patterns of jealousy.” The latter statement is true but should be considered a qualification to the former: a peripheral rather than a central claim. To stress the sex difference alone would be like observing that male elephants are bigger than females while steadfastly neglecting to mention that all adult elephants are large compared to most terrestrial animals. It would almost certainly foster an inaccurate view.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

(pp. 266-267)
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

“Like many of her sex, Sophie was fiercely competitive with other women, working on the crackpot theory that if she could be better in some way, men would like her more, respect her. Make her happy. She never cottoned on that the men she was attracted to, the men who found her attractive, didn’t like women.”

Craig Ferguson book Between the Bridge and the River

Between the Bridge and the River (2006)

“The idea that women are the choosier sex is one of the best-known claims associated with EP [evolutionary psychology]. Ironically, another of the best-known claims associated with EP is an exception to this rule: On average, men are choosier than women when it comes to the physical attractiveness of a prospective mate. Even if we put this counterexample aside, though, the statement “females are choosier than males,” although true of many species, does not apply easily to our own. It is true that men may sometimes be more willing than women to lower their standards for a casual sexual partner. However, when it comes to the most important mating decisions of a man’s life — who he will marry, who he will have children with — the difference in choosiness is much smaller and maybe nonexistent. This fact of human life is even implicit in everyday folk psychology; the stereotype is that men will “sleep with anything that moves,” not that they will marry or have children with anything that moves. In long-term, committed relationships, men are about as choosy as women.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 157

“One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement. As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock’s tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 9. Battle of the Sexes

“We have to face the fact that most men and women out there are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit.”

John W. Gardner (1912–2002) American politician

Quoted in "Self Renewal" (1964).

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