In a tiny town tucked into the desert an hour’s drive out of Nevada, a legal brothel operates. Its ‘menu’ of services range from less expensive sexual intercourse to the most expensive, ‘the White Whale’, starting at $20,000. Dr Justin Garcia, there with his colleagues doing research, asked the manager, a woman with bright yellow hair and a Minnie Mouse voice, what the White Whale was. She explained: ‘Oh, that’s the full Girlfriend Experience… sex isn’t necessarily part of it, but you’ll get a hell of a cuddle.’
Two new books on the power of intimacy mark Valentine’s Day: The Intimate Animal by Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and executive director of the Kinsey Institute (founded by Dr Alfred Kinsey, colloquially known as the ‘grandfather of western sexual science’); and Bonded by Evolution by Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at UC Davis, who specialises in the field of attraction and close relationships.
‘Better together’ is the common message of both books. The first argues that we have been hardwired over many millennia of evolution to form a strong pair bond with a single mate and that this social monogamy has been most adaptive for Homo sapiens because the ‘two-parent unit, working together… has led to stronger, smarter and healthier young’. Eastwick agrees, but the goal of his book is to rewrite the ‘EvoScript’ – the ‘economic model of human mating’. Evolutionary biology in a nutshell is: ‘She’s hot, he’s rich, let’s make a deal.’ Eastwick says that this wrongly reinforces mistrust and pessimism between the sexes.
The books are timely, since we are on the precipice of an ‘intimacy crisis’, and without intimacy we may survive but not thrive. Data shows that fertility rates are down and we are facing a singledom and loneliness pandemic. Why? Garcia says that Gen Z and millennials are ‘dating less, having less sex and marrying much later’. The decline in sexual activity among the young has been referred to as a ‘sex recession’. This is bad news for our health, as Garcia tells us that love really is the best medicine. Oxytocin (the cuddle hormone) can act as an anti-inflammatory and antioxidant, meaning better wound healing. Social isolation is akin to ‘smoking 15 cigarettes a day’.
The culprit? Phones and dating apps are making both adults and young people more antisocial, deprived of smell and touch. Dancing and the release of pheromones in our sweat are part of the mating ritual (cue the ‘Strictly curse’). As a capitalist construct, dating apps offer a ‘paradox of choice’, but we simply cannot cope with the ‘deluge of data’. These apps are about your relative value – looks, status, resources – and data found that ‘both men and women tend to pursue potential partners who are about 25 per cent more desirable than themselves’ or have a higher ‘mate value’, i.e. punch above their weight. Ultimately, apps cannot predict the mysterious and elusive factor of compatibility.
Garcia claims even when ‘love on the brain’ is picked up by an fMRI scanner, the science can see that we love but it can’t explain why. Do opposites attract? Eastwick analyses the data and shows us that both similarity-attraction and opposites-attraction phenomena fail. People experience attraction first and then perceive similarity afterwards. Algorithms used at speed dating events cannot predict which pairs of people are compatible.
The ‘sex recession’ among the young is bad news for health, since love really is the best medicine
Garcia, who is also a scientific adviser to Match Group (which started as Match.com in 1995 and now owns Tinder and Hinge), argues that digital dating itself is not the problem; it’s how we use it that’s at fault. Interestingly, Match Group’s stock price spiked in lockdown but plummeted post-pandemic. Does this mean we want to meet IRL (in real life)? Eastwick thinks so, declaring that competing in ‘a vast pool of complete strangers is the antithesis of what we’ve evolved to do’. Garcia advises us to forget the idea of ‘the perfect match’; scientifically, looks are important for immediate impressions but personality wins out in the long run.
But Garcia stresses that ‘social monogamy is not always in lockstep with sexual monogamy’. And there’s the rub. Eastwick reassuringly points out that not everyone is a sexual opportunist in marriage, claiming that ‘when people are in committed relationships they find alternative partners on the sidelines to be as appealing as gas station sushi’. Is Infidelity in Our Genes? was a study conducted by Garcia on the DRD4 gene, which is involved in thrill-seeking behaviours such as gambling and drinking. He concluded that ‘individuals with a certain variant of the DRD4 gene were also more likely to have a history of uncommitted sex’. Strangely, Eastwick quotes the study and dismissively concludes that genes affect infidelity ‘hardly at all’. Rivalry between sexologists?
Humans, unlike most mammals, have sex facing each other and we’re different in other ways too. Garcia tells us about the ‘male argonaut octopus, who will tear off his own penis’ and ‘launch it at a female to avoid being eaten by her during mating’. In the human kingdom, we call that female an ex-wife. Eastwick informs us that human males have a penis that is very different in form and function from that of the other great apes, for example, ‘Gorillas and chimpanzees have rather small penises, and copulation typically lasts only seconds.’ Greg, is that you?
Eastwick notes in his introduction that ‘humans have been forming and maintaining romantic relationships – often happily – for hundreds of thousands of years’. Happily? Was he there? His book is perhaps too idealistic: ‘Our evolutionary instincts don’t prime us to chase the most attractive or highest-status partner we can find… Rather, we crave attachment bonds with partners who can meet our needs in good times and bad.’ In other words, we should marry people who are good for us. But frequently we don’t. If people didn’t make wrong romantic decisions there would be no place for the thousands of books published on coping with heartbreak and divorce.
Eastwick says that the EvoScript is tied to the ‘red pill’ idea (recently explained in Netflix’s Adolescence). This refers to ‘learning hard truths’, such as the controversial 80/20 claim favoured by incels that ‘80 per cent of women desire only the top 20 per cent of the men’. He argues that ‘tradwives and men’s rights advocates take evolutionary findings to mean that we can cure our societal ills by returning to the way things were done in the past’. He does not consider that #tradwife content might be more of a female fantasy than male one. What about Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm) who graduated from Juilliard, has eight children, a 328-acre farm and more than ten million followers on Instagram? Such women could be said to be living the feminist dream of ‘having it all’ – independently rich and happy with floofy hair and lots of carrots.
The tradwife might be more of a female fantasy than a male one
Eastwick does admit that ‘men are more interested in having casual sex than women’ and that on Tinder men are more indiscriminate, swiping right (‘yes’) 50 per cent of the time compared with only 5 per cent of women. Reassuringly, in real life men are much more discerning. Eastwick’s main message is of evolutionary equilibrium and the ‘flimsiness of biological determination’ – i.e. men can also be fantastic caregivers and women can be efficient providers.
On the subject of polyamory, Eastwick argues that attachments can work beyond the ‘prototypical romantic dyad’ because ‘children regularly bond to more than one caregiver’. Garcia acknowledges that certain small communities have a cultural history of polyamory (such as women in the Himalayas who practise fraternal polyandry, or marriage to two or more men who are brothers). But ultimately ‘humans are wired to be jealous, to protect pair bonds’, and generally speaking polyamory causes more tension than most people can handle. Garcia dryly recalls: ‘As one of my friends who had attempted to form a polycule once told me “It didn’t work. I just pissed off two women instead of one.”’
Considering the dawn of the ‘AI girlfriend’, he wonders: ‘Can the illusion of human connection ever hold a candle to the real thing?’ He ends on a positive note: ‘Fortunately, we are an adaptive animal.’ And Eastwick agrees. So where do we go from here? Both books offer good advice for finding and nurturing love – much of which is common sense. But then how many of us use common sense when it comes to love and intimacy?
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