Book Review : The Natural Selection--of Men

Sexual Choice: A Woman’s Decision by Heather Trexler Remoff Ph.D. (Dutton/Lewis: $15.95)

All right, all you gentlemen who incessantly ask what it is that women want, and all you sore losers who come home from first, second, 15th dates with a score of zero, here’s a book that could help you out.

Heather Trexler Remoff is more than just a jolly sex therapist. She’s an anthropologist with a heavy interest in evolutionary biology. She’s sure that no matter how much it looks as if men choose women for mating and eventual reproduction, it’s probably the other way around. Because, look at it, Remoff suggests, from a biological point of view.

‘So Little Time’

Men are the owners of zillions of sperm, and their biological imperative is to deal out those sperm to as many ladies as possible. (Thus the bumper sticker so often seen on snazzy sports cars: “So many women, so little time.”) But women have comparatively few eggs, in the great scheme of things, and in order to be sure that their genes end up in the great human gene pool, they must exercise considerable caution and discrimination in what men they choose as mates and, in particular, what men they choose as fathers for their children.

If your response is an irritable “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! My mother told me all that years ago,” well, my mother told me something of the sort too, but Remoff came into possession of her facts somewhat differently than Mom. First, Remoff worked extensively with Lionel Tiger (of male-bonding fame), so that she became expert at looking at things in purely evolutionary and biological terms. Then she used the methods of an anthropologist, finding 66 “informants” in her own society, women who crossed the lines of age and class, and asked them what they looked for in a man.

The material is--as in any splendid work of art or science--both inevitable and a surprise. Here, for instance, are the first five traits Remoff found that women look for when they select, not dads for their children, but lovers: “Good-looking,” “intelligent,” “good income potential,” “control of social resources,” and “food provided.”

“Good-looking”? Yes, of course, but that trait (as Mom told us years ago) isn’t standardized in men as it is in women. The “good-looking” men described here are variously balding, scrawny, stocky. If the women love them, they’re “good-looking.”

“Intelligent”? It’s important, Remoff says, that a woman perceive her man as intelligent: “This is made easier if he possesses a skill that the woman does not.”

“Good income potential”? Men should appear to be ambitious.

“Control of social resources”? That’s just a fancy way of saying “popular.” Everyone’s known about that forever.

“Food provided,” way up in fifth place, turned out to be a surprise to Remoff--in that it appears even when she wasn’t looking for it. A great number of affairs begin after a meal--either in a restaurant or one that the man has cooked--even after the woman has decided “against” that man. “King Kong’s chances would have increased,” Remoff remarks, “had he taken her to dinner before proposing.”

With every page you read here, you get (or feel) a double impulse: I always knew that!/I never knew that! “Sexual Choice: A Woman’s Decision” is a charming book, and the most charming thing (surprising? inevitable?) is that the sexual act itself is almost never mentioned.