Well, to my chagrin, yet again a low response rate to my poll about sex and emotions has divested it of the ability to ground any interesting conclusions. That's partly the reason why I've decided to go global with this blog.
Anyway, perhaps you already guessed the impetus for Part 1 of my Sophie's Choice blog entry. Namely, study after study has demonstrated cross-cultural tendencies for men to feel more jealous and/or threatened/betrayed by his partner's sexual infidelity, whereas women tend to feel more jealous and/or threatened/betrayed by her partner's emotional infidelity.
The six women who took this survey didn't really bear that out, but it is interesting that no men indicated that they'd feel more threatened by their partner falling in love with somebody they weren't bonking.
So, why does the discrepancy obtain? If you've been reading my blog, I think you already know where this is going.
Women and Jealousy: Evolutionarily, women are wired to respond to indicators of strength, ability to provide, ability to protect, sexual acumen. Youthful appearance, physical bulk/strength, 1-1 hip-to-waist ratio, etc. are all important, but critically, the indicators to which women respond with feelings of sexual attraction are more often non-physical than they are in men. Men, on the other hand, tend to respond to indicators that the woman will be able to bear children, which usually tend to be physical indicators such as youth, smooth skin, .7 hip-to-waist ratio, etc. For this reason, although height and weight preferences differ across cultures, no human culture has ever sexually preferred old or very young females to females in their sexual prime (say, 16-35).
Anecdotal evidence means nothing, but try to think of couples (in which there was a noticeable disparity in physical attractiveness) you know. Which is more common: (1) couples where an average or below-average looking guy was with an above-average or beautiful looking woman, or (2) couples where an above-average or handsome looking man was with an average or below-average looking woman? Probably the former, if your experience is like mine. By the same token, how many couples do you know where the female is significantly older than the male? And the converse, where the male is significantly older than the female? That happens all the time! If you want some sociological data on this point, just browse profiles and see what age ranges people select.
So, in theory, the things women find attractive in men tend to be indicators of the ability to protect, support, and provide access to high-quality sperm. And which sort of infidelity is more of a threat to these things that women seek their men to provide? You guessed it: emotional. That's because if a man falls in love with another woman, the chances are much higher that he'll abandon his partner in favour of his lover, in which case the woman will lose his protection, his support, and access to his sperm.
A purely sexual fling, on the other hand, although there is a risk that an illegitimate child will result (which could, especially in the modern world of child-support etc., force the man to divert certain resources to the lover to help raise the illegitimate child), the likelihood that the man will abandon the partner for the lover is extremely small. Hence, the theory goes, women are more jealous of emotional infidelity, less so of sexual infidelity.
Men and Jealousy: There's a saying in Africa that goes "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe". This just reflects the platitude that when a woman gives birth, she KNOWS beyond all possible doubt that she's the mother. The father, however, does not have the same level of beyond-all-possible-doubt knowledge that he is the father. Sociologists have commented again and again that observations of new parents interacting with people being introduced to the newborn child have suggested that people are much more likely to comment that the baby looks like the father than they are to say that it looks like the mother. I find this fascinating, although nobody really seems to know what conclusions this tendency to re-assure fathers about their paternity means.
A problem with the male jealousy response is that falling in love tends to lead to sex much more often than sex leads to falling in love. So, men are right to be jealous of their partner falling in love with another man, because that is likely to lead to sex with the other man. Importantly, however, in the event that both sorts of infidelity obtain, men seem cross-culturally to be much more threatened and/or jealous by the sex side of being cuckolded, rather than the emotional side.
Why? Well, because evolutionarily, the cost to a man of being cuckolded is potentially extremely high, since if one's partner is adept at concealing her sexual infidelity, her partner can be tricked into spending his life (i.e., foregoing reproductive opportunities with other women) and expending his effort/resources raising another man's children. In fact, a widely accepted theory in evolutionary biology is that this is a reproductive strategy that the female body is actually biologically programmed to be competent at undertaking.
And in case you're wondering, this isn't an isolated incident; world-wide, roughly 8-10% of people in the world are estimated to have been raised by men who mistakenly believed themselves to be the biological father of the child(ren) they helped to raise. This statistic obtains even in western society and across socio-economic lines; in fact, this statistic does not even take into consideration children who are aborted, something that would certainly increase the percentage had those children been carried to term, since the desire to avoid one's partner discovering sexual infidelity is a leading motive for women procuring abortions.
In sum, a man's partner's sexual infidelity can be a great threat to the man, genetically speaking, because it could potentially result in him not passing on his genes to the next generation, since he harbours throughout his life the mistaken belief that he has already passed on his genes in the form of "his" children. Hence, men are more jealous and/or sexually threatened by their partner's sexual infidelity than are women, and are less jealous and/or sexually threatened by their partner's emotional infidelity than are women.
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