Why do women love and men lust?

Of course there are exceptions, but in general the ladies are more interested in long term romance and the gents in making woopie. Women want Mr. Right and men want Miss Right Now. As I just said, there are plenty of exceptions. Plenty of guys want to find that perfect woman to settle down with a marry and snuggle with for all eternity, and some (I wouldn't say plenty) women are interesting in horizontal mamboing and little else - not to mention those guys interested in finding Mr. Right and those women looking for Miss Right Now. But as far as statistical majorities go - women look for more love and men for more booty.

This is very easy to explain with the cold, soulless mathematics of evolutionary theory. Searching for amour and being overly amorous are two different replication strategies. At the core of the Darwinian algorithm is this concept - any replication vehicle will behave in such a way as to maximize the potential replications of its replications. In plainspeak this means that people (or indeed, all organisms) act in such a way so that they can have the most babies that will in turn grow up, make woopie in their due time, and have more babies. It is often a mistake to think that evolution simply drives organisms to procreate as much as possible. This does the organisms in question no genetic good if their offspring do not also reach maturity and pass on their genes as well. How does this explain that females are more inclined towards monogamous love while males lean towards polygamous philandering? Females can only have 1.33 pregnancies per year, while a male can cause potentially 1000s of pregnancies in the same time, albeit he runs an awful risk of chafing at that point. Added to that is the fact that females must invest a great deal of care and resources to bring a child to term, whereas a male can be a jerkwad and skip town after his tiny investment. It is because of this simple dichotomy that females have evolved much stronger tendencies towards pair-bonding (monogamy) while males have evolved to opposite strategy of gettin' some whenever possible. Thusly women are genetically inclined towards romance and true love and males are inclined towards being a ship passing in the night. For a more in-depth explanation of the genetic theory behind this, there's piles of reading that can be done. Two excellent examples are Jared Diamond's Why is Sex Fun? and the more scientifically rigorous but more disturbing A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer. That second one is a superb scientific study, but can be a bit off-putting. It does talk about chipmunk rape, and that's about the most lighthearted subject in the book.

There are other strategies as well; those two are simply the most common overarching ones. Darwinian theory can easily explain the use of each strategy for the opposite sex, although they come with certain qualifiers which make them less common. A sex-crazed man will do the dirty deed with a wide variety of willing gals, whereas the sex-crazed lady seeks out a specific kind of male - specifically the most successful sex-crazed man (i.e. "the bad boy") often referred to in evolution literature as the genetic Superman, although this one does not stand for truth or justice, but arguably might for the American Way. The romantically inclined monogamous male is apt to be more responsible and have more solid familial foundations, and thusly seeks out a similar woman so they can mate for life just like swans (although if you read more about swans, you'll find out that they're actually about as monogamous as...well...humans - if you read more about human monogamy that is. Which can be little surprising considering that we have "fine" institutions like Promise Keepers to show us all how we should behave.*)

For those that would still argue that women are equally as obsessed with sex as men are, I offer the spot-on wisdom of thespian Larry Miller spouting about the idea that women think about sex as much as men do - "It's like the difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it. If women had any idea, even for a second, of how we really looked at them, they would never stop slapping us."


*We should keep promises is their gist, I believe. Oh yeah, and women should do what they're told to by their men. Or at least promise to.