The Future Of The Sexual Marketplace - Roy Baumeister

Human female orgasm is, is a fairly novel thing. They have done studies with vibrators and so on indicating that, you know, some of the other great apes do seem to have contractions. A joke that I'm glad I'm not the research assistant who had to go to the gorilla with the vibrator and say, "Uh, sign a consent form and then we'll, we'll do something here."

What do you mean when you say that women shaped men more than men shaped women?

There's the biological argument that, uh, men are change- are more changeable and, and continue to evolve faster than women do, has something... And I'm not an expert on this, but it has something to do with the, the Y chromosome doesn't have the backups that the X does. So, if, if you get a mutation on the X chromosome, it produces something weird, the, the backup, the normal one might take over and keep the person normal. Whereas, uh, for at least half of the Y chromosome, there's no backup, uh, which means that the, the men are more changeable biologically. It, uh, like to put it, uh, men are nature's play things, that there's more, uh, selection that operates on the male than on the female. Uh, and there's evidence for it, there's just greater variance, um, in, in, in males than in females. So...

More gen- more geniuses and more retards in the male side.

More geniuses, more retards, uh, yeah. Even with height which is a very genetic, uh, uh, thing, um, the, the high- the difference between the tallest and the shortest man is bigger than the difference between the tallest and the shortest women. Uh, so again, nature produces more variety, uh, on the male that have talked some biologists about whether this is plausible and they sort of say yes, but I haven't gotten a firm straight answer. Uh, you see, to drive evolution (laughs) forward, uh, there are a lot of mutations, some of them are, a few of them are beneficial, most of them are bad. So ideally, to improve the population, you want the bad ones to be flushed out of the gene pool, you don't want them to keep reproducing. Uh, whereas the good ones, you want them to spread as, as, uh, as rapidly as possible. Um, in our species and in many others there's a l- both of those are more easily accomplished with the male than the female. The thing is most women have a baby throughout history, uh, and hardly any have more than a dozen. Whereas there are lots of men who have zero, uh, and there are men who have, you know, a thousand. (laughs) Uh, and certainly it's easier for a man than for a woman to have a, a couple of dozen, uh, even in these days with serial monogamy and, and so on. Um, so if the son has a really great new trait, uh, then it will spread faster than, uh, than if it's in the daughter.