Sexual Harassment and Sexual Consent by Roberto Refinetti

Author:Roberto Refinetti [Refinetti, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138532465
Google: ed0AtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2017-11-15T05:20:04+00:00

Parental Investment and Sexual Selection in Humans

In Homo sapiens, as in most mammalian species, females tend to be the more heavily investing sex (Bateson, 1983; Symons, 1979; Buss & Schmitt, 1992). This is so largely because fertilization, placentation, and a nine-month gestation period take place within the female. In addition, the female bears the biological costs associated with labor, birth, and lactation (Buss & Schmitt, 1992; Symons, 1979). These factors seriously delimit the number of offspring a woman can sire. Under optimal conditions, a healthy woman can produce up to twenty offspring, but such an occurrence is rare (Symons, 1979). In contrast, men make a negligible biological contribution to offspring (their investment in spermatozoa) and bear none of the costs associated with perinatal development. As a result, a man has the potential to sire a great many offspring (Symons, 1979).

Given this disparity in biological parental investment, and the abundant, panspecific evidence for parental investment theory, one should expect that men will compete more aggressively than will women for mates and that women will be more discriminating than will men in mate selection (Buss, 1987; Buss & Schmitt, 1992; Symons, 1979, 1987; Trivers, 1985). Indeed, in the last few years, this prediction has received a great deal of empirical support (Buss, 1987, 1989; Buss & Schmitt, 1992; Daly & Wilson, 1983).

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