The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch by Jonathan Gottschall

Author:Jonathan Gottschall [Gottschall, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-14T07:00:00+00:00

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LOOK AT IT THIS WAY: what we find in women’s sports is exactly consistent with what we find in girls’ forms of play. Girls use play to establish intimate friendships and have less interest in competitive games than boys do. Given that most girls especially dislike physically rough, dominance-oriented forms of play, it’s no wonder that, as girls mature, they remain less keen on the exuberant dominance contests of sports. Given that girls and women put a higher value on cooperation and cohesion than males do, it is not surprising that they are not as attracted to the sports men have invented to show off their prowess and thrash out bragging rights.

But it is also obvious that many women play sports with great avidity and fierceness. That women are motivated to play sports at all is one of the truly fascinating things about our species, because in most animal species females don’t participate in ritual combat at all.

What’s going on here? My explanation for men’s sports applies to women as well, only more weakly. Most female animals don’t compete very hard for mates because, high-quality sperm being in abundant supply, there’s no point. In humans, sperm is also cheap, but a father’s investment in his offspring is not. So women must compete for quality mates who are able, and willing, to share the uniquely heavy burden of rearing human young. In sports, women, like men, make a gaudy display of health and physical quality. This should be attractive to men, because a woman’s athleticism—and the quality genes underlying it—are likely to be passed down to her children. But women don’t invest as much in sports because, in the end, men only care so much. Women value kindness and intelligence in mates, but they also gravitate to dominance cues—including the cues exhibited by successful athletes. As the psychologist Anne Campbell argues, the attributes that allow a man to successfully compete with other men—physically, economically, socially—pretty much sum up what turns women on. But while there’s something undeniably sexy about the sheer physical excellence of Jena Baldwin, studies reliably show that men don’t care a whit whether a prospective mate can dominate other women, physically or otherwise. For most men, power in women is simply not an aphrodisiac. If anything, men’s preference for women who are young and delicate in appearance—whose looks signal lots of estrogen, not lots of testosterone—means that men are most attracted to women who would likely lose fights and other physical forms of contest. I don’t think this is mainly because—as many would argue—men find female power threatening (though they well may; men certainly find male power threatening). I think it’s simple biology: men seek out fertility cues; women seek out strength cues.

So humanity’s love of sports is a riddle that needs a solution based in evolutionary biology. But having come so far, there’s still a way to go. The evolutionary mystery of sports extends beyond the motivations of players to those of fans. It’s weird

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