Promiscuity: Difference between revisions

*High incidence of mate poaching, mate switching, back-burners and relationship instability and a massive decline in long-term monogamous mating in contemporary "liberated" society.

**This point is less about female promiscuity and is more evidence of female hypergamy, now that alpha males are more readily available and casual sex is more acceptable, the hypergamous instinct in females intensifies. Back up partners and mate switching is evidence that, when possible, a woman will trade her current partner out for a better mate. To argue for a promiscuous mating system, we need to show that a woman will still exhibit this behaviour even when paired with alpha males; even chimpanzees will mate with lower status males from time to time in their promiscuous mating system despite the availability of Chads to have sex with females. As it doesn't seem plausible that most females will exhibit mate switching/poaching whilst with Alpha men, this cannot be used as evidence of female promiscuity in Humans.

**Whilst this is certainly interesting to look at, it is unlikely that the conditions that allow women whom cuckold their husbands in the Himba tribe are widespread. For one, men are aware whose children are genetically their and those whom aren't (they are reffered to as 'omaka') and both women and men regularly engage in adultery (seemingly openly). The reason why the women whom cuckold their husbands enjoy greater greater reproductive success is two fold.<br>Firstly favouring genetic children over omaka is genrally frowned upon, this is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to how men deal with children in humans. Almost no other culture in history would condemn a man for favouring his own children over other children; the only modern exception to this would be regressive France that criminilized paternity tests. Secondly the actual fathers of the omaka often give food to the women they've had children with. So the greater reproductive success essentially comes from the fact that women receive resources from both their husbands and lovers and would thus have healthier children and lower mortality rates.<br> Finally when a man dies, his sister inherits his possessions not his children; this essentially lowers the cost of him being cuckolded by other men as he invests less into his children. Interesting to note that most marriages in the Himba are arranged (the women have no say) and that 'love matches' (marriages were the women has married for love) experienced lower rates of extra-pair paternity. Now whilst it might be interesting to study, it would be fallacious to assume that simply because this one tribe that displays a chimpanzee like mating system therefore ancestral females were promiscuous, they were not.<br> The genetic and morphological presented above opposing rampant female promiscuity is reflective of millions of years of evolution and is a ''far'' better indicator of what ancestral females were like.