The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology Vol. 3 (2022) is the third entry in a four-part academic series on sexual psychology. This volume offers an in-depth overview of female sexual strategies and adaptations through the lens of evolutionary psychology, exploring both well-established findings and emerging theories.

FULL SUMMARY

About the Author:
Various experts for each chapter, while the volume is edited by Todd K. Shackelford, a leading evolutionary psychologist and active handbook editor.

Chapter 1 — Women’s Preferences: Precopulatory Adaptations

Authors: Donald F. Sacco, Mitchell Brown, Kaitlyn Boykin, Alicia L. Macchione, Kelsey M. Drea, Mary M. Medlin

This chapter explains the evolved decision rules women use before sex to choose mates who maximize offspring survival and future reproductive success. It shows what those decision rules are — the kinds of cues they use, why some cues matter more in short-term versus long-term contexts, how fertility and ecology shift preferences, and how personality and life history calibrate choice.

• Women trade off heritable-quality cues (good genes) against indicators of investment and fidelity; cues are integrated across face, body, voice and odor and are flexibly weighted by fertility, pathogen risk, resource scarcity and individual sociosexuality.
• Good-genes vs. investment trade-off: Masculinity, symmetry and muscularity index possible genetic/immune benefits but often correlate with lower paternal investment or higher short-term mating orientation.
• Signals of mate quality: Facial masculinity, symmetry, limbal rings, white sclera with eye/skin contrast, and other cues signal health and reproductive value.
• Short-term vs long-term cues: STM emphasizes physical cues (masculinity, muscularity, symmetry); LTM emphasizes resources, prosociality, self-control and fidelity.
• Cycle & context effects: Fertility and local ecology (pathogen load, resources) shift cue weighting.
• Individual differences: Sociosexuality, personality, and pathogen avoidance motives modulate cue emphasis.

Interesting Notes

• Expensive purchases signal short-term interests (e.g., purchasing a Rolex) are frequently perceived by women as a man interested in STM, with men motivated by LTM avoiding such behavior (Sundie et al., 2011).
• Daddy-types playing with children are attractive: Recent work has found that men who play and interact well with children are found to be particularly attractive (Bleske-Rechek, Remiker, Swanson, & Zeug, 2006; Oswald et al., in press).
• High status women are less hypergamous: Women belonging to a high socioeconomic status are more likely to seek mates with indicators of heritable fitness, whereas lower-status women frequently prefer resource potential and willingness to invest resources in offspring (Fan, Dai, Liu, & Wu, 2005; Fleck & Simpson, 2017; Stone, Shackelford, & Buss, 2008; Swami & Tovée, 2005).
• Unrestricted women prioritize looks: Sociosexually unrestricted women prioritize physical attractiveness given its emphasis in STM (Li & Kenrick, 2006) and facial structures suggesting interpersonal dominance, namely, extraversion and narcissism (Brown & Sacco, 2017; Marcinkowska, Helle, & Lyons, 2015) whereas…
  • Restricted women have stronger preference for benevolent behavior (Simpson & Gangestad, 1991)
• Unrestricted women like dirty jokes: Women with unrestricted sociosexual attitudes are attracted to men who utilize dirty jokes, although such mating displays are considered particularly aversive in LTM contexts (Medlin, Brown, & Sacco, 2018).
• Women who feel more vulnerable to infections prefer symmetrical faces that signal good genes (Young, Sacco, & Hugenberg, 2011), a preference specific to opposite-sex faces, suggesting a mating basis (Ainsworth & Maner, 2019). They like less faces signaling extraversion (Brown & Sacco, 2016), which may be adaptive since extraverted men are more likely to contract diseases and pursue promiscuous strategies that increase infection risk (Nettle, 2005).

Chapter 2 — Female Sexual Attraction Tactics

Authors: Trond Viggo Grøntvedt, Mons Bendixen, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair

This chapter describes the behavioral toolkit women use to attract mates: visual dress and grooming, body language, gait, vocal modulation, proxemics, flirtation scripts, and digital-profile curation. It explains how tactics differ for short- vs long-term goals.

• Women’s signals balance conspicuousness with reputation: Attraction tactics are multimodal, calibrated to goals and context, and constrained by reputational costs.
• Strategic deployment: Short-term contexts favor sexual displays; long-term favors trust and commitment displays.
• Hormonal effects: Evidence suggests cycle-linked shifts in tactic use, though findings are mixed.

Interesting Notes

• Men prefer hairless bodies because they signal youth, fertility, or health
• Shaved women report being more sexually active (referring pubic hair)
• Tattooed women are more sexually active and more open to short-term sexual relationships (Davis & Arnocky, 2020). The common factor underlying both tattooing and sexual activity may be sociosexuality.
• Dating app users are more sexually unrestricted: current dating app users are less sociosexually restricted than former users, who again are less restricted than non-users (Botnen, Bendixen, Grøntvedt, & Kennair, 2018).
  But women also use it for long-term relationships and for entertainment and to pass time

Chapter 3 — Extra-Pair Sexual Interest

Authors: Marissa A. Harrison

This chapter reframes extra-pair interest as an evolved conditional strategy: not mere moral failing but a motivation that can yield genetic benefits, insurance against partner infertility, or an exit strategy when long-term provisioning declines.

People seem to be more interested in female cheating, than male.
Says the author:

it appears that there are far more evolutionary psychological research endeavors geared at documenting women’s extra-pair interest and behavior than men’s extra-pair interest and behavior. Is it because women hold the keys to the kingdom with internal fertilization?

• Extra-pair sex is evolved and adaptive: Since our brains process information in a manner to facilitate adaptive behavior (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987), it seems that selection favored at least some degree of extra-pair sex (Andrews et al., 2008)
• It’s a risk-benefit calculation: Extra-pair interest is hormonally and contextually modulated and represents a risk–benefit calculation.
• Triggers: Fertility cycles, relationship dissatisfaction, partner qualities, and local mating markets.
• Constraints: Male mate guarding, reputational sanctions, and provisioning loss limit payoff.

Interesting Notes

• Love shields against cheating: the most powerful predictor of deciding against cheating was love for and loyalty to the current partner.
  And loving one’s partner and satisfaction with the relationship inoculates against infidelity (Shackelford, Besser, & Goetz, 2008). Apostolou and Panayiotou (2019) surveyed men and women in their early thirties
• Women may partner with a lower-value mate and cheat with a higher value one: The dual-mating theory, AKA “good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis,” states that women secure a long-term partner with inferior genes who provides, but engage in EPCs to reproduce with men with high-quality genes (Jünger et al., 2018; Pillsworth & Haselton, 2006a, 2006b). This is called ‘alpha fucks, beta bucks‘ in the manosphere, and there is some supporting but also mixed evidence for a more nuanced and couple-dependent picture. Also see our article for the full dynamics
• Cheating is heritable, and more in men: by studying twin pairs, they documented an arguably high heritability in extra-pair behavior, with 63 percent of the variation for men and 40 percent for women in extra-pair mating propensity attributable to genetic differences (Zietsch et al. 2015)
• The most important factor in forgiving infidelity is children (Apostolou and Demosthenous, 2020), and more children related to increased forgiveness.
  Dependence and increased age also raised the odds of forgiveness

🙋🏼‍♂️Lucio’s suggestion: the table of ‘proximate factors creating risk for infidelity’ is great, add a row for ‘effect size’

Chapter 4 — Female Intrasexual Competition

Authors: Maryanne L. Fisher

This chapter analyzes how women compete with each other for mates and resources. It dissects typical forms (indirect aggression, reputation management, appearance enhancement), triggers, and adaptive trade-offs.

• Indirect aggression: Female competition is usually indirect and social, targeting investment rather than physical dominance.
• Men’s parental investment is a commodity women compete for: women compete with each other for access to men who are able and willing to invest.
• Forms: Indirect aggression, derogation, exclusion, self-enhancement, and coalition-building.
• Triggers: High-value mates, rival fertility, status asymmetries, or scarcity of men/resources
• Costs: Reputation risks and cultural modulation of acceptable tactics.

Sexual Economics Theory

Sexual economics theory conceptualizes heterosexual sexual relationships as a market, where women are “sellers” of sexual access and men are “buyers” competing for it (Baumeister et al., 2017).

The theory assumes men desire sex more, giving women greater negotiating power. Women may exchange exclusive sexual access for material resources, while men compete to display those resources.

Women compete by signaling sexual loyalty, attractiveness, and willingness, and may view sexually promiscuous women as a threat because sex is a scarce resource that gives them leverage (Baumeister & Twenge, 2002; Baumeister et al., 2017).

To maintain this sexual economy, women may use indirect aggression, such as gossip or ostracism, to suppress rivals.

If indirect aggression is linked to mating, it should emerge at puberty, and evidence supports this. Adolescent girls who date earlier show higher levels of same-sex indirect aggression, while victims of such aggression date later and receive fewer flirtations (Gallup, O’Brien, & Wilson, 2011).
Adolescents of both sexes also score higher than adults on measures of intrasexual competitiveness (Buunk & Fisher, 2012; Polo et al., 2018; Fernández et al., 2014), suggesting that adolescence marks a peak in competitive behaviors for reproductive success.

In adulthood, strategies stabilize and become fewer but more refined (Ellis et al., 2012).

Gossip to damage and control rivals

Baumeister and Twenge (2002) suggest that women use acerbic gossip to enforce norms around sexual promiscuity, preventing rivals from “dropping the price” of sexual access.

Women compete strategically for desirable mates, balancing the risk of gossip against the benefits of granting sexual access selectively. They may also derogate rivals’ promiscuity or use other information to improve their own mating success (Baumeister et al., 2017).

Indirect aggression works

Indirect aggression is a successful female adaptation that provides high benefits at low cost, by reducing rivals’ ability or desire to compete for mates (Vaillancourt, 2013).

Attractive women can influence men’s evaluations of other women, lowering rivals’ mate value (Fisher & Cox, 2009).
Same-sex victimization can also cause negative outcomes—such as poor health, low self-esteem, or suicide attempts—which females may experience more than males (Vaillancourt, 2013).

Coalitions of Friends for Self-Defense

Women rely on friends to help protect their reputations, forming a buffer against malicious gossip (Reynolds, 2018; 2021).

However, if a friend is also a mating rival, support may depend on closeness, since close friendships can shield against social exclusion and harassment, and same-sex peers can act as alloparents or co-aggressors to defend one’s children (Hrdy, 1999; Krems, Williams, et al., 2021).

The benefits of alliances often outweigh the risks of sharing personal information, so women form same-sex networks to gain status and dominance, increasing access to social and reproductive advantages (Liesen, 2013).

In this video we highlight though that women grow closer when men are perceived as more of a common threat, a phenomenon we dubbed the sisterhood.

Short vs. Long-Term Tactics

P.S.:
🙋🏼‍♂️ Loved this chapter

Chapter 5 — Female Intersexual Selection

Authors: Steven Arnocky, Adam C. Davis, Michael Suszter

This chapter reframes female choice as a driver of male trait evolution: preferences create selection pressure on male ornaments, displays, and behaviors.

Interesting Notes

• Women engage in more mate retention tactics when with higher value men: women who are mated to men who are higher in status striving and income, as putative indices of their mate value, have been found to engage in more mate retention effort (Buss & Shackelford, 1997).
• Economic inequality increases women’s expenditure for beauty (Blake et al., 2018) and income inequality increased women’s intentions to wear more sexualized clothing for a hypothetical night out (Blake and Brooks, 2019).
  This mirrors the “lipstick effect” – the finding that in times of economic uncertainty and hardship, women shift spending to appearance enhancement products (Hill, Rodeheffer, Griskevicius, Durante, & White, 2012)

Health & Genetic Quality Matter More In Unhealthy Places

Research indicates that in regions with higher pathogen threats, both men and women place greater importance on partner attractiveness as a cue for good genes and disease resistance (Gangestad & Buss, 1993; Arnocky et al., 2014).

Individuals higher in pathogen disgust rate unattractive targets as even less attractive.

Less healthy individuals are at a mating disadvantage and tend to be more vigilant against reproductive threats, exerting greater effort to retain desired partners.
For example, young adults with poorer health perceived their partners as more likely to cheat and engaged in more cost-inflicting mate retention behaviors (Arnocky, Pearson, & Vaillancourt, 2015; Davis, Belanger, Mattsson, & Arnocky, 2019).

Are Lower Value Women More Promiscuous? Maybe, More Research Needed

Buss and Shackelford (2008) argue that high mate-value women can secure all desired male traits from a single partner, while lower mate-value women may pursue pluralistic mating—gaining resources from one man and good genes from another.

Less attractive women are more likely to commit infidelity (McNulty, Meltzer, Makhanova, & Maner, 2018) and are viewed as less desirable long-term mates (Campbell et al., 2009), leading them to adopt a more unrestricted sociosexual strategy.

Conversely, some research shows a small positive link between women’s attractiveness and unrestricted sociosexuality (Fisher, Hahn, DeBruine, & Jones, 2016; Arnocky et al., 2021), suggesting that high mate-value women may also pursue pluralistic strategies when confident in attracting future mates.

Chapter 6 — Evolution of Precopulatory Defense from Rape and Coercion in Women

Authors: Domenic Roberto, Rachel James, Melissa McDonald

This chapter examines evolved female defenses against sexual coercion — a ‘threat management system’ for rape avoidance that includes perceptual threat detection, avoidance, protective partners, and coalition-building.

Given the importance of reproductive choice in women’s mating strategy, rape presents a serious threat to women’s fitness.
Female rape victims are prevented from expressing their desired mate preferences, controlling the preferred timing of pregnancy, and may be subjected to conceiving with a mate of low genetic quality and/or who provides no protection or resources to the mother or offspring (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000)

• Threat management system includes:
  • Greater care when fertile: less likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors that may put them at greater risk of rape during their ovulatory window (Bröder and Hohmann, 2003)
  • Greater risk is matched with greater care, suggesting an evolved ‘risk tracking’
  • Alliances for protection, with other women and men. Women prefer men who are physically strong as friends, which may serve as protection and/or as future mating options (Weatherhead & Robertson, 1979)
  • Information gathering for avoidance and defense, which the author link to women’s greater intereset for true crime

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s suggestion: I’d suggest more caveats of speculation around some hypotheses like rape fantasies as rehearsal for self-defense. They didn’t feel the most compelling explanation to me.

• Rape is unfortunately cross-cultural and widespread: Minturn et al. (1969) examined 135 small-scale societies and found rape to be reported in 90 percent of those for which sufficient data were available for examination. Indeed, the hypothesis of a society without rape has been refuted (Rozée, 1993) even among allegedly “rape-free” societies (Palmer, 1989)
• Some men switch to aggression after rejection: After repeated failed attempts at mating, some males shift strategies and become more aggressive, such that escalating the force of a coercive strategy may lead to rape (Gorelik et al., 2012)
• Opportunistic rape is unfortunately a possible sexual strategy: interviews with serial rapists suggest they select victims based on the probability that they will be successful and will not be caught (Beauregard, 2007). Women who are intoxicated for example are at greater risk of rape and coercion (Abbey, Zawacki, Buck, Clinton, & McAuslan, 2004)
  • Men can detect ‘exploitability cues’ from pictures, and rate these pictures more sexually attractive.
    Categories of exploitability includes ‘susceptibility to manipulation’, ‘primiscuity’ and ‘risk-taking behaviors’

🙋🏼‍♂️ Manipulation Is Related to Rape. But Seduction? Probably Not

The author proposes an interesting take:

Related to rape are manipulative tactics that facilitate sexual coercion.
Coercion tactics include behaviors categorized as sexual seduction, verbal or nonverbal pressure, and deception (Goetz, Easton, Lewis, & Buss, 2012).

I agree that some of these behaviors can range on a spectrum and pure manipulation is on the ‘coercive’ and ‘value-taking’ end of the spectrum.

However, I’d be careful listing ‘seduction’ there, and I offer a different take. Good seduction is a display of advanced skills and mental abilities that signal genetic quality.
It’s not any different than a woman mating with a good-looking man for pathogen resistance or a dominant man for genes that help climb social hierarchies.

Seduction falls squarely into the sexy son theory.

Chapter 7 — Mate Poaching

Authors: Jasna Hudek-Knezević, Igor Kardum, Nermina Mehić

This chapter analyzes mate poaching as a conditional tactic: pursuing already-partnered individuals can secure vetted, high-quality mates but carries retaliation and reputational risks.

• Mate poaching is universal, present in all cultures
• Why adaptive: Partnered targets are pre-vetted
• Constraints: Social sanctions and retaliation risks

Interesting Notes

• Friendships can be a first step of mate poaching: Friendship between men and women sometimes increases the likelihood of mate poaching. Friendship is often a first stage in a longterm romantic relationship and single men and women prefer friends for a long-term romantic relationship over those already taken (Bleske-Rechek & Buss, 2001)
  🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s note: this confirms that the male ‘fear’ of being a friend only applies to lower mate value men who are less likely to be a mating option and, hence, more likely to be used

Women’s Poaching Increases with Gender Equality, Decreases With Patriarchy

Social Structural Theory argues that sex differences in mating behaviors stem from patriarchal gender ideologies and social role expectations (Wood & Eagly, 2002; Eagly & Wood, 2005).

Cross-cultural research shows that sex differences in short-term mate poaching are larger in traditional societies but smaller in more gender-egalitarian societies, largely due to increased female poaching behavior (Schmitt et al., 2004).

Women are more likely to engage in short-term poaching when they have greater access to resources, political power, or when they outnumber men, and women’s long-term poaching is also positively linked to gender equality (Schmitt et al., 2004).

🙋🏼‍♂️Lucio’s suggestion: tighten the chapter around the core topic of mate poaching. Social structure theory was the cherry

Chapter 8 — Sexual Fantasies

Authors: Rui Miguel Costa

• More frequent and diverse fantasies correlate with higher desire
• Fantasizing about someone else during sex is common: popular fantasies during foreplay and/or intercourse included not only sex with the partner (100 percent of women and 84 percent of men), but also sex with someone other than the partner (80 percent of women and 92 percent of men).
  Oral sex on the partner and reliving a previous sexual experience were also common fantasies during foreplay and/or intercourse in the male and female control groups (Nutter & Condron, 1983, 1985).
• Women fantasize more about current partners, men about new partners: Evolutionary theory predicts that compared to men, women are less likely to fantasize about multiple partners, group sex, or sex with complete strangers, but more likely to fantasize about their current partner. Several studies have confirmed these predictions.
  One study found the current partner was involved in 64 percent of women’s fantasies, but in only 46 percent of men’s fantasies (Hicks & Leitenberg, 2001)
• Rape fantasies are not uncommon in men and fantasies of forcing others are not uncommon in women. While men have more rape fantasies and women more fantasies to be raped, the other way around is also not uncommon <— 🙋🏼‍♂️ This was the first time I learned about this. Very surprising at first, logical with hindsight
• Functions: Rehearsal, compensation, and exploration of taboos.
• Clinical relevance: Fantasy informs assessment but does not predict behavior directly.

Rape Fantasies: Prevalence, Correlates, and Explanations

Rape fantasies are surprisingly common.

Studies since the 1970s estimate that 30–60% of women report such fantasies, with 10–20% describing them as frequent or preferred (Critelli & Bivona, 2008; Joyal et al., 2015).
Men also report them, though fantasies of forcing others are more common among men, while fantasies of being forced are more common among women (Joyal et al., 2015).

Rape fantasies are not directly linked to actual victimization, but are linked to childhood sexual abuse, which is consistently associated with higher frequency and diversity of sexual fantasies, including coercive ones (Briere et al., 1994; Wilson & Wilson, 2008).
Not all women find the fantasies purely erotic. Emotional responses vary: some women experience them as erotic, others as aversive, and many as a mix (Bivona & Critelli, 2009).

Several explanations have been proposed:

• Self-blame avoidance – fantasies permit sexual expression without guilt.
• Desirability theory – women imagine being irresistibly attractive.
• Openness to experience – linked with greater fantasy variety and sensation seeking.
• Sympathetic arousal – controlled fear enhances sexual excitement.
• Sociological accounts – fantasies reflect cultural gender norms or eroticized stereotypes (Brownmiller, 1975).
• Adversarial transformation – fantasies symbolize the conquest of a cruel man into a loving partner.
• Power dynamics – some women’s fantasies correlate with desire for control over resources (Hawley & Hensley, 2009).
• Childhood sexual abuse and dissociation – abuse may heighten fantasy proneness, leading to coercive themes.

Overall, no single theory explains rape fantasies; they likely emerge from multiple pathways.
Freud’s idea of fantasy resolving contradictory desires (1915) may help integrate these findings: in fantasies, conflicting states—desire and resistance, fear and arousal, dominance and submission—can coexist safely, enhancing sexual arousal.

Chapter 9 — Copulatory Thrusting

Authors: Olivia Le Moëne

This chapter analyzes the biomechanics and communicative functions of thrusting: how tempo, depth and angle affect stimulation, sperm transport, arousal, and signaling.

Chapter 10 — Female Provision of Oral Sex

Authors: James B. Moran, Catherine A. Salmon, Rebecca L. Burch

This chapter treats female-provided oral sex as behavior with proximate motives (pleasure, reciprocity) and adaptive functions (pair-bond maintenance, signaling, reciprocity).

• Main takeaways: Oral sex operates as mating effort, retention strategy, and pleasure behavior; prevalence varies by culture.
• Hypotheses: Signaling commitment, reciprocity, and partner satisfaction.
• Variation: Cross-cultural and relationship-phase differences.
• Some view male provisioning of oral sex as unmasculine: For much of recorded history, performing oral sex on a woman was taboo and viewed as not ‘manly‘

The authors mention The Sopranos as an example:

Mobsters: Make fun of Uncle Junior for giving oral sex, a ‘non-masculine’ behavior

We Can Explain Behaviors With Pleasure, Not Just Evolution

Agmo and Ellingson (2003) argue that people aren’t thinking about evolutionary survival when having sex.

Sexual behavior is about the positive affect it produces—people have sex because it is pleasurable.

While behaviors like oral sex may still serve evolutionary functions, this perspective highlights the need to study all sexual behaviors, including non-reproductive ones.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s note: I couldn’t agree more.
We sometimes get caught up in explaining every behavior strictly through the lens of survival or reproductive maximization, when in fact some may simply be byproducts of other adaptations that produce pleasure.

Chapter 11 — The Adaptive Value of Women’s Orgasm

Authors: Lisa L. M. Welling, Virginia E. Mitchell, Jenna Lunge, Alex C. Orille

This chapter evaluates competing explanations for the female orgasm. It could be a ‘happy by-product’ of common fetal development with males, for which orgasm serves a reproductive purpose.
Or it could serve adaptive roles such as cryptic female choice, sperm retention, pair-bond reinforcement, and a screening tool for bonding only with quality and/or good long-term partner choices (mate choice of female orgasm hypothesis).

The authors seem to favor the adaptive role of female orgasm:

The evidence that female orgasm may be adaptive, be it through increased pair-bonding, increased likelihood of conception, encouraging sex with high-quality partners, or by reinforcing sexual behaviors in general, is too plentiful to be dismissed.

But much research remains to be conducted.
The authors also raise important issues that must be addressed before linking female orgasm to ‘sexy partners for sexy sons’:

(…) results from studies investigating female orgasm as a sire choice mechanism may have alternative explanations. More dominant and masculine men have more sexual experience (e.g., Keller, Elliott, & Gunberg, 1982; Perusse, 1993; Puts, Gaulin, & Verdolini, 2006)
(…)
Given that women find masculine men more sexually attractive (Little, Jones, Penton-Voak, Burt, & Perrett, 2002), the earlier timing of female orgasm with partners whom they consider attractive may not be related to increasing sperm retention (and increased probability that that individual will sire offspring), but rather associated with sexual excitability and arousal.

• Main takeaways: Orgasm may serve bonding and cryptic-choice roles but evidence is mixed.
• Mechanistic proposals: Bonding via oxytocin, sperm transport, mate assessment.
• Evidence: Orgasm frequency correlates with closeness and technique but causal mechanisms remain unclear.

Interesting Notes

• Few women reach orgasm through coitus: the estimates vary widely, from 6 percent (Wallen, 2006) or closer to 100 percent (Marshall, 1971), but the majority of research finds incident rates closer to 50 percent (e.g., Dawood, Kirk, Bailey, Andrews, & Martin, 2005)
  • Rates go up if there is concurrent clitoral stimulation: Eschler (2004) reported that only 33.3 percent of women experienced orgasm with no clitoral stimulation, and 77.4 percent of women reported experiencing orgasm with clitoral stimulation <— 🙋🏼‍♂️ Could be a good tip for men to encourage women to touch themselves
  • Orgasms are more likely and intense if the man is attractive: Women report more intense orgasms (Gallup, Ampel, Wedberg, & Pogosjan, 2014) and are more likely to experience orgasm when they are more physically attracted to their sexual partner (Puts, Welling, et al., 2012; Shackelford et al., 2000) and if their partner is very masculine (Puts, Welling, et al., 2012).
  • There is wide cultural variation: For example, rates of anorgasmia are higher among East Asian women compared to women from Western countries (Moreira et al., 2005), and field research on the Polynesian island of Mangaia, a culture that places a high emphasis on female sexual pleasure, reports that all women achieve coital orgasm (Marshall, 1971).
  • Most women achieve orgasm via masturbation: women most often achieve orgasm through masturbation, clitoral stimulation, oral sex, or a combination of these practices (e.g., Baker & Bellis, 1993; Richters, de Visser, Rissel, & Smith, 2006).
• Unrestricted women experience more orgasms in casual encounters: Women with more restricted sociosexual orientations experienced more orgasms in committed relationships, but women with less restricted sociosexual orientations experienced similar orgasm frequency in casual sexual encounters as they did in long-term committed relationships (Wongsomboon et al., 2020)
• Orgasm is a desired outcome for most women. One study found that only 6 percent of women rate having an orgasm during sexual intercourse as either somewhat or very unimportant, whereas 75.8 percent rate it as somewhat or very important (Eschler, 2004). Likewise, roughly 32 percent of women report they would be somewhat or very likely to enjoy sexual intercourse without an orgasm, compared to roughly 54 percent who would be somewhat or very unlikely to enjoy sex without an orgasm
• Testosterone heightens orgasms: women with higher testosterone report more positive orgasm experiences (van Anders & Dunn, 2009), and a single dose administration of exogenous testosterone increases female genital responsiveness, genital arousal, and subjective reports of “sexual lust” and “genital sensations” (Tuiten, Van Honk, Koppeschaar, Bernaards, Thijssen, & Verbaten, 2000)
• Many women and few men fake orgasm: more than half of women admit to having previously faked an orgasm (e.g., Ellsworth & Bailey, 2013; Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010; Roberts, Kippax, Waldby, & Crawford, 1995; Wiederman, 1997) compared to only 25 percent of men (most of whom faked orgasm because of intoxication or because they had already orgasmed that day; Muehlenhard & Shippee, 2010).
  • Women who fake orgasms are more likely to engage in mate retention behaviors, suggesting faking orgasms is a tool to maintain the relationship
• Orgasm is more complex for women than for men, and women seem to be able to experience orgasm through non-genital stimulation

Chapter 12 — Copulatory Urgency: An Evolutionary Perspective of Women’s Sexual Desire

Authors: Courtney L. Crosby

Crosby outlines the evolutionary purposes of desire, ranging from reproduction to mate attraction and retention, and maximizing offspring survival by tracking the presence/absence of children (and their age).

It’s possible for example, that women may have lower sexual desire with young children to avoid being spread too thin with sexual effort or a new child.

• Relationship length decreases desire, and it’s one of the strongest predictors of declines in sexual desire (Durr, 2009a; Laan & Both, 2008; Moor et al., 2021; Murray & Millhausen, 2012)
• Bait and switch hypothesis with sex: Women’s higher levels of sexual desire at the beginning of relationships may represent efforts to bait – or secure – a high-quality mate.
• The presence of children lowers sexual desire: consistent with evolutionary metatheory, women who have children report lower levels of sexual desire than women without children (e.g., Dewitte & Mayer, 2018). Although there are no studies investigating if this effect is strongest when children are young, frequency of intercourse is lower with young children
• Mate retention hypothesis: when women face a mate retention problem, they may experience increases in sexual desire; engaging in sex in response to potential threats may facilitate partner retention
• Sexual motivation-disgust hypothesis: Sexual disgust is hypothesized to repel from costly mates or sexual situations (Tybur et al., 2009). Researchers hypothesize a continuum of sexual motivation, with sexual desire – or lust – being the opposite of sexual disgust (Lieberman & Patrick, 2018)

Chapter 13 — Mate Retention

Authors: Jitka Lindová

Mate retention has been defined by Buss (1988) as behavior aimed at preventing a partner’s infidelity or desertion.
This chapter catalogs mate-retention tactics from benefit-provisioning to high-cost surveillance and coercion. Choice depends on mate-value asymmetry and perceived infidelity risk.

• Women are well-equipped to identify a decrease of male commitment. On the emotional level, women are more anxiously attached than men (del Giudice, 2011). On the cognitive level, women are better at identifying emotions and responding with appropriate emotions (Thompson & Voyer, 2014)
• Main takeaways: Tactics are adaptive and scale with threat level.
• Taxonomy: Low-cost (gifts, affection) to high-cost (monitoring, aggression).
• Predictors: Infidelity risk, mate value, and stressors increase costly tactics.

Interesting Notes

• Polygyny reduces the costs of mate sharing for women because she won’t lose his investment: Research shows that, especially in the case of first wives, being part of a polygynous marriage is connected with reproductive success. For the subsequent wives, on the other hand, marrying an already partnered man can represent an optimal solution in a situation when there is a lack of alternative men able and willing to provide for her and any offspring she might produce (Gibson & Mace, 2007)
• Coalitional mate retention recruits an ally, typically a friend (Pham, Barbaro, & Shackelford, 2015b). Think of it as the ‘sisterhood’ (real-life example of sisterhood in action here)
• Sex differences in mate retention: men more than women submitted to their partners, debased themselves, and were violent toward their rivals (the latter tactic was used more often by men in Arabic countries as well). Women, on the other hand, punished a mate’s infidelity threat more than men did (Atari et al., 2017b; Buss & Shackelford, 1997; de Miguel & Buss, 2011; Kardum et al., 2006)
• Women derogate other women for using makeup and revealing clothes because they’re threats: women derogate other women for using makeup, perceive them as dishonest, promiscuous, and more inclined to mate poach, feel more jealousy toward them and do not want to associate with them (Batres et al., 2018; DelPriore, Bradshaw, & Hill, 2018; Mileva, Jones, Russell, & Little, 2016). Women are also intolerant of other women who wear revealing clothing (e.g., Arnocky et al., 2019; Borau & Bonnefon, 2019; Reynolds, Baumeister, & Maner, 2018; Vaillancourt & Sharma, 2011)

The 19 Tactics of Mate Retention

The Mate Retention Inventory (Buss, Shackelford, & McKibbin, 2008) sorts nineteen tactics into five components and two higher-order domains:

1. Intersexual manipulations, i.e., behaviors directed at one’s romantic partner:
   • 1.1. direct guarding (vigilance, concealment of mate, and monopolization of mate’s time)
   • 1.2. negative inducements (threatening infidelity, punishing mate’s threat of infidelity, emotional manipulation, commitment manipulation, and derogation of competitors)
   • 1.3. positive inducements (resource display, sexual inducements, enhancement of physical appearance, emphasis on love and caring, and submission and debasement),
2. Intrasexual manipulations, i.e., behaviors directed at same-sex rivals:
   • 2.1. public signals of possession (verbal signals of possession, physical signals of possession and possessive ornamentation)
   • 2.2. negative inducements (derogation of competitors, intrasexual threats, and violence)

A major difference is between cost-inflicting and often associated with lower mate value women and dark triads, and benefits-providing, more associated with higher mate value women.
But the link between mate value and benefit-provisioning behaviors seems stronger in men; in women, their mate retention behaviors reflect their partner’s mate value more than their own (Salkicevic et al., 2014)

Chapter 14 — Shifts in Partner Attractiveness

Authors: Juliana E. French, Sierra D. Peters, Olivia W. Breedin, Emma E. Altgelt, Andrea L. Meltzer

This chapter explains how and why partner attractiveness is re-evaluated over time, depending on needs, contexts, and dyadic changes in values.
Important drivers of change include fertility, pregnancy, parenting, aging, and hormonal contraception.

The importance women ascribe to each component of partner attractiveness, according to their functions, across the life-course of their relationship. Critical gaps in our current theoretical and empirical understanding are highlighted with dashed lines. French et al., 2022

• Main takeaways: Attractiveness is multidimensional and dynamically reweighted across life stages.
• Drivers: Fertility, contraceptive use, pregnancy, parenting, and aging transitions.
• Research gaps: More longitudinal research is needed.

Interesting Notes

• Hormonal contraceptives decrease attraction for masculinity: women who use (versus do not use) hormonal contraceptives report lower attraction to masculine men (Little, Burriss, Petrie, Jones, & Roberts, 2013; for a review, see Alvergne & Lummaa, 2010; but also see Marcinkowska, Hahn, Little, DeBruine, & Jones, 2019) and symmetrical men (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999)
• Altruism trumps attractiveness for long-term: Women demonstrate a preference for an unattractive partner high in altruism – an indicator of good character and parenting ability (Farrelly, 2013) – over an attractive partner low in altruism, but only in the context of a long-term relationship (Farrelly, Clemson, & Guthrie, 2016)

Masculinity and Indicators of Good Genes Increase Women’s Faithfulness

Women’s long-term relationship outcomes (e.g., relationship satisfaction, extra-pair attention, dissolution) seem to depend on the extent to which their long-term partners possess traits signaling physical health, genetic quality, and genetic dissimilarity.
For example, women whose partners are more (versus less) symmetrical or behaviorally masculine report increased attraction to and satisfaction with their partners near peak fertility (Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver-Apgar, 2005; Meltzer, 2017). In a similar vein, women whose partners lack such good gene indicators report greater interest in extra-pair partners near peak fertility (e.g., Gangestad et al., 2005; Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver-Apgar, 2010; Pillsworth & Haselton, 2006)

Chapter 15 — Emotional Commitment

Authors: Marissa A. Harrison

This chapter treats emotional commitment as an evolved mechanism that stabilizes biparental investment through credible costly signals of future orientation.

• Commitment provided evolutionary benefits, or it wouldn’t have evolved. Evolutionary psychologists seek to answer what those benefits are
  • Better survival of offspring
  • Cooperation / division of labor
• Signals: Sacrifices, public promises, and future planning.
• Systems: Attachment, reputation, and future orientation underpin commitment.

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s question: baby cuteness, and the chicken-and-egg issue
The author states that ‘baby cuteness’ is an evolutionary mechanism to elicit parental emotional commitment. Cuteness is not an inherent trait—it only exists in the eyes of the beholder. So I wonder: did babies evolve traits that signal cuteness, or did parents evolve to perceive babies as cute? Probably co-evolution since both gained from it

Interesting Notes

• Women seek pair-bonding more than men do, and it appears to be intercultural (Buss, 1989; 2003)
• Attractive women want a loving partner: Women’s own level of physical attraction can influence commitment. Attractive women have higher demand for a loving partner, an indication of an emotionally committed partner, and other traits most conducive to their reproductive success (i.e., good genes, investment and parenting potential). Buss and Shackelford (2008) called this mate value calibration adaptation (p. 141)
• Love is a means to emotional commitment, cementing the pair bond

What is a commitment?

Its first statement is already a reminder of evolution’s amoral calculativeness:

According to game theory, a commitment is a strategy to change or influence others’ approaches (Schelling, 1960)

Commitment involves forsaking alternatives in exchange for reciprocity and assurance of others’ behavior, thereby reducing free riding and fostering trust (Del Corral, 2015; Kurzban, McCabe, Smith, & Wilson, 2001).

Strong commitments signal reliability and clarify from whom one can expect benefits (Smith, Pedersen, Forster, McCullough, & Lieberman, 2017).

Why commitment? Because cooperation is good for long-term

“Two parties who can count on reciprocity exchanges that transcend opportunities for short-term gain by cheating or defection will have an advantage over individuals who cannot establish this type of relationship” (Neese, 1990)

Humans gain many advantages by sacrificing short-term for long-term via pair-bonds, not the least of which is biparental care of offspring (Fisher, 1992).

Chapter 16 — Female Sexual Jealousy

Authors: Jaroslava Varella Valentova, Marco A. Correa Varella, Andrea Lorena da Costa Stravogiannis, Ana Maria Fernandez, Tamsin Saxton

This chapter analyzes sexual jealousy as an evolved system to prevent infidelity and resource diversion. It details affective, cognitive, and behavioral components.

• Main takeaways: Jealousy motivates detection and retention responses; shaped by individual and cultural factors.
• Variation: Attachment styles, ecology, and cultural scripts shape expression.

Interesting Notes

• Jealousy matches the threat: the bigger the threat, the more we can expect jealousy. Especially when a rival exceeds the qualities of the person
• Higher jealousy when the partner is higher value: Individuals with a partner of higher mate value than themselves are susceptible to insecurity and hypervigilance, which increases jealousy and mate guarding (Redlick, 2016)
• Some studies show women are more jealous than men, Although men report higher sexual than
• emotional jealousy, women show higher emotional, overall, reactive, and virtual jealousy than men (Buunk & Fernandez, 2020; Southard & Abel, 2010; Valentova et al., 2020). It might apply to populations where children depend on biparental care, and women depend economically more on men (cf. Schmitt, 2005)
• Higher neuroticism, social anxiety, & lower self-estee = higher jealousy (Buunk, 1997; Khanchandani & Durham, 2009)
• Jealousy is considered proof of love in many cultures (Sheets, Fredendall, & Claypool, 1997)
• Father absence increases anxious and preventive jealousy compared with women who grew up with their father (van Brummen-Girigori, Buunk, Dijkstra, & Girigori, 2016)
• 🚩 Excessive jealousy can be a red flag: jealousy in women can thus be a manifestation of proper self-value and self-esteem, which can be influenced by many factors, such as previous relationship experience but also stress that each society gives to pair-bond, procreation, and intrasexual competition (Bhugra, 1993; Hupka, 1981).

Chapter 17 — On Attachment and Evolution

Authors: William L. Dunlop, Majse Lind

This chapter retells attachment theory through evolution: infant proximity systems evolved for caregiver investment and were repurposed to sustain adult pair bonds.

• Main takeaways: Attachment styles are developmental calibrations linked to mating strategies and life history strategies (Del Giudice, 2009, 2011).
• Developmental logic: Harsh childhoods bias toward insecure attachment and faster life histories.
• Avoidance is considered a “male-biased” strategy as it is associated with reduced parental investment
• Anxiety is hypothesized to be adaptive for women under conditions of moderate environmental stress, whereas highly stressful and dangerous conditions would prompt avoidance and reduced parental investment in both sexes”

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s suggestion: Consider cutting the history and explanation of attachment theory. I felt it could have been briefer on a book focused on female sexual adaptations.

Chapter 18 — Maternal Filicide

Authors: Vibeke Ottesen

This chapter treats maternal filicide as a rare, tragic, but potentially adaptive calculation.

the evolutionary consequence of the fact that ancestral women would have to make exceedingly high investments to successfully rear the children in their care is that women inevitably evolved to be discriminative with regard to regulating whether and how much investment is made in any given child.
From an evolutionary perspective, to study maternal filicide is to study discriminative maternal investment in its most extreme form

• Main takeaways: Filicide arises under extreme stress, deprivation, or illness and requires prevention efforts.
• Preventing unplanned and unwanted pregnancies reduces filicides by reducing the number of women who may experience reproductive conflicts with their neonates

SHARPEST INSIGHTS

These are the insights that struck us the most.
We use the authors’ quotes and research, but the titles and interpretations are our own—and may not reflect the authors’ intent.
Credit for the insight goes to them; blame for the interpretation is on us.

Makeup Sex: A Tactic to Keep Partners In Toxic Relationships

From Crosby, chapter 12:

when women face a mate retention problem, they may experience increases in sexual desire; engaging in sex in response to potential threats may facilitate partner retention.

The author is clear that it’s only speculation for now, but with some initial preliminary support:

Though there is no research directly examining this hypothesis, there is preliminary evidence that provides insight into this as a possibility.

They list as supporting evidence:

For example, relationship duration is associated with higher levels of sexual satisfaction such that the longer a couple is together, the more sexually satisfied they are (Heiman, Long, Smith, Fisher, Sand, & Rosen, 2011).
This effect exists despite reported declines in sexual desire over the course of a relationship, suggesting that when couples do engage in sex, they are more satisfied.
In turn, higher levels of sexual satisfaction are related to greater commitment (e.g., Sprecher, 2002).

It seems to me that even stronger evidence comes from real-world observation.

The most ‘troublesome’ partners, both women and men, seem to follow a cycle of fight/love.
And women may resort more than men to makeup sex for the differential value that sex and bonding have for each sex.

I’ve noticed this pattern from anxiously attached women (see ‘anxious-avoidant trap‘ for the dynamics), and borderline personality disorder, for example.
And both types make for poor quality and emotionally draining relationships.

This may go together with female emotional and behavioral control tactics that women may have evolved to control relationships and secure provisioning (linked is our take on it).

Self-Made Men Are Higher Value

However, the desirability of this wealth is largely rooted in men’s capability of earning money themselves instead of through inheritance or illicit means, with women finding men’s industriousness a priority in their criteria to select a long-term mate (Buss, 1989; Jonason, Li, & Madson, 2012).

Extra-pair Sex Is Evolved And Adaptive

From chapter 3 by Marissa A. Harrison:

Since our brains process information in a manner to facilitate adaptive behavior (Cosmides & Tooby, 1987), it seems that selection favored at least some degree of extra-pair sex (Andrews et al., 2008)

Relationships: A Contract of Sexual Exclusivity For Provision?

From chapter 13 by Lindová:

granting sexual exclusivity to a man can be exchanged for other valuable resources, such as food or protection (Ellis, 1998; Lovejoy, 2009) provided to a woman, her offspring, and/or her family, while demanding sexual exclusivity from a man would decrease the risk that he will divert investment from her in the future

I believe that this is indeed a tacit but foundational barter in monogamous and committed relationships.

Women’s Dream Is Turning A Player Into A Husband

From Harrison in chapter 15:

Further, as shown by Cox and Fisher (2009) and Fisher and Cox (2010), women worldwide read billions of books, i.e., romance novels, where the predominant story is one of transforming a “cad” into a “dad.” These stories follow particular patterns of female–male romantic commitment and of becoming a mother to the offspring of a wealthy male progenitor.

QUOTES

On the inherent challenges of human mating systems, and the challenges of monogamy:

In an ideal world, women would prefer a marriage partner who has it all – that is, a partner who is (a) physically attractive, (b) committed to the relationship, and (c) willing and able to invest resources. However, such men (…) are likely few and far between and thus most women are unable to attract and – more importantly – retain such a long-term partner

🙋🏼‍♂️ Lucio’s Analysis

Avoid Inflating the Case for Nonpaternity

In chapter 3 the author takes the highest Western reported rate of extra-pair paternity (about 6% in low-income urban families: Larmuseau et al., 2019), scales it up to Belgium’s population, arriving at half a million misattributed children.

Then the final number is compared to whole countries.

This feels a dramatization and I think the whole point of a good analysis is to focus on the percentage rather than inflating smaller rates into impressive raw numbers.

It also feels dramatizing when it says (and similarly restated in chapter 15):

‘Even today’s most sophisticated DNA tests are not guaranteed to provide accurate results, as laboratories can make mistakes and parties involved can lie about genetic samples.

Sure, nothing is guaranteed, but… how often do labs make mistakes?
And when they do, it’s rarely a false positive — most mistakes are false negatives that get corrected with a second test when the alarm bells go off.

And let’s be real: if paternity is in doubt, he won’t send the wife to confirm he’s the dad :)

Suggestion: cut history of attachment & myths of oral sex

They’re tangential to female adaptations.
The ‘myths of oral sex’ doesn’t seem befitting to a handbook—the note that it doesn’t imply loss of vaginal vrginity adds no scholarly value for an academic readership. I suggest cutting the whole section

Suggestion: focus on women only

Just like we said for Volume 2 on male adaptations, this Volume 3 is supposed to be about female adaptations.

I felt there is too much talk about ‘people’, ‘partners’, ‘fathers’, male mate guarding, and ‘men’. This should be about girlfriends, mothers, and women.

Remove ungendered and men’s point of view: focus on women.

REVIEW

The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology – Female Adaptations caps the Cambridge series on evolutionary sexual psychology (general overview is vol. 1, and male adaptations is vol. 2)

There is a fourth volume on animals and open questions, but I’ll hold off on that since we focus more on humans here.

Overall, it’s a great text, just like the previous two volumes. I still recommend sticking closely to the main topic of female adaptations: cut all discussions about men and move them to the second volume (and vice versa). Doing so would make an already excellent series even stronger and more coherent.

But overall, thumbs up.
I learned something new once again and could also improve a few articles. Thankful to the authors and look forward to reading more from them again.

Get this book on Amazon or check the best evolutionary psychology books.