among those inhabitants of New Guinea and the Amazon till then uncontacted by ‘civilisation’, these emotional expressions have the same form and the same meaning.27 At the same time, the astonishing variety of rituals and habits expressed by the human race testifies to its capacity for difference. As usual in science, each side of the argument pushed the other to extreme positions.
Perhaps it would satisfy both (or neither) to focus on the paradox of human differences that are universally similar all over the world. After all, similarity is the shadow of difference. The prime candidate is sex and gender difference. Nobody now denies that men and women are different not just in anatomy but also in behaviour. From best-selling books about them being from different planets to the increasing polarisation of films into those that appeal to men (action) or to women (relationships), it is surely no longer controversial to assert that – despite exceptions – there are consistent mental as well as physical differences between the sexes. As the comedian Dave Barry puts it, ‘If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, she will choose to save the infant’s life without even considering if there are men on base.’ Are such differences nature, nurture, or both?
Of all the sex differences, the best studied are the ones to do with mating. In the 1930s, psychologists first started asking men and women what they sought in a mate, and they have been asking them ever since. The answer seems so obvious that only a laboratory nerd or a Martian would bother to ask the question. But sometimes the most obvious things are the ones that most need demonstrating.
They found many similarities. Both sexes wanted intelligent, dependable, cooperative, trustworthy and loyal partners. But they also found differences. Women rated good financial prospects in their partners twice as highly as men. Hardly surprising, since men were breadwinners in the 1930s. Come back in the 1980s and you would surely find such a patently cultural difference vanishing. No: in every survey conducted since then, right up to the present day, the same preference emerges just as strongly. To this day, American women rate financial prospects twice as highly as men do when seeking mates. In personal advertisements, women mention wealth as a desirable feature of a partner 11 times as often as men do. The psychology establishment dismissed this result: it merely reflected the importance of money in American culture, not a universal sex difference. So the psychologist David Buss went and asked foreigners, and got the same answer from Dutch and German men and women. Don’t be absurd, he was told, Western Europeans are just like Americans. So Buss asked 10,047 people from 37 different cultures on six continents and five islands, ranging from Alaska to Zululand. In every culture, bar none, women rated financial prospects more highly than men. The difference was highest in Japan and lowest in Holland but it was always there.28
This was not the only difference he found. In all 37 cultures, women wanted men older than them. In nearly all cultures, social status, ambition and industriousness in a mate mattered more to women than to men. Men by contrast placed more emphasis on youth (in all cultures, men wanted younger women) and physical appearance (in all cultures, men wanted beautiful women more than women wanted beautiful men). In most cultures, men also placed slightly more emphasis on chastity and fidelity in their partners, while (of course) being much more likely to seek extramarital sex themselves.29
Well, what a surprise! Men like pretty, young, faithful women, while women like rich, ambitious, older men. A casual glance through films, novels or the newspaper could have revealed this to Buss, or any passing Martian. Yet the fact remains that many psychologists had firmly told Buss he would not be able to find such trends repeated outside the countries of the West, let alone all over the world. Buss proved something which was – at least to the social science establishment – very surprising.
Many social scientists argue that the reason women seek wealthy men is that men have most of the wealth. But now you know this is universal to the human race, you could easily turn it around. Men seek wealth because they know it attracts women – just as women pay more attention to appearing youthful because they know it attracts men. This direction of causality was never less plausible than the other, and given the evidence of universality, it is now more plausible. Aristotle Onassis, who knew a bit about both money and beautiful women, reputedly once said: ‘If women did not exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.’30
By proving how universal so many sex differences in mating preferences are, Buss has thrown the burden of proof on to those who would see a cultural habit rather than an instinct. But the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. They are probably both true. Men seek wealth to attract women, therefore women seek wealth because men have it, therefore men seek wealth to attract women. And so on. If men have an instinct to seek the baubles that lead to success with women, then they are likely to learn that within their culture money is one such bauble. Nurture is reinforcing nature, not opposing it.
With the human species, as Dan Dennett observed, you can never be sure that what you see is instinct, because you might be looking at the result of a reasoned argument, a copied ritual or a learned lesson. But the same applies in reverse. When you see a man chasing a woman just because she is pretty, or a girl playing with a doll while her brother plays with a sword, you can never be sure that what you are seeing is just cultural, because it might have an element of instinct. Polarising the issue is entirely mistaken. It is not a zero-sum game, where culture displaces instinct or vice versa. There might be all sorts of cultural aspects to a behaviour that is grounded in instinct. Culture will often reflect human nature rather than affect it.
MONEY OR DIAMOND?
Buss’s study of global similarity in difference proves the universality of different approaches to mating behaviour, but says nothing about how they come about. Suppose he is right and the differences are evolved, adaptive and therefore at least partly innate. How do they develop and under what influences? Thanks to an extraordinary battle in the nature–nurture war, called Money vs. Diamond, there is now a glimmer of light to be cast upon this subject.
Money is John Money, a psychologist from New Zealand who reacted against his strict religious upbringing to become an outspoken ‘missionary’ of sexual liberation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, eventually defending not just free love but even consenting paedophilia. Diamond is Mickey Diamond, a tall, soft-spoken, bearded son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants to the Bronx who moved first to Kansas and then to Honolulu, where he studies the factors determining sexual behaviour in animals and people.
Money believes that sex roles are the products of early experience, not instinct. In 1955 he set out his theory of psychosexual neutrality based on the study of 131 human ‘hermaphrodites’ – people who had been born with ambiguous genitalia. At birth, said Money, human beings are psychosexually neutral. Only after experience, at about the age of two, do they develop ‘gender identity’. ‘Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis,’ he wrote. ‘It becomes differentiated as masculine or feminine in the course of the various experiences of growing up.’ Therefore, said Money, a human baby can be literally assigned to either sex, a belief that was used by doctors to justify surgery to change baby boys born with abnormal penises into girls. Such surgery became standard practice: males with unusually tiny penises were ‘reassigned’ as females.
In contrast, the Kansas group came to the conclusion that ‘the biggest sex organ is between the ears, not between the legs’ and began to challenge the orthodoxy that sex roles were environmentally determined. In 1965 Diamond argued the point in a paper critical of Money, charging that Money had presented no case histories to support his theory of psychosexual neutrality, that the evidence from hermaphrodites was irrelevant – if their genitalia were ambiguous, their brains might be, too – and that it was more plausible that human beings, like
