The Moral Animal [Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology] by Robert Wright (1994)
Part 1: Sex, Romance and Love.
Chapter 2. Male and Female.
Playing God: “So, while there are various reasons why it could make Darwinian sense for a woman to mate with more than one man (maybe the first man was infertile, for example), there comes a time when having more sex just isn’t worth the trouble. Better to get some rest or grab a bite to eat. For a man, unless he’s really on the brink of collapse or starvation, that times never comes.”
“Darwin’s failure, then, was a failure to see what a deeply precious commodity females are. He saw their coyness had made them precious, but he didn’t see that they were inherently precious--precious by virtue of their biological role in reproduction, and the resulting slow rate of female reproduction.”
Testing the Theory: “In species after species, females are coy and males are not. Indeed, males are so dim in their sexual discernment that they may pursue things other than females. Among some kinds of frogs, mistaken homosexual courtship is so common that a ‘release call’ is used by males who find themselves in the clutches of another male to notify him that they’re both wasting their time. Male snakes, for their part, have been known to spend a while with dead females before moving on to a live prospect. And male turkeys will avidly court a stuffed replica of a female turkey. In fact, a replica of a female turkey’s head suspended fifteen inches from the ground will generally do the trick. The male circles the head, does its ritual displays, and then (confident, presumable, that its performance has been impressive) rises into the air and comes down in the proximity of the female’s backside, which turns out not to exist. The more virile males will show such interest even when a wooden head is used, and a few can summon lust for a wooden head with no eyes or beak.”
“In a sense, dreaming up plausible stories is what evolutionary biologists do. But that’s not the damning indictment. (referring to criticism by non-Darwinians) The power of a theory, such as the theory of parental investment, is gauged by how much data it explains and how simply, regardless of when the data surfaced (i.e., before or after the predictive hypothesis has been made).”
Further discussion about the related prediction (to the parental investment hypothesis) that species where the male plays a larger role in rearing of offspring there will be a tendency toward role reversal in courtship and mating. A few examples where this is true are given (seahorses, some birds, the Panamanian poison-arrow frog, a water bug, and the Mormon cricket.
Apes and Us. “Amid the great variety of social structure in these species (orangutan, gorilla, chimps, pygmy chimps and bonobos), the basic theme of this chapter stands out, at least in minimal form: males seem very eager for sex and work hard to find it; females work less hard. This isn’t to say the females don’t like sex....And, intriguingly, the females of the species most closely related to humans--chimpanzees and bonobos--seem particularly amenable to a wild sex life, including a variety of partners. Still, female apes don’t do what male apes do: search high and low, risking life and limb, to find sex, and to find as much of it, with as many different partners, as possible;...”
Animals and the Unconscious. “A common reaction to the new Darwinian view of sex is that it makes perfect sense as an explanation for animal behavior--which is to say, for the behavior of nonhuman animals.” Then a bit about comparing the poor turkey mating with a wooden head and a man viewing pornography. “To a layperson, it may seem natural that the evolution of reflective, self-conscious brains would liberate us from the base dictates of our evolutionary past. To an evolutionary biologist, what seems natural is roughly the opposite: the human brains evolved not to insulate us from the mandate to survive and reproduce, but to follow it more effectively, if more pliably;...” “At some point in gibbon (a primate separated from humans by about 20 million years) evolution, circumstances began to encourage much male parental investment. The males regularly stick around and help provide for the kids. In one gibbon species the males actually carry the infants, something male apes aren’t exactly known for....Well, human males too have been known to carry around infants, and to stay with their families. Is it possible that at some time over the last few million years something happened to us rather like what happened to the gibbons? Have male and female sexual appetites converged at least enough to make monogamous marriage a reasonable goal?”
Chapter 3. Men and Women.
“Are human males and females born to form enduring bonds with one another: The answer is hardly an unqualified yes for either sex. Still, it is closer to a yes for both sexes that it is in the case of, say, chimpanzees. In every human culture on the anthropological record, marriage--whether monogamous or polygamous, permanent or temporary--is the norm, and the family is the atom of social organization.” “At some point, in other words, extensive male parental investment (MPI) entered our evolutionary lineage.” “In Robert Trivers’s 1972 paper on parental investment, her remarked, ‘One can, in effect, treat the sexes as if they were different species, the opposite sex being a resource relevant to producing maximum surviving offspring.’”...”But to a distressing extent--and an extent that was unclear before his paper--this metaphor does capture the overall situation; even with high MPI, and in some ways because of it, a basic underlying dynamic between men and women in mutual exploitation. They seem, at times, designed to make each other miserable.”
What Women Want. Starts with some discussion of women being attracted to wealthy and powerful men. Then “Of course, ambition and industriousness are things a female might look for even in a low-MPI species, as indices of genetic quality. Not so, however, for her assessment of the male’s willingness to invest. A female in a high-MPI species may seek signs of generosity, trustworthiness, and especially, an enduring commitment to her in particular.”
“Why should women be so suspicious of men? After all, aren’t males in a high-MPI species designed to settle down, buy a house, and mow the lawn every weekend? Here arises the first problem with terms like love and pair bonding. Males in high-MPI species are, paradoxically, capable of greater treachery than males in low-MPI species. For the ‘optimal male course...is a mixed strategy.’ Even if long-term investment is their main aim, seduction and abandonment can make genetic sense, provided it doesn’t take too much from the offspring in which the male does invest. The bastard youngsters may thrive even without parental investment; they may, for that matter, attract investment from some poor sap who is under the impression that they’re his. So males in a high-MPI species should, in theory, be ever alert for opportunistic sex.”
That's funny ! I prefer not to do any other comment in respect for our 'males' interlocuters. 
