Forget the sexual and feminist revolutions, says Townsend; men and
women want what they have always wanted over the decades - and
centuries and millennia, for that matter. In a nutshell, posits
Townsend (Anthropology/Syracuse Univ.), men who engage in "dating
and mating" are looking primarily for physical attractiveness in
women; women seek men who have "status and earnings power" and who
will emotionally and materially "invest" in them. Such
proclivities, he argues, are largely hard-wired into us by
evolutionary psychology. Thus, for example, studies show that men
are far more easily aroused by visual stimuli, while women's
fantasies deal more with men who will provide security and caring
(thus, pornography is overwhelmingly purchased by males, romance
novels by females). Such proclivities are little affected by some
women's newfound economic status; even economically self-sufficient
or otherwise high-achieving women, such as medical students, often
resist dating lower-status men, even if they're perceived as
handsome. Nor does marital status or gender orientation play much
of a role (Townsend cites studies that reveal that the differences
between what gays and lesbians seek in lovers are even more
pronounced than between male and female heterosexuals). But his
book suffers from methodological (not to mention stylistic)
problems. Townsend's sample of interviewees is somewhat skewed (a
quarter of these 200 were medical students, while another quarter
were Mexican-Americans); some of his statistics are meaningless
("Blumstein and Schwartz found that women in their twenties with
three children have a 72 percent chance of remarrying, while women
in their thirties with no children have a 60 percent chance"); and
he also is too focused on the "macro" picture; there is almost
nothing here about how individual psychology or cultural
conditioning affects the search for, and selection of a partner. An
interesting but flawed sociobiological analysis what men and women
want from each other. (Kirkus Reviews)
What Women Want--What Men Want offers compelling new evidence about the real reasons behind men's and women's differing sexual psychologies and sheds new light on what men and women look for in a mate, the predicament of marriage in the modern world, the relation between sex and emotion, and many other hotly debated questions. Drawing upon 2000 questionnaires and 200 intimate interviews that show how our sexual psychologies affect everyday decisions, John Townsend argues against the prevailing ideologically correct belief that differences in sexual behaviour are `culturally constructed'. In spite of socioeconomic gains of women, it seems that the sexes are still being swayed by evolutionary constraints and emotional alarms that remind them of how to make mating and marriage choices.
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