The Science of Sex


SIMON SHEPPARD


Females are more uniform than males, so are easier to understand, once their policy of obfuscation is recognized. Most of the following is adapted from All About Women because it is more suitable as an introduction than excerpts from the Suppressed Science papers.

(Here terms like strategies, policy and procedure may be used relatively informally; formal definitions of these terms are given on the ‘Game-Theoretic Models of Human Behaviour’ page.)


Biology, Evolution and History


Most of history has not been written; it lies within us. Instincts have evolved just as organs to give us advantage in a competitive, often hostile environment. During early human history women were constantly either pregnant or breast-feeding. In the upper paleolithic period (30,000 – 10,000 BC) the life-expectancy of males was 33.3 years and of females 28.7, with the major cause of female mortality being childbearing and attempts to induce abortions (e.g. putting a plank over a woman’s stomach and jumping on it until blood spurted out of her vagina). Male mortality would have been mainly due to hunting accidents or fights over women. According to Darwin the Best Man tradition derives from him being the groom’s accomplice in the act of stealing a bride from a neighbouring village.

To obtain anything approaching an accurate perspective on human behaviour, and male-female interaction in particular, we have to be aware of humans’ evolutionary history: in the biological jargon, our phylogeny. The great bulk of our evolutionary conditioning took place during our two million-year prehistoric period and it is here that we find the origins of behaviour and the reasons we are what we are.

Probably the three dominant factors at the root of male-female interaction are the following, operating at the primal, the physical and the psychological level:

  1. Primal. The abundance and ready availability of sperm versus the finite supply of eggs. This is the biological origin of the different amounts of parental investment required by males and females, particularly the child-bearing and nurturing role of the female. In the biological terminology, the female is gravid: egg-bearing. (Post-menopausal females are null in evolutionary terms.)

  2. Physical. The female is physically weaker than the male. To compensate for this disadvantage the female has evolved a variety of mechanisms for manipulating males, and her mate in particular. Males must be unaware of these mechanisms for them to be effective. (An obvious long-term female strategy is to deny reproductive facilities to males who are immune to female manipulation.)

  3. Psychological. During sexual selection, telling the female anything she doesn’t want to hear, regardless of how true it is, immediately spoils a male’s chances. Since the female is inherently more perceptive than the male, and is likely to detect a conscious attempt to deceive her, the male, in order to improve his reproductive success, deceives himself. The most convincing liar is one who had deluded himself.

Several psychologists have investigated male pick-up lines and the consistent lowest-scorer is ‘Come back with me and have sex right now.’ That is, if the male is direct and completely honest, he does not generally succeed. (Males using such an approach statement in real life are likely to be doing so in an attempt to resolve excessive neurosis.) In fact females, if given a free choice, will prefer males who express female characteristics. This is because of the ‘selfishness of the gene’ (Dawkins): the gene promotes itself. This explains, for example, the female affinity for homosexuals: male homosexuals express female characteristics.

Mature males feign disinterest in a female in order to arouse her interest: the difficult part here is engineering a situation where the relationship may progress without obviously declaring a desire. Immature males sometimes approach a female making no attempt to hide their intentions and occasionally succeed, likely reasons for this being: a) The female is offered a relationship on such favourable terms that she cannot resist (she is given all control of the relationship at the outset), and/or b) She is seeking to remove Ambiguity of Intention from males in general. Females seek to monopolize Ambiguity of Intention so that only their objectives are allowed to be ambiguous (e.g. females interpreting a friendly remark from a male as an approach).



It is proposed that every transaction can be analyzed in terms of

Signals, Markers, Tokens and Handles

Definitions and Examples

Signal. Ambiguous; a signal is an ambiguous gesture, especially of a sexual nature.

Examples: Accident Signals, the Open Legs Signal, the Wide Eye Signal, normally functioning to attract a mate: ‘The female signals, the male responds.’

Signalling is the female strategy; it is passive, safe and ambiguous. The female manipulates the male into making an approach and can always deny her intent. Signals induce neurosis in males, making them confused and yet easier to manipulate. (Neurosis is here defined in Pavlovian terms as the stress induced when one stimulus evokes two or more responses.) Each sexual signal is evolutionarily stable.

Marker. Unambiguous; a marker is an unambiguous indication of involvement.

Examples: Talking to someone or buying someone a drink. Electricity, telephones, cars and other items of utility are markers discovered, invented or created by males. A female marks a male by choosing or mending his clothes. Primordial marking is leaving scent. Other forms of territorial marking are decorating a flat or leaving something at a table intending to return.

Token. Ambiguous; a token is when one thing means another.

Examples: ‘Do you have a light?’ or ‘Come back and have some coffee.’ Hints are commonplace examples of the token. A token has different values for the giver and the receiver. The cost of a cup of coffee in a café is a token because the cost of the drink is insignificant compared to the rent of the premises, wages of staff etc., and this is understood by both parties.

Handle. Unambiguous; a handle is a request which generates a fixed and predetermined response.

Examples: Calling someone’s name, having an arrangement to meet, being able to touch or hold someone. A handle state is a state in which handles are issued (e.g. being married).


Females prefer signals and tokens because they are ambiguous and therefore manipulative, while males prefer markers and handles because they are unambiguous and often involve the wealth which he creates.



The Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Male-Female Game

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a basic model in biology, used to model and predict the behaviour of many animal species. The PD has been applied to insects, lizards and fish, to name but a few. It can also be applied to humans and here it is applied especially to the male-female game.

The model is mathematical (see box) in which behaviour is modelled as a game, but it is possible to detail its essentials without mathematics. For a fuller discussion of the PD see Axelrod: The Evolution of Cooperation or Poundstone: The Prisoner's Dilemma; the former is easier to find but Poundstone’s is more wide-ranging (and entertaining).

  1. Suppose that two players, a Protagonist and an Opponent, transact. The transaction may be social, in which case the benefits (payoffs) may be difficult to measure, or they may be monetary, in which case numbers are already available: the winner is the player with the highest payoff at game-end. In the evolutionary game the only important payoff is the number of progeny. In this male-female model the female is cast as Protagonist (the main player, who starts the game) because most sexual games are instigated by females, whether the male is aware of it or not.

  2. Both players cooperate, in which case each gets a Reward payoff. (One example of this is a distributor selling to a retailer: each takes his profit from the transaction.)

  3. One player cheats: he defects (in the case of a distributor selling to a retailer, the retailer doesn’t pay his bill). If the other player is attempting to cooperate, the defector gets the highest payoff of all, the Temptation payoff. However a defector will normally collect the Temptation payoff only once: only a fool will continue to cooperate when the other player is cheating. For this reason, cooperative behaviour (sometimes known as reciprocal altruism) only evolves when there are to be repeated transactions. Then the cumulative Reward payoffs are worth more than a single, large Temptation payoff.

  4. Disguised Defection. In the male-female game, interactions between the players are inevitable. For this reason subtle behaviour is employed by the female to maximize her payoff. Normally if a player cheats they only collect the Temptation payoff once. However if the female were to bring the male to a state of such confusion that he no longer recognized defection when it occurred, she would then be able to collect the Temptation payoff over and over again. She thus obtains the maximum possible payoff from the game.


Disguised Defection models the female imitating the male, adopting roles and exploiting technologies which males have defined and developed once they become sufficiently facile, in order to disguise her defection from her natural functions.



The Prisoner’s Dilemma


The Protagonist is the main player, who starts the game. The payoffs are shown for the Protagonist.

  MALE OPPONENT
FEMALE PROTAGONIST Cooperate Defect
Cooperate Reward
R
Sucker's Payoff
S
Defect Temptation Payoff
T
Punishment
P

For a Prisoner’s Dilemma T > R > P > S. The highest payoff is received by a Protagonist who defects while the Opponent is cooperating. The lowest payoff goes to the Sucker who cooperates while the other defects.

Real-life games are asymmetric: cooperation and defection take different forms for each player, as will the payoffs. More rigorously, showing that the payoffs as well as cooperation and defection can take different forms for each of the two players:-

  MALE OPPONENT
FEMALE PROTAGONIST Cooperate' Defect'
Cooperate R, R' S, T'
Defect T, S' P, P'

It is proposed that, in general, females play the Tit For Tat (TFT) strategy. TFT is ‘Cooperate on the first move, thereafter do as the opponent last did.’ TFT is imitative, it simply emulates any attempt to improve upon it – an expression of the female policy of imitation. One of the key features of TFT, accounting for its robustness as a long-term evolution strategy, is its provokability. If a player is provoked by an opponent’s defection, he retaliates by defecting himself.

The female acquires power surreptitiously, continually testing the male in order to establish a new base from which her power can be further incremented. The female optimally proceeds just below the threshold at which the male is provoked. If she miscalculates in her power-seeking manoeuvres she may provoke a violent reaction.






Some Other Policies and Forms of Perception-Distortion Encouraged by Females

  1. Increase the population, reducing the probability of a further encounter and disrupting male territorial instincts;
  2. Employ wide variations in dress and style, disrupting male targeting mechanisms and his ability to recognize the protagonist;
  3. Erode the discrimination of the opponent, reducing his ability to foresee defection, recognize the protagonist’s strategies or recognize defection;
  4. Impose taboos and emotionalize language. (Once a topic cannot be openly and rationally discussed the perception of it can be altered to suit unstated and hidden goals);
  5. Stigmatize the opponent;
  6. Exploit humans’ capacity for selective perception, such as turning off attention when an embarrassing event occurs, or being unable to fully comprehend an event because it is inconsistent with established stereotypes;
  7. Foster irrational and anti-scientific perception (belief in astrology, UFO’s, the supernatural etc.);
  8. Reduce an opponent’s prospects in subsequent encounters by attributing less significance to the material interactions (markers and handles) which have already taken place;
  9. Promote a false expectation of a payoff in the future (e.g. a female maintaining a circle of hopeful suitors while she selects a single best match).


Discrimination

Discrimination is an essential human function. To discriminate is ‘to see the difference.’ It is obvious that someone who cannot see the difference between a small opponent and a large one, or between an enemy sneaking up in disguise and a friend, is at a disadvantage. If one kind (sex, race, species, genotype) is exploiting another it is to their advantage to erode their opponent’s discrimination – to discourage discrimination on the basis of kind. This is the Malign Encouragement procedure: encouraging an opponent to pursue an adverse strategy. Collectively employed it is ‘What’s bad for them is good for us.’

One of the most profound discoveries was that it is the male instinct to be racist. Anyone who says they are "anti-racist" is really saying they are anti-male.




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