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1 - Women’s Preferences: Precopulatory Adaptations

from Part I - Precopulatory Adaptations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Donald F. Sacco ,
Mitch Brown ,
Kaitlyn Boykin ,
Alicia L. Macchione ,
Kelsey M. Drea  and
Mary M. Medlin
Edited by
Todd K. Shackelford
Todd K. Shackelford
Affiliation:
Oakland University, Michigan
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Summary

This chapter focuses on women’s preferences in mate selection, which have evolved as a suite of adaptations designed to solve women’s problems associated with reproduction. We first summarize basic differences in women’s reproductive rate and metabolic costs associated with reproduction that have shaped women’s mating preferences. We then summarize women’s short-term-mating preferences, designed primarily to identify mates who possess “good genes” cues that would ensure healthy offspring, followed by a summary of women’s long-term mating preferences, designed primarily to identify mates capable and interested in investing in women and offspring. We discuss how women’s ovulatory cycle, in which conception risk varies across their monthly cycle, modulates women’s mating preferences, particularly short-term mating preferences. This is followed by a summary of how environmental factors, such as the presence of resources or threatening conspecifics, modulate women’s mating preferences, indicating the context-sensitivity of women’s preferences. Finally, we discuss how individual differences in women’s personality traits further modulate short-term and long-term mating preferences.

Keywords

Mating preferencesOvulationShort-term MatingLong-term MatingPersonality
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology , pp. 3 - 32
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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