‘Women Want Providers, Men Want Beauty And Compliance’
This isn’t sociobiology; it’s culture, and rather recent culture at that
I cannot even count the number of times that someone (usually a guy) has tried to feed me the story of how we are programmed by evolution. They tell me that women want a strong man who can protect and provide for them, and men want beauty, but also “sweetness,” aka compliance. It’s the trade-off for being the protector and provider, right? “That’s just evolution,” they invariably say because no-doubt, that’s what they’ve been taught. But this isn’t actually a timeless evolutionary dynamic or our invariable sociobiology. Instead, it’s a rather recent dynamic brought about by specific cultural conditions.
The idea of a provider for a family is a pretty recent one, beginning with plowed agriculture and intensifying with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to agriculture, both men and women contributed to the food supplies and the wellbeing of the family because until that time humans lived in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands where the survival strategy was for the entire group of 20–50 to feed and look out for each other. In some current hunter-gatherer bands, it is actually the women who provide most of what the tribe eats.
