Re: how many bastards are there, anyway?

Hugh Gibbons (103305.62@compuserve.com)
Wed, 28 Aug 1996 23:43:19 +0000

Matt Beckwith wrote:
> Wow, somebody actually answered a post of mine with something other than
> hostility. I think this is going to be a good day!
>
> So it isn't that cuckolds are superior by virtue of being cuckolds, but
> that women sleep with men who are attractive to them, and the attractive
> men become cuckolds because so many women want them.
>
> So how would we get an attractive, faithful man? The cuckold would have
> to finally want more from a relationship, and realize that you can't get
> that without commitment.
>
> Matt Beckwith
> http://users.southeast.net/~beckwith/

I don't like this explanation because it relies on fairly dubious
assumptions.
(That attractive men have genes that make them able to survive better.)

The more conventional and more likely explanation is that females have
orgasm to attract them to the act of sex, which results in procreation.
Since women are intelligent, men would have a hard time persuading them
to engage in sex, knowing the dangers of pregnancy, unless the women
got immediate benefit.

The cuckold takes advantage where he finds it by persuading a female to
mate with him and possibly have his children. This does not interfere
much with his main chance of reproducing, which is with his regular
mate.
His childrearing efforts are spent on kids that are probably his, and he
gets free bonus kids on the side. The female's advantage in the scheme
is that she gets children of the cuckold, whose male offspring
may inherit the very traits that attracted her, increasing their own
reproductive odds.

Hugh Gibbons