The Sexual Contract
Essay from the book On the Edge.
Human existence is based on an implicit deal between a man and a woman, which I call “the sexual contract”. The sexual contract is an exchange of two types of labor:
The man protects and supports the woman and her children.
The woman has sex with the man and bears him children.
This exchange is between an individual man and an individual woman, not between men and women as collectives.
The sexual contract is built into our emotions. It is an essential part of human nature.
Imagine life 10,000 years ago. Our ancestors lived in small groups, surrounded by wilderness. Life was difficult and dangerous. Food was acquired by hunting and gathering. Predators lurked in the undergrowth. An enemy tribe could attack at any time. Under those conditions, women needed men to survive, especially if they were pregnant or had small children.
These days, we take the comfort and security of modern civilization for granted. A feminist can say “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”, but she couldn’t survive without the civilization created and maintained by men. The sexual revolution liberated women from their reliance on individual men. Today, a woman doesn’t need an individual man to survive. She can get everything that she needs from the state and the market. A woman needs men, but she doesn’t need a man. In the past, however, a woman needed a man like a fish needs water: to survive.
Men need women to reproduce. Women have the baby-making factory inside them. They have the larger sex cell (the egg), the uterus, milk-producing breasts, etc. To reproduce, a man needs a woman, while a woman needs only a sperm.
The ancient deal between a man and a woman was survival for reproduction.
Our culture does not have a realistic view of human nature. We place it off-limits to rational understanding. We sacralize it. The emotions are especially sacred, and love is the most sacred emotion. We pretend that love is magical and inexplicable. But it is not. Love is an evolved mechanism with a biological function.
Sexual attraction is an emotional heuristic for evaluating potential mates. Men are attracted to signs of fertility in women. Women are attracted to signs of power in men. Female fertility is the ability to do reproductive labor: to conceive, bear and care for children. Male power is the ability to do productive and protective labor: to support and protect women and children. Each sex is attracted to the abilities that it needs in the other.
In most mammal species, there is little or no male investment in parenting. Instead, males invest in competing for females. Males fight over females, while females are mostly indifferent to males. Think of bucks locking antlers to fight over does, or bull elephant seals fighting in the surf over a harem. The males do not help to raise the offspring that they sire.
Unlike mammals, birds typically form bonded pairs to raise offspring. This is mainly possible because bird eggs are incubated outside the female’s body, which allows the male to help out. In a typical bird species, the male claims a territory, defends it from other males, and attracts a female. The male and female then form a bond, mate, build a nest, incubate their eggs, and raise their offspring together. The pair-bond adaptation is very effective, because it allows for a greater investment of energy in offspring.
Like birds, humans have the pair-bond adaptation. Unlike most other mammals, primates often have some level of sexual cooperation. Primate males often protect females and offspring to some extent. Humans have a stronger version of the pair-bond than most other primates. Male parental investment is essential in humans, because of the large brain, long gestation period, and long infancy. Pregnant or nursing women and small children cannot survive without men to support and protect them. Sexual cooperation is an essential part of the human adaptation. Without it, our large brains would be a liability, not an asset.
We evolved to cooperate sexually and socially. Cooperation is not altruism. It is biologically selfish. Both sides benefit.
The pair-bond is an exchange of two different types of work. Male protective and productive labor are exchanged for female reproductive labor. The female body does a huge amount of work just to bring a child into the world, let alone take care of that child for 10 or more years. The female body has been shaped by evolution to do reproductive work: to gestate and care for children. Women evolved to depend on men for survival, so that they could focus more on reproduction. The male body is shaped to do protective and productive work. The physical differences between men and women are adaptations to different types of work.
Our sexual emotions evolved to create sexual cooperation. Emotions bring men and women together, as individuals, and cause them to develop bonds of personal attachment (love) that keep them together over long periods of time, long enough for children to be conceived, born and raised.
With any type of cooperation, there is a risk of defection. In the sexual contract, there are risks for both sides. The main risk for the male is that he will raise another male’s offspring. The main risk for the female is abandonment by the male: that he will impregnate her, and then leave without fulfilling his side of the deal. Pair-bonding species have emotional/instinctual mechanisms to protect individuals from those risks. A long courtship is a way of establishing sexual fidelity and trust between the two sides. But the risks remain.
Creating the sexual contract requires solving a problem of cooperation: a prisoner’s dilemma between the two sides. Each side can sometimes benefit by defecting. Men can sometimes benefit by impregnating and abandoning women. Women can sometimes benefit by cuckolding men.
Traditional marriage was an explicit and socially enforceable form of the sexual contract. Marriage made sexual cooperation easier by reducing the risk of defection. It protected men from being cuckolded, and it protected women from being abandoned. Marriage is an example of how social coercion can enable cooperation between individuals. By making the sexual contract socially enforceable, marriage made it easier to create and maintain.
In modern times, we have reduced the functional aspects of marriage. As a result, sexual cooperation is harder to achieve.
See The End of Marriage.
There are some people who view the sexual contract as exploitation of one sex by the other. Feminism portrays the sexual contract as exploitation of women by men. The male counterpart of feminism is “MGTOW”: men going their own way. Both feminism and MGTOW implicitly reject the sexual contract. Both ignore the contribution of one side, while portraying the contribution of the other side as compelled by coercion or deception. Both exaggerate the risks of defection for one side. Both ignore or reject the underlying purpose of the sexual contract, which is reproduction.
The sexual contract is not exploitation. It is an exchange of labor that has biological benefits for both sides. Male and female bodies and brains evolved to fit together and form a functional unit. Women need men to survive, and men need women to reproduce.
Such a clear sighted essay. One could still come up with a feminist take on this as “women need men to protect them from male violence”. Maybe that’s true. Feminism can probably only arise in conditions when women are protected by the state and supported by the state. Remove those conditions and feminism will vanish overnight.
I disagree that MGTOW rejects the sexual contract. It simply recognises that the contract is in tatters, and that engaging in it as a man is a sucker move in game theory terms. And as you rightly analyse, it is because there is no social enforcement that the rate of defection is high, which in turn makes the risk-reward calculation irrational. Certainly for men but also to a lesser extent for women. Women less so because the state provides significant support for women after a defection, with absolutely no distinction as to whether the woman was the defector or the defected-again. Conversely the state enforces sanctions against the man, regardless of whether he was the defector or the defected-against.