The following is an excerpt from an interview I did a few years ago with the biologist and science writer Mairi Macleod. Mairi was working on an article about dating and love myths. This part of the interview didn’t make the final cut, so I thought I’d share it here. Enjoy!
Mairi Macleod: “Do you think women will learn to find househusband type men sexy given that this would be an adaptive thing to do in order to enable reproduction in couples where women are bringing in an increasingly large share of the household income?”
Steve Stewart-Williams: Yes and no. Social norms are clearly important. It’s more acceptable today than 50 years ago for the woman to work while the man takes care of the kids, and thus more women (and men) are happy with that arrangement.
Women may find their househusband partners sexy for many reasons: their looks, their personality, their sense of humor. But could women learn to find them sexy specifically because they change diapers or do the dishes?1 Could they learn to find washing dishes sexier than status or social dominance?
It seems unlikely to me - even if such preferences would be biologically adaptive today. Humans don’t have an evolved tendency to acquire whatever tastes and preferences happen to be adaptive in their current environment. Instead, we have certain built-in tastes and preferences that were adaptive for our ancestors throughout the course of our evolution.
For women, one of these built-in preferences seems to be for men with high status and ambition. Thus, high status, ambitious men may always have more female fans than househusbands.
That doesn’t mean, though, that women can’t find househusbands sexy. It just means that, if they do, it’ll largely be for other reasons. And of course, there are always exceptions!
In Other News
Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick cite my research on the effect of body count on attractiveness in a recent episode of their
. (Great name!) You can listen to it here on Spotify or check out the show notes here:How You Can Support the Newsletter
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It’s worth pointing out that men also don’t find women sexy specifically because of these activities.
Every so often, I imagine the ancestral grave of all the easy-going women who didn’t pursue status and either died before passing on their genes or whose genes didn’t survive. I salute them.
Interesting insights in the light of recent research: "men around the world have gained height and weight twice as fast as women over the past century, driving greater differences between the sexes". And it's not about doing the dishes. “men’s height and weight are condition-dependent, sexually selected traits”, the scientists speculate that women’s sexual preferences may have fuelled a trend for taller, more muscular men"
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/22/men-have-grown-twice-as-much-as-women-over-past-century-study-shows?CMP=share_btn_url