Don’t ask me how I got into it, but I spent far too long last night reading about Evolutionary Psychology, and thus, “Men” and “Women.”
What I really hate about reading any of the psychological models dealing with love, sex, and issues associated with those is how they make me feel about the males of the species. The argument often concludes with the meta-message: “Men are just big dumb animals who incline toward having one-off sexual encounters with people who aren’t their mates. It’s their biology, and they can’t help it.”
Someone is WRONG on the Internet!
Naturally, I’m not satisfied until I’ve taken multiple hours of this punishment. At the end, I’m temporarily disgusted with humankind in general, and how we’re all just led around by various pieces of genitalia to do strange, ridiculous, and illogical things.
Don’t worry, it soon wears off. Soon after I’ve shaken off that sick feeling, I am reminded of the old NLP saying, “The map is not the territory.” Even though I’m pretty much a total recluse, there still manages to be many wonderful people in my life, both offline and online (esp. recently due to The Twitter.) Sure, we all have these mammalian machines that produce unfortunate chemistry cocktails at times, but we’re so much more than that.
But wait… this post actually does have a point related to romance novels.
So, the general consensus with all the EP stuff I read was that men, and maybe women, are naturally mildly promiscuous and it is natural to seek out occasional sex partners outside of one’s normal sex parter. The opinion was split on whether this tendency is stronger in men than women, but several women said the desire was at least there for them, if not the actual practice. Fine, I’ve got no argument against that.
But the second conclusion was what got me a-thinkin’. Some researchers said that men were polygynous by nature — multiple mates / harem. That way, the best men (big, tall, masculine features, aggressive, sexually potent, and rich) could seed multiple women to produce superior offspring. Now, here’s where my extremely dubious reasoning comes in…
Look at a standard “alpha” romance hero.
Let’s assume this is true. Let’s also assume that women want monogamy. Now, look a standard “alpha” romance hero — big, tall, strong, masculine, sexually potent, rich, aggressive, etc. And look at a typical romance HEA, which results in both material stability for the heroine and exclusive sexual monogamy with the highly-desirable male.
Women readily admit that the standard romance hero isn’t realistic. I thought that was because he was an ideal man, the likes of which only grace Construction Worker Fantasy calendars. But now, I think it’s because the alpha hero is an ideal man who is monogamous.
What this means for M/M romance.
For years, the rising M/M trend never made that much sense to me. I thought, “Don’t women want at least one female character to identify with? Isn’t that the point of romance, to put themselves in the female character’s place?” Too logical. If women read romance for the satisfaction of “knowing” that highly-desirable men can be monogamous, having two highly desirable men is even better.
Because you can point to the story and say, “Look, it has nothing to do with women. It’s actually men’s natures to want a HEA with one person. See? SEE??”
Yeah, I could be talking out my ass, as is not unusual when I go on these armchair-psychology tangents. But it’s food for thought, isn’t it? What do you think? Please comment and let me know — I’m really interested to hear the opinions of longtime romance readers, which I ain’t.
PS – I wanted to include artwork, but I didn’t want to just steal their stuff. If anyone has good book cover art that I can use, let me know, and I’ll give you credit and a link.
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