Perhaps it's a form of signalling to spurn unattractive women. A male may be saying to the attractive women, "I am so certain of the health of my genes, I can afford to spurn the women I find ugly." Healthy males can afford to engage in this activity, and unhealthy males cannot. I think those are the conditions necessary for signalling to be useful.
Did anyone ever say that the Shoshone of the Great Basin were clever? I never read any such thing, but they were hunter-gatherers surrounded by farmers. And remember that "agriculture" is not really a good variable. In history, or across societies, there is a continuum between (a) gardening on the one hand and (b) labor-intensive agriculture on the other. Along this transition there is a change from bride-price to dowry, from males being cads to males being dads, from males being fierce to males being drab workers, and so on. Gardening societies are at most invariably associated with females doing the work and men being rather worthless [or] else heavily involved in local warfare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_price
An evolutionary psychology explanation for dowry and bride price is that bride price is common in polygynous societies which have a relative scarcity of available women. In monogamous societies where women have little personal wealth dowry is instead common since there is a relative scarcity of wealthy men who can choose from many potential women when marrying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/is-american-wedding-system-in-direct.html
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2012/09/our-brideprice-culture.html
You have to remember that in sub-Saharan Africa, according to decades of anthropological research (e.g., Jack Goody), women do most of the work... One African feminist organization estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, women put in 80% of the hours worked...Much of the agricultural work in sub-Saharan Africa is weeding with light hoes, at which women are at least as good as men at. There’s very little of heavy plowing behind draft animals, the classic medieval male peasant’s job...So, sub-Saharan African women are often valued on the marriage market for being sturdy workers, while men tend to be valued for things like being large land owners, good dancers, singers, athletes, fighters, conversationalists, and lovers...Because wives do most of the work to feed themselves, their children, and their husband, sub-Saharan Africa is where you most often see mass scale polygamy: some handsome devil with several dozen wives...How can the husband afford all those wives and children? Well, he’s not paying much for them...How can he keep all those wives satisfied and faithful? He’s probably not. He’s not keeping his wives home in a harem, he’s sending them out into the fields to work, where lonely local bachelors try to lure them into the bushes. But if his nominal children include a number of cuckoos’ eggs, it’s no big deal. He’s not paying much to keep them fed.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/08/serial-monogamy-and-women.html
Perhaps the worst social problem of African-Americans: the culture that African-Americans brought with them from Africa is one of low paternal investment. Traditionally, an African husband was not much expected to bring home the bacon for the wife and kids. Today, this is reflected in the very high American black illegitimacy rate—currently about two out of three children are born out of wedlock.
Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy of UC Davis wrote in Mother Nature:
"Many fathers are only sporadically in residence with the mothers of their children; and fathers, when they are on the scene, may be unpredictable regarding which children they invest in, and how much. A substantial number of women conceive at a young age, often prior to marriage or formation of any stable relationship… relatively few fathers provide a great deal of care."
While this may sound like inner city black neighborhoods in the U.S., she's actually describing "large areas of sub-Saharan Africa."
The anthropologists Jack Goody and Ester Boserup first explored how continental differences in raising food affected family structure. Boserup noted in 1970:
"Africa is the region of female farming par excellence. In many African tribes, nearly all the tasks connected with food production continue to be left to women."
James Q. Wilson summarized their findings:
"In Europe, where animal-drawn plows were used to farm rich land, intensive agriculture made monogamy important… In these places, men did much of the agricultural work …
In much of Africa, by contrast, farming was done by handheld hoes used to work small plots of land that were often rather infertile. Women were widely used to do the hoeing and carry in the produce.
Many husbands found that they could use extra wives to wield even more hoes, and so marrying several women made sense economically… the conditions they describe may have had important consequences for the kinds of families that had to endure the travails of slavery in the Western Hemisphere."
This tropical farming system causes African cultures to tend toward polygamy and/or matrilineal-matrilocal family structures. These tendencies can still be seen among African-Americans.
But, in systems of tropical agriculture where land was traditionally cheap and most of the work is weeding, which women can do as well as men—as opposed to manhandling draft animals for plowing—you sometimes see handsome men with 50 or more wives.
Of course, the Big Man can't afford to keep them locked up in harems. So he puts them to work in the fields, where they can produce enough to support themselves and their children.
Now, the 49 local bachelors who are left over are going to try hard to lure the polygamist's wives out of the fields and into the bushes. So many of the children born to the Big Man's wives might not be his genetic offspring. But their mothers can support them—which means that some cuckoo's eggs aren't that big of a loss to him.
Sub-Saharan African husbands are less likely to do what it takes to keep their wives sexually faithful, such as working hard to provide for them. Thus Emily Wax wrote in the Washington Post:
"[W]omen perform 80 percent of daily work, according to studies by African gender groups …"
These men get cuckolded a lot. In turn, they put even less effort into providing for their wives' children, since the odds are lower that they are also their own children.
What does your French correspondent mean by "polygamy"? Does France permit polygamy? Or does it just mean that black men in Africa live with several women at the same time without benefit of marriage under the same roof? Or do they indeed live under the same roof? In some forms of polygamy each woman and her children have separate homes.
Thus, if there is no marriage in France, and the "wives" live with their own respective children in separate dwellings, what we see is the classic ghetto pattern in the USA: black men servicing several women concurrently, traveling from house to house as the spirit moves, and leaving it up to the women to take care of themselves and their children.
And by extension, American ghetto patterns are nothing more than a reversion to the classic peasant African social pattern: marginally employed males traveling from hearth to hearth impregnating females, and leaving it up to the women to take care of themselves and their children, typically by growing food in small plots in the homelands areas [or, in America beginning in the 1960s, by collecting welfare].
...
The farther south you go, the more forward men become. This leads to a "jealousy belt" in the lower temperate latitudes, like Sicily, where shyness is low and men tend to be vain and cocksure, but the economy and culture still require intense paternal investment. There, the men are constantly trying to seduce all the women they meet and trying to keep their womenfolk from meeting and being seduced by other men. Life is full of interest in the jealousy belt!
South of the Sahara, men tend to be extremely outgoing, and talented in the arts of seduction (chatting up girls, dancing, singing, and so forth). But the traditional low paternal investment tropical agricultural economy doesn't require much certainty of paternity, so they invest more effort in chasing new women than in providing for their current women or keeping other men away from their women.
Islam's attitude toward women is very much a product of the jealousy belt. Indeed, I suspect that Islamic social customs are driven in part by Arab revulsion toward the seemingly chaotic black African family structures that Arabs came in contact with when slaving in Africa.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-return-of-patriarchy
Read Jason Malloy's December 7th Post Concerning Short-Term Mating Strategies And How It Relates To The Show Jersey Shore. I Tel Yan Males, Like Niggas,
Are Ostentatious In Body Ornament (Exaggerated Musculature, Trendy Hair
Styles, Flamboyant Clothing, Shoes, Etc.) And Engage In More
Conspicuous Consumption (The Purchasing Of Flashy Cars, Expensive Jewelry, Fancy Homes, Etc.) Because
They Come From More Sexually Promiscuous Cultures In Which Male
Investment In Offspring Is Minimal, So Female Mate Preference Is More
Biased Toward Physical Appearance And Physical Ability (Both Fitness
Indicators). (If A Female Is Going To Get Little Commitment From A Male,
And Thus, Little Investment In Their Potential Offspring, She'll Be
Wise To Compensate By Seeking Males With Superior Genes As Indicated By
Their Bodily And Facial Symmetry And Ornamentation, Hence Males Engaging
In Such Short-Term Mating Or Polygamy Will Place Greater
Emphasize On Preening And Displaying Their Genetic Quality Through Such
Means.)
The more a man decorates his body - tattoos, earrings, jewelry, odd haircuts, etc. - the less he has to offer in other areas.
Lek is a Swedish word for "play" and refers in zoology to a complex
of behavior whereby members of one sex, almost always male, strut and
display their genetic quality in a contest, in front of an audience
consisting of members of the other sex, almost always female. At the end
of the lek, the females choose the winner and exclusively mate with
him. The winner of lekking monopolizes all of the mating opportunities,
and none of the other get any.
At first sight, humans appear to be an exception in nature. Among most species, males are gaudy, colorful, decorated, and ornamented, while females are drab in appearance. (Compare peacocks with peahens.) Males of lekking species display their physical features in order to attract mates, and females choose their mates on the basis of the males' physical appearance; the gaudier and more colorful, the better. In contrast, among humans, it is women for whom physical appearance is more important for their mate value, and it is men who choose their mates mostly for their physical appearance...And, at least in industrial societies, women tend to be more decorated and ornamented than men, although men in many preindustrial societies often wear more elaborate ornamentation than women.
The female of most species in nature does not receive any material benefit from her mates; the male does not make any parental investment beyond the sperm deposited inside the female body during copulation. This is why the male's genetic quality is especially important for the female; in fact, nothing else matters. So among these species, males display their genetic quality in lekking, and the females choose their mates solely on the basis of their genetic quality. Human males are exceptional in nature in this regard; they make a large amount of material investment in their offspring, even though they don't make as much paternal investment as women do...This does not mean, however, that their genetic quality is not important to women; men's genetic quality can predict their future ability to acquire resources and attain status, hence their ability to make parental investment. For humans, because of high male parental investment, what is important is not the male's genetic quality per se but earning potential. His genetic quality is important only to the extent that it predicts or correlates with his potential to earn and accumulate material resources.
This is why when men lek, they display their earning potential and accumulated wealth in addition to their genetic quality. And unlike other lekking species, like the sage grouse or the antelope, men lek mostly by nonphysical means. They drive luxury cars, wear expensive watches and designer suits, carry electronic gadgets like cell phones and PDAs, and brag about their achievements in casual conversations. Young men also advertise their genetic quality and earning potential by "cultural displays" - excelling in such "quantifiable, public, and costly" activities as music, art, literature, and science.
In one study, for example, researchers covertly observed patrons of a bar in central Liverpool in the late 1990s, when cell phones were still relatively rare and expensive. The researchers discovered that men's tendency to place their cell phones on the table in clear view of others, unlike women's tendency to do the same, increases with the number of men in their group and its ratio of men to women. The researchers' interpretation is that men do this, consciously or unconsciously, in order to compete with other men in their group for the attention of the women, and to display their wealth and status and hence their genetic quality and earning potential. So men lek via social and cultural, rather than physical, ornamentation.
Such social and cultural ornamentation, however, presents men with one problem that males of other species, who lek via physical ornamentation, do not face: It does not travel well. Social and cultural ornamentation is, by definition, socially and culturally specific. Men cannot brag about their achievements in conversations with women unless they speak the same language. Yanomamo women in the Amazon rain forest would not be able to tell the difference between a BMW and a Hyundai or the difference between an Armani suit and a Burger King uniform, and their status implications; a Grammy or Nobel Prize will not impress them at all. (Has any Nobel Prize winner ever had massive head scars, indicating their experience in club fights?) Conversely, Western women are unlikely to be impressed by body scars and large penis sheaths. Signs of men's status and mate value are specific to societies and cultures, and they lose meaning outside of them.
This is in clear contrast to women's status and mate value. Standards of youth and physical attractiveness, the two most important determinants of women's status and mate value, are culturally universal because they are innate...Men in preliterate and innumerate cultures without any concept of fractions or the decimal point will be able to distinguish between women with 1.0 and 0.7 waist-to-hip ratios. Yanomamo men will see that a Victoria's Secret lingerie model is extremely moko dude (a Yanomamo phrase meaning "perfectly ripe").
If men's status and mate value are specific to their own society and culture, then they should avoid different cultures, where a completely different set of rules, of which they are ignorant, may apply. In contrast, women should not avoid foreign cultures to the same extent that men do, because rules applicable to them are cross-culturally universal.
However, this sex difference should
disappear once men marry, for a couple of reasons. First, married men
who have achieved reproductive success should have less of an urgent
need to attract mates by social and cultural ornamentation than do
unmarried men. Second, and more important, mates are probably the only ornamentation or lekking device men can display that is cross-culturally meaningful.
There is evidence that females of a species as varied guppies, Japanese medaka, black grouse, and Japanese quail prefer to mate with males who
have recently mated. Females use other females' choice of males as
evidence of their genetic quality; in other words, they copy each
other. And some suggest that human females might do the same.
The idea is simple: If a woman meets a strange man, she has no basis on which to form an opinion of him. He can be a high-quality. He can be a high-quality man, or he can be a low-quality man; she just doesn't know. However, if he has a wife, that means that at least one woman, who presumably closely inspected his quality before marrying him, found him good enough to marry. So he couldn't be that bad after all; at least one woman found him desirable. So being married (the presence of a wife) is one cross-culturally transportable ornamentation or lekking device that signifies men's superior mate value, and married men should not avoid foreign cultures.
...
Both the likelihood of travel abroad and expressions of xenophobia reflect men's need to attract women using social and cultural ornamentation. Men's status and mate value, unlike women's, are socially and culturally specific, and they cannot successfully attract women outside of their own society and culture. Married men, on the other hand, can use their wives as cross-culturally meaningful social ornamentation to signify their mate value. In sharp contrast, the standards and criteria by which women are judged for their mate value are socially and culturally universal, and thus women have no need to fear foreign cultures.
At first sight, humans appear to be an exception in nature. Among most species, males are gaudy, colorful, decorated, and ornamented, while females are drab in appearance. (Compare peacocks with peahens.) Males of lekking species display their physical features in order to attract mates, and females choose their mates on the basis of the males' physical appearance; the gaudier and more colorful, the better. In contrast, among humans, it is women for whom physical appearance is more important for their mate value, and it is men who choose their mates mostly for their physical appearance...And, at least in industrial societies, women tend to be more decorated and ornamented than men, although men in many preindustrial societies often wear more elaborate ornamentation than women.
The female of most species in nature does not receive any material benefit from her mates; the male does not make any parental investment beyond the sperm deposited inside the female body during copulation. This is why the male's genetic quality is especially important for the female; in fact, nothing else matters. So among these species, males display their genetic quality in lekking, and the females choose their mates solely on the basis of their genetic quality. Human males are exceptional in nature in this regard; they make a large amount of material investment in their offspring, even though they don't make as much paternal investment as women do...This does not mean, however, that their genetic quality is not important to women; men's genetic quality can predict their future ability to acquire resources and attain status, hence their ability to make parental investment. For humans, because of high male parental investment, what is important is not the male's genetic quality per se but earning potential. His genetic quality is important only to the extent that it predicts or correlates with his potential to earn and accumulate material resources.
This is why when men lek, they display their earning potential and accumulated wealth in addition to their genetic quality. And unlike other lekking species, like the sage grouse or the antelope, men lek mostly by nonphysical means. They drive luxury cars, wear expensive watches and designer suits, carry electronic gadgets like cell phones and PDAs, and brag about their achievements in casual conversations. Young men also advertise their genetic quality and earning potential by "cultural displays" - excelling in such "quantifiable, public, and costly" activities as music, art, literature, and science.
In one study, for example, researchers covertly observed patrons of a bar in central Liverpool in the late 1990s, when cell phones were still relatively rare and expensive. The researchers discovered that men's tendency to place their cell phones on the table in clear view of others, unlike women's tendency to do the same, increases with the number of men in their group and its ratio of men to women. The researchers' interpretation is that men do this, consciously or unconsciously, in order to compete with other men in their group for the attention of the women, and to display their wealth and status and hence their genetic quality and earning potential. So men lek via social and cultural, rather than physical, ornamentation.
Such social and cultural ornamentation, however, presents men with one problem that males of other species, who lek via physical ornamentation, do not face: It does not travel well. Social and cultural ornamentation is, by definition, socially and culturally specific. Men cannot brag about their achievements in conversations with women unless they speak the same language. Yanomamo women in the Amazon rain forest would not be able to tell the difference between a BMW and a Hyundai or the difference between an Armani suit and a Burger King uniform, and their status implications; a Grammy or Nobel Prize will not impress them at all. (Has any Nobel Prize winner ever had massive head scars, indicating their experience in club fights?) Conversely, Western women are unlikely to be impressed by body scars and large penis sheaths. Signs of men's status and mate value are specific to societies and cultures, and they lose meaning outside of them.
This is in clear contrast to women's status and mate value. Standards of youth and physical attractiveness, the two most important determinants of women's status and mate value, are culturally universal because they are innate...Men in preliterate and innumerate cultures without any concept of fractions or the decimal point will be able to distinguish between women with 1.0 and 0.7 waist-to-hip ratios. Yanomamo men will see that a Victoria's Secret lingerie model is extremely moko dude (a Yanomamo phrase meaning "perfectly ripe").
If men's status and mate value are specific to their own society and culture, then they should avoid different cultures, where a completely different set of rules, of which they are ignorant, may apply. In contrast, women should not avoid foreign cultures to the same extent that men do, because rules applicable to them are cross-culturally universal.
The idea is simple: If a woman meets a strange man, she has no basis on which to form an opinion of him. He can be a high-quality. He can be a high-quality man, or he can be a low-quality man; she just doesn't know. However, if he has a wife, that means that at least one woman, who presumably closely inspected his quality before marrying him, found him good enough to marry. So he couldn't be that bad after all; at least one woman found him desirable. So being married (the presence of a wife) is one cross-culturally transportable ornamentation or lekking device that signifies men's superior mate value, and married men should not avoid foreign cultures.
...
Both the likelihood of travel abroad and expressions of xenophobia reflect men's need to attract women using social and cultural ornamentation. Men's status and mate value, unlike women's, are socially and culturally specific, and they cannot successfully attract women outside of their own society and culture. Married men, on the other hand, can use their wives as cross-culturally meaningful social ornamentation to signify their mate value. In sharp contrast, the standards and criteria by which women are judged for their mate value are socially and culturally universal, and thus women have no need to fear foreign cultures.
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