There is gold in "unpublished" dissertations
According to #evopsych, it's not surprising that male tourists pay for sex with locals. What is surprising, as April Gorry found, is that women do the same. Is #evopsych wrong about women's mating psychology? In some ways, yes:
A 🧵
2. White women tourists visiting the Caribbean and other warm-weather locales are stereotyped as sex-starved nymphomaniacs lusting after sexually potent dark-skinned men. Where did this myth come from?
3. Western tourist women often do enter into sexual relationships with local men in Belize, where Gorry did her fieldwork, and many other resort locations:
4. The men that tourist women choose seem to lack all the qualities, such as financial resources and status, that #evopsych claims they should have. In an apparent reversal of sex roles, tourist women often provide their sexual partners with substantial financial resources:
5. What's going on? Women tourists unfamiliar w/ the local culture don't recognize the men's low status but do notice universal aspects of their mate quality. First, men display cues of competency & mastery of the physical & social environments, which indicate resource potential:
6. Second, the men exhibit powerful cues of investment and devotion:
7. Gorry's female informants describe intense emotional experiences:
8. But in many cases it's a hustle. Local men at the bottom of the economic and ethnic hierarchy learn to feign indicators of romantic love in order to obtain sexual and financial benefits from tourist women:
9. The motivations of the men, however, are not quite so simple:
10. Gorry concludes her dissertation with an analysis of #RomanceNovels. The male heroes are universally portrayed as masters of their physical and social environments...
11. ...and the heroes are obsessed with the heroine.
In ancestral environments, competence and devotion would have been reliable indicators of male mate value, and are probably stronger cues than the evolutionarily novel financial resources often emphasized in #evopsych:
12. If you research sex and mating from an evolutionary perspective, check it out.
13. Her 1994 MA thesis on #femalecompetition looks interesting too (not sure if it's available anywhere):
/end
Postscript. The informants for the romance tourist study:
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