The evolutionary psychology of the cuckolding kink (Part 2/4)
In this second part, the evolution of jealousy as an adaptive mechanism to mitigate risks of failure of male long-term reproductive strategy precipitated by female infidelity.
This is part of a series of essays on the evolutionary psychology of male submissive kinks. Find the Table of contents here.
One of the themes of male submissive sexual fantasies is the female partner’s infidelity. This is the core element in so-called cuckolding fantasies, in which the man imagines various scenarios of his romantic partner’s unfaithfulness and her conquest by a rival.1
In this essay, I explore this theme from an evolutionary perspective. In accordance with my evolutionary theory of masochism, I argue the case that, like all submissive sexual fantasies, those of female infidelity eroticize the failure of long-term reproductive strategy.
This essay is composed of four parts. In this second part, I present the evolutionary argument that male jealousy is an adaptive mechanism that evolved to prevent certain risks of failure of the male long-term reproductive strategy precipitated by female infidelity.
Evolution of male jealousy
The evolutionary psychologists posit persuasive hypotheses to explain why men have the peculiar passion of jealousy regarding their female partners. The evolutionary argument is that male jealousy evolved as an adaptive mechanism to mitigate risks of failure in the male reproductive strategy. Through natural selection, evolutionary pressures in the ancestral environment favored jealous men in the game of reproduction, protecting them against potential perils that lie in their pursuit of propagating their genes.
Potential perils
The potential perils of female infidelity to the male long-term reproductive strategy have been discussed at length in the literature. Two of these perils have taken center stage in research. The first is the risk that the female partner will take another man and leave her original mate, a risk called mate switching. The second risk is that the male partner will be deceived into raising the offspring of another, thinking they are his. This risk has been referred to by several names, including cuckoldry and nonpaternity; here, I refer to it as paternity fraud. In addition to these two risks, I add a third which has received less attention than the others in the literature: the risk that a male’s resources will be diverted to his female partner’s paramour. I call this risk resource diversion.
Mate switching
Women are the sexual selectors in the species. To guide their choices, they seek certain traits and attributes in men.2 A woman selects a long-term mate by optimizing these mating preferences in the pool of available men at a given moment in time. But after the woman makes her choice and commits to a man, she can always meet someone who makes her rethink her original choice.
Thus, in a committed relationship, a man always runs the risk that his female partner will meet a potential rival who ticks more boxes in her list of mate preferences, and that she will potentially upgrade to this better option.3 The longer the relationship lasts, the more risk the man incurs of losing his mate because she is exposed to more opportunities of meeting better suitors who are available and interested. When such a rival presents himself, the woman can make a rational estimation that she would be better off with him or she can simply be seduced by the rival into leaving her partner.
This threat of mate switching is counterbalanced by the woman’s emotional investment in the relationship through her love for her partner, her reproductive investment through having children with him, the uncertainty in the rival’s genuine commitment to her, and the unpredictability of the course of the alternative relationship.
Even when the woman does not desire to leave her partner, she has an evolutionary advantage in cultivating the possibility of alternative mates in case the original relationship fails or ends. Thus, the threat of mate switching lurks in the shadows if the woman keeps another man as a backup option. The original mate might fall ill, perish unexpectedly, lose his freedom, status, or resources, desert the woman, or simply prove infertile. Backup mate options mitigate these risks, functioning as a form of mate insurance.4
When mate switching occurs, the man loses access to the woman’s reproductive resources, failing to propagate his genes and losing all return on the resources he invested in the relationship. Such is the risk of mate switching, which threatens the success of the man’s long-term reproductive strategy.
Paternity fraud
Men seek to reproduce to propagate their genes but a fundamental issue for them lies in the certainty of parenthood. The recent invention of DNA testing notwithstanding, a man can never be certain that he is in fact the father of his female partner's baby. Indeed, only women can be assured of their motherhood since they are the ones who bear the offspring. Men, on the other hand, can only deal in probability.
Therefore, in the pursuit of a successful reproductive strategy, a man faces the major risk of being duped into raising and investing in an offspring that he thinks is his biological progeny, but who is in fact another man’s child. I call such a situation paternity fraud. The man who falls prey to this danger fails to propagate his genes since the offspring he raises carry the genetic material of another man. This makes paternity fraud a major risk of failure in a man’s long-term reproductive strategy.5
This situation can be brought about if the woman sleeps with other men but does not switch mates, choosing to stay with her original partner for the long term. Women, in furthering their own reproductive success, might have reasons to seek reproduction with other men for the short term, potentially tricking their long-term mate into raising the offspring of another man. This dual-mating strategy can be advantageous if the short-term mates offers better genetic material while the long-term mate offers more secure investment and resources.6
Resource diversion
A man has to invest resources in his female mate and in the offspring they raise together. The more resources a man has, the better he can provision and protect, thus ensuring the best chances of survival and reproduction for his female mate. This is why women prefer men with resources.
If a woman is committed to a long-term mate but becomes involved with another man, the original mate runs the risk of having his resources funneled to the rival by the woman. In such a situation where resources are diverted due to the woman’s emotional or sexual involvement with another man, the rival’s reproductive strategy is helped and that of the original mate is harmed because resources are finite.
Thus, a man faces the potential peril of losing his resources to a rival, failing to invest them in ways that further his own reproductive goals. This makes resource diversion another potential risk for men in their pursuit of a successful long-term reproductive strategy.
Adaptive mechanism
In the ancestral environment, the man who was not jealous was likely to get the short end of the stick when it came to these potential perils. Indeed, the unjealous man lacked the incentive to prevent those disastrous scenarios that spelled doom for his reproductive strategy.
The unjealous man did not seek to guard his mate from potential rivals. Therefore, she had more opportunities of meeting better mate options. In consequence, he ran a higher risk of losing her if she decided to switch mates. The unjealous man also had no incentive to guard his partner’s sexuality, thereby exposing himself to the risk of paternity fraud if she slept with others. The unjealous man was also more exposed to the risk of losing his resources if his partner diverted them to an extra-pair liaison.
By contrast, the man who possessed the passion of jealousy was highly motivated to prevent female infidelity. The tactics of mate guarding, along with the threat of aggression, likely served to prevent and to deter the female partner from seeking other mates and possibly mate switching, from sleeping with others and potentially committing paternity fraud, and from getting involved with men to whom she might wish to divert the resources of her original mate.
Therefore, the jealous man had higher chances of successfully guarding his mate, had more certainty of his paternity of the offspring he raised, and protected himself against the potential loss of his resources. As a result of being less exposed to the risks of mate switching, paternity fraud, and resource diversion, the jealous man’s reproductive strategy had higher chances of success than that of the unjealous man, all thanks to the passion of jealousy.
Thus, jealousy confers an advantage. In all likelihood, the jealous men in the ancestral environment were more successful at reproduction than their unjealous counterparts. Once the passion of jealousy appeared in the genetic pool, it could have been favored by natural selection as an adaptive mechanism. Such is the explanation advanced by the evolutionary psychologists for why male jealousy universally dominates in our species as a fundamental part of men’s sexual psychology.7
Conclusion
Evolutionary psychology makes a compelling case that male jealousy evolved to mitigate the risks of failure of the male reproductive strategy due to female infidelity. The careful study of sexual fantasies of cuckolding reveals that they fundamentally revolve around scenarios that represent such failure. In men who have cuckolding fantasies, the potential perils identified above become the sources of erotic stimulation. In the third part of this essay, I make this connection clear, providing a conclusive answer to the question of what cuckolding fantasies are fundamentally about.
The line art in this essay’s card is by Georgian artist Dorian Chelios.
For a comprehensive description of sexual fantasies of cuckolding, see Beta, Ph.D. (2024, July 9). The Structure of Male Submissive Sexual Fantasies: Female Sexual Infidelity. Beta Chronicles.
For more on women’s mate preferences, see Buss, David M. (2016). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Fourth edition (revised and updated). Basic Books.
Buss, David M., et al. (2017). The mate switching hypothesis. Personality and Individual Differences, 104, 143–149.
Wedberg, Nicole A. (2016). Partner insurance: Women may have backup romantic partners as a mating strategy (Master's thesis). State University of New York at New Paltz.
For an evolutionary perspective on female infidelity and the risk of paternity fraud, see the edited volume Platek, Steven M., & Shackelford, Todd K. (Eds.). (2006). Female Infidelity and Paternal Uncertainty: Evolutionary Perspectives on Male Anti-Cuckoldry Tactics. Cambridge University Press.
For more on dual-mating strategies, see Gangestad, Steven W. & Simpson, Jeffry A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(4), 573–644. See also the extensive open peer commentary on that work.
For more on the evolutionary view of male jealousy as an adaptive mechanism, see Buss, David M. (2000). The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. The Free Press.