Ovulatory shifts in female sexual desire Journal of Sex Research - Find Articles: "Ovulatory shifts in female sexual desire
Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2004 by Elizabeth G. Pillsworth, Martie G. Haselton, David M. Buss
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Given the profound reproductive importance of mate choice, female sexual psychology has likely been shaped by reproductive constraints and opportunities. The high energetic costs of pregnancy and an extended period of juvenile dependency in humans have limited the total lifetime reproductive output to only a few offspring (Daly & Wilson, 1983; Low, 2000). In modern hunter-gatherer communities, for example, lifetime reproductive output ranges from a low of about 4.5 children among the !Kung of Southern Africa to just over 8 children among the Ache of Paraguay (Hawkes, O'Connell, & Blurton-Jones, 1997; Hill & Hurtado, 1996; Howell, 1979). Moreover, opportunities for conception are restricted to a small window within a woman's monthly cycle (Wilcox, Weinberg, & Baird, 1995), and over the long course of human evolutionary history, such ovulatory events necessarily would have been rare in a woman's life. Most women of reproductive age spent many years pregnant or lactating, states that suppress ovulation (Symons, 1995). High infant mortality required more frequent pregnancies to reproduce successfully. Menarche occurred later in life, shortening ancestral women's reproductive years compared with those of modern women. Earlier age of death abbreviated the reproductive span. In women living today, ovulation is sometimes a monthly event that recurs for roughly 2 decades, resulting in perhaps 200 to 300 hundred ovulatory episodes. In ancestral women, older age of menarche, frequent episodes of pregnancy, many years of lactation, and shorter lifespans would have drastically reduced the number of these episodes to perhaps as few as a dozen, rendering each "