Sexual conflict refers to tug-of-war dynamics where the reproductive or sexual interests of men and women diverge, leading to competing and win-lose strategies.

This article is not for the faint of heart, since we focus exclusively on the adaptations to cheat, control, and gain an advantage against others.

That’s also evolution.
Those who were too nice lost, and failed to shape our modern brain.
Those who won, engaged in the never-ending escalation of the sexual arms race.

Women’s Evolved Tactics

Women, just like men, wage the sexual war both against men and against female competitors.

We will review both.

Women Against Men

Women seek from men good genes, resources, and support.

All of them are important for women, and what she goes for depends on personality, environmental factors and life phase, leading to some complex and interesting sexual strategies.
Let’s review them:

#1. Orgasms to Help The Affair Partner

Scholars haven’t yet settled the evolutionary payoff of orgasms.

But since orgasms may help retain sperm, women may orgasm with the affair partner to increase the odds of retaining his sperm.
Indeed, women are more likely to reach orgasm with the affair partner.

#2. Escaping Men’s Control & Mate Switching

Women usually prefer switching to the affair partner, if he is available (mate-switching hypothesis).

Otherwise, women may be happy to get the affair partner’s superior genes, and let the boyfriend raise the child (dual sexual strategy hypothesis).

In my experience, mate switching is the preferred option if he is available.

And women may test and drop hints to the affair partner.
See an example here:

Her unstated message was “I’m single now (for you)”.
BTW, notice the dynamics. A controlling freak install apps on her phone to check her location. But smart “filles de joie” find ways around it and may find it even more exciting to cuckold them. 
It’s a way to reassert their power and freedom, and to take their revenge.

Also see:

• Female hypergamy

#3. Concealed Ovulation: Keep ‘Em Guessing

Why do women hide their ovulation?

It’s atypical in the animal kingdom.
Most other animal females, including our brethren great apes, advertise fertility.

Why not women?

Well, there are several theories, and a good chunk of them involve the deceit of men.
Here are some of the most popular (names are mine):

• Gold-Digger theory: female primates get more male support when ovulating, so hiding ovulation allowed more astute women to keep the treats coming
• Ho-theory: women can trade sex for favors, but sex linked to conception was costly and risky to sell. Thus, delinking sex from conception empowered women by lowering the risks
• “Dread fatherhood game”: men are paranoid about fatherhood, and women developed concealed ovulation to force men into permanent marriage bond
• “Love me” theory: men, clueless about her fertile days, had to keep having sex with her for long stretches of time. Time and sex increase pair-bonding and keep him and his investment around

We don’t know for sure which one is correct, but it might be a mixture of them all.

#4. Tell Men The Child Looks Like Him (to make him invest)

I’m sorry to spoil this one for fathers.

But in these most innocent words, there might lie the darkest manipulation:

Her: Look at him, he looks just like you!

Well, that might be the case.
The child might indeed look exactly like the father.
But then, how come studies show women say this far more often than men do?
Even the mother’s family says it more often than the dad’s family!

One theory is that since fathers can never be certain of paternity, it’s always good for the woman (and her family) to “remind” him.
Telling fathers that the baby looks just like them is a way of telling them “it’s yours, baby, invest in him”.

Of course, there is also a darker twist here.
Sure, most of the time the kid truly is his kid.
But the “this is your kid game” can also be used by cheating wives to support their dual strategy of “sexy son – unsexy provider”.

#5. Mood Swings & Makeup Sex: The Female Emotional Slip Knot

Mood swings may serve several functions:

• Test of commitment: strong reactions signal strong interest
• Multiplier of investment, as men scurry to please her. And research suggests that the more one invests, the more he values the investment receiver
• Arousal of emotion and desire

About the latter, this is an interesting hypothesis from the ‘Cambridge Handbook on Female Sexual Adaptations‘:

when women face a mate retention problem, they may experience increases in sexual desire; engaging in sex in response to potential threats may facilitate partner retention.

I believe the researchers may be onto something.
Makeup sex seems to be more common among volatile women like anxiously attached women, and borderline personality disorder women. And these relationships often involve volatile yet strong attachments.

Example: The First Woman Who Cried on me

I was still naive and vowed to myself that I’d make her stop crying (what a knight, eh?).
After I succeeded, she rewarded me saying I ‘did great’, an obvious power move.

Result? 

She confirmed I was into her and I was going to be a good emotional provider.
And I got more invested into the relationship.

Some men who fell the hardest for their women met them right when they were crying. 

5.2. Nagging, Drama & Tasking: Controlling the Relationship

This is a bit more speculative, but consider this:

Women who were able to secure male investment over time won over women who got abandoned.
Evolutionary pressures may have favored women who got good at locking down men into committed relationships.

Refer to this article for the details:

• How women control men in relationships
• The power dynamics of assigning tasks

#6. Ridiculing Male Preference For Femininity

Imagine this sentence:

Her: Only weak men need the reassurance of a submissive woman

Or its similar version:

Her: Men who are afraid of successful women are weak

Those women might have a point, sometimes.
But their goal is to change the culture and the male mating strategy in a way that favors them.

They want to guilt-trip men in choosing less feminine women, and change the culture in a way that rewards and appreciate the go-getter women who, traditionally, have paid a heavy price for their more masculine traits.

But it’s funny you never hear feminine women complaining, right?
It’s non-feminine women who are scared of more feminine women because feminine women steal their mates.

And instead of competing on femininity, which requires work and a difficult change, some women lash out and try to change the culture.

Of course, it’s not just culture, it’s mostly nature.
But culture still matters a bit. And women have been winning this battle and have largely succeeded in changing at least the superficial cultural layer (the proof is the virtue-signaling men).

#7. Derogating Short-Term Strategies: Real Men Commit (?)

You know this game.

It’s one of the most obvious (and cheap).
Basically: women looking for commitment denigrate sex and “fun” in favor of the supposedly “serious” relationships (as if the “serious” relationship didn’t entail sex and fun anyway).

Here is an example from yours truly:

LOL at that, no more comments needed.
But do check what happened later on (link to follow).

Here is another example, this time using a cheap form of reverse psychology:

She was testing my availability and using inverse psychology to prod me to “prove her wrong”
But it was a cheap shot. It’s as if I had sent her an article about “emotional clinginess”.

Women Against Women

Women certainly have competing interests with men, but they probably compete even harder with other women.

Here are the weapons they use:

#1. Denigrating the Competition (Basic)

Basic denigration seeks to reduce competitors’ mate value in the short or long term.
A popular one:

Her: She’s such a slut

That’s designed to trigger the male inborn “Madonna-whore radar”, leverage men’s fear of cuckoldry, and lower the competitor’s long-term value.

However, that may backfire for short-term as men may seek her out for a fling. And an astute woman may then turn episodic sex into a relationship.

In short-term contexts, women may sometimes denigrate for short-term, saying that a woman is a prude.
But that’s rarer and can easily backfire.

1.2. Advanced Denigration

Let’s analyze these tactics:

Her: He uses his power and position on desperate women

That tactic discourages men from taking advantage of their power, and women from seeking out powerful men.

Her: They only like him because they think he’s rich / has white skin / has this or that “superficial” trait

That tactic discourages men from ‘geo-hacking‘ and women from pursuing wealthy men.

These sentences do three things at once:

• Denigrate men who ‘hack’ the sexual marketplace, for example moving or using their power position
• Denigrate women who offer easier sex to these men
• Virtue signal their supposed superiority

In general, women dislike lateral male mobility far more.
With lateral mobility or ‘geo-hacking’, men move to dramatically improve their dating opportunities overnight.
This strategy is scarier because while top-1% men are statistically rare, ‘normal’ men moving has a stronger impact on her pool of options.

#2. Suppression of Competitor’s Sexuality

This is the principle:

⚖️ The more easily women offer sex, the more difficult it is for women to get men’s investment

Meaning, women have an incentive to suppress other women’s sexuality.
So you get the advice:

• Make him wait 3 months
• Make him wait until you’re married

Women may also use covert aggression and acerbic gossip to enforce norms around sexual promiscuity, preventing rivals from ‘dropping the price’ of sexual access (Baumeister and Twenge, 2002).

#3. Competitors’ Manipulation: Fake Help, Real Harm

This is by far the nastiest.

The manipulation game some women use is truly Machiavellian. 
It’s framed as help, while disempowering a competitor. For example:

• Focus on yourself, not on men
• You don’t need a man

Both are valid, in some cases.
But in many other cases, strength and independence lower a woman’s attractiveness and sexual competitiveness. She may drop dating altogether to focus on her career. And if not, strong and independent women are less attractive to many men.

Body positivity may also be another manipulation tactic.
Example here:

Her: Men opposed my body positivity journey while women approved it <— It’s because men lose when more women gain weight, while women gain

3.2.: Don’t Settle: Advice or Manipulation?

Think of this common advice:

Her: Never settle for less than the man you truly deserve

Her: Never accept a man who doesn’t show proof of his love

This type of advice places all the risk on the receiver while providing all the benefits to the advice giver.

A woman who refuses to settle risks remaining alone.
But her unyielding dating stance always favors women as a group, including the advice giver.

Why?

Think about it: if all women refused to settle and/or give sex without huge male investment, men would always have to invest big.
And the global bargaining power of women would increase.

Paraphrasing psychology researcher David Buss:

The sexual strategy of the group affects the individual’s mating success

However, as a woman sets unyielding standards for others, she may compromise and land a ‘good enough’ but sure deal.
Or she might decide to get quality genes, without that man’s investment.

In the meanwhile, her girlfriend remains single, sex-less and, if she wanted a baby, childless.

This is the general feminist dating advice as well. Part of the feminist strategy is demanding individual compromise to favor the collective. 

Malena is the story of female intra-gender sexual competition, with the protagonist physically “pushed off the market”. The film culminates with the mob lynching Malena -Monica Bellucci- and cutting her hair, the symbol of her beauty and femininity.

Men’s Evolved Weapons

Men certainly aren’t standing there and watching women play games on them.

We have already talked in the past of games men play at the micro-level.
This section will deal more with the systemic-level strategies that men deploy to win the sexual conflict.

#1. Circumcision: Lowering Her Sexual Appetite

Men love it when their women lust after them.
But fear when women lust after other men.

Of course, on average, high-quality men are more likely to enjoy the former and not worry about the latter. But since high-quality men are a minority, when in doubt, some men prefer to play defensively.

Men mutilate women’s clitoris to prevent them from having orgasms which, in turn, should reduce the risk of her straying and/or deploying dual sexual strategies.

I am not aware of any data, but I doubt that this is even effective. The woman still has the same urges, and she is still going to prefer better males.

#2. Restricting Her Sexuality: Infibulation / Chastity Belts

Infibulation and chastity belts seek to physically prevent sexual penetration from other men by blocking the vaginal opening.

#3. Feigning Long-Term Strategy & Support

What do men lie about?

It depends on the environment, circumstances, personal sexual market value and the type of sexual strategy (short term, long term or mixed).

Men pursuing a short-term strategy seek to come across as ladies’ men, good lovers, pre-selected, etc.
This is a minority of men.

Most men instead feign to pursue long-term strategies by faking resources, kindness, feelings and professing non-existing love.

However, the short-term / long-term divide can get blurry sometimes.
Contrary to what some believe, a high-quality man faking long-term potential can also score quick sex if he’s also sexy and moves fast.
As evolutionary psychology researcher David Buss says, women are more open to considering a short term mate if he also fits her long term ideal (also see providers VS lovers)

See Berlusconi: 

Also see “atypical seduction techniques“.

#4. Arranged Marriages: Abducting Female Choice

There are two reasons why arranged marriages benefit men than women:

1. On average, women choose, and arranged marriages limit female choice
2. In a free sexual marketplace, most women have more power than most men, and arranged marriages curtail that power

The fact that most arranged marriages take place in male-dominated societies gives us a clue as to who they benefit the most.

#5. Traditional Values & Slut Shaming

Traditional values intersect with “cultures of honor”.

These cultures seek to repress women’s sexuality to ensure male paternity.
One way they do it is by “slut-shaming”.

Most high-status (and liberal) men enjoy libertine sex because that means more sex for them.
But high status men are the minority, and for most men it’s safer to keep women under a restrictive cultural leash to protect against infidelity.

Of course, men may adopt a convenient double standard:

Honor for me if I sleep around, shame on women for doing the same.

I’ve seen this culture often growing up in Italy.
The father of my sister in law professed, publicly and in front of all the extended family:

If I hear any “stories” I take care of it personally. I don’t even let the husband stain his hands with it

The “honor” in this case was also about “guaranteeing a high quality woman” to my brother and my family. 
Especially important when the man’s family is higher social status.

#6. Institutionalized Mate Guarding: Religion

Did you think the veil was for religion?

Maybe. Partially.
But hiding the female is such a time-tested technique in the animal kingdom that you might forgive us for seeing malice in male’s insistence on veils.

Writes Butovskaya in The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Psychology:

The study by Pazhoohi and Kingstone in twenty-five countries demonstrates that veiling promotes sexual
fidelity in women (Pazhoohi & Kingstone, 2020).
Veiling is a male mateguarding strategy used to secure male reproductive success.

See more here:

#6. Harassment & Coercion

Men have developed two biases that may increase the odds of sexual harassment:

1. A bias for taking a shot (men who tried more got laid more)
2. A positive bias in reading female signals (men who read more interest got laid more)

And sexual coercion may be an unfortunate adaptation for mating access.
Initially, the mate deprivation hypothesis suggested it was men without options who rape more. But David Buss more presented some evidence that it’s dominant men instead who are more likely to rape.

#7. Men On Men Derogation

Intra-gender derogation tends to be more associated with women, but men do it as well.
See the forum entry for men VS men derogation.

The Contested Battlegrounds

Men and women’s wars span many fields, from biology, culture, legal frameworks, and genes:

• Legal system: historically dominated by men, but recently may have swung the opposite side
• Economic policies: redistribution and socialism generally favors women (Ghodsee, 2018), while financial concentration benefits the few top men
• Morality, the ultimate tool of social influence
• Genetic war: men’s genes code for maximizing an infant’s resource allocation, while maternal genes ‘defend’ the mother (Brown, 2020)
• Mating systems, like monogamy or polygyny
• Relationship social standards, for example with ‘men supposed to provide and protect’ and ‘women supposed to serve and support their men’

Also read:

• How women control relationships

Morality is the pro-social mask of a selfish sexual strategy

When Genders Band Together

Genders sometimes coalesce for common causes.

As we’ve already seen for example, the majority of men have an incentive to limit women’s sexual freedom.
Conversely, women coalesce to demand and gain more sexual freedom, social, and economic power.

Sometimes these alliances are open and openly embraced and encouraged.
Writes for example Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In:

We need to look out for one another, work together and act more like a coalition.
As individuals we have little power. Working together we are 50% of the world population and therefore have real power.

Women also seek more power by trying to remove men from the sexual equation. 
For example, I saw this on my Facebook timeline when I started this article:

However, these alliances are often subconscious and emerging from individual drives.
For example, most men don’t consciously shame career women in a conscious effort to shape a culture opposing women’s career. Instead, it becomes an emerging social property of men’s individual drives.

It would also be wrong to believe that all men or women gain from these alliances.
Instead, the interests of top men and top women are often misaligned with their own gender majority.

Just as an example, most men gain with monogamy.
But the top men gain with polygyny instead.

Collaboration (May Be) Bigger Than Competition

Dawkins and Krebs (1978) first mentioned that courtship is sometimes collaborative, other times exploitative.

But the exploitative side shouldn’t overshadow the collaborative side.
Relationships exist because, for most peopl,e collaboration between men and women maximizes fitness.
Quoting the excellent Oxford Handbook of Evo Psych and Relationships:

Despite the often too prevalent perception of a war between the sexes in the social sciences (see special issue of Sex Roles, e.g., Vandermassen, 2011), to a large degree interdependent reproduction promotes cooperation rather than confict (Buss, 2017; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007)

This article put that in perspective, showing that relationships are both cooperation and defection, genuine support, and manipulative.
And believing that male and female interests perfectly intersect is naive at best.

In the meanwhile, don’t get paranoid.
But don’t be naive, either.