Quotes from Robin Baker

Surveys of many cultures around the world consistently show that, in looking for a long-term partner, women prefer men who have, or have the potential of, wealth, status, stability and durability.

A woman's difficulty is that she has a much wider choice of men to provide her with genes than she has of long-term partners. She could probably persuade many men of her choice to give her their genes — it takes only a few minutes of sex, after all. Her options for a long-term partner, though, are much more limited.

In choosing a man to help raise her children, a woman is only secondarily impressed by looks, whereas in choosing a short-term partner for sex, looks are much more important.

All women alive today are the genetic descendants of the more cautious of female ancestors, not their more reckless contemporaries. Men, on the other hand, are genetically programmed to be urgent and single-minded about one-off sex. In past generations, men who were not urgent and persuasive were less successful reproductively than those who were. All men alive today are the genetic descendants of the more urgent of male ancestors, not their more complacent contemporaries.

If you were a human sperm, there is no prize for coming second.

it was found that girls who were exposed to an attempt at date rape were three times more likely to resume their relationship with the man concerned if his attempt succeeded than if it failed

Those men In Scene 34 who decided not to rape the young girl did not live to produce more children who would inherit their compassion, whereas one of the men who raped her did produce a child to inherit his lack of compassion. It is by this process of weeding the genes that do not enhance reproductive success that evolution has saddled the majority of men with the propensity to behave as rapists in the appropriate situation.

As for female mink, if they do not experience physical trauma at the male's hands, they do not ovulate.

In choosing a man or men with whom to share her life, a woman has two major issues to consider. On the one hand, she needs a man who can help her raise her children. On the other, she needs genes that in combination with her own will produce attractive, fertile and successful children.

studies show that when a woman leaves one partner for another, she invariably moves up the scale to a better compromise

One of the criteria that a woman can add to her list when selecting a mate, therefore, is his ability to overcome her physical resistance

Conversation became strained as they each waited for a sign that they would not be rebuffed.

In some species, females are so successful as prostitutes that they never need to find food themselves.

Often, a woman is already pregnant when she settles down with a long-term partner, and occasionally this partner is not the father of her child. Sometimes he knows this and takes on the woman and her child anyway, for reasons we have discussed, but sometimes he doesn't know. The woman is least likely to be unfaithful in the weeks or months preceding the conception of her second child. Subsequent children, however, are more and more likely to be the product of infidelity.

Whether a man is twenty or seventy, therefore, his preferred age for a new partner is about twenty, or even younger.

Lion prides contain two or three males and up to eight females and their young. Wandering over the savannah are bachelor groups of two or three males, each group looking for a pride from which they can oust the current males. If they succeed, the first thing they do is kill the cubs, the pride's legacy from the previous males.

The more men and women drink, the more they both seek intercourse — or, at least, the less they resist it.

Since the aim of masturbation is to give the male an edge over others in sperm warfare, he gains most if he masturbates but can dissuade those around him from doing so. That way, he gains competitive benefits that his rivals do not. The world-wide tendency to criticise, even victimise, other people for masturbating while continuing to masturbate oneself is thus as strategic as masturbation itself.

older women often 'fit in' a stable homo-sexual relationship between successive heterosexual ones

This conclusion does not mean, as people often assume, that a woman should therefore seek to be raped. On the contrary, it is reproductively important to the woman that her body collect genes from only the most successful of rapists. If she conceives to an inept rapist, doomed quickly to be caught and to suffer social retribution and incarceration, her male descendants would inherit unsuccessful characteristics.