Sexual disorders in the context of Darwinian psychiatry

The thesis of this article is that a Darwinian perspective can provide medical sexology with a new theoretical framework which is useful to clarify the relationship between the evolutionary bases of human sexuality and the sex-specific vulnerability to different sexual disorders. Evolutionary theory predicts that the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring is associated with different mating strategies in males and females. Individuals of the sex that invests more in offspring should be more discriminative in their sexual interactions because the costs of making a poor mate choice are greater for the highest-investing sex. Because in Homo sapiens, as in many other mammal species, the higher-investing sex is the female sex, women are more discriminative in their sexual preferences and less promiscuous than men. Accordingly, the epidemiology of sexual disorders can be expected to reflect sex differences in evolved mating strategies and sexual psychology. Sexual disorders that represent extreme variants of a mating strategy involving greater voluntary control over mate choice, accurate assessment of the quality of potential mates, and a tendency toward sexual restraint should be more prevalent among women. In contrast, sexual disorders that represent extreme variants of a mating strategy involving responsiveness to a variety of sexual stimuli and a tendency toward promiscuity should occur more frequently among men. Clinical data support these predictions.