Hagen Renée V, Scelza Brooke A
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. United States of America.
Evol Hum Sci. 2024 Jan 30;6:e10. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2024.3. eCollection 2024.
Sexual conflict theory has been successfully applied to predict how in non-human animal populations, sex ratios can lead to conflicting reproductive interests of females and males and affect their bargaining positions in resolving such conflicts of interests. Recently this theory has been extended to understand the resolution of sexual conflict in humans, but with mixed success. We argue that an underappreciation of the complex relationship between gender norms and sex ratios has hampered a successful understanding of sexual conflict in humans. In this paper, we review and expand upon existing theory to increase its applicability to humans, where gender norms regulate sex ratio effects on sexual conflict. Gender norms constrain who is on the marriage market and how they are valued, and may affect reproductive decision-making power. Gender norms can also directly affect sex ratios, and we hypothesize that they structure how individuals respond to market value gained or lost through biased sex ratios. Importantly, gender norms are in part a product of women's and men's sometimes conflicting reproductive interests, but these norms are also subject to other evolutionary processes. An integration of sexual conflict theory and cultural evolutionary theory is required to allow for a full understanding of sexual conflict in humans.
性冲突理论已成功应用于预测在非人类动物种群中，性别比例如何导致雌性和雄性在生殖利益上产生冲突，并影响它们在解决此类利益冲突时的谈判地位。最近，这一理论已被扩展用于理解人类的性冲突，但成效不一。我们认为，对性别规范与性别比例之间复杂关系的认识不足，阻碍了对人类性冲突的成功理解。在本文中，我们回顾并扩展现有理论，以增强其对人类的适用性，在人类社会中，性别规范调节着性别比例对性冲突的影响。性别规范限制了婚姻市场上的人群及其被看重的方式，并且可能影响生殖决策权。性别规范还能直接影响性别比例，我们推测，它们塑造了个体对因性别比例偏差而获得或失去的市场价值的反应方式。重要的是，性别规范部分是女性和男性有时相互冲突的生殖利益的产物，但这些规范也受到其他进化过程的影响。需要将性冲突理论与文化进化理论相结合，才能全面理解人类的性冲突。
