We all play out many different roles in many different arenas; I am a student, a writer, a HumEccie, a friend and daughter. But according to sexual strategies theory (SST), the only role of mine that matters is that of a fertile vessel for sperm.

Not that many people have heard of SST, but most are familiar with what it theorizes. Coined in 1993 by Davids Buss and Schmitt, the term describes the popular behavioral-ecology-based idea that the supposedly distinct mating strategies of males and females are based on maximizing reproductive potential while accounting for differential investment. Women have a gestation period of nine months followed by a year or more of breastfeeding; men need only donate several minutes of their time to the conception of a child. SST states that, because of this, men compete with other males to mate with as many youthful, fertile females as possible, while women look for men with resources and status, aiming to rope in “good providers” who will take care of them and their children. It’s simply part of our biology, proponents of the theory say; billions of years of evolution have made us this way.

Have they really? Rather than analyzing statistical data, SST exaggerates differences between the sexes and does not describe actual human mating behavior. The rich older man / beautiful younger woman pairing that supporters cite as the archetypical SST relationship is rare; most couples are extremely similar in intelligence, education, class and attractiveness level. Though men admit to having more sex partners than women do, the gap is narrowing and a survey of college students showed that a huge majority of both sexes — a percentage in the high 90s — desire to settle down with one person for the rest of their lives. When asked how many more people they would like to sleep with in the future, the mean male response was much higher than the mean female response, but the median for both sexes was one — the mean was skewed by a male subject who put down 10,000 as his answer.

Like most theories that make sweeping generalizations about human behavior and its origins, SST is wrong. There’s no way to empirically test its validity because it’s a theory based on hindsight, formulated by interpreting already-present human behavior through a cultural lens. Evolutionary determinists grab at straws; any behavior imaginable can be construed as enhancing reproductive fitness if one tries hard enough. If females slept with as many males as possible, evolutionary determinists would argue that females benefit from this because only the best sperm gets to fertilize the egg — more than 90 percent of human sperm are specialized for competition. Without any way to compare the reproductive success of this model against the success of the promiscuous-male model, it is impossible to argue that the latter is more successful.

SST proponents often refer to the mating behavior of other animals as evidence of the promiscuous-male model’s superiority, but if anything, the diversity of mating strategies becomes more obvious when one looks outside humanity. The male seahorse, for example, becomes pregnant and gives birth to baby seahorses. The female praying mantis kills her mate immediately after copulation. Some species mate for life; a particularly interesting example is that of prairie voles, which form extremely strong dyadic bonds and nest together for the rest of their lives, grooming each other and attentively caring for their young. What sets prairie voles apart from other vole species, which are not monogamous, is the presence of the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin — bond-promoting hormones that humans have as well.

The promiscuous male / selective female model is clearly only one of many paths to reproductive success, and for humans it might only be a path to population crash. There are two basic categories of mating strategies: one is maximizing the birth rate by producing large numbers of essentially self-sufficient offspring, and the other involves investing all resources in a few well-cared-for young. The former strategy is great for environments with ample resources and room to grow, and the latter is most adaptive when carrying capacity looms close. As the world population nears a staggering 6.5 billion and unused land grows scarce, there’s no question about which mating strategy is best for humans. The SST paradigm fails to take this fact into account, assuming that for all species the best approach to propagating one’s genetic material is for the male to mate with as many females as possible and expend no effort in raising his young.

Furthermore, mating strategy should hardly be a central part of the discussion of human behavior, which cannot be explained with sweeping generalizations and simple evolutionary arguments. Evolutionary determinism reduces humans to purely biological beings, absent of free will, slaves to their genes — and this is simply not the case. Though human behaviors must be grounded in biology — humans are, at their very essence, merely a collection of cells — their development is inextricably intertwined with culture. One has only to look at the documented cases of feral children to understand how vital a role culture plays in determining our behavior; isolated from civilization and reared in a completely natural environment, these children cannot walk upright and lack even the most basic language skills. They are more animal than human.

The fundamental facts we have to work with are that women have more of a reproductive commitment and that men have, on average, slightly stronger sex drives; whatever behaviors humans derive from this incontrovertible foundation are up for grabs. To argue that our activities and choices are dictated solely by our need to propagate our genes is to ignore millions of years of sociocultural influences — the years that made us humans instead of praying mantises. And all you males out there should take a moment to be thankful for that.