What Do Tiger Woods, Charlie Sheen and Moulay Ismail Have in Common?
The answer to the question in the title is sex. More specifically, they all have had sex with many different women during their lives.
We do not the exact number, but it is probably safe to conclude from all reports that Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen have had sex with dozens of women, both of whom still have a looooong way to go before they're finished with their sexual lives. Certainly the number of sexual consorts they have had is greater than the number reached by most, or all, of you reading this essay. But in fact, that is exactly what a behavioral ecologist expects.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an essay here posing why people become avid fans of sports teams. My hypothesis was that those individuals who followed and proclaimed their allegiance to a football or baseball team were enhancing their status, at least a little. And I recognized that this phenomenon of being a fan is more common in males than in females. I should have written this essay first, and then that one, because that would seem to be the more logical order in which to present these ideas.
The idea here is that men seek as high a status as they can muster, and with that status, comes access to women. And this has been going on for millions of years--in Homo sapiens, and in all the ancestral species before that. Realize that men all over the world are seeking high status by trying to excel at whatever they do in life (e.g., whether being a surgeon, a golfer, an actor, a warrior in the Amazon, a politician, or an assembly line worker), because the payoff for millenia has been to leave more offspring than those who don't. And, as we learned in that out-of-order blog of mine, men don't have to be conscious of all this evolutionary stuff; they do it because it feels good.
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