Lek Mating and Why (Most) Nightclubs Suck

Also, influencer 'science' has a disco problem.

How you doin’?

Imagine you’re a young woman (guys, I know it’s hard, but try anyway). You and your girlfriends go to a large convention center. You enter the main conference room, squint against the bright light, and there they are… rows upon rows of horny young men, each one with his own little exhibition booth. Some plaster their booth with gym pics, showing their rippling pecs and bulging biceps, others are more than happy to regale you with tales of their car collection and luxury travels. They flash their Rolex at you every chance they get.

Each guy gives the same speech to each woman who approaches. This is not about personality; this is about image and ego. Time passes. Sweat begins to stain our gents’ fresh-pressed shirts. The winners, though, are pretty clear. To be fair, they’ve been clear from the start, they just had to prove their worth.

This is a fictional, humanized version of what biologists call lek mating.

A ‘lek’ is a place where male animals gather, stake out their temporary territory within sight and earshot of each other, and start competing for the females who check out the goods. We find this lek strategy in several species, most notably in many birds. For example, this photo is an example of a sage grouse lek, where the bigger, flashy males compete for the attention of the smaller, brown females:

(Flickr, USFWS Pacific Southwest Region, Jeannie Stafford)

Humans do not have a lek mating system.

Right?

In da club

Go back to that conference room full of horny men. Now, get rid of the booths. Dim the lights. Add some pounding techno music.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like a typical nightclub?

I can’t take credit for the analogy. A 2009 study explicitly called nightclubs ‘human sexual display grounds’. An older study looked at groups of men in bars and suggests that the guys flashed their fancy cellphones¹ as - I wish I were joking - ‘lekking devices’.

If we take the idea of human ‘lekking’ at face value, we could say that most people don’t go to nightclubs or bars to have fun; they go to be seen. I think that’s truer than we like to admit. Enter a nightclub and tell me you don’t taste the cloying miasma of alcohol-infused testosterone. Each (single) guy tries to outdo the next, which, sadly, often translates into being the loudest, the drunkest, or the most disrespectful.

Unsurprisingly, those drunk men bring us back to non-human animals.

More specifically, it leads us to the lek paradox: if female animals select their hubbies based on the same trait (say bright plumage), then how does the variation in this trait not erode? In other words, if all female birds want bright plumage and they pass on the trait to their sons, in a few generations there will only be males with fancy feathers. How will the bachelorettes choose then?

Look at this absolute chad of a greater sage grouse. (Wikimedia Commons, Bureau of Land Management)

There are several proposed solutions to the lek paradox, which probably all play their part. A popular idea is the handicap principle — traits that attract females incur a cost. Perhaps bright feathers are metabolically costly, so bright-feathered dudes are in good enough condition to get plenty of food. Or maybe they’re more resistant to parasites. An extended form of this idea is the genic capture hypothesis, which proposes that secondary sexual traits provide a glance at many gene variants at once — a red or green flag for the general genetic condition of the hopeful males.

If you’re trying to attract attention on the dance floor with your luxurious attire and glittering jewelry, are you signaling that you have a lot of resources (money)? If you stand out because you‘ve been blessed with the unanimously desired square jaw and 6-foot-plus Greek god physique, does that signal good genes? You be the judge, my female friends². Literally.

Very male-centric, though, don’t you think? Female preferences can change, after all. For example, in fallow deer, young females use different mate choice tactics than older ones, as do females living farther from versus closer to the lek location. Female animals likely use a variety of traits to select a male as well, so it’s not always the biggest or brightest that gets the girl. Maybe some women prefer a Loki over a Thor. Maybe personality matters, or kindness, or intelligence, or a sense of humor and playfulness. Sure, hard to show that on the dancefloor, but a guy can dream, right?

In the case of humans, let’s not forget about cultural pressures either.

But for that, let’s leave this nightclub and its techno music behind. It’s hard to hear each other and have a good conversation this way, isn’t it?

Let’s find a disco bar.

The disco problem

Shifting cultural preferences and mixed mating strategies have been suggested as a resolution for the lek paradox in a human context (in as much as it applies, but we’ll get to that soon). I’m sure you’ve heard something along these lines: women date the bad boys, but marry the good guys³.

That’s it. It’s biology. Case closed.

I could wrap it up here, as certain influencers who distort evolutionary psychology would do⁴. You know, mumble something about mate value (likely unquantifiable and overly reductive) and alpha status (not in humans, bros). Thanks for listening to my podcast of me jabbering for two hours. Buy my e-book that’ll teach you how to be a gigachad⁵.

Not here. Here, we pay attention to the disco problem.

The disco problem is one of the pervasive misunderstandings about human social evolution, or

… only considering the evolutionary literature up to approximately the late 1970s and, hence, missing the huge advances that have been made since then.

A specific version of the disco problem is wrongfully applying insights from non-human animal behavior to humans, as suggested by this great paper. I quote a big chunk because it’s right on the money.

… although these metaphors seem to be an appealing means of bridging the gap between humans and other animals, they may simply confuse the issue, and the extent to which such comparisons illuminate our understanding of human mating systems is limited. This more literal form of the disco problem may stem at least partly from a tendency to cherry-pick the animal literature to find a relevant comparison. Given the immense diversity of species, it is always possible to find a bat, bird, or bug that shows a behavioral pattern ostensibly similar to humans as a means to prove a point but, again, the value of such comparisons is often questionable.

An example of this type of disco problem is how Jordan Peterson used lobsters to justify the inevitable existence of hierarchies in humans. This is problematic disco behavior and cherry-picking on steroids (manly, isn’t it?). Pick any social or mating system you want to promote and I can probably find you an animal species to use as justification. Matriarchy? Try bonobos. Lone wolfs? Try not wolves but orang-utans. Oh, you want a harem? Gorillas will do. Polyandry, polygyny, and monogamy? Try a few closely related species of tamarins or marmosets; those little primates flexibly engage in every type of social organization but the hivemind (as far as we know…).

And that’s just among our primate cousins! (Take that, Peterson’s lobsters.)

Actually… do you know which species has a remarkable range of social and mating systems? Homo sapiens. We are uncannily good at accumulative culture and cultural diversity. Sure, we can learn about average preferences (tall, dark, and handsome, or a specific waist-to-hip ratio, or…), but it would be a mistake to assume all individuals at all times have these partner preferences to the same extent. Dear Internet, you can’t take an average aggregate metric and assume it tells you all you need to know about an individual.

Can we compare human mating systems to a lek? Not really. I had fun writing about it in those terms, but in real leks, the mating happens then and there, and all the female is left with is sperm. Most young women (I assume) don’t have quick, unsatisfactory, and anonymous one-night stands in the middle of the dancefloor hoping to get pregnant.

Does human behavior have biological roots? Absolutely; more than we think or like to admit. Is what we deem attractive affected by our evolutionary path as a species? Of course.

Does that mean we need to slave ourselves to our impulses? Of course not. Evolutionary psychology is an interesting and valid route toward understanding human behavior. At the same time, human culture is so powerful that it strongly mediates how biology shapes our behaviors, emotions, and psychology. We are shaped by a feedback loop of biology and culture⁶ — and we make culture. Hence, we are not (fully) psychologically chained to our biology.

Everybody wants to be seen. I want to be seen too. But I don’t want to have to put on a mask to obscure the depths of me. I don’t want to participate in nightclub status games that, let’s be honest, are designed for a specific type of (male) person — the one with the fanciest booth, even if it’s nothing but glitter on cardboard.

My booth has walls of parchment, soul music playing in the background, too many books, and me, cartwheeling past the small talk to learn about your dreams and desires. After that, want to go dance in the park with a rising sun in the background?

Thanks for visiting my booth among the many others vying for your attention. Let me know what you think, click hearts, share, etc.

(If you’re a fellow newsletter writer and think your readers might appreciate my writing, you can recommend Subtle Sparks, if you are so inclined…)

1. It’s a study from 2000, so fancy phones were less prevalent and more of a status symbol.

2. Straight female, bisexual, and gay male friends, to be more inclusive.

3. Wait… I’m neither a bad boy nor a good guy. This. Explains. Everything.

4. There’s been a bit of a stir in the evolutionary psychology community about this lately, kicked off by this opinion in the Boston Globe. Scientists in the field, however, largely agree that the manospherians misappropriate evolutionary and behavioral research. This paper on the phenomenon concludes:

The manosphere has its own version of evolutionary psychology, mingling cutting-edge scientific theories and hypotheses with personal narratives, sexual double standards and misogynistic beliefs.

Shocker.

5. Or consider a paid subscription to Subtle Sparks. No chest-pounding, just science, culture, and verbal gymnastics…

6. It’s more complicated than that. There are gene variants that affect how susceptible you are to environmental (including cultural) influences. So it’s a bunch of tiny feedback loops in a bigger feedback loop. Biology is fun. (See also: orchid children.)