roles in society. Men are still viewed as the main providers of families.Further, the conclusion "now widely accepted ... that males of most species are less selective and coy in courtship because they make smaller investments in offspring" is used to justify male sexual promiscuity. Male promiscuity is, in other words, genetically determined because males profit, evolutionarily speaking, from frequent mating, and females do not. The more females a male mates with, the more offspring he produces - whereas a female need only mate with one male to become pregnant. Evolution would progress only if she selected the most fit male, which is what Darwin's theory of sexual selection predicted. For this reason, males have "an undiscriminating eagerness" to mate, females "a discriminating passivity" (Diamond, 1993, 220). Fox even argues that high pregnancy rates among unmarried teenage girls is due to our 'evolutionary legacy" which drives young girls to get pregnant. Consequently, cultural and religious prohibitions against unmarried teen pregnancy are doomed to fail.To understand the psychology of this, we turn to Freud. With all of its confusing contradictions, the influences of Freud have had a profound and subversive effect on the thinking of our present age. He changed man's understanding of himself and his nature. Perhaps the most critical influence Freud has had upon society was his invention of a new determinism by which man does what he does and becomes what he becomes. He saw the libido as the prime mover. This legacy has dragged sex into the streets, our homes, into every nook and cranny of our lives-and has also filled our psychiatrists' couches.Much of 1970s feminism was virulently anti-psychological, fearing that inquiry into motives and inner worlds inevitably entailed a strategy of divide and rule: divide the women into their individual inner worlds so as to remove the possibility of their recognition of what was social and ther...
