Social moeurs are necessarily arbitrary and vary from time to time and from place to place. As such, they are often risible and always largely irrelevant. A more interesting perspective is offered by evolutionary psychology, in which fairytale blinkers are cast off in favor of seeing human behavior in terms of fundamentals: the attempt to survive and thereafter pass on one's genes in a manner most likely to lead to subsequent genetic success.

When we understand this basic fact, our behaviors - our true behaviors, not the nonsense promulgated by popular fiction - are far more comprehensible. Nature cares nothing for transient beliefs about ethics, but merely about what works. It follows that men and women thus have different potential strategies for attempting to secure the optimal genetic legacy, and we see these strategies being pursued down the ages - often thinly disguised in order not to upset those clinging to whatever happen to be the social beliefs of the moment.