Why are they attracted to other women?
I use scare quotes because they’re really bisexual, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Most women who “become” lesbians later in life for various reasons (like having a lot of bad experiences with men) were always bisexual, because it makes evolutionary sense for them to be. It also explains “LUG”s (lesbian until graduation).
I would go beyond the thesis here and note that women compete with other women on their looks, so they’re actually pretty finely attuned to the attractiveness of other women.
So male proto-humans developed sexual dimorphism (with males being bigger and stronger) in order to build bigger harems? Could be, I suppose. The article didn’t conjecture that female proto-humans developed bigger boobs to trick the alpha males into thinking they were pregnant and so shouldn’t be abandoned for a younger female. It would have provided some support for their conjecture if they had mentioned if girl-on-girl chimp sex was a thing.
I was reading an article several years ago about a modern man spending quite some time with a stone-age hunter-gatherer tribe. That tribe, at least, didn’t seem to have much in the way of a harem culture–instead, they paired off every night and swapped partners when they felt like it. I have no idea how common that was–I don’t think there are many stone-age tribes around anymore to investigate. I wouldn’t be too surprised if large harems were corelated to agriculture.
I think that girl-on-girl sex chimps is a thing, at least with bonabos. Pretty sure that the sexual dimorphism in humans is because the males hunted and fought (probably for females, but in general, and war).
I agree that war and hunting seem much more likely to be the primary reason for men getting big and strong and tough and fast.
I have no idea if women trading sex with other women in exchange for sharing childcare was ever enough of a thing for there to be evolutionary pressure to favor it. It seems like something the Greeks would have written about if it were common, but I’ve read almost no classical literature.
For what it’s worth, Google says that polygyny in hunter-gatherer societies isn’t universal and seems to be more dependent on social status than strength and such. Take that with a dump truck of salt–anthropology was going woke when I was in college and has only gotten worse. It also says that male:female ratios tend to oscillate back and forth–apparently, it wasn’t a stone age Surf City, with two girls for every boy.
Well, consider that, with harems, largely the only regular sexual outlet for many women was other women…
Whether that constituted evolutionary pressure is an interesting conundrum.
I’m only half tongue-in-cheek about this, but isn’t it obvious? Women are hot. Men are…tolerable.
Mr Diety and the Naughty Bits got it right.
I was about to say that the main evolutionary pressure I see from women using other women for sexual outlets is that they might be less likely to strangle each other, but lesbian violence is pretty nasty. You might be able to make a case that in societies where large harems were common this would create a social evolutionary pressure to reduce female sexual desire (like clitorectomies). That seems bogus to me, but I’m not an anthropologist.
There was an article a few years ago that I didn’t read that was looking for evolutionary bottlenecks; it sounded like they found an evolutionary bottleneck (tracking changes in the Y chromosome) in men that wasn’t matched by one in women (tracking mitochondrial DNA). The implication being that a lot of men were removed from the gene pool. I was reading another article about the early days of agriculture, and how the farming communities were in a constant state of war with the surrounding hunter-gatherers. I have no idea if there’s a connection, but it’s kind of interesting. Maybe I’ll try hunting for the first article.
Does the prevalence of women who, in surveys, say they are heterosexual and experience some sexual attraction to women vary across cultures, places and time?
Grok says it does.
https://x.com/i/grok/share/23b5764f7002486f9d67d3e7cf676364
“Now that we have all of the data from 2025, it appears non-heterosexual identification is not declining (at least not anymore). However, it has stabilized and is no longer racing upward as it did between 2014 and 2022, when identifying as LGB nearly tripled among U.S. 18- to 24-year-olds.”
https://www.generationtechblog.com/p/the-demise-of-lesbians-gays-and-bisexuals
A better explanation for humans’ sexual dimorphism, which also accounts for female neoteny is that, until just very recently, “statutory rape” was the norm, rather than a crime. Anecdotally, one of my young female relatives (high school age) suddenly declared herself “gay.” Turned out she was being pressured by female teachers to declare for feminism that way, and also, she thought it was a dandy way to deflect unwelcome male attention until she was ready for same. Coincidentally, one of the female characters in my book “The Transmigration of Souls” comes up with this same strategy. Most likely the study in question is hogwash, as usual.