I just read about a study which shows an inverse correlation between how attractive a woman thinks she is and how willing she is to have a lot of sexual partners. So if a woman believes that she is beautiful—you could use the term 'self-esteem' I suppose—then she's less likely to sleep with a lot of men. The study also claimed that the reverse is true. The less attractive a woman thinks she is the larger the number of men she's willing to sleep with.
This is exactly the sort of thing that would be discussed in my A-Level psychology classes. Well not this subject matter, but some behaviour would be identified and then we'd have to argue over what causes it.
Well Freud said that pretty much everything is caused by unrequited love for a parent or from childhood trauma, so all the people that have low self-esteem must have... No, behaviourism says that humans learn behaviours through reinforcement and so as a society we must be in the habit or urging less attractive women to maximise their options by being total... No, no, no, cognitivism says all humans are born with innate faculties which shape our reasoning and leads ugly women to...
And on and on. I mentioned how completely marginalised evolution was in these discussions, didn't I? I think that one substitute teacher we once had actually believed that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, so you can see just how little stress is placed on human history.
But, as usual, looking at a problem through from a biological point of view will solve everything. If some humans are more promiscuous than others then you can bet that there's a gene, or a combination of genes, which leads to different grades of promiscuity. You could have genes to make you sexually conservative or genes that make you very popular in secondary school.
But why do the good-looking girls seem to have more of the conservative genes? Natural selection to the rescue.
Two million years ago when we were evolving in Africa, making sure you mated with strong partners was a big deal. If you had sex with a loser then you'd have loser babies. How are loser babies going to survive on the Savannah? With great difficulty. So it is in the best interest of your genes that you choose carefully.
If you're a good-looking primate then you'll have a lot of options. All the boy primates will want to show you how worthy they are so they'll compete to show you their strengths. One might demonstrate his intelligence by showing you that he has figured out how the seasons work, and how he can predict where and when abundant food will grow. Another might demonstrate his strength by killing an animal and offering it as a gift. You get the picture. If you're sexy then all boys desperately want to commingle their genes with yours.
This means that the choosier that sexy girls are, the better chances they have of having successful offspring. Less attractive girls on the other hand can't afford to be so choosy. If they're too picky—we're still on the African plains, remember, not here and now—then nobody is going to spend too much time competing for them. So the ugly girls that are choosy die out without passing on their genes. The ugly girls who aren't choosy though will manage to get lots of sex—because male genes are screaming "have sex with all of them!"—and ugly, slutty genes will spread in the gene-pool.
So for the next two million years you see good-looking girls taking their time over choosing a partner and being rewarded for it with the strongest possible kids. Less attractive women are rewarded for their indiscriminate approach to sex by having babies with the first man they can get.
This is why I hesitated to use the term self-esteem earlier. It has nothing to do with self-esteem. In fact I'm not even sure there is such a thing. Genes that tell a girl "you're pretty" have a high chance of being paired with genes that tell her "don't jump in to bed with any old guy". Genes that tell a girl she's not very attractive have a good chance of being paired with genes that say "have lots of sexual partners".
Psychology classes could really do with setting aside Freud and Jung for a while and listening to what Darwin and Mendel had to say.
