That some of Buss's conclusions make sense to you simply indicates that you come from the same culture and are using roughly the same criteria to reach your conclusions - things that leave out all sorts of relevant facts but also include ones that have been debunked 50 years ago (but that still hang on, even amongst some scientists).
The notion that females are naturally choosy comes straight from Darwin being steeped in Victorian sexual mores. Aside from the fact that human sexuality is infinitely adaptable and does not fit or employ any single universal mating pattern, primate females are largely characterized by their desire for variety.
In fact, women get bored with monogamy long before men do, something that tends to look like "going off sex" when the real issue is their sexuality shuts down because they are bored. This doesn't mean that most women don't value the coziness of monogamy but the fact that having the same mate over and over kills her libido is something that Buss either doesn't know about or doesn't want to bring up because it skews his theories.
"Primatologist, Meredith Small notes that seeking novelty is the single most observable trait among all the sexual behaviors, preferences, and drivers of female primates. Female primates are actually the complete opposite of how we’ve been taught to imagine them — as reluctant breeders or seekers of “intimacy” with a single “best” mate or only seeking to mate with the alpha.
“Indeed, Small suggests that it is difficult for us humans to wrap our minds around ‘just how little importance nonhuman female primates attach to knowing a male before they mate with him.’
Au contraire, our primate sisters are sexual adventuresses, driven by the thrill of the unknown and unfamiliar.”
Multi-mating and promiscuity are quite common throughout the animal kingdom and offer a lot of evolutionary benefits. There are also instances where males are the more choosy ones.
"Aside from the fact that many primate females are far from sexually reticent or choosy, across all species, mating with several males confers a significant evolutionary benefit. Gowaty describes the benefits of multiple mates as an answer to the never-ending evolutionary struggle against what may be the world’s greatest predator: disease.
In this illness-driven arms race, organisms that produce offspring from multiple mates are more likely to produce some children with the right antibodies to survive the next generation of viruses, bacteria and parasites."
Seems like Buss has fallen into a lot of the same pitfalls as the many scientists who have accepted Bateman's research on fruit flies because it confirms their cultural biases.
"Our field might profitably do some soul-searching: Why were Bateman’s obvious errors overlooked for so long? As we said in our primary report, legions of graduate students have for the past 40 years read and discussed Bateman. Why did they not bring attention to the errors? Surely all of them, among biologists at least, understand the elements of mutation, inheritance and Mendelian genetics. Why did their professors not challenge Bateman’s results? We are inclined to the idea that Bateman’s results and conclusions are so similar to status quo, dominating world-views (competitive males, dependent females) that pre-existing cultural biases of readers may have dampened skepticism and objectivity. Perhaps lack of repetition is simply due to lack of professional incentives such as funding for repetitions. (Although that doesn’t explain why so few people ever pointed to the glaring errors in methodology — comment mine)
Women in a patriarchy tend to be choosier than men (although not as much as you'd think given the social prescriptions and safety issues), but women in many Polynesian or Amerind cultures have no such fears of being slut-shamed for being with more than one man at a time, having a lot of sex, or of getting raped and therefore don't exhibit the same kind of "sexual reticence."
As to why these people would subscribe to these ideas, it has to do with patriarchy justifying itself. They've never interfaced with anything that wasn't a male centric dominance hierarchy with ubiquitous violence and social control of women and they can't conceive of anything else - even though we've only had those for the past 3-4% of human history and they are not universal in the world, even today. This is not masculine nature - it's a very particular type of social system that spread to most of the world largely because it was so disruptive.
In contrast with the peoples of Old Europe as well as those of Mesopotamia, who worshipped a life-giving goddess that brought abundance, law, art, and beauty both the Kurgans and the ancient Hebrews worshipped a god of war and mountains, one who had no balancing female consort like that of the goddess. These invaders glorified in the death and destruction that they brought in the name of their god (Jehovah or Yahweh for the Hebrews), and in the case of the Kurgans, they actually paid devotion to their swords.
The one thing they all had in common was a dominator model of social organization: a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm. Another commonality was that, in contrast to the societies that laid the foundations for Western civilization, the way they characteristically acquired material wealth was not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction.
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade (p. 86). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Pinker is another one who used shoddy methodology to come to conclusions that supported his pet theory that he’d already gotten attached to — and ignored all sorts of things that point to just how off base it is. For one thing, The Smithsonian and most other mainstream scientific organizations place the first "war" at about 10k years ago - and even that was more of a massacre than an actual war as we tend to think of them. About 27 people were killed. Pinker's own chart indicating how widespread human violence is only goes back 14k years and most of his examples are from the past 5k years (Homo sapiens have been around about 300,000 years — and older humans for about 2 million years). There are cases where he takes two violent deaths in a remote part of Europe to be indicative of widespread violence on that continent. It's just kind of laughable - except for the number of people who believed him because they didn't know better - and it made sense to them by looking at the world around them. But that world is very different in almost every way from the bulk of human history.
This is why I say that Buss is a moron and that overwhelmingly, EP is a crock — using poor methodology to jump to conclusions that seem like they could be true — but that leave out a whole host of relevant information.
It is really only with the social and sexual control of women that came with patriarchy that routine fighting over women makes any sense. Even today in more communally oriented cultures, such as in parts of rural Africa, no one cares all that much about who fathered a child because everyone in the community looks out for and helps each other. As Christopher Ryan notes in Sex at Dawn,
When seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune lectured a Montagnais Indian man about the dangers of the rampant infidelity he’d witnessed, Le Jeune received a lesson on proper parenthood in response. The missionary recalled, “I told him that it was not honorable for a woman to love any one else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’
Among the Mosuo of China, there is no real concept of fatherhood. Women sleep with who they want to when they want to and never marry or otherwise formalize relationships with male partners. Everyone lives in the home of their mother or grandmother and couples never cohabitate. Men help to care for the nieces and cousins who are growing up in the household they live in and there is no social construct for husbands or fathers.
I could go on and on with challenging his rather silly and naive ideas, but this is already perhaps a bit long. I’ll leave you with this quote from renowned primatologist, Frans de Waal, who notes that although we certainly have the capability for violence, it is largely out of sync with “human nature” except in certain particular circumstances:
The idea of humans as killer apes was rather curious given how little pleasure we take in lethal combat. Species-typical tendencies normally include built-in rewards. Nature has ensured that we find fulfillment in eating, sex, and nursing, all of which are required for survival and reproduction. If warfare were truly in our DNA, we should happily engage in it. Yet, soldiers report a deep revulsion to killing, and only shoot at the enemy under pressure. They end up with haunting memories. Far from being a recent phenomenon, combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, such as Sophocles, who described the “divine madness” now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A most illuminating book in this regard is On Killing by Dave Grossman
