This is an excellent comment, which gets to the heart of the matter. One point that should be added, however, is that there are some important considerations here in addition to the status structure.
Namely, when people get into relationships—and especially serious long-term relationships, particularly those that are expected to produce children—they obviously must use some heuristics to estimate the likely future behavior of their partner. Clearly, people’s past behavior provides some powerful rational evidence here—and like in many other cases, the best possible rules for evaluating this evidence might have the appearance of crude stereotypes with plenty of individual exceptions, but nevertheless, it is entirely rational to stick to them. Moreover, a troublesome fact for dedicated egalitarians is that, from a purely rational point of view, these rules are not symmetrical for men and women (not least because men and women tend to find different behaviors acceptable and desirable, so even the goals of their inferences are not the same).
Of course, these considerations are heavily entangled with the matters of status here. However, the important point is that unlike in those cases where status is assigned to different behaviors in a mostly arbitrary way due to higher-order signaling strategies and locked equilibriums, when it comes to people’s history of sex and relationships, low-status markers have a significant overlap with things that predict (in the statistical sense of the word) problematic or undesirable future behavior.
This is an excellent comment, which gets to the heart of the matter. One point that should be added, however, is that there are some important considerations here in addition to the status structure.
Namely, when people get into relationships—and especially serious long-term relationships, particularly those that are expected to produce children—they obviously must use some heuristics to estimate the likely future behavior of their partner. Clearly, people’s past behavior provides some powerful rational evidence here—and like in many other cases, the best possible rules for evaluating this evidence might have the appearance of crude stereotypes with plenty of individual exceptions, but nevertheless, it is entirely rational to stick to them. Moreover, a troublesome fact for dedicated egalitarians is that, from a purely rational point of view, these rules are not symmetrical for men and women (not least because men and women tend to find different behaviors acceptable and desirable, so even the goals of their inferences are not the same).
Of course, these considerations are heavily entangled with the matters of status here. However, the important point is that unlike in those cases where status is assigned to different behaviors in a mostly arbitrary way due to higher-order signaling strategies and locked equilibriums, when it comes to people’s history of sex and relationships, low-status markers have a significant overlap with things that predict (in the statistical sense of the word) problematic or undesirable future behavior.