[no subject]

The age and sex demographics of cultural production are almost the same as
the demographics of homicide (Miller, 1995; see Daly & Wilson, 1988):males
produce about an order of magnitude more art, music, literature, and violent
death than women, and they produce it mostly in young adulthood.  This
suggests that, like violent sexual competition, the production of art, 
music,  and literature functions primarily as a courtship display.  For
males, the mating benefits of public cultural displays are large because
every additional short-term mating achieved through impressing some
receptive female represents a substantial increase in expected fitness. 
Because male reproductive success can be virtually unlimited, the amount of
energy and time that talented men are motivated to invest in cultural
displays should be virtually unlimited.  For example,  although the gifted
guitarist Jimi Hendrix died at age 27 from a drug overdose, he had affairs
with hundreds of groupies,  and fathered children in the U. S., Germany,
Britain, and Sweden.  Composer J. S. Bach fathered 8 children by his first
wife and 11 by his second.  The sexual conquests of Picasso, Chaplin, and
Balzac are legendary.  As every teenager knows and most psychologists
forget,  cultural displays by males increase their sexual success.
 
But for females,  the genetic benefits of public cultural displays are
smaller, because their maximum reproductive success is constrained directly
by their maternal investment ability (i.e. the time required for pregnancy
and lactation), not by the number of short-term matings they can achieve. 
Rather than broad-casting her courtship displays to all males
indiscriminately  and risking sexual harassment from undesirables, it may be
more effective for a woman to narrow-cast her courtship displays to a few
select males who are capable of giving her the long-term care, attention,
and resources she wants.  This could be called the `Scheherezade strategy',
after the woman who retained a sultan's intellectual attention,  sexual
commitment,  and paternal investment by inventing fantastic stories
throughout  a thousand and one nights.  Thus, cultural dimorphism is much
more likely to reflect a difference in motivation and sexual strategy than a
difference in basic mental capacity.