Why Are So Many Italian Men Such Chotches? Is It Evolution?
When walking alone through the medina here in Essaouira, Julie occasionally gets unwanted male attention. It’s low-key and harmless, and comes with the territory. It’s not nearly as bad as she’s experienced in Italy, though.
In both Palermo and Rome, she was constantly harassed by Italian men. She couldn’t sit down to have a coffee without some chotch doggedly attempting to join her. She was followed for a block down the street, and solicited by an aging hound dog who was definitely on the wrong side of seventy. These men really wouldn’t take no for an answer.
I got to thinking about why men behave this way, and about this evolutionary psychology book I wrote about (Derek wrote a more thorough review) a while back. There seem to be two possibilities:
- The success rate is greater than zero, and the effort involved is worth the occasional success. If they never succeeded, you’d think that they’d eventually give up.
- The behaviour has nothing to do with earning female affections, and everything to do with lekking. From Wikipedia: “A lek is a gathering of males, of certain animal species, for the purposes of competitive mating display.”
A premise of that book is that our brains stoppped evolving 10,000 years ago, and that our basic goal in life is simple: reproduction. Presumably the psychological goal of option #2 is to intimidate the other males in the lek, and get to the female first.
But why is this practice particularly common in Italy (I’m sure it’s common in other countries–this is just the worst among those that we’ve visited)? It’s probably cultural.
I wanted to use this photo to illustrate this post, but it was all rights reserved.
January 28th, 2008 at 3:44 am
I am an italian man (that’s why I write in “bad english”) and here’s what I can say: you’re right.
A lot (not everybody, thank god) of italian men follow the motto “ogni lasciata รจ persa” which roughly translates as “every woman I don’t try to harass is certainly not coming to bed with me, hence I try to harass every woman” .
There are a lot of differences between northern italians and southern ones. Northern ones tend to be colder and a lot less intrusive. Suthern ones tend to be more passionate. Not every north-ling is cold, not every south-ling is passionate but… well… this is what is commonly said.
Personally, I’ve never harassed no one, and none of my friends did (I come from northern Italy). But I know of a lot of others who did.
I’m really sorry about the reputation italians have… I often read bad opinions about us. We even had a prime minister like Berlusconi who greatly increased our bad reputations and… well… bad news: he’s coming back.
Italy has a lot of geographical variety: high mountains, soft hills, foggy plains, seas, rivers, big cities and small medieval ones. People from Italy comes in a similar variety.
January 28th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Emanj: Thanks for the insights–very interesting. Your English is way better than my Italian. It’s interesting what you say about regional differences. Julie says that she was barely hassled in places like Venice and Florence, so you’re right about things being worse in the south.
January 28th, 2008 at 8:41 am
I had similar troubles in Italy. But, in Greece, a man who had to be in his mid 70s took my hand and then suddenly kissed me. I hightailed it.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:09 am
So this is why you don’t want to move to Italy, eh Darren? Are the Maltese men not like that?
emanj, that is very interesting. I wonder how many of those men also call themselves Catholic?
I also find it strange the double standards in the culture to men and women. They are extremely protective of their daughters, but seem to think its okay for their sons to be players.
(This comes from my experience dating an Italian girl with a very traditional family here in Toronto.)
January 28th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Mark, you wrote two interesting things.
1. Catholic people.
Almost everyone here in Italy who says “I’m a catholic” is a catholic in his/her very own way. A lot of people go to church for no catholic reason… just to be there. There are a lot of those so called sunday-catholics…
2. traditional family.
That’s the keyword! “Traditional”. A lot of “traditional” families are very strict and treat women in a different way. They think women are made to be housewives… This is very very sad.
January 28th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Mark: There was no such harassment in Malta, none at all, actually. I’m not sure what accounts for that…
January 28th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
The double standard is also something that the evolutionary psychology book Darren and I reviewed attempts to explain. It’s actually pretty simple (although I’ll oversimplify): for animals that reproduce as we do, it is evolutionary advantageous for men to sleep around as much as possible, but not so much for women, for whom it can also be reproductively risky.
Recall that the original evolutionary pressures that created those kinds of behaviours don’t make them _right_, or justify them in the modern world. But they explain why those behaviours exist. Why they persist in some cultures and not in others is a different question.
A question I would ask: how do Italian women feel about and react to all this lekking?
March 1st, 2008 at 1:15 am
I recently visited Rome, and even though we were in a gay club there every 2 metres i walked, an italian man would hold my face and try to kiss me!
when i explained this to my friend, i was told that they know we are tourists so think we are easy targets for a one night stand.. i hope this isn’t true because i met the most beautiful, unsleazy man there even though we don’t keep in touch…
March 21st, 2008 at 10:45 am
If you’re interested, there has been some pushbackabout the evolutionary psychology book that Darren and I reviewed.