Posting this here, as I think we who have amassed a longer perspective might find  a more esoteric take on sex to be of interest.  Also, tired of the topics popular on GD board.  

I'd heard of Darwin's "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" but knew nothing about his idea that aesthetic selections by the female is, in addition to "survival of the fittest", a big driver of evolution.

Per Richard Prum, ("The Evolution of Beauty"):     "  . . .the civilizing pressure of female preference help drive evolution,  leading to a gradual “aesthetic remodeling” of males.  It’s about selecting for males who allow females autonomy and choice, resulting in the deweaponization of the human male through the evolutionary shrinkage of almost every body part except the brain ( and penis).

This as opposed to the other common evolutionary strategy seen in many duck species and gorillas, where dominant males use the threat of force to command exclusive mating access to the females in their groups and often murder the offspring of their predecessors.

Males that are not attractive enough evolutionarily do have a much needed outlet -- trading goods for sex, but sterile sex. This avoids upsetting the course of our  evolutionary progress, where the only desirable males, as judged by the female, gets children.  

The NYT book review here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/books/review/evolution-of-beauty-richard-prum-charles-darwin.html

Interesting post. Being retired and with time on my hands I've read it over a few times and still not quite 100% clear
on the message. Female preference helps drives evolution. I get it. And, I would think, the male's urge to 'get off' would be a factor as well. Unattractive men, not so much? Who sets the standard on that one? I need to spend more time on the idea of the "....deweaponization of the human male through the evolutionary shrinkage of almost every body part except the brain and penis."  

What is evolving, thankfully, is men's understanding of consent, harassment, and assault. Don't mean to pivot too far from the OP's subject but in today's climate it's important to keep the dialogue going.  

Heidi Stevens nicely addressed this issue with this morning's column in the Chicago Tribune.  

"But for the hard, painful work of the #MeToo movement to pay off, we need, as a culture, to move toward a better definition of masculinity. One that doesn’t teach men to dominate women like some sort of opposing team on the football field.

Continuing to frame women as the opposing team doesn’t get us there.

“A lot of what we as young men learn as seduction is really more like preparatory sexual assault training,” sociologist Harry Brod told New York Times gender editor Jessica Bennett.

“If you’re a man,” Bennett wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, “that ‘no’ often means ‘just try harder’ — because, you know, persuasion is part of the game.”

Good, pure women don’t have much use for sex, other than procreating, we’ve told generation after generation of women. Men are always after it, we’re taught, and women are in charge of shutting it down.

This sets up an incredibly dangerous and unbalanced setup, in which some men think wearing down and cajoling a woman into sex is a “win.” (A real win, of course, would be mutual, fantastic sex with someone who wants to be having it as much as you do.)

This is not the whole of the problem that creates the Weinsteins of the world. It’s not even the half of it.

But it’s part of it. And it’s a part that I fear we get even further away from even broaching, let alone solving, when we blame women for not doing more to police men and their sexual urges.

Ideally, this movement inspires all sorts of conversations about sex and power and consent.

Ideally, we really do start to #BelieveWomen. When they say no. When they say yes. When they say they are in charge of their own bodies." And when they say they’re not in charge of anyone else’s

Of necessity, I abstracted the book review, which explains in a lot detail.  Intrigued me enough to order it on Amazon.  The balance of your post clearly describes "civilizing pressure" done by women, and enlisting the more enlightened men around them. This kind of development would not happen to gorillas or lions, where male dominance is nature's adopted strategy.  We seem to share our innate strategy with bonobos, but not other primates.

This should not be a surprise. Let us be in charge for a while and see how well the world would work ...

you got my vote Gayle

I'm sorry to rain on your parade, but if this is true...

"Males that are not attractive enough evolutionarily do have a much needed outlet -- trading goods for sex, but sterile sex. This avoids upsetting the course of our  evolutionary progress, where the only desirable males, as judged by the female, gets children"  

...then, some females must have horrible judgement. There are some pretty undesirable males who have lots of offspring running around.

to select a mate.   I would think the ability to support them and their offspring would be a more important criterion.

It's a leftist,liberal,progressive wet dream that humans are born blank slates that they can then program -- teach men to be women, women to be men, or whatever.

Every preacher's daughter who turned out to have a kink fetish gives lie to the idea that sexual desires are "learned."  

We didn't crawl out of the evolutionary mud as blank slates with men fucking men or trees or whatever, we come equipped with inborn desires to fuck specific sexes (yeah, cross-wired in a few percent of cases.)    

So the progs can yap all they want about cultural de-masculineization ... and they might convince a few guys to suppress their desires, but the desires will be there -- and there will always be feminine females who have the opposite desires.