ABSTRACT
A good century before Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that culture began when men began to compete with one another in order to impress women. Unlike contemporary evolutionary psychologists, Rousseau focused on the human shape of erotic desire. Like other animals, humans copulate in order to reproduce themselves; unlike other animals, human beings want more. Desire for another body is easy to feel, and not hard to gratify; what human beings feel in addition is desire for the other’s desire. If all animals desire to copulate, human animals want to be desired by whomever they wish to copulate with, and it’s this desire that gives human sexuality its peculiar and often tormented shape. On Rousseau’s account, culture began when men began to don paint and feathers, trying to excel at singing and dancing in order to beat their rivals for the attention of the opposite sex. This moment marked the point at which we began to be conscious of how we appear as well as how we are, and this split took us down the long road to what is today known as status-seeking, which the eighteenth-century philosopher thought the source of much of our misery.
