The male choice hypothesis, developed by Apostolou and colleagues in a series of papers beginning in 2017, proposes that female same-sex attraction persists in populations because men find some degree of same-sex attraction in women appealing, and because such women may be more willing to engage in same-sex behavior that satisfies male partners. In this framework, male preference functions as a selective force: if men preferentially choose women with certain patterns of sexual flexibility, and if this preference translates into higher mating success or relationship stability for those women, then genes and developmental pathways associated with female same-sex attraction could be maintained by positive selection rather than eliminated by its reproductive costs. The hypothesis sits within a broader program of research by Apostolou on sexual selection under parental choice, which argues that for much of human evolutionary history parents, rather than prospective mates themselves, exercised substantial control over mating decisions.

Wilczkowski’s 2026 target article, titled Male choice hypothesis: Shortcomings, inconsistencies, and proposed alternatives, argued that the evidential foundations of this account are weaker than its proponents suggest. According to the structure of the debate, the critique pressed on multiple fronts: that the survey findings showing male approval of female same-sex attraction are modest in magnitude and vulnerable to methodological artifacts; that male preference in a modern, largely WEIRD sample does not establish an ancestral selective pressure; and that the hypothesis sits awkwardly alongside the substantial body of evidence indicating that exclusive or predominant female homosexuality is associated with reduced reproductive output. When a trait demonstrably lowers the number of offspring produced, the argument goes, a preference-based benefit must be strong and consistent enough to offset that cost, something Wilczkowski contended the existing data do not demonstrate.

Apostolou’s response takes up that challenge by reassembling the evidence base and contesting the interpretation of several key datasets. A central empirical pillar of the male choice program is work using nationally representative and convenience samples showing that a substantial proportion of men report that a partner’s same-sex attraction would not deter them, and that many men find the prospect of a female partner engaging in same-sex behavior appealing. Follow-up cross-cultural work by Apostolou and Wang extended these findings beyond Western samples, an important move because evolutionary hypotheses ultimately rest on claims about ancestral and species-wide selection pressures rather than the idiosyncrasies of contemporary college students. From this perspective, the presence of the preference across disparate cultural settings is precisely the kind of pattern one would expect if male choice had played a genuine selective role.

The reply also engages with the physiological and psychometric literature on female sexual response. Studies of sexual arousal, including work by Chivers and colleagues and more recent research on genital and subjective arousal patterns, have repeatedly found that women’s arousal is less category-specific than men’s, responding to a broader range of sexual stimuli. For proponents of male choice, this nonspecificity is consistent with a capacity for sexual fluidity that male preference could have shaped. Apostolou’s broader account of female same-sex attraction as relatively fluid, weakly canalized, and responsive to social context draws on behavioral-genetic findings from twin studies in Sweden and elsewhere, which indicate modest heritability for same-sex sexual behavior alongside substantial environmental influence, and on longitudinal cohort research showing that women’s sexual identity and attraction shift over time more often than men’s. The massive genome-wide association study published in Science in 2019 reinforced the picture of a highly polygenic, non-deterministic architecture for same-sex sexual behavior, leaving room for accounts in which developmental plasticity interacts with social selection.

Against this, the critique and the reply must both confront the reproductive cost data directly. Apostolou’s own 2022 analysis of two nationally representative U.S. samples documented a direct reproductive cost associated with same-sex attraction, meaning that women reporting such attraction had fewer children on average. This is a crucial technical point in the dispute: the male choice hypothesis does not deny the cost, it argues that the cost was historically offset by fitness benefits flowing from male preference, such as greater access to mates, improved partner retention, or cooperative alliances with other women that enhanced survival and resource acquisition. Evaluating this balancing act requires reconstructing ancestral mating markets, and it is here that the parental choice framework does much of the work. If parents historically controlled whom daughters married, as evidence from historical societies and hunter-gatherer marriage practices suggests, then women’s own preferences were under weaker sexual selection, and traits that made a woman more acceptable to the men who influenced mating decisions could plausibly spread.

Methodological disagreements run through the exchange as well. The response addresses concerns about survey design, including the treatment of midpoint responses on Likert scales, an issue with a technical literature of its own, and about the gap between stated preferences and actual mating behavior. Critics of preference-based selection arguments note that what men say they find appealing in hypothetical scenarios may bear little relation to the mate choices they make, and that self-reported attraction measures diverge to a degree from genital measures of arousal, as meta-analytic work by Chivers and colleagues has shown. Defenders counter that preference measures, when replicated across cultures and supplemented by behavioral proxies such as pornography consumption patterns and reported willingness to satisfy partners, collectively point in the same direction, and that the absence of any single perfect measure is not grounds for discarding convergent evidence. The dispute thus becomes a case study in how evolutionary behavioral scientists adjudicate between competing bodies of imperfect evidence.

The stakes of the debate extend beyond a single hypothesis. Any account of female same-sex attraction must square three robust empirical regularities: the trait is partially heritable but not strongly genetically determined; it is more fluid and less category-specific in women than in men; and predominant homosexuality carries measurable reproductive costs. The male choice hypothesis is one of several positive-selection proposals in the literature, alongside Kanazawa’s arguments about female sexual fluidity arising from generalized arousal mechanisms and Diamond’s work situating same-gender sexuality within a broader framework of fluidity and diverse forms of sexual diversity. Alternative accounts, including weak negative selection, where mildly deleterious variants persist because selection against them is too weak to eliminate them quickly, and byproduct explanations, in which same-sex attraction emerges as a side effect of selection acting on other traits, remain live competitors, and Wilczkowski’s article is explicitly framed as proposing alternatives to male choice rather than merely attacking it.

What the exchange ultimately illustrates is the current state of evolutionary hypotheses about human sexuality: rich in explanatory ambition, but constrained by the difficulty of testing claims about ancestral selection with modern data. Apostolou’s letter argues that the accumulated evidence, from male preference surveys across cultures, from the psychophysiology of female arousal, from behavioral genetics, and from anthropological records of parental control over mating, does not come close to refuting the male choice hypothesis, and that rejecting it requires a higher standard of disproof than Wilczkowski applies. Whether the hypothesis survives this scrutiny will depend on future work that can quantify how large a preference-based fitness benefit would need to be, measure male preference with methods that map onto actual ancestral mate choice, and test the predicted patterns in populations and datasets not yet examined. For now, the journal’s correspondence pages have become the arena where one of the more provocative ideas in evolutionary psychology is being stress-tested in public, and readers of sexual science are witnessing how a contested hypothesis earns, or loses, its place in the literature one rebuttal at a time.

Subject of Research: Evolutionary explanations of female same-sex attraction and the male choice hypothesis debate

Article Title: Does the Evidence Refute the Male Choice Hypothesis? A Response to Wilczkowski (2026)

Article References: Apostolou, M. (2026). Does the Evidence Refute the Male Choice Hypothesis? A Response to Wilczkowski (2026). Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03635-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03635-7

Keywords: male choice hypothesis, female same-sex attraction, evolutionary psychology, sexual selection, sexual fluidity, Apostolou, Wilczkowski, Archives of Sexual Behavior, parental choice, reproductive cost, mate preference, behavioral genetics