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

The male choice hypothesis begins with an observation about the Darwinian puzzle of same-sex sexual behavior. Same-sex attraction and behavior appear in virtually every human culture, yet they seem to offer no obvious direct reproductive or survival advantage, particularly in people who identify as heterosexual. Apostolou’s proposed solution was that heterosexual men evolved a preference for female partners who exhibit some degree of same-sex attraction. According to the theory, if a woman engages in same-sex contact instead of opposite-sex infidelity, her partner’s paternity is protected because no conception can result. In addition, a female partner attracted to women might facilitate the man’s access to other women—a “participation effect” that would boost his reproductive output without requiring a new committed relationship. The hypothesis also proposed that women with same-sex attractions would enjoy better relationship quality because men particularly value the trait, granting such women extra resources and leniency. Underlying all of this was a genetic model in which mutations create alleles that shift individuals along a spectrum from exclusive heterosexuality toward exclusive homosexuality, with the alleles maintained in the population partly because ancestral parental control forced same-sex attracted women to marry men and reproduce.

Wilczkowski’s critique identifies multiple places where this framework conflicts with core principles of evolutionary psychology and sexual selection. The “participation effect” requires a third-party woman to consent to sex with the male partner despite the risks of unplanned pregnancy and lack of male investment—something that would undermine the very logic of why women supposedly seek resources through mating. If the woman’s same-sex attraction evolved to help her acquire more resources, it makes little sense that it would also cause her to share her partner’s support with another woman. Furthermore, the hypothesis assumes men can gain fitness benefits by mating widely without investment, but in a species with extremely dependent offspring who typically require biparental care, such a strategy would reduce offspring survival and cancel out the proposed advantage. And if a third-party woman conceived and then sought resources from another man, the supposed cuckoldry protection would simply be exported to someone else, creating a cuckoldry liability elsewhere rather than eliminating it.

The critique also highlights contradictions with well-established empirical findings on female sexuality. The male choice hypothesis claims that only “mostly heterosexual” women possess the capacity for same-sex activity, yet decades of research document sexual fluidity—the capacity for attractions and behavior to shift with context—in women across the entire spectrum of identity, including those who identify as exclusively heterosexual. Large-scale surveys show many exclusively heterosexual women have considered or engaged in same-sex contact. The hypothesis likewise dismisses the robust phenomenon of gender-nonspecific physiological arousal in women, documented across studies of genital response, pupil dilation, neural activity, and viewing time, in which heterosexual women show measurable arousal to stimuli featuring both sexes. Apostolou has argued that such women are simply untruthful about their responses, a stance Wilczkowski calls perplexing given the overwhelming methodologically diverse evidence. The hypothesis further asserts a rigid genetic trade-off in which same-sex attraction necessarily reduces interest in men, yet bisexual women report more male partners than heterosexual women and have similar reproductive output, and homosexual women freely engage in sex with men.

The genetic assumptions fare no better against modern data. The landmark genome-wide association study of nearly 478,000 people published in Science in 2019 identified only five genetic markers associated with same-sex sexual behavior, together explaining less than one percent of the variation in the trait; overall genetic influences accounted for an estimated 8 to 25 percent, with the remainder attributed to environmental factors. Crucially, the genetics of ever engaging in same-sex behavior differed from the genetics of the proportion of same-sex partners, and no genetic connection was found between people with exclusively same-sex partners and those with only mild bisexuality—undermining the smooth, single-dimensional genetic spectrum the male choice hypothesis requires. The critique also challenges the hypothesis’s reliance on strong ancestral parental control over daughters’ sexuality, noting instead that female promiscuity has deep evolutionary roots reflected in male anatomy: relatively large testes suggesting sperm competition, penis morphology potentially adapted to displace rivals’ semen, and male sexual jealousy and mate guarding evolved precisely to counter female infidelity. Overt suppression of female sexuality, by this account, is more likely an evolutionarily recent phenomenon than the ancient selective force the hypothesis needs.

Perhaps the most consequential part of the new paper is its methodological reanalysis. In the studies testing the male choice hypothesis, participants rated agreement or likelihood on five-point Likert-type scales whose endpoints were labeled (for example, “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”) but whose intermediate points—including the midpoint at 3—were left unlabeled. According to standard survey methodology, an unlabeled midpoint typically represents neutrality or uncertainty. Yet in the original publications, responses of 3, 4, and 5 were all classified as “affirmative,” effectively treating every neutral response as moderate agreement. Because Likert distributions often pile up at the midpoint, this coding choice substantially inflates apparent endorsement of key items—statements about women finding same-sex contact exciting, considering it, or being willing to do it, and men tolerating or being excited by a partner’s same-sex infidelity.

Wilczkowski reanalyzed all relevant published percentage distributions, excluding the unlabeled midpoint as analytically indeterminate and coding only responses of 4 and 5 as affirmative. Statistical comparisons used two-sample proportion t-tests, with effect sizes expressed as Cohen’s h and the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure applied to control the false discovery rate across multiple comparisons. The corrected results were dramatic. Where the original data suggested, for example, that 31.3 percent of women in long-term relationships would find partner-sanctioned same-sex contact sexually exciting, the unskewed figure was 14.0 percent, with 64.7 percent explicitly not finding it exciting. Willingness to actually engage in such contact dropped from 16.7 percent to 5.8 percent. Similar reversals appeared across short-term relationship scenarios, across scenarios involving the partner’s participation, and among the subgroup of women reporting same-sex attractions. Negative reactions—anger, sadness, feeling uncared for, considering a breakup—remained common even after correction, particularly in short-term contexts.

The reanalysis of men’s responses was equally damaging to the hypothesis. Originally reported figures suggested that around three-quarters of men would consider a partner’s same-sex contact to be cheating and that roughly half to sixty percent would find it sexually exciting. After correction, sexual excitement fell to 25.4 percent in long-term contexts and 32.6 percent in short-term contexts—majorities explicitly did not find such scenarios exciting—and substantial numbers of men still considered the behavior infidelity worth breaking up over. When women were asked whether they would cheat with a woman or a man, the corrected data showed overwhelming preference for cheating with a man in every condition, directly contradicting the cuckoldry-protection mechanism. Notably, propensity to cheat with a man relative to a woman was actually greater in short-term than long-term contexts, the opposite of what the hypothesis would predict if same-sex contact served as a substitute for risky heterosexual infidelity.

Taken together, Wilczkowski argues, none of the three proposed mechanisms survives scrutiny. The cuckoldry-protection account fails because very few women express interest in same-sex contact and because men do not preferentially select such partners the way they prefer chastity and fidelity cues. The participation effect fails because women show little inclination toward the required behavior and most men do not desire it, even in short-term contexts where the hypothesis predicts maximal enthusiasm. The relationship-quality account fails because women with same-sex attractions are no more open to partner-suggested same-sex encounters than other women. The author notes that the conclusions are robust to alternative treatments of the midpoint: even if neutral responses were included, the overall pattern would be unlikely to change, though a definitive test would require newly collected raw datasets, since the reanalysis necessarily relied on published percentage tables.

The paper does not leave the Darwinian puzzle unanswered. Wilczkowski points to two alternative evolutionary accounts that better fit the evidence: the alloparenting hypothesis, which frames female sexual fluidity as a conditional strategy for recruiting allomothering help when paternal investment was unreliable, and the polygyny hypothesis, which proposes that fluidity evolved to reduce conflict among co-wives and facilitate cooperative child-rearing in polygynous ancestral households. Both accounts explain sexual fluidity and women’s broader erotic plasticity, and the polygyny hypothesis additionally assigns functional relevance to men’s widespread cross-cultural arousal to female–female sexuality, treating it as a mechanism promoting co-wife harmony rather than an adaptation for cuckoldry protection. Whether either of these frameworks ultimately withstands the same rigorous scrutiny that has now undone the male choice hypothesis remains an open empirical question—but the burden of proof for the male-benefit account, this analysis makes clear, has become considerably heavier.