Sexual attitudes among Hispanic students at a border university: gender differences and failure to support Buss's jealousy theory

Abstract Sexual attitudes were studied in 126 university students, at a Hispanic-serving university in the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, near the Mexican border. Males and females rated their level of agreement to 38 items on a 1-to-5 scale, in a revision of a previously used sexual attitudes scale. For the most part, these students agreed with one another, but there were some important differences, with males being more permissive than females on some items. Both males and females reported that they would be jealous if their partner had sexual intercourse with someone else, and if their partner got emotionally involved with someone else. For the sexual intercourse item, females were significantly more jealous. These findings contradict Buss's evolutionary psychology theory of jealousy (Buss, 2000). We present possible explanations for the findings. Introduction Researchers have looked at sexual attitudes or behavior in racial and ethnic minorities (Airhihenbuwa, DiClemente, Wingood, & Lowe, 1992; Dantzker & Eisenman, 2003; Day, 1992; Eisenman & Dantzker, 2004; Erkut, Szalacha, Coil, & Alarcon, 2000; Fierros-Gonzalez & Brown, 2002; Flores, 1992; Pesa & Mathews, 2000). Minority people have to judge things while drawing on emotions and information from at least two perspectives, the majority culture and their own culture, while the majority person may only have to employ one perspective. Another important individual difference is gender: differences between males and females. Gender differences would seem to reflect a variety of cultural, biological, and social influences. In the present study, we are interested in the sexual attitudes of male and female college students at a university near the Mexican border. We use the term Hispanic because that is the most popular term used here. In other parts of the United States, Latino is considered more acceptable and Hispanic may even be seen as unacceptable. The University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) has the second largest population of students in the nation (second only to Florida International University, in Miami), and 88% of the students attending UTPA are Hispanic. Most of the students at UTPA are bilingual, at least to some degree. Most live in the Rio Grande Valley area of the United States, although a few live in Mexico, and commute to classes. UTPA is part of the University of Texas system, and is the school in that system designated to be the system's number one Hispanic-serving institution. That, and its location near the Mexican border, and in the Rio Grande Valley region, helps explain why UTPA has the largest number of Mexican American students of any university in the nation. Florida International University, in Miami, has a large Cuban student body. Evolutionary Psychology An excellent perspective for understanding biological matters is evolutionary psychology theory. Evolution is the unifying theory in biology. Evolution has also come to be very important for the field of psychology, and may possibly be the number one theory today in psychology, having gained much recent popularity in the field. From an evolutionary psychology standpoint, men and women have different needs, as they try to maximize the survival of themselves and of their offspring into future generations. For men, the optimal strategy to insure their genes going into future generations is to impregnate as many women as possible, leading to a permissive attitude toward sex. Also, men should seek out partners who have youth, health and beauty. Women, on the other hand, get pregnant, and could not effectively employ the male strategy. Their passing on their genes to future generations is best assured by finding a male companion who possesses status and money, and who will invest in taking care of her and her offspring. Thus, women should be less permissive about sex than men, and should be more selective in who they wish to have sexual relations with. …

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