Mate retention behaviours are intended to prevent a partner’s infidelity or defection from a relationship. In humans, women’s reproductive success is importantly affected by their ability to retain a partner. Furthermore, it is beneficial for a woman to retain a partner who is willing to protect and provide for her, her offspring, and her family, and who is a cooperative partner. Women can achieve this by deploying cost-inflicting or benefit-provisioning mate retention behaviours. The benefits women provide include care for their appearance: women enhance their appearance for their partners to embody male preferences for attractive and young mates. Appearance enhancement takes various forms, including cosmetic surgeries, application of makeup, fashionable clothing, use of perfumes, and specific movements aimed at displaying attractiveness. Women use these behaviours in all phases of a relationship, to attract a mate, to seduce and a mate, and to retain a mate. Appearance enhancement is, however, also subjected to monitoring and penalisation by other women in the context of intrasexual competition. Women therefore often opt for cosmetic procedures with moderate effects which do not emphasise their sexual appeal, but help increase their prestige and status. Other behaviours women use to retain a mate include the use of sexual behaviour and, in particular, oral sex and pretending orgasm. As hinted above, women also use mate retention behaviours that are costly for their partner, such as punishment of their partner’s infidelity threat or indirect aggression, including derogation of their partner or rivals. Despite women’s physical strength inferiority to men, physical aggression is sometimes performed by women against their partner, although it results in injuries less frequently than does male domestic violence. Women’s higher anxiety and, especially, their skill at identifying the mental states of others and responding with appropriate emotions, enable them to be efficient at indirect and manipulative mate retention behaviours. The same skills and abilities help women keep the partner satisfied and the romantic dyad functioning as long as the relationship remains beneficial for the couple.

Over human evolutionary history, women have benefited from competing with same-sex mating rivals to acquire and retain desired mates. Winning a rivalry may lead to direct advantages, such as securing an attractive, healthy mate who has the ability and willingness to invest in a relationship, as well as possessing important resources that may help sustain future children. Simultaneously, such competition is associated with potential costs, such as jeopardizing alliances, being victimized within social networks, becoming the target of malicious gossip, or, in the case of a loss, wasting one’s time and effort that could have been allocated elsewhere. Here I first present the evolutionary framework that underpins women’s intrasexual mating competition, and then review the existing literature on the specific ways that this competition is manifested. Attention is especially paid to competition via physical attractiveness, namely women’s efforts to improve or enhance their attractiveness, given men’s universal tendency to prefer attractive mates. I focus on how this competition typically utilizes indirect aggression tactics and relies on women behaving in a strategic manner that depends on the local environment, such as the number of available mates, the mate value of potential rivals, and concerns about maintaining one’s reputation.

From an evolutionary perspective, aggression is viewed as a flexible context-specific adaption that was selected for because it enhanced the survival and reproductive success of ancestral humans. Evolutionary pressures have impinged differentially on the sexes, leading to the hypothesis that sex differences should be manifest in aggressive behavior. Evidence to date supports key predictions made from sexual selection theory that women direct their aggression primarily toward same-sex competitors, which peaks as mate competition intensifies. Women demonstrate a notable preference across cultures for more indirect, as opposed to direct, forms of intrasexual rivalry as a likely consequence of heightened obligatory parental investment, lower lifetime reproductive potential, and the greater importance of maternal survival for the health and longevity of offspring. An evolutionary approach can yield unique insights into the sex-differentiated functions, development, and outcomes of aggressive behavior.