Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (18 page)

Contemporary medical researchers attempt to neutralize this effect by using double-blind methodology in all serious research—where neither the researcher nor the subject knows which pills contain the real medicine.

Without a clear definition of what they’re looking for, many anthropologists have found marriage wherever they’ve looked. George Murdock, a central figure in American anthropology,

asserted

in

his

classic

cross-cultural

anthropological survey that the nuclear family is a “universal human social grouping.” He went on to declare that marriage is found in every human society.

But as we’ve seen, researchers trying to describe human nature

are

highly

susceptible

to

Flintstonization:

unconsciously tending to “discover” features that look familiar, and thereby universalizing contemporary social configurations while inadvertently blocking insight into the truth. Journalist Louis Menand noted this tendency in a piece in
The New Yorker,
writing, “The sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.”7

Paradoxically, in each of these cases, so-called
natural
behavior has to be encouraged and
unnatural
aberrations punished.

The now-forgotten diseases
drapetomania
and
dysaethesia
aethiopica
illustrate this point. Both were described in 1851

by Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a leading authority on the medical care of “Negroes” in Louisiana and a leading thinker in the pro-slavery movement. In his article “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Dr. Cartwright explained that
drapetomania
was the disease “causing Negroes to run away … the absconding from service” to their white owners, while
dysaethesia aethiopica
was characterized by “hebetude of and obtuse sensibility of the body.” He noted that slave overseers often referred to this disease, more simply, as

“rascality.”8

Despite high-minded claims to the contrary—often couched in language chosen to intimidate would-be dissenters
(dysaethesia aethiopica
!)—science all too often grovels at the feet of the dominant cultural paradigm.

Another weakness of many of these studies is known as the

“translation paradox:” the assumption that a word
(marriage,
for instance) translated from one language to another has an identical meaning.

We can agree that birds
sing
and bees
dance
only as long as we remember that their singing and dancing has almost nothing in common with ours—from motivation to execution.

We use identical words to signify very different behaviors.

It’s the same with marriage.

People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to
long-term pair bond
rather than
marriage
is no better. As Donald Symons put it, “The lexicon of the English language is woefully inadequate to reflect accurately the texture of human experience…. To shrink the present vocabulary to one phrase—pair-bond—and to imagine that in so doing one is being scientific … is simply to delude oneself.”9

On Matrimonial Whoredom

Even if we overlook the ubiquitous linguistic confusion, people who consider themselves to be married can have strikingly different notions of what their marriage involves.

The Aché of Paraguay say that a man and woman sleeping in the same hut are married. But if one of them takes his or her hammock to another hut, they’re not married anymore. That’s it. The original no-fault divorce.

Among the !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) of Botswana, most girls
marry
several times before they settle into a long-term relationship. For the Curripaco of Brazil, marriage is a gradual, undefined process. One scientist who lived with them explains, “When a woman comes to hang her hammock next to her man and cook for him, then some younger Curripaco say they are married
(kainukana).
But older informants disagree; they say they are married only when they have demonstrated that they can support and sustain each other. Having a baby, and going through the fast together, cements a marriage.”10

In contemporary Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there is a form of marriage known as
Nikah Misyar
(normally translated as

“traveler’s marriage”). According to a recent article in Reuters:

Misyar appeals to men of reduced means, as well as men looking for a flexible arrangement—the husband can walk away from a misyar and can marry other women without informing his first wife. Wealthy Muslims sometimes contract misyar when on holiday to allow them to have sexual relations without breaching the tenets of their faith. Suhaila Zein al-Abideen, of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Medina, said almost 80 percent of misyar marriages end in divorce. “A woman loses all her rights. Even how often she sees her husband is decided by his moods,” she said.11

In the Shia Muslim tradition, there is a similar institution called
Nikah Mut’ah
(“marriage for pleasure”), in which the relationship is entered into with a preordained termination point, like a car rental. These
marriages
can last anywhere from a few minutes to several years. A man can have any number of temporary wives at the same time (in addition to his “permanent wife”). Often used as a religious loophole in which prostitution or casual sex can fall within the bounds of religious requirements, there is no paperwork or ceremony required. Is this, too,
marriage
?

Apart from expectations of permanence or social recognition, what about virginity and sexual fidelity? Are they universal and integral parts of marriage, as parental investment theory would predict? No. For many societies, virginity is so unimportant there isn’t even a word for the concept in their language. Among the Canela, explain Crocker and Crocker,

“Virginity loss is only the first step into full marriage for a woman.” There are several other steps needed before the Canela society considers a couple to by truly married, including the young woman’s gaining social acceptance through her service in a “festival men’s society.” This premarital “service” includes sequential sex with fifteen to twenty men. If the bride-to-be does well, she’ll earn payments of meat from the men, which will be paid directly to her future mother-in-law on a festival day.

Cacilda Jethá (coauthor of this book) conducted a World Health Organization study of sexual behavior among villagers in rural Mozambique in 1990. She found that the 140 men in her study group were involved with 87 women as wives, 252

other women as long-term sexual partners, and 226 additional women on an occasional basis, working out to an average of four ongoing sexual relationships per man, not counting the unreported casual encounters many of these men likely experienced as well.

Among the Warao, a group living in the forests of Brazil, ordinary relations are suspended periodically and replaced by ritual relations, known as
mamuse.
During these festivities, adults are free to have sex with whomever they like. These relationships are honorable and believed to have a positive effect upon any children that might result.

In his fascinating profile of the Pirahã and a scientist who studies them, journalist John Colapinto reports that “though

[they] do not allow marriage outside their tribe, they have long kept their gene pool refreshed by permitting their women to sleep with outsiders.”12

Among the Siriono, it’s common for brothers to marry sisters, forming an altogether different sort of
Brady Bunch.
The marriage itself takes place without any sort of ceremony or ritual: no exchanges of property or vows, not even a feast.

Just rehang your hammocks next to the women’s and you’re married, boys.

This casual approach to what anthropologists call “marriage” is anything but unusual. Early explorers, whalers, and fur trappers of the frigid north found the Inuit to be jaw-droppingly hospitable hosts. Imagine their confused gratitude when they realized the village headman was offering his own bed (wife included) to the weary, freezing traveler. In fact, the welcome Knud Ramusen and others had stumbled into was a system of spouse exchange central to Inuit culture, with clear advantages in that unforgiving climate. Erotic exchange played an important role in linking families from distant villages in a durable web of certain aid in times of crisis. Though the harsh ecology of the Arctic dictated a much lower population density than the Amazon or even the Kalahari Desert, extra-pair sexual interaction helped cement bonds that offered the same insurance against unforeseen difficulties.

None of this behavior is considered adultery by the people involved. But then,
adultery
is as slippery a term as
marriage.

It’s not just thy neighbor’s wife who can lead a man astray, but thine own as well. A well-known moral guide of the Middle Ages, the
Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine),
written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.” The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love his wife with his judgment, not his affections.”13 Vincent of Beauvais would have enjoyed the company of Daniel Defoe (of London), famous still as the author of
Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe scandalized Britain in 1727 with the publication of a nonfiction essay with the catchy title
Conjugal Lewdness: or,
Matrimonial Whoredom.
Apparently that title was a bit much.

For a later edition, he toned it down to
A Treatise Concerning
the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.
This was no desert island adventure but a moralizing lecture on the physical and spiritual dangers of enjoying sex with one’s spouse.

Defoe would have appreciated the Nayar people, native to southern India, who have a type of marriage that doesn’t necessarily include any sexual activity at all, has no expectation of permanence, and no cohabitation—indeed the bride may never see the groom again once the marriage ritual has been performed. But since divorce is not permitted in this system, the stability of these marriages must be exemplary, according to the anthropological surveys.

As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universal: sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage.

Now consider the confusion created by the words
mate
and
mating.
A mate sometimes refers to a sexual partner in a given copulation; other times, it refers to a partner in a recognized marriage, with whom children are raised and all sorts of behavioral and economic patterns are established. To mate with someone could mean to join together “till death do us part,” or it could refer to nothing more than a quickie with

“Julio down by the schoolyard.” When evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women have different innate cognitive or emotional “modules,” which determine their reactions to a mate’s infidelity, we suppose that this refers to a mate in a long-term relationship.

But you never know. When we read, “Sex differences in humans’ mate-selection criteria exist and persist because the mechanisms that mediate mate evaluation differ for men and women,” and that “a tendency to become sexually aroused by visual stimuli constitutes part of the mate-selection process in men,”14 we scratch our heads, wondering whether this is a discussion of how people choose that special someone to introduce to Mom or merely the immediate, visceral response patterns heterosexual men often experience in the presence of an attractive woman. Given that men have shown these same response patterns in response to photographs, films, attractively attired mannequins, and a Noah’s ark of farm animals—none of which are available for marriage—it seems that this language must refer to sexual attraction alone. But we’re not really sure. At what point does a mate become a mate with whom to mate?

CHAPTER NINE

Paternity

Certainty:

The

Crumbling Cornerstone of

the Standard Narrative

According

to

anthropologist

Robert

Edgerton,

the

Marind-anim people of Melanesia believed: Semen was essential to human growth and development.

They also married quite young, and to assure the bride’s fertility, she had to be filled with semen. On her wedding night, therefore, as many as ten members of her husband’s lineage had sexual intercourse with the bride, and if there were more men than this in the lineage, they had intercourse with her the next night…. A similar ritual was repeated at various intervals throughout a woman’s life.1

Welcome to the family. Have you met my cousins?

Lest you think this a particularly unusual wedding celebration, it seems the ancestors of the Romans did something similar. Marriage was celebrated with a wedding orgy in which the husband’s friends had intercourse with the bride, with witnesses standing by. Otto Kiefer, in his 1934

Sexual Life in Ancient Rome,
explains that from the Roman perspective, “Natural and physical laws are alien and even opposed to the marriage tie. Accordingly, the woman who is entering marriage must atone to Mother Nature for violating her, and go through a period of free prostitution, in which she purchases