The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (28 page)

On the other hand, even systems of ostensible monogamy--as found in modern Western societies--often allow successful men, married or not, to have additional sex partners, a situation typically not condoned for married women. There are also other ways of maintaining the legal form of monogamy while circumventing it nonetheless. Of these, the most common pattern is serial monogamy, in which powerful or wealthy men divorce their wives and take up with younger (more fertile and physically attractive) women as their earlier wives grow older. The movie
The First Wives Club
depicted the situation of women deserted by husbands seeking younger spouses as their financial success enabled them to accumulate a kind of harem, albeit serially instead of simultaneously. The question arises: Is serial monogamy, wherein powerful, successful men abandon their wives, more humane than polygyny, wherein they might simply add additional mates? (Serial monogamy is also practiced, on occasion, by wealthy and successful women, and although it appears to be less frequent than its male counterpart, no data are available.)

To be sure, various coercive causes of human monogamy are also less than humane. There is, for example, the fear of social ostracism or--in the case of traditional Roman Catholics--fear of excommunication if they elect to terminate a marital union considered sacred by the Church in order to marry someone else. There can also be fear of physical injury inflicted by a "wronged" spouse: The most common cause of one spouse killing another is sexual jealousy, specifically a man's suspicion that his mate has been unfaithful. One must wonder how many marriages are kept together by fear.

Aside from fear of death, battering, ostracism, and damnation, there is also fear of abandonment, poverty, and vulnerability. One must also ask, accordingly, how many marriages are kept together by a woman's fear that if she leaves her husband--especially if she has dependent children and may also have sacrificed her own economic prospects for her husband's--she is liable to have a terribly difficult time making ends meet, particularly if she

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is no longer young and attractive. The alternative is a kind of long-standing sexual exchange, almost an inverted prostitution, whereby women exchange fidelity--or, at least, the appearance of fidelity--for resources, especially a decent standard of living and protection. When it comes to the evolution of monogamy, however, the phenomenon to be explained is less female fidelity than male willingness to "stop at one." (After all, part of the burden of this book is that fidelity--whether male or female--is more myth than reality.)

And, finally, there is the old chestnut: staying together for the sake of the children. It sounds trite, but is nonetheless real for thousands, probably millions, of couples. Insofar as the benefit of shared parenting is a major cause of monogamy, it may be altogether understandable--if profoundly unro-mantic--that this benefit is often responsible for maintaining monogamy as well... for better or worse.

Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, reports that there are many isolated pretechnological societies in which paternity is unclear, suggesting that maybe men get something else from monogamy. Among the Bari of Colombia and Venezuela, "partible paternity"--the idea that a child can have several fathers--is a common belief: 24 percent of Bari children and 63 percent of Ache children (Paraguay) were said to have multiple fathers. And kids were better off with multiple fathers than with just one: 80 percent of the former survived to age 15 versus only 64 percent of those with a "single father." This finding also supports Sara Hrdy's theory, described earlier, that female sexual receptivity to multiple males (and concealed ovulation) is a strategy to keep males uncertain as to paternity. Hrdy sees this as a way of avoiding infanticide, but it might also help generate tendencies to provide dependent children with food and other crucial resources, as well as defending them if need be.

Hawkes also points out that among the Ache of Paraguay and the Hadza of northern Tanzania, different families are likely to receive equal portions of meat brought back from the hunt. This, also, doesn't fit the "bargain hypothesis" of monogamy, under which a successful hunter's wife--and her offspring--should get to hog the proceeds. Hawkes has found, however, that successful Hadza hunters have younger wives, have more EPC partners, and father more children than do the less successful hunters. Their offspring also have a higher survival rate, perhaps because of better nutrition or because successful hunters got to select more competent women as wives (and, thus, mothers). According to Hawkes, monogamy may have arisen as a result of "negotiations among males," whereby access to women is divided up and harmful fighting is avoided.

Nonetheless, as we shall see in the next chapter, there is overwhelming evidence that monogamy is not "natural" to human beings. If, then, monogamy is a rather peculiar and derived state, why has it been victorious ... at

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least in official doctrine, if not in the actual observance? A simple answer is that it is the avowed marital system of Western countries, whose military, economic, and cultural power have simply imposed Western preferences on the rest of the world. But this ducks the question: Why is monogamy approved--in theory if not in practice--in these Western countries?

To some extent, it may be a little-appreciated example of the triumph of democracy and "equal opportunity," at least for men. Polygyny, as already mentioned, is a condition of elitism, in which a relatively small number of fortunate, ruthless, or uniquely qualified men get to monopolize more than their share of the available mates. With monogamy, by contrast, even the most successful individual cannot have more than one legal mate; as a result, even the least successful is likely to obtain a spouse as well. If it requires some suppression of our tendencies for multiple mates, monogamy offers in its place an enhanced prospect of there being a mate for each of us.

The early evolutionary history of human mating systems is unclear, but here is a possible quick-and-dirty scenario: Our early ancestors roamed the Pleistocene African savannas in small bands. Most current hunter-gatherer human societies are monogamous (although with adultery relatively common). Only a small number of men--typically 5 to 15 percent--are active polygynists, and even then, it is extremely rare for one man to have more than a few wives. With a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, it is almost impossible for one man to obtain a monopoly of resources, or even a preponderance: Luck is often involved in hunting, for example. Besides, when game and gathered vegetable foods are at issue, it is difficult to store excess. Then came agriculture, providing the opportunity for some men to own large amounts of land and, with it, large surpluses. The rich were able to get richer yet. Out of this came enhanced competition as well as the prospect of enhanced success-- especially more wives;--for the winners. In a sense, maybe Rousseau wasn't altogether wrong, after all, when he suggested that people were primitively egalitarian, with this Eden disrupted by the invention of private property!

In any event, with increased wealth concentrated in the hands of a few came the prospect of additional wives. Polygyny flowered--and not just among early farmers: The same applied, if anything more so, to pastoralist societies, nearly all of which were traditionally polygynous. Even today, large herds of cattle, goats, camels, and so forth equal large wealth, which equals large numbers of wives for the "haves."

Polygyny was evidently widespread in the Near East, as reflected by numerous Old Testament references to the many wives of the early Israelite kings. And polygyny continued to be the favored practice in much of the world, especially in what anthropologists and sociologists call "highly stratified societies," those in which there are substantial economic and social differences between the poorest and the wealthiest. As expected, polygyny has

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long been a preferred system for wealthy, powerful men, continuing up until modern times in India, China, and Africa. Western Europe, however, was a notable exception; even though there has long been plenty of disparity in wealth between the richest and poorest Europeans, these people moved rapidly toward what has been called "socially imposed monogamy."

Opinion is divided as to why. One possibility is that by the Industrial Revolution, most people (i.e., workers) were once again more or less equal in possessions. Of course, successful captains of industry became fabulously wealthy; the point is that even the average wage-slave--although badly off compared to the factory owners--was capable of supporting a family, at least minimally.

Monogamy may thus be, at least in part, a
result
of male-male equality; even more so, however, it is a
cause
of equality, a great reproductive leveler (for men)--at least in biological terms. The possibility therefore arises that, historically, monogamy arose in Europe as an implicit trade-off. The wealthy and powerful would in effect have agreed to give up their near-monopoly on women in return for obtaining greater social involvement on the part of middle- and lower-class men, who, if reproductively excluded, might have refused to participate in the social contract necessary for the establishment of large, stable social units. According to this view, these men were offered a level--or, at least, a somewhat more level--reproductive playing field in exchange for their cooperation in dealing with internal or external threats.

Male-female reproductive conflict, whatever its degree, pales in comparison with the intensity of male-male conflict, which, in turn, may have induced powerful men to accept restrictions (however unwillingly) in order to enlist the aid of their less fortunate but more numerous competitors. And so, instead of bread and circuses, the hoi polloi may have been offered monogamous marriage. In any event, among Europeans in particular, Christianity became especially active in promoting monogamy and imposing it on the secular elite.

The foregoing explanation fails to account for the fact that many highly stratified polygynous societies--such as those of the Incas, Aztecs, Indians, and Chinese--also maintained an extraordinary amount of social cohesion despite an intense degree of non-monogamous reproductive despotism. This criticism is not devastating, however, since the theory relating European monogamy to enhanced social integration simply claims that the connection may be significant, not that it is necessary or exclusive.

Even Bill Gates is legally forced to be monogamous ... although successful sports and rock stars often have multiple sexual liaisons, and, for all we know, so does Mr. Gates himself. Bill Clinton, too, is legally forced to be

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monogamous ... although powerful men are typically inclined to seek additional pairings (if only briefly) and--because of the nature of female sexual psychology--are generally able to find willing partners. It is easy, as well, to imagine queen bees such as Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, or Oprah Winfrey being in demand--and command--as polyandrous females ... except for the legal restraints. The point is that although social ideology and legal restrictions cannot change human nature, they can and do impose egalitar-ianism in several forms: Everyone is supposed to be equal before the law, equally deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and entided to--or bound by--monogamy.

CHAPTER SIX

What Are Human Beings, 'Naturally"?

thel Merman used to belt out a song that advised "doing what comes

naturally." (As you might expect, it was about sex.) It is easier to

1
J
talk--or sing--about what is "natural" than to pin it down, especially when the subject is human beings. After all, people could never, in a sense, do anything truly zmnatural: We cannot survive without air, walk upside down on the ceiling, or grow additional heads. At the same time, everything we do, everything we are, is a consequence not only of our internal "human nature" but also of our experiences. There is no way to know for certain what human beings would be like without the influence of the environment, since a person without an environment could not survive, not to mention behave in interesting and meaningful ways.

Nonetheless, people keep trying to tease apart the roles of experience, environment, culture, social tradition, and so forth, hoping to get a glimpse of what "naked, unaccommodated man" (as Shakespeare's Lear put it) is like. The devout King James of England--who commissioned what became the most famous translation of the Bible--is said to have arranged for a few children to be reared in complete isolation from any spoken language, so as to ascertain the "natural" human language, uncontaminated by the prompting of others; James apparently hoped that the unfortunate subjects would spontaneously begin speaking Hebrew! They didn't. (Not even Aramaic.)

Nonetheless, the search for bona fide human "naturalness" goes on. Underlying much of the research of anthropologists has been the unspoken