The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (30 page)

Wliy? In part because of the well-known consumer effect, whereby any product--shoes, car, food item, Wall Street stock--becomes more desirable if it is seen as being desired by others. And in part because of a logical outgrowth of polygyny as the long-standing, primitive human condition. Polygynous societies are not
uniformly
polygynous; after all, there are approximately equal numbers of men and women, so it is impossible for all men to be harem-keepers! Those who succeed are likely to be especially powerful,

WHAT ARE HUMAN BEINGS, "NATURALLY" ?
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physically or mentally well endowed, high in status, and in control of substantial resources (land, domestic animals, other forms of material wealth, social allies). Given this connection, it is not surprising that men who acquire a reputation for sexual access to many women are widely perceived to be high in status or control of resources, so that--by a process similar to that described earlier for the "sexy son hypothesis"--success can lead to success... for men.

By contrast, a reputation for promiscuity does far more harm to a Woman than to a man. Whereas a man who is sexually successful with many women is likely to be seen as just that--successful--a woman known to have "success" with many men is unlikely, as a result, to have enhanced her reputation. Instead, even in today's more sexually liberated and egalitarian climate, she is more likely to be known as a "slut."

A "fast" woman known to be an "easy lay" may well be popular among men seeking their own short-term sexual liaisons, but not among those looking for a committed relationship. This, of course, is part of the long-lamented double standard, whereby men and women are typically subjected to different sexual expectations. Willard Espy neatly expressed the curious double-bind implicit in the male approach to the double standard:

I love the girls who don't.

I love the girls who do.

But best, the girls who say, "I don't...

But maybe just for you.

Although such standards are undoubtedly heavily influenced by culture, the fact that they are generally cross-cultural--that is, found among a wide variety of human societies--strongly suggests that they are ultimately rooted in biology. Those roots probably sprout from the difference between men and women when it comes to confidence of genetic parentage. (The long-term reproductive success of men would not generally be well served by affiliating with women likely to cuckold them; men can therefore be expected to refrain from marrying women who have a reputation for being EPC-prone. By contrast, although a reputation for EPCs could indeed be a detriment to the desirability of a man, especially when monogamy is expected, it would do little to diminish a man's prospects if the expectation were polygyny.)

A woman with a reputation for sexual promiscuity may well be signaling that she is less discriminating, perhaps because she is unable to obtain a high-quality long-term mate. A woman's history of many short-term sexual partnerships may thus have precisely the opposite effect of a similar reputation for a man: It is likely to announce that she is of low quality and minimum long-term desirability.

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THE MYTH OF MONOGAMY

The case "for" human polygyny--not as an ethical good but simply as a biological "natural"--is further solidified by the findings of pri-matologists and anthropologists. Primatologists first. Monogamy had been reported for 10 to 15 percent of all primate species, as compared to 3 percent or so for mammals generally (and better than 90 percent for birds). As we have seen, reports of avian monogamy--and mammalian monogamy generally--have turned out to be greatly exaggerated ... like Mark Twain's comment on the rumor of his death. Similarly, field evidence, accumulated after thousands of hours of direct observations of elusive tropical primates in the wild, has been showing that primate monogamy, too, is not what it was cracked up to be. A recent review of the evidence has concluded, in fact, that only nine species of primates live in exclusive two-adult groups throughout their geographic range. (Some others appear to be monogamous under certain conditions only.) So there is no reason to think that human beings represent a mammal group that is unusually predisposed to monogamy.

As to human predispositions, the clearest evidence comes from how people actually lived before the cultural homogenization that came with Western imperialism and the Judeo-Christian ethic of monogamy. (Incidentally, even that ethic was not originally monogamous: King David had at least 6 wives. [2 Samuel 3: 2-5] and later took more [2 Samuel 5:13]. And Solomon is said to have had 700 wives as well as 300 concubines [1 Kings 11:1-3].)

Students of human society have long been divided as to how and why human beings ever arrived at monogamy. The nineteenth-century Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck maintained that monogamy came first and was subsequently embroidered upon as various other marriage systems were developed. By contrast, Lewis Morgan, father of American anthropology, argued that monogamy isn't primitive at all but is, rather, not only an advanced condition but, in fact, the pinnacle of human family structures. In this view, monogamy rests triumphantly, if not chastely, on top, like a man in the missionary position. This view is no longer widely held and has even been ridiculed, as in the following passage from the noted student of South Pacific cultures, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who noted that, according to Morgan,

Human society originated in complete sexual promiscuity, passed then through the consanguine family, the punaluan household, group marriage, polyandry, polygamy and what not, arriving only after a laborious process of 15 transformations in the happy haven of monogamous marriage.

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Malinowski further notes that, in this view,

The history of human marriage reads like a sensational and somewhat scandalous novel starting from a confused but interesting initial tangle, redeeming its unseemly course by a moral denouement, and leading as all proper novels should to marriage, in which "they lived happily after."

Whatever course the evolution of the human family may actually have traveled, it is clear that we didn't all arrive at the same place. And, moreover, it is also clear that monogamy was at best a minority destination. Of 185 human societies surveyed by anthropologist C. S. Ford and psychologist Frank Beach, only 29 (fewer than 16 percent) formally restricted their members to monogamy. Moreover, of these 29, fewer than one-third wholly disapproved of both premarital and extramarital sex. In 83 percent of the societies examined (154 out of 185), males were allowed multiple mate-ships--that is, polygyny or socially approved concubines rather than monogamy--if they could afford it.

The renowned anthropologist G. P. Murdoch, in his classic study
Social Structure,
found that of 238 different human societies around the globe, monogamy was enforced as the only acceptable marriage system in a mere; 43. Thus, before contact with the West, on average more than 80 percent of human societies were preferentially polygynous, meaning that male harem-keeping was something that most men sought to attain. It is safe to say that institutionalized monogamy was very rare.

Anthropologist Weston LaBarre concurs:

When it comes to polygyny, the cases are extraordinarily numerous. Indeed, polygyny is permitted (though in every case it may not be achieved) among all the Indian tribes of North and South America, with the exception of a few like the Pueblo. Polygyny is common too in both Arab and Negro groups in Africa and is by no means unusual either in Asia or in Oceania. Sometimes, of course, it is culturally-limited polygyny: Moslems may have only four wives under Koranic law--while the King of Ashanti in West Africa was strictly limited to 3,333 wives and had to be content with this number.

The greater the degree of "stratification" in most nontechnological societies, the greater the degree of polygyny. In other words, those who were very powerful and very
Wealthy
(the two have long been pretty much synonymous) were nearly always (1) men and, also, (2) possessors of large

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THE MYTH OF MONOGAMY

harems. Not uncommonly, harem size was precisely calibrated to power and wealth. "In Inca Peru, as probably everywhere," notes evolutionary anthropologist Laura Betzig of the University of Michigan,

the reproductive hierarchy dramatically paralleled the social hierarchy. Petty chiefs were by law allowed up to seven women; governors of a hundred were given eight women; leaders of a thousand got 15 women; chiefs over a million got 30 women. Kings had access to temples filled with women; no lord had less than 700 at his disposal. Typically, the "poor Indian" took whatever was left.

However, a preference for polygyny does not mean that it is always achieved. Even when multiple mateships are considered highly desirable, at any given time most men had no more than one mate. But in these situations, many men, if they lived long enough, still had more than one socially approved mate, since as they grew older, they typically got richer.

So much for polygyny. (Although a great deal more can be said!) For now, the point is that monogamy is under assault from many different directions, one being that it is not the "natural" human condition. On this, the evidence from anatomy, physiology, behavior, and anthropology can be considered decisive. Another point is that even when human monogamy occurs, it is shot through with extra-pair copulations, with the same penchant for EPCs that has been so persuasively documented of late for animals.

In their sample of 185 widely separated human societies, anthropologist Ford and psychologist Beach found that 39 percent not merely tolerated but actually approved extramarital sexual liaisons, generally of specific kinds. Incest was the only consistent sexual prohibition. The Toda people of India, for example, reputedly had no concept of adultery and even considered it immoral for one man to begrudge his wife to another. In many societies, extramarital sex was limited to certain categories, such as brothers and sisters-in-law among the Siriono of eastern Bolivia. These people were "monogamous," but men were permitted to have sexual intercourse with their wife's sisters and with their brothers' wives. Women, in turn, could have sex with their husband's brothers and their sisters' husbands. Among the Haida tribe, married men and women were generally permitted sexual relations with anyone belonging to the spouse's clan; at most, the husband or wife could "object softly." Usually he or she did not. In short, even when monogamy has been the legally instituted form of mateship, it often has not

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precluded certain specified extramarital relationships, at least among some human societies. Most of the world's peoples, throughout history and around the globe, have arranged things so that marriage and sexual exclusivity are not necessarily the same thing.

In addition to permitting extramarital sex among designated relatives, many otherwise monogamous societies have approved extramarital sex at special times, notably religious or harvest festivals such as the Brazilian Mardi Gras.

Next: polyandry. As a socially sanctioned institution, it is exceedingly rare. It is also a fascinating biological irony that although men stand to gain more--in terms of producing offspring--from multiple copulations, women are physiologically capable of "having" more sex than men. Add to this the peculiar anthropological fact that nearly all social systems are structured the other way around. In his
Letters from the Earth,
Mark Twain had great fun with this paradox. Here is Twain's Devil reporting his discoveries, after visiting our planet:

Now there you have a sample of man's "reasoning powers," as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can't overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be restricted to one man.

Now if you or any other really intelligent person were arranging the fairnesses, and justices between man and woman, you would give the man a one-fiftieth interest in one woman, and the woman a harem. Now wouldn't you? Necessarily, I give you my word, this creature ... has arranged it exactly the other way.

Twain's Devil is absolutely right: One man is less capable of sexually satisfying many women than one woman is of satisfying many men. Nonetheless, from a biological perspective the difference between eggs and sperm proclaim that it is more logical for one man to mate with multiple women than for one woman to mate with several men. And, in this case, evolutionary logic has won out.

Group marriages are even scarcer than polyandry. Perhaps the most flexible matrimonial system was found among the Kaingang of southeast Brazil: 8 percent of Kaingang marriages were truly group affairs, involving two or more men mated to two or more women; 14 percent involved one woman

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married to several men; in 18 percent, one man was polygynously mated to several women; and 60 percent were monogamous. But clearly it would be misleading to call the Kaingang "monogamous," even though monogamy was the most frequent pattern. Other arrangements were officially permitted, and, in fact, polygyny was preferred (at least by men).

Even among those societies that can legitimately be described as monogamous--that institutionalize marriage between one man and one woman-- sexual relations between husband and wife are less exclusive than a Western Judeo-Christian perspective might anticipate. For example, among avowedly monogamous societies, about 10 percent actually permit relatively free extramarital sexual intercourse. Among the Lepcha of the Himalayas, for example, a husband is expected to object only if his wife has sexual relations with another man in his presence! About 40 percent of ostensibly monogamous human societies permit extramarital sex under special conditions (certain holidays) or with particular individuals (such as the husband's brothers), and only about 50 percent prohibit extramarital coitus altogether. Among these restrictive societies, the rules apply most tightly to wives, much less so to husbands: Only a very small percentage prohibit extramarital sexuality on the part of men.