The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (31 page)

In a number of human groups, men routinely exchanged sexual relations with each other's wives. Among certain Eskimo, Cumana, Araucay, and Crow Indians, honored guests were permitted to sleep with the host's wife, and the Siberian Chukchee established regularized patterns of wife-exchange, so that a traveler, far from home, could be guaranteed a warm bed and pleasant accommodations. (Nothing has been reported regarding the wives' attitudes toward this system.)

Similar arrangements were set up by the Mende people of Sierra Leone. In this case, wives were supposedly encouraged by their husbands to take lovers; these, in turn, were then expected to provide manual labor to help the family.

Aside from cases in which the rules of marriage allow for sexual relations with persons other than the husband or wife, extramarital sex--even when socially disapproved--sometimes carries only mild penalties; for many of the world's people, it is closer to a misdemeanor than a felony. According to anthropologist Ruth Benedict, for example, the Pueblo people of New Mexico

do not meet adultery with violence.... [T]he husband does not regard it as a violation of his rights. If she is unfaithful, it is normally a first step in changing husbands, and their institutions make this sufficiently easy so that it is a really tolerable procedure. They do not contemplate violence.

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Wives are often as moderate, if not more so, when their husbands are known to be unfaithful. As long as the situation is not unpleasant enough for relations to be broken off, it is frequently ignored, as with this case among the Zuni:

One of the young husbands of the household ... had been carrying on an extramarital affair that became bruited about all over the pueblo. The family ignored the matter completely. At last the white trader, a guardian of morals, expostulated with the wife. The couple had been married a dozen years and had three children; the wife belonged to an important family. The trader set forth with great earnestness the need of making a show of authority and putting an end to her husband's outrageous conduct. "So," his wife said, "I didn't wash his clothes. Then he knew that I knew that everybody knew, and he stopped going with that girl." It was effective, but not a word was passed. There were no outbursts, no recriminations, not even an open recognition of the crisis.

The Pueblo are what Benedict termed "Apollonian"--after the Greek god Apollo, deity of the sun, music, medicine, and reason--in that they are reluctant to show violent emotions. Divorce is readily available to the Pueblo people, and, in fact, a wife who remains with her husband after he has had numerous affairs is considered faintly ridiculous, because her perseverance is seen to indicate that she must really love him!

By contrast to the Apollonian Pueblo, anthropologist Benedict described so-called "Dionysian" cultures, in which violent emotion is permitted, even encouraged. For example, on the island of Dobu, off the coast of New Guinea, adultery is frequent, but it is also cause for outrage and jealousy: "Faithfulness is not expected between husband and wife, and no Dobuan will admit that a man and woman are ever together even for the shortest interval except for sexual purposes." The Dobuan husband, according to Benedict, is suspicious even when his wife goes briefly into the bushes to urinate. And for good reason:

Adultery within this group is a favorite pastime. It is celebrated constantly in mythology, and its occurrence in every village is known to everyone from early childhood. It is a matter of profoundest concern to the outraged spouse. He (it is as likely to be she) bribes the children for information, his own or any in the village. If it is the husband, he breaks his wife's cooking pots. If it is the wife, she maltreats her husband's dog. He quarrels with her violently.... He throws himself out of the village in a fury. As a last resort of impotent rage he

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attempts suicide by one of several traditional methods, no one of which is surely fatal.

As we shall see, however, even the Dionysian Dobu are mild in their response to adultery compared with many of the world's peoples.

The double standard is widespread in most societies, with men permitted far greater freedom than women to engage in sex outside marriage. After reviewing 116 different human societies, anthropologist Gwen Broude reported that whereas 63 permit extramarital sex by husbands, only 13 permit it for wives. In addition, 13 had a "permissive single standard," allowing extramarital sexual activities equally to both husband and wife, whereas 27 engaged in a "restrictive single standard," prohibiting husband and wife equally from engaging in any extramarital affairs. Similarly, Laura Betzig evaluated the causes of marital dissolution worldwide, concluding that whereas there are many causes--childlessness, economic failures, sexual incompatibility--adultery is "the single most common cause of divorce" and that infidelity by the wife is far more likely to be cited than is infidelity by the husband.

If a female mammal becomes inseminated because of an out-of-pair-bond copulation, she is no less the mother of the offspring produced; but her deceived mate--who may nonetheless provide food, defense, baby-sitting, and so forth--is very much less the father! So it is anticipated that, for most living things, not only will males be more eager for EPCs, but they will also be more intolerant of the same behavior by their mates. The stage is therefore set for the double standard, wherein sexual expectations differ for men and women, as they typically do for males and females of other species.

Friedrich Engels, in
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
suggested that the human family "is based upon the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity." In a famous oration known as
Against Neaira,
the Greek orator Demosthenes stated the sexist bias of society in his day: "Mistresses we keep for pleasure, concubines for daily attendance upon our persons, and wives to bear us legitimate children and to be our housekeepers." Of these various "uses" of women, the production of legitimate children seems to have been especially important, and it may go a long way in explaining the reason male-dominated society has been so persistent in institutionalizing the double standard.

But
Homo sapiens
is a peculiar creature, influenced by many things beyond its biology. Given any biological predispositions in a particular direction, however slight, we often extend these inclinations by cultural prescriptions and injunctions, sometimes even hyperextending them far beyond

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any reasonable scope provided by biological underpinnings. The sexual double standard may well be a "cultural hyperextenson" of this sort, an instance of human societies taking a biological molehill and exaggerating it into a mountain of male-female differences.

aving looked, although briefly, at the diversity of human mateships,

what can we conclude? For one thing, it seems undeniable that

JL JL
human beings have evolved as mildly polygynous creatures whose "natural" mating system probably involved one man mated, when possible, to more than one woman. It is also clear than even in societies that institutionalized some form of polygyny, monogamy was nonetheless frequent, although, for men at least, this typically meant making the best of a bad situation. (Worse yet was bachelorhood.) There is also great diversity, however, in the patterns of monogamy, ranging from frequent extramarital sexuality, condoned and sometimes even encouraged by the social code, to occasional affairs, frowned upon but not taken very seriously, to rigid monogamy, jealously and violently enforced ... although even here it seems likely that the rules of absolute sexual fidelity are often violated, in secret.

Certainly there is no evidence, either from biology, primatology, or anthropology, that monogamy is somehow "natural" or "normal" for human beings. There is, by contrast, abundant evidence that people have long been prone to have multiple sexual partners.

In a sense, however, even if human beings were more rigidly controlled by their biology, it would be absurd to claim that monogamy is unnatural or abnormal, especially since it was doubtless the way most people lived, most of the time ... even while men strived for polygyny and women (as well as men) engaged in EPCs. This is clearest for men, if only because polygyny has often been institutionalized--and, thus, proudly displayed by the male "winners"--whereas EPCs among
Homo sapiens,
as among most living things, have been much more covert, because of the costs of disclosure. Nonetheless, male philandering would never have become part of our biological heritage if women did not permit some men, at least on occasion, to succeed in their quest for EPC. WTiich is to say that, whether officially polygynous or monogamous, women--perhaps no less than men--have
long
sought extramarital lovers.

Human beings are enormously flexible creatures, at least socially. They are capable of living a variety of lives depending on the demands and expectations of the society in which they live. To some extent, then, human inclinations may be able to fit whatever matrimonial pattern happens to exist in the society they happen to experience.

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But, on the other hand, mild polygyny is likely so much a part of the primitive human condition that it is reflected not only in our anatomy, physiology, and development--not to mention the anthropological record--but also in our behavioral tendencies. If this is true, then the marriage bed may be a procrustean bed as well, insofar as it denies the possibility of nonexclusive sexual relationships. Deprived of both socially approved polygyny and EPCs, perhaps it is not surprising that many people, throughout history and around the globe, have chafed at lifetime monogamy and often circumvented it.

What makes human beings unusual among other mammals is not our penchant for polygyny but the fact that most people practice at least some form of monogamy. At the same time,
Homo sapiens
is quite prone to sexual jealousy, which strongly suggests that monogamy has long been unstable.

Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is an interesting case. Reich insisted in his work and his writings that monogamy was an unhealthy state for human beings, undermining their sexual health and stunting their emotional lives. Yet his wife reports that Reich was often insanely jealous:

Always, in times of stress, one of Reich's very human failings came to the foreground, and that was his violent jealousy. He would always emphatically deny that he was jealous, but there is no getting away from the fact that he would accuse me of infidelity with any man who came to his mind as a possible rival, whether colleague, friend, local shopkeeper, or casual acquaintance.

Among animals, male-male competition is the centerpiece of the most consistently aggressive and often violent actions that take place within a species, including the great skull-splitting clashes of bighorn sheep and the ferocious natural battles that span the animal kingdom from whales to dungflies. Small wonder, then, that even some of the most perceptive, avowedly liberated, and otherwise civilized members of
Homo sapiens
sometimes "lose it" when it comes to sexual jealousy and male-male competition.

Even Sigmund Freud, so insightful--and sometimes fanciful--with regard to unconscious mental processes, was afflicted with jealous rages. In one of his many hundreds of letters to his fiancee, Freud noted his reaction upon finding out that she had once encouraged another suitor to express his affection for her: "When the memory of your letter to Fritz ... comes back to me I lose all control of myself, and had I the power to destroy the whole world ... I would do so without hesitation."

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Freud later proposed that sibling rivalry developed as a result of the older child's fundamental jealousy at being displaced in the mother's affections by a younger one. His interpretation may be more appropriate if applied to sexual jealousy, which in fact is more aptly described in the following passage devoted to sibling rivalry:

What the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother.