Woman: An Intimate Geography (60 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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nor dares to suggest that change is possible, nor dares to suggest that love and lust are not the characterological property of either sex.
There is so much left to be understood. Why do women have concealed ovulation, anyway? Why don't their buttocks turn bright red when they're fertile, as they do on a rhesus monkey? A standard proposal is that by keeping her ovulatory status a secret, a woman invites the long-term investment of a man and lures him to stay around day after day; and as I've said above, a man might be compelled to do so, in the hope of finally hitting a bull's-eye, a viable egg. But if the woman needs the man's extended investment, and if she can extract that investment only by disguising the current status of her fecundity, we might be surprised at the extreme visibility of the human
pregnancy
, which is more visible than that of any other female primate, particularly given the hair loss that has exposed the belly to public scrutiny. Even if a man stayed around for a few months until conception occurred, her pregnancy could be his cue that it was time to move on, which means that the woman would lose his help just when she needed him most, if need him she did. Men appear to be very tuned in to the state of a woman's waistline. Several cross-cultural studies have shown that men have a preference for women with a waist that is at least 30 percent smaller than her hips. The ratio is what matters, not the absolute body size. The woman may have hips as wide as a hippo's, but if her waist is 30 percent narrower by comparison, she still rates as comely. A cinched-in waist is a feature unique to women. Men have waists and hips of similar circumference. So too do other female primates, which is part of the reason that their pregnancies are not terribly obvious. In women, the surest disruption to an alluring waist-to-hip ratio is not getting fat, for many women deposit their fat on their hips and thighs rather than on their bellies, but being with child. What is the good of having cryptic ovulation for the purpose of attracting the sustained attentions of a man if a woman then goes ahead and gives him a laughably easy visual clue that his job is done, he's impregnated her and can move on to narrower pastures?
Perhaps a woman's body isn't designed to attract the long-term investment of a mate. A number of theorists have suggested that cryptic ovulation lends a woman a certain amount of control over her mating

 

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strategies, by making it more difficult for a man to monopolize her fecundity than it would be if she advertised her status during the few days when the egg is willing. A man attempting to claim exclusive rights to her must now attempt to guard the woman over an interval of weeks or months rather than days, and since the attention of even a vigilant male is likely to lapse now and again as the weeks pass, the woman can be freed to wander, thereby gaining whatever benefits philandering might bring. She can be freed to mate with several local males, thus confusing the issue of paternity and lessening the chance that one of them will commit infanticide, or increasing the total intake of male help for her offspring.
Who knows the reason for cryptic ovulation, or any other salient feature of human sexuality? I don't but neither do the evolutionary psychologists. They just sound as though they do, and disagreeing with them is like trying to tell a carnivore you're taking away its meat. Men want sex with many partners more than women do, and women want love more than men do. These are the truths that we hold to be self-evident. But they are not self-evident when you run them through the meat grinder of analysis. Why in the name of Demeter should a woman be prone to fall in love and hitch her future to the commitment of one man and forsake the possible contributions of other prospects if men are by nature so prone to abandon her? The answer is, they're probably not. They're probably prone to be opportunistic by nature, which is the nature of most intelligent, highly gregarious creatures. Human nature, in other words.
If men today appear to be more interested in all manner of sexual stimuli than women are, if they are the major consumers of pornography and prostitution, and if they say in surveys they'd like to dabble around with as many gals as will approach them on the street with a clipboard in hand, we gals can only reply, It's a man's world, designed for the pleasures of men; and on those rare occasions when a female-friendly sexual nerve is tapped, females respond with crows and roars of hunger and delight. "Why are women so seldom whipped up into an onanistic frenzy by pictures of men?" Robert Wright asks. Except when they are. For example, Raul Julia, may he not be resting in peace, was in the mid-1970s one of the great sex symbols for New York's womankind. A poster of his face, with his dark, knowing, heavy-lidded eyes and his

 

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full, beestung lips, was plastered everywhere, advertising the Broadway production of
The Threepenny Opera
, in which he played Mack the Knife. I was a teenager, and I remember stopping and staring at the poster frequently, feeling lust in my parts, and I remember talking about the poster to my friends, and I guess everybody must have been talking about that poster, because one of the alternative newspapers ran a story with the headline "Why Every Woman in New York Wants to Fuck Raul Julia." More recently, the actor Jimmy Smits has played a similar sex-puppy role, and the producers of
NYPD Blue
must have realized as much, for they gave us not one but several episodes in which his naked butt was displayed.
Oh, opportunity. Bill Clinton has affairs; Hillary Clinton does not (or so we're told). The funny thing is, it looks like Bill didn't always have to work that hard for his sex; sex had a way of finding him. (He's become a female chimpanzee!) Were handsome young interns hurling themselves at the first lady? Or were they intimidated rather than aroused by her power? Former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder has observed ruefully that powerful middle-aged women are not exactly a turn-on for men. We can't deny that young people are as a rule prettier than older people, and if an older man can attract a younger woman, we can see why he might be tempted to indulge. But if the older woman is unable to manage likewise, her innate desire and temptation have nothing to do with it. Assuming that our sexual drive is adapted to maximize our fitness at the time when such fitness counts for women, during the years of their peak fertility, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight then the basic machinery of that drive would be our gift or burden for our entire adult life. In other words, even though a woman of forty-five is considerably less fertile than a woman of twenty-two, she still feels, in some cloaked part of her soul, like a greedy young woman. One of the commonest symptoms of neurodegenerative disease and stroke in older women is the release of sexual inhibitions. The women lose their "dignity." They become dirty old ladies. Lynn Johnston gave a rare voice to an old lady's lewdness in her comic strip
For Better or for Worse
when she showed an elderly woman, her health failing, being lifted from her bed into a stretcher by two strapping young ambulance workers. "My, you two boys are strong and handsome, too!" the woman says with a grin, at which her middle-aged daughter exclaims,

 

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"Mom!" In the next panel, the old woman's thought balloon is "I've always wanted to make passes at handsome young men and now I'm finally free to do so." Freed by dint of grave illness; the character died soon afterward.
We don't have to argue that men and women are exactly the same, or that humans are meta-evolutionary beings, removed from nature and slaves to culture, to reject the perpetually regurgitated model of the coy female and the ardent male. Conflicts of interest are always among us, and the outcomes of those conflicts are interesting, more interesting by far than what the ultra-evolutionary psychology line has handed us. Patricia Gowaty, of the University of Georgia, sees conflict between males and females as inevitable and pervasive. She calls it sexual dialectics. "Human mating systems are characterized by conflict from start to finish," she says. Karl Marx saw workers and managers as locked in an eternal struggle over who controls the means of production. The thesis of sexual dialectics is that females and males vie for control over the means of
re
production. Those means are the female body, for there is as yet no such beast as the parthenogenetic man. Women are under selective pressure to maintain control over their reproduction, to choose with whom they will mate and with whom they will not to exercise female choice. If they make bad mating decisions, they will have less viable offspring than if they are clever in their choices. Men are under selective pressure to make sure they're chosen or, barring that, to subvert female choice and coerce the female to mate against her will. "But once you have this basic dialectic set in motion, it's going to be a constant push-me, pull-you," Gowaty says. "That dynamism cannot possibly result in a unitary response, the caricatured coy woman and ardent man. Instead there are going to be some coy, reluctantly mating males and some ardent females, and any number of variations in between.
"All of these strategies and counterstrategies are going on in real time, so that we have responses associated with learning and experience rather than as a result of coded genetic modules," Gowaty says. "The ecological problems that one sex has to solve are produced by the other sex. Nothing is fixed. Until we incorporate that notion, of the dynamic and dialectic pressures underlying human mating systems, we'll never

 

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get to the real meat of human behavior, and we'll continue repeating the extreme, and extremely boring, parodies.
"I think that female choice has to give some viability benefits that is, a female will choose to mate with a male whom she believes, consciously or otherwise, will confer some advantage on her and her offspring. If that's the case, then her decision is contingent on what
she
brings to the equation. For example, some theorists talk about the 'good genes' model of mate selection, the idea that a female looks for a male who exhibits signs of having a superior genotype. The 'good genes' model leads to oversimplified notions that there is a 'best male' out there, a top-of-the-line hunk whom all females would prefer to mate with if they had the wherewithal. But in the viability model, a female brings her own genetic complement to the equation, with the result that what looks good genetically to one woman might be a clash of colors for another."
Maybe the man's immune system doesn't complement her own, for example, Gowaty proposes. There's evidence that the search for immune variation is one of the subtle factors driving mate selection, which may be why we care about how our lovers smell; immune molecules may be volatilized and released in sweat, hair, the oil on our skin. We are each of us a chemistry set, and each of us has a distinctive mix of reagents. "What pleases me might not please somebody else," Gowaty says. "There is no one-brand great male out there. We're not all programmed to look for the alpha male and only willing to mate with the little guy or the less aggressive guy because we can't do any better. Some women might find it exciting to be with the little guy. He might be a fabulous lover. She might like him for all the subliminal reasons of chemistry that we find hard to articulate. But the propaganda gives us a picture of the right man and the ideal woman, and the effect of the propaganda is insidious. It becomes self-reinforcing. People who don't fit the model think, 'I'm weird, I'll have to change my behavior.'"
It is this danger, that the ostensible "discoveries" of evolutionary psychology will be used as propaganda, that makes the enterprise so disturbing. And evolutionary psychologists sometimes do dispense advice. Robert Wright is persuaded that the madonna-whore dichotomy is "rooted firmly in the male mind." Not just his mind, or the minds of his

 

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like-minded friends, but
the
male mind. Thus he gently and generously advises women who want to get married to abide by the old verities and resist the sexual overtures of a suitor, lest their easy capitulation ''stifle any budding feelings of love" the man may have had for them. Consciously or unconsciously, he says, men put women to the test. They try to get women into bed, and if the women agree too readily, that's it, the women are tramps and can't be trusted. "Women who would like a husband and children have been known to try the Emma Wedgwood plan for landing a man," he writes, referring to Mrs. Charles Darwin. "In its most extreme form, the plan runs as follows: if you want to hear vows of eternal devotion right up to your wedding day and if you want to make sure there
is
a wedding day don't sleep with your man until the honeymoon." But where is the evidence that women who "give in too easily" do not get married, while those who remain chaste do? There is no such evidence, and Wright admits as much. Nevertheless, the principle of delayed gratification is a sound one, he insists. "Some women have found that a move of
some distance
toward austerity may make sense" (emphasis in original). But how long is this "some distance toward austerity" supposed to be? What will it take to calm a man's cuckold-control monitor? No sex until the third date? The third month of dating? A year? Oh dear. Every man has one, it seems, but the sizes are all different. What is a millennial gal to do? Maybe she should just ask the fellow. How long is it, sir? How long, oh lord, how long?
In fact, women who start trudging down the path of austerity for the sake of proving to men their "goodness," chastity, and marriageability may find their Cinderella slippers splattered with all sorts of unpleasant effluvia. A full concordance with the familiar portrait of female modesty may demand other behavioral concessions beyond keeping our legs tightly crossed for example, not seeming overtly clever. Smart girls have always been told that they should try to hide their intelligence, that men don't find bright, outspoken women terribly appealing. Could the man's fear of female intelligence be linked to his ostensibly innate fidelity surveillance equipment, reflecting his worry that a shrewd woman will figure out how to cheat on him the moment his back is turned? I have no data to support this proposition. But it makes sense, doesn't it? So if you're going to start advising a woman to act virtuously, even when she doesn't feel particularly virtuous, why not go the dis-

 

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