Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (17 page)

Married couples (with and without children) accounted for roughly 84 percent of all American households in 1930, but the latest figure is just under 50 percent, while the number of unmarried couples living together has mushroomed from about 500,000 in 1970 to more than ten times that number in 2008.

Before Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), the most respected and influential anthropologist of his day, declared the issue settled, there was plenty of debate over whether or not the mother-father-child triad was, in fact, the universal atomic unit of human social organization. Malinowski scoffed at Morgan’s notion that societies could ever have been organized along nonnuclear lines, writing: These actors are
obviously
three in number at the beginning—the two parents and their offspring…. This unquestionably correct principle has become … the starting point for a new interpretation of Morgan’s hypothesis of a primitive communal marriage. [They are] fully aware that group-marriage

implies

group-parenthood.

Yet

group-parenthood [is] an almost
unthinkable
hypothesis….

This conclusion has led to such capital howlers as that “the clan marries the clan and begets the clan” and that “the clan, like the family, is a reproductive group” [emphasis added].12

“Unquestioningly

correct

principle?”

“Unthinkable

hypothesis?” “Capital howlers?” Malinowski seems to have been personally offended that Morgan had dared to doubt the universality and naturalness of the sanctified nuclear family structure.

Meanwhile, within a few blocks of the London classrooms where he lectured, untold numbers of infants whose existence threatened to expose the colossal error at the heart of Malinowski’s “unquestioningly correct principle” were being sacrificed, quite literally, in foundling hospitals. The situation was no less horrific in the United States. In 1915, a doctor named Henry Chapin visited ten foundling hospitals and found that in nine of them, every child died before the age of two.
Every
child.13 This dark fate awaited inconvenient children born throughout Europe. In her memoir of middle-class life in early twentieth–century Germany, for instance, Doris Drucker describes the village “Angel-maker,” who received babies from unwed mothers and “starved the little children in her care to death,” while the unwed, now childless mother was hired out as a wet nurse to upper-class families.14 How efficient.

Horrifying as it is to contemplate, widespread infanticide was not limited to Malinowski’s day. For centuries, millions of European children had been passed through discreet revolving boxes set into the walls of foundling hospitals. These boxes were designed to protect the anonymity of the person leaving the child, but they offered scant protection to the infant. The survival rate in those institutions was little better than if the revolving boxes had opened directly into a crematorium’s furnace. Far from being places of healing, these were government- and church-approved slaughterhouses where children whose existence might have raised inconvenient questions about the “naturalness” of the nuclear family were disposed of in a form of industrialized infanticide.15

In his book
Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of
History,
historian Robert S. McElvaine gets off a few “capital howlers” of his own, writing, “the general trend in human evolution is
undeniably
toward pair bonding and lasting families. Pair bonding (albeit often with some backsliding, especially by men) and the family are,” he insists, “the exceptions notwithstanding, among the traits that
characterize
the human species
[emphasis added].”16

Sure, forget all the backsliding and the many exceptions, and you’ve got a real strong case!

Despite

overwhelming

evidence

to

the

contrary,

Malinowski’s position remains deeply embedded in both scientific and popular assumptions about family structure. In fact, the whole architecture of what qualifies as
family
in Western society is based on Malinowski’s insistence that each child everywhere has always had just one father.

But if Malinowski’s position has won the day, why is poor Morgan’s intellectual body still being regularly disinterred for further insult? Anthropologist Laura Betzig opens a paper on conjugal dissolution (failed marriage) by noting that Morgan’s “fantasy [of group marriage] … expired on encountering the evidence, and a century after Morgan … the consensus is that [monogamous] marriage comes as close to being a human universal as anything about human behavior can.”17 Ouch. But in truth, Morgan’s understanding of family structure was no “fantasy.” His conclusions were based upon decades of extensive field research and study. Later, a bit less wind in her sails, Betzig admits that “there is still, however, no consensus as to why” marriage is so widespread.

That’s a mystery all right. We’ll see that anthropologists find marriage wherever they look mainly because they haven’t quite decided what it looks like.

* Where nonparents act in a parental role.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Making a Mess of Marriage,

Mating, and Monogamy

Marriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the
state in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of
the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

When Albert Einstein proclaimed that E=mc2, no physicists asked each other, “What’s he mean by E?” In the hard sciences, the important stuff comes packaged in numbers and predefined symbols. Imprecise wording rarely causes confusion. But in more interpretive sciences such as anthropology,

psychology,

and

evolutionary

theory,

misinterpretation and misunderstanding are common.

Take the words
love
and
lust,
for example. Love and lust are as different from each other as red wine and blue cheese, but because they can also complement one another splendidly, they get conflated with amazing, dumbfounding regularity.

In the literature of evolutionary psychology, in popular culture, in the tastefully appointed offices of marriage counselors, in religious teachings, in political discourse, and in our own mixed-up lives, lust is often mistaken for love.

Perhaps even more insidious and damaging in societies insistent on long-term, sexually exclusive monogamy, the negative form of that statement is also true. The absence of lust is misread as indicating an absence of love (we’ll explore this in Part V).

Experts inadvertently encourage us to confuse the two. Helen Fisher’s
Anatomy of Love,
a book referenced earlier, is far more concerned with shared parental responsibility for a child’s first few years than with the love joining the parents to one another. But we can’t blame Fisher, as the language itself works against clarity. We can “sleep with” someone without ever closing our eyes.1 When we read that the politician

“made love” with the prostitute, we know love had little to do with it. When we report how many “lovers” we’ve had, are we claiming to have been “in love” with all of them?

Similarly, if we “mate” with someone, does that make us

“mates”? Show a guy a photo of a hot-looking woman and ask him if he’d like to “mate with her.” Chances are good he’ll say (or think), “Sure!” But chances are also high that marriage, children, and the prospect of a long future together never entered into his decision-making process.

Everyone knows these are arbitrary expressions for an almost infinite range of situations and relationships—everyone, it appears, but the experts. Many evolutionary psychologists and other researchers seem to think that “love” and “sex” are interchangeable terms. And they throw together “copulating” and “mating” as well. This failure to define terminology often leads to confusion and allows cultural bias to contaminate our thinking about human sexual nature. Let’s try to hack a path through this tangled verbal undergrowth.

Marriage:

The

“Fundamental

Condition” of the Human Species?

The intimate male-female relationship … which zoologists
have dubbed a ‘pair bond,’ is bred into our bones. I believe
this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything
else.

FRANS DE WAAL2

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying
to play the violin.

HONORé DE BALZAC

The holy grail of evolutionary psychology is the “human universal.” The whole point of the discipline is to tease out intrinsically
human
patterns of perception, cognition, and behavior from those determined on a cultural or personal level: Do you like baseball because you grew up watching games with Dad or because the sight of small groups of men strategizing and working together on a field connects to a primordial module in your brain? That’s the sort of question evolutionary psychologists love to ask and aspire to answer.

Because evolutionary psychology is all about uncovering and elucidating the so-called
psychic unity of humankind
—and because of the considerable political and professional pressure to discover traits that conform to specific political agendas—readers need to be cautious about claims concerning such universals. Too often, the claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.

The supposed universality of human marriage—and the linked omnipresence of the nuclear family—is a case in point.

A cornerstone of the standard model of human sexual evolution, the claim for this universal human tendency to marry

appears

to

be

beyond

question

or

doubt—“unquestioningly correct” in Malinowski’s words.

Though the tendency has been assumed since before Darwin, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers’s now-classic paper
Parental Investment and SexualSelection,
published in 1972, consolidated the position of marriage as foundational to most theories of human sexual evolution.3

Recall that marriage, as defined by these theories, represents the
fundamental exchange
underlying human sexual evolution. In his BBC television series
The Human Animal,
Desmond Morris flatly declares, “The pair bond is the fundamental condition of the human species.” Michael Ghiglieri, biologist and protégé of Jane Goodall, writes,

“Marriage … is the ultimate human contract. Men and women in all societies marry in nearly the same way. Marriage,” continues Ghiglieri, “is normally a ‘permanent’ mating between a man and a woman … with the woman nurturing the infants, while the man supports and defends them. The institution of marriage,” he concludes, “is older than states, churches, and laws.”4 Oh my.
The fundamental condition?

The ultimate human contract?
Hard to argue with that.

But let’s try, because slippery use of the word
marriage
in the anthropological literature has resulted in a huge headache for anyone trying to understand how marriage and the nuclear family
really
fit into human nature—if at all. The word, we’ll find, is used to refer to a whole slew of different relationships.

In
Female Choices,
her survey of female primate sexuality, primatologist Meredith Small writes of the confusion that resulted when the term
consortship
drifted away from its original meaning—a striking parallel to the confusion over
marriage.
Small explains, “The word ‘consortship’ was used initially to define the close male-female sexual bond seen in savannah baboons and then usage of the word spread to the relationship of other mating pairs.” This semantic leap, says Small, was a mistake. “Researchers began to think that all primates form consortships, and they applied the word to any short or long, exclusive or nonexclusive mating.” This is a problem because “what was originally intended to describe a specific male-female association that lasted during the days surrounding ovulation became an all-inclusive word for mating…. Once a female is described as ‘being in consort,’

no one sees the importance of her regular copulations with other males.”5

Biologist Joan Roughgarden has noted the same problematic application of present-day human mating ideals to animals.

She writes, “Sexual selection’s primary literature describes extrapair parentage as ‘cheating’ on the pair bond; the male is said to be ‘cuckolded’; offspring of extrapair parentage are said to be ‘illegitimate’; and females who do not participate in extrapair copulations are said to be ‘faithful.’ This judgmental terminology,” concludes Roughgarden, “amounts to applying a contemporary definition of Western marriage to animals.”6

Indeed, when familiar labels are applied, supporting evidence becomes far more visible than counter-evidence in a psychological process known as
confirmation bias.
Once we have a mental model, we’re much more likely to notice and recall evidence supporting our model than evidence against it.