The Lifestyle (25 page)

It is now generally accepted by anthropologists that the balance of power between the sexes—and thus the control of sexuality—rests on which gender controls the wealth in a society. Some scientists theorize that there may have been a pre-historical time, as recently as 10,000 B.C., when women did have at least equal rights with men based on their equal or even dominant role in accumulating wealth through food gathering and “net-hunting” of small animals—which in some societies might even have opened up ruling roles for women
at all levels, from the spiritual to the sexual. But at some point in the transition from a hunter-gatherer existence to the development of agriculture, men, wielding the heavy plow women couldn’t handle, got the upper hand on resources in settled communities. Desiring assured paternity, they enforced the state of matrimonial dominance that has characterized much of recorded history. Tales of prehistoric gynarchies and unleashed females like Lilith have indeed been around since the dawn of civilization. Sherfey offered up the body of modern woman to lend weight to the notion of a prehistorical reign of the human female’s “intense, insatiable eroticism,” an eroticism that “could be contained within one or possibly several types of social structures.” She went so far as to predict that with the “scientific revolution… and the new social equality and emotional honesty sweeping across the world,” our society could well be heading back to the structure from whence it arose.

We don’t know that, of course, and we don’t know if she was near the mark in her speculations about the unrecorded sexual past. Yet feminist North American civilization—where over one-third of women have had multiple sex partners by the time they enter university (a rate six times higher than when Sherfey posited her theory thirty years ago), and where the swinging lifestyle is established in hundreds of cities—is beginning to resemble one of the “social structures” Sherfey thought could have accommodated “aggressive eroticism in women.” In 1997, the remains of a female warrior society thought to be the six-foot-tall Amazons of myth were discovered in Kazakhstan; they in turn were thought to be the remnants of the mysterious Minoan civilization, which the Greeks all but annihilated thirty-five hundred years ago in a battle with enormous females. Minoan art shows women driving chariots, fighting in wars, farming, sailing ships, and hunting with bows and arrows. It also depicts both men and women
wearing very sexual clothing in daily life. Whether they lived in a culture of unbridled promiscuity is unknown, but it’s worth pointing out that one of the most fastlane women at New Horizons, Jodie, outranked a couple of million men when she served in the U.S. military during the time of the Gulf War.

In the end, Sherfey did not argue that indulging inordinate sexual appetite was the way women
should
behave in our civilization, and she warned that if women threatened male virility, paternity, and the family, men would react violently and attempt to subjugate them in the manner of the patriarchs. The controversial point she stressed was that promiscuous female lust was innately part of a woman’s sexual nature, and that this explained the behavior of some women “throughout historic time.” As a psychiatrist her emphasis was on compassion, not promotion; evolutionary recognition, not cultural denial. “I urge the re-examination of the vague and controversial concepts of nymphomania and promiscuity without frigidity,” she wrote. “It could well be that the ‘oversexed’ woman is actually exhibiting a normal sexuality—although because of it her integration into her society may leave much to be desired.”

Sherfey published her theory in 1966 in
The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
—the most respected in its field—and republished it in book form in 1972. As can be imagined, it was widely discussed and people breathlessly wondered if women would really behave that way if they ran the world and were given the total freedom to have sex with whomever they wanted. Evolutionary biologists soberly argued that, yes, women
could
behave that way, but most women wouldn’t. A quick comparison of the “hinder end” of a monkey and the anterior side of even the most aroused female tells the story, they said. Ovulating women do not exhibit the
irresistible sexual swellings of other primates that make them Sherfian creatures for a time. In human females ovulation is “hidden.” Hidden ovulation was for a long time assumed to be the great divide between human females and nonhuman female primates. The various explanations given for the evolution of concealed ovulation rest on what might literally be called a motherhood issue: the helplessness of the human infant at birth. This, in part, say the theorists, accounts for the evolution of monogamy and human female choosiness—the natural way to be. Let’s have a look at this theory.

At some point in evolution, probably about three million years ago, the pelvic changes required to accommodate the upright posture of early humans made it more difficult for females to bear their large-headed young. The solution selected for by nature was for the mother to bear offspring at an earlier stage of their development. The evolutionary difficulty, however, was that the infant was left so needful at birth that for at least four years considerable nurturing was required just to keep it alive. Also, if one assumes that women did not run the group of early humans or raise their children in primitive “day cares,” infant helplessness necessitated that the father lend consistent support to the mother. If in a group of male-dominated
Homos
females were flying fertile sexual flags everywhere a male looked, and he was being approached by those females, he might be tempted to leave his defenceless “wife” and offspring, and go off and have intercourse willy-nilly. But if all the women in the group “hid” their fertile phases, he would be less tempted to stray and would stay home. A corollary to this theory is that females no longer experienced the hormonal rush and heightened sensitivity of periodically engorged flesh; with their sex drive thus diminished they became better wives and mothers. And so the human female became “continually receptive,” like a turned-down flame on the back burner of sexuality, pleasuring her ravenous male
when he wanted it and helping him resolve the dilemma of whether to stay or stray.

That leads us to one of the most resonant, persistent, and appealing explanations offered for hidden ovulation: it accounts for the origin of romantic love and fidelitous attachment between spouses. It goes like this: the male, wanting to father offspring and pass on his genes, would never know the precise week when he should have intercourse with his continually receptive mate, and so he would hang around and keep trying to have a baby by her until he fell in love, thus cementing their bond in time for the birth of their child. This presupposes that he and his mate would have known that sex causes babies—something many peoples such as the Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific hadn’t figured out until the missionaries arrived (and many teenagers still haven’t). However, if we take for granted that the early human male, with the approximate mental capacity of a modern five-year-old, was aware of the consequences of sex, the theory that hidden ovulation led to romantic love seems to work.

It may in fact
be
the origin of human primary pair-bonding. Almost everyone on earth falls in love, and even the most fastlane married swingers believe so deeply in romantic love, the pair-bond, and responsible child-rearing in a nuclear family that they would toss me out of their clubs if I claimed they didn’t. But we don’t know for certain that the consensual non-monogamy they practice—including open eroticism, group sex, and all the rest—was not on occasion practiced by our distant ancestors even as they felt the attached, romantic love that supposedly arose from hidden ovulation. And we don’t know that they would not have practiced it even more frequently if they had lived into their late thirties, forties, and fifties. As Timothy Taylor points out, many peoples of the world have practiced open sexuality—and some still do.

But if you visit the American Museum of Natural History
in New York City, you will see a diorama that stands as a model of our currently approved behavior and represents the monogamous outcome of hidden ovulation: a pair
of Australopithecines
, “Lucy” and her “husband,” walking arm in arm across the three-million-year-old landscape as a loving couple. The scene has a lot of appeal for evolutionists, even those who believe Lucy might have been “occasionally” tempted by other males. “In a few years, she and her male might break up and start second families,” Diane Ackerman wrote in
A Natural History of Love
. “But that emotional cataclysm would be the farthest thing from her mind as she travels with her lover.”

Despite the fact that the museum presents this scene as “natural history” (with an assumed emphasis on the word natural) it is in large part coded fable, an example of the cultural wishful thinking we have allowed ourselves to cast over what we don’t know about the past, based on what Ackerman approvingly calls “the version of relationships that has come down to us.” Footprints of our chimplike, bipedal ancestors have been found, but there is no evidence to indicate that males and females walked together as couples, or that females didn’t rule, or that they weren’t as casually promiscuous as bonobos—the species evolutionists like De Waal and Taylor consider to be “the closest living analogue to the early
Australopithecines.”
What we
can
read from the diorama, however, was possibly unintended. The hair of both creatures is shown thickest around the pubic region, where the eye is drawn—the reason for which pubic hair is thought to have evolved. “Look down here, I’m old enough to produce children,” it virtually shouts. “Let’s have sex.” In addition, the male
Australopithecus
has a good-sized, thick penis for female pleasure and a strong rump for thrusting, while the female has good-sized breasts and fit-looking gluteus maximus. These characteristics are believed to have evolved because they gave both sexes visual hints fore and aft. We can presume that another
Australopithecus
would
perceive their healthy bodies as flying the sexual flags as high as they could be hoisted, even if there were no telltale “swellings.”

Notwithstanding the theoretical monogamous benefits of concealed ovulation, it should be noted that hidden ovulation is common among promiscuous primates, and the feminist anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has theorized that it evolved to
facilitate
promiscuity. The female langur monkey in India has no sexual swelling, but when outside males show up to challenge the alpha male of their troop, the females begin mating with all the outsiders long before the old alpha is overthrown and a new one installed. The usual routine among langurs and some other primates is for the new dominant male to murder all the infants sired by the old alpha and Hrdy suggests that by “confusing” paternity through promiscuity and non-estrus receptivity, the females thereby save their young. Another explanation is that the langur females are simply thrilled by the prospect of sexual variety after being repressed by a single dominant male for so long. That would have sounded perfectly logical to Mary Jane Sherfey.
^*

Despite Sherfey, despite Hrdy, and despite no hard evidence that hidden ovulation led to a relatively low female sex drive and a high level of “choosiness,” the standard model still held firm well into the 1980s. True, in the wake of changing female sexual behavior in human society a number of evolutionary
biologists had modified the model to acknowledge that human and nonhuman female primates were assertive beings, with sexual agendas of their own, but they tended to judge the naturally promiscuous behavior of female primates—human and nonhuman—by the size of male testicles, not female desire. Males who had a lot to fear from the competition of other sperm in the female’s womb had evolved large testicles to produce copious amounts of ejaculate to swamp their rivals. Males who had little to fear from rivals had little testicles. Human testicles were somewhere between the relatively small proportions of the gorilla, who dominated a harem in his well-defended terrain and almost never had to deal with the infidelity of his consorts, and the relatively large testicles of the appropriately named
Pan satyrus
, the chimpanzee. Even in the case of those grandly endowed satyric primates, however, the theoreticians maintained that while females could be promiscuous (as it was noticed human females could be), they still invested far more heavily in offspring than males did; and thus, they had to be far more discriminating in their choice of males than males were in their choice of females—in short they had to be less driven to pursue sexual variety.