Woman: An Intimate Geography (57 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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18
Of Hoggamus and Hogwash: Putting Evolutionary Psychology on the Couch
We can love, and there are many reasons to love, but whom do we love, and why do we love them? We understand the genetic logic behind loving our children and our parents, although there are limits to these loves. Conflict between parent and offspring is an abiding fact of life, as much as we wish it otherwise, as much as we think we can talk our way out of it. The conflict is built into the system. Children want more than their parents are willing to give, and they'll try to manipulate things to procure their share and then some; but parents usually have more than one child, and they may plan on having even more children down the road, so they resist devoting too much to any single child and having their resources and strength sucked dry. As children real or innerwe privately nurse a little myth of the perfect mother, the all-giving, all-loving mother. Mothers know they can be no such thing, that they cannot and will not give their all for one. Mothers must keep some for themselves, for the others, and for the eggs they have yet to hatch.
Mother-offspring conflict begins before birth, in a clandestine skirmish between the fetus, which tries to build a very big placenta and to absorb as many maternal calories as it can, and the mother, whose body responds by inhibiting the explosive growth of the placenta and protecting the mother from the precipitous depletion of her energy stores. The conflict continues throughout childhood. Babies cry, toddlers throw tantrums, children wheedle. And then, when the children reach puberty, the nature of the conflict shifts dramatically. The offspring want independence and a garden of their own; they might even hope that the parents soon will die and leave their resources to them. For their part, the parents may try to keep their grown children around a bit longer,

 

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enlisting them in the care of younger siblings and thereby enhancing the parents' personal reproductive success. Oh, it goes on. Children need love and nurturing to thrive, and parents are inclined to give it, are strung like fine violins to give it. But then the sweetness and filial light turns taut and sharp, snaps back to our old beetle-browed friend: aggression. Love and aggression are conjoined like Chang and Eng, the most famous sideshow act of all time: where you find one, the other must be.
Yet parent-offspring conflict pales in comparison to the war of love we all know best, the war we know so well that we've given it a morose, flaccid tag line, the Battle of the Sexes. To talk of the physiology of love and the evolution of love raises the question of what we want from love, what we look for when we search for love. We don't choose our children or our parents, and so the love we feel for them is leavened by a sense of fatalism; only a few New Agey types have the gall to blame a person for choosing his or her parents badly. But for our choice of mates and the expectations we hold for our mates, we must accept at least a modicum of responsibility. So what do we want from a mate, which for most women means a man, and what do men want from us? What is the taproot of romantic love? Why do we bother getting married? Is it nature? Is it habit? Are we the marrying kind
we
meaning humans in general, and then, parsed a notch or two closer, women in particular? Certainly we see marriage everywhere around us. In most cultures today, and historically, people have gotten married through some sort of ritualized ceremony, a public declaration that this man and this woman are an item on the tribe's register. Still, commonness doesn't necessarily indicate innateness. Just because we do get married doesn't mean we really want to get married, down to our Darwinized stem cells. Marriage could be like the written word, a tool so useful that it has become almost universal. But really, does anybody enjoy writing? And none would argue that writing is natural, even as natural as speech.
Let me confess right here and now that I don't know when, where, or how marriage was invented. I don't know if we're naturally inclined toward marriage or if it's like your mother's wedding gown you'll need a brilliant tailor to make it fit you. Prairie voles
are
the marrying kind, or rather, the pair-bonding kind. They're born to affiliate, Noah-

 

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fashion, male by female. So are a lot of birds. They couple up and raise their fledglings as a nuclear family unit. Nonhuman primates are
not
the marrying kind. Chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, monkeys almost none of them are inclined to pair bond. They are polygamous. Males mate with many females. Females mate with many males.
Do you feel like a vole? A macaque? A canary, perhaps? Were you born to bond? Do you know? I don't. I surely don't. Sometimes I think that marriage suits us as well as or better than any alternative, and that children recognize the inherent rightness in having a daddy and a mommy on hand to rear them. Sometimes the words of Samuel Johnson sound like Newton's
Principia
. ''Sir," he said to a dinner companion, General Paoli, "it is so far from being natural for a man and a woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together."
I don't know the depths of our desire to marry. I don't know why we choose the partners we do, or what women really want from men and what men want from women. What I do know is that nobody else knows either. I know that the deep psychology of human love and human bondage is as yet a great mystery, though there are a few glittering sequins scattered here and there that tempt some to think, Oh yes, we see the light.
Love and marriage are considered womanly arts. They are ostensibly our property. We are said to want them. Men cadge, men scramble, men sweat, but finally men capitulate, sighing like stallions being led to the stable, while we, as women, need no persuasion. They bridle; we are brides! We are the marrying sex.
This, of course, is the party line, and has been for many years. It has earned a little ditty written by William James, no less which R. V. Short quoted, coyly, at the conclusion of his recent book,
The Differences Between the Sexes
:
Hoggamus, higgamus
Men are polygamous
Higgamus, hoggamus
Women monogamous.

 

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And lately that idea has found new fodder and new fans, through the explosive growth of a field known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology professes to have discovered the fundamental modules of human nature, most notably the essential nature of man and of woman. Now, it makes sense to be curious about the evolutionary roots of human behavior. It's reasonable to attempt to understand our impulses and actions by applying Darwinian logic to the problem. We're animals. We're not above the rude little prods and jests of natural selection. But evolutionary psychology as it has been disseminated across mainstream consciousness is a cranky and despotic Cyclops, its single eye glaring through an overwhelmingly masculinist lens. I say masculinist rather than male because the view of male behavior promulgated by hardcore evolutionary psychologists is as narrow and inflexible as their view of womanhood is.
Evolutionary psychology likes to think of itself as new and thrilling, but it is really just a subset of sociobiology, a discipline that is more than thirty years old. The grand patriarch of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, defined his field as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior," though by biological he really meant evolutionary, for he was less interested in the proximate end of things the "how" behind a behavior than he was in the ultimate cause, the why of it. Many sociobiologists long have applied their reasoning to the study of human behavior; evolutionary psychologists simply formalized the application through the use of the anthropic term
psychology
. Evolutionary psychologists have been enormously successful at promulgating their views, I give them credit for that. Writing in
The New Yorker
in 1997, the movie critic David Denby talked about how fashionable evolutionary psychology is and how it has replaced Freudianism as the preferred method at cocktail parties for ad hoc dissections of a lover's despicable conduct. In my view the evo-psycho rendering of human nature has been granted far more homage than it deserves, perhaps because so much of it endorses our old prejudices and conforms to our mental Dewey decimal system. I don't like jabbering in perpetuity about the differences between men and women and who is better at mentally rotating a geometric figure in three-dimensional space or why it might be that different parts of the brain light up on a magnetic resonance scan when men and women think about the same things. As I said in the

 

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beginning, I have chosen to write a fantasia of the female body and mind rather than hashing and thrashing over what we do and don't know about X versus Y. I'm not going to explain to men what they really want or how they should behave. If a fellow chooses to tell himself that his yen for the fetching young intern in his office and his concomitant disgruntlement with his aging wife's housekeeping lacunae make perfect Darwinian sense, who am I to argue with him? I'm only going to propose here in good humor, honest that the hardcore evolutionary psychologists have got a whole lot of us gals all wrong, and that we want more and deserve better than the cartoon Olive Oyl handed down for popular consumption.
The cardinal premises of evolutionary psychology of interest to our discussion are as follows:
1. Men are more promiscuous and less sexually reserved than women are.
2. Women are inherently more interested in a stable relationship than men are.
3. Women are naturally attracted to high-status men with resources.
4. Men are naturally attracted to youth and beauty.
5. Our core preferences and desires were hammered out long, long ago, a hundred thousand years ago or more, in the legendary environment of evolutionary adaptation, or EEA, also known as the ancestral environment, also known as the Stone Age, and they have not changed appreciably since then, nor are they likely to change in the future.
In sum: higgamus, hoggamus, Pygmalionus,
Playboy
magazine, eternitas. Amen.
Hardcore evolutionary psychology types go to extremes to promote their theses, and to argue in favor of the yawning chasm that separates the innate desires of women and men. They declare ringing confirmation for their theories even in the face of feeble data. They suffer amusing internal contradictions of their data. They pick and choose, one from column A, one from column B, and good food, good meat, holy Darwin, let's eat!
For example: Among the cardinal principles of the evo-psycho set is that men are innately more promiscuous than women are, and that

 

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