Woman: An Intimate Geography (62 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

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choice. But the truth is, the men don't seem to mind. They don't object. They're not demonstrably jealous. So you can speculate that partible paternity works for men as a kind of life insurance, a series of bets against the odds. A man allows other men to have sex with his wife. He bets that he will be the father of most if not all of his children. But if he should die, some other man will have a residual obligation to care for some of those children. If you look at it that way, you can see how partible paternity might be adaptive for both the women and the men."
There's so much gorgeous material left to be mined. Women are said to need an investing male (or more than one, if they can get it). We think we know the reason why. Human babies are difficult and time-consuming to raise. Chimpanzee females may be able to provision their offspring on their own, but women cannot. Stone Age mothers needed husbands to bring home the bison. Yet as we've already seen in the discussion of the organic grandmother, the age-old assumption that male parental investment lies at the heart of human evolution is now open to serious question. Men in traditional foraging cultures do not necessarily invest resources in their offspring. Hadza men hunt, but they share the bounty of that hunting widely, politically, strategically. They don't deliver it straight to the mouths of their progeny. Women rely on their senior female kin to help get their children fed. The men are often away hunting, in quest of big game. The women gather. There is a division of labor by sex. But in hunting, the men are not engaging in the most calorically productive enterprise. In many cases, they would be better off gathering, or combining an occasional hunt with the trapping of small prey. The big hunt, though, is a big opportunity, to win status and allies. The women and their children in a gathering-hunting society clearly benefit from the meat that hunters bring back to the group. But they benefit as a group, not as a collection of nuclear family units, each beholden to the father's personal pound of wildeburger.
This is a startling revelation, which upends many of our presumptions about the origins of marriage and what women want from men and what men want from women. If the environment of evolutionary adaptation was not defined primarily by male parental investment, the bedrock of so much of evolutionary psychology's theorizing, then we can throw the door wide open and breathe again, and ask new questions, rather than endlessly repeating ditties and calling the female coy

 

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long after she has run her petticoats through the presidential paper shredder.
For example: Nicholas Blurton Jones, of the University of California at Los Angeles, and others have proposed that marriage developed as an extension of men's efforts at mate-guarding. Just as male baboons demand exclusivity during peak estrus, so a man might attempt to claim access to a woman and keep other men away from her. The invention of lethal weapons of war very likely upped the ante for male-male competition relatively early in human evolution. When armed men fight, they can kill with far greater ease than the males of other species can. If fighting for access to females resulted in too high a cost too often, then the average archaic male wouldn't have wanted to get into such contests terribly often. In other words, the bedhopper, who tried to spread his seed quantitatively, might not have survived long enough to have many successful hits, for each effort at wooing a fertile female would have pushed him smack up against a thicket of other suitors' spear tips. The cost of philandering becomes ludicrously high. The man might be better off trying to claim rights to one woman at a time. Regular sex with a fertile woman is at least likely to yield offspring at comparatively little risk to his life, particularly if sexual access to the woman is formalized through a public ceremony a wedding. Looked at from this perspective, we must wonder why an ancestral woman bothered to get married, particularly if she and her female relatives did most of the work of keeping the family fed from year to year. Perhaps, Blurton Jones suggests, to limit the degree to which she was harassed. Chronic male harassment can be a terrible problem for a female, he said, and if a woman has to forage to feed herself and her dependent young, the cost of harassment to her efficiency may be too high to bear. Better to agree to a ritualized bond with a male, and to benefit from whatever hands-off policy that marriage may bring, than to spend all of her time locked in one sexual dialectic or another.
Thus marriage may have arisen as a multifaceted social pact: between man and woman, between male and male, and between the couple and the tribe. It is a reasonable solution to a series of cultural challenges that arose in concert with the expansion of the human neocortex. But its roots may not be what we think they are, nor may our contemporary mating behaviors stem from the pressures of an ancestral environment

 

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as it is commonly portrayed, in which a woman needed a mate to help feed and clothe her young. Instead, our "deep" feelings about marriage may be more pragmatic, more contextual, and, dare I say it, more egalitarian than we give them credit for being. If marriage is a social compact, a mutual bid between man and woman to contrive a reasonably stable and agreeable microhabitat in a community of shrewd and well-armed cohorts, then we can understand why, despite rhetoric to the contrary, men are as eager to marry as women are sometimes, it seems, even more so. Are not men the ones who gain most in health and happiness from being married? A raft of epidemiological studies have shown that marriage adds more years to the life of a man than it does to that of a woman. Why should that be, if men are so "naturally" ill-suited to matrimony?
Many critics have pointed out that the international mate preference surveys on which David Buss and other hardcores base their presumptions of the nativist male and female differences show striking similarities between the sexes. When asked what qualities are most important in a prospective mate, men and women alike rate love, dependability, emotional stability, and a pleasant personality as the top four traits, whatever the country, whatever the creed. Only when we descend to the fifth tier do we find the familiar dialectic, men requesting physical attractiveness, women financial endowment. If we see as the archaic cradle of marriage a social compact between independent agents rather than a plea by a needy female for a male provider, then the consanguinity of responses becomes easy to comprehend. Whom do we want to love and live with? A lovable person. A kind person. A trustworthy person who doesn't skitter all over the place and pull a Houdini on you. A person who doesn't stand on the streetcorner shouting obscenities. And though evolutionary psychologists like to toss up stock footage of the wealthy older man with the radiant young model draped on his arm as evidence of some sort of subliminal truth in motion, the more prevalent truth is that most men and most women marry people with whom they have a great deal in common. They marry people who are close to them in looks, education, wealth, religious belief, politics, age. They marry people they like and feel comfortable with. Marriages often fail, of course, and where divorce is an option, divorce is common. Traditional foraging people like the Hadza and the !Kung get divorced at

 

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rates similar to those seen in Western countries. When asked the reason for the divorce, the commonest answer is, We didn't get along.
What do women want? None of us can speak for all women, or for more than one woman, really, but we can hazard a mad guess that a desire for emotional parity is widespread and profound. It doesn't go away, although it often hibernates under duress, and it may be perverted by the restrictions of habitat or culture into something that looks like its opposite. The impulse for liberty is congenital. It is the ultimate manifestation of selfishness, which is why we can count on its endurance.
When intelligent and articulate women have created the men of their dreams, as the great female novelists of history have done, the men read like the men of many women's dreams, for they are men who love women of strength and intelligence, who do not want their women emotionally and intellectually spayed and chastened. Charlotte Brontë gave us Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester, two well-matched blades of fire, tit for tat down the checklist of debits and credits. She is plain, thin, and pale. He is ugly, "a Vulcan a real blacksmith, brown, broad-houldered." He is rich, self-possessed, and worldly but bordering on middle-aged. She is poor, provincial, and alone but has youth in her favor and, more to the point, a rich inner life. Rochester's love for her is stirred when he sees her watercolors of fabulous Blakean landscapes. "And who taught you to paint wind?" he demands. "Where did you see Latmos? For this is Latmos." Each lover is scorchingly bright, and glad of the other's depth and quickness. Charlotte Brontë wants her heroine to come to her mate in full strength, in the purity of desire and self-invention. She even throws in an inheritance for Jane three quarters of the way through the novel, to liberate her from any need of Rochester beyond the man of him. Oh, they are equals all right, for though Rochester towers over Jane physically, he is perpetually getting himself injured and calling on her small, pale frame to help prop him up.
Jane Eyre is fiction, Mack the Knife the archetypal smoldering poster puff. The throngs of us who have loved her and lusted onanistically after him, though, are flesh-and-bloody phenotypes. We and our fantasies are the fruit of evolution, and we are waiting to be known. It all begins with the first small, sly bite. You will come back for more.

 

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19
A Skeptic in Paradise: A Call for Revolutionary Psychology
When Frans De Waal talks about love, he tells a tale of two monkeys: rhesus monkeys and stump-tailed macaques. The species are in the same genus,
Macaca
, and they look fairly similar, but they are dramatically different in disposition. Rhesus monkeys are nasty and edgy, quick to fight and slow to reunite. Stump-tails are much less inflammatory, and when they do quarrel, they seek to make amends within ten minutes, through grooming and unmistakable gestures of rapprochement like holding on to one another's hips. "Rhesus monkeys are despotic species, while stumpies are egalitarian," de Waal says. "Presumably a cohesive group life is comparatively more important for stumpies, and so they have become experts at compromise and apology. But is it genetic? Are the stumpies simply nicer by nature? I would argue otherwise. I would argue that reconciliation behavior is a learned social skill."
De Waal believes this because some years ago he and his colleagues did the following experiment at the Wisconsin Primate Research Center. They reared several young rhesus monkeys together with a group of stump-tailed macaques for five months, a long stretch in the life of a rhesus. Under the influence of the prosocial stumpies, the rhesus monkeys grew into diplomats. They learned reconciliation behaviors. They became great groomers and hip-huggers, every bit the stumpies' equals in pacifism. They became so good at reconciliation that when they were returned to their own kind a group of despotic rhesus monkeys they continued to use their civic skills to calm tempers after a rhesus quarrel. "The encouraging lesson is this," says de Waal. "If we can make

 

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peacemakers out of rhesus monkeys, we can surely do it with human children."
Certain habits come more easily than others. It is easier to add a good habit to your life than to eradicate a bad one. It is easier to say yes than to say no. That's why people who try to lose weight succeed better by adding exercise to their lives than by struggling to cut calories. You may still want that occasional bar of Toblerone, and to go against the urge may feel too unnatural, too grim; but if the indulgence is tempered by counterindulgence, then the sin is effectively detoxified. I have a short, snarly temper. Of the four dispositional humors the ancients described choler (mostly hot), phlegm (mostly cold), black bile (mostly dry), and blood (mostly moist) I'll claim three parts choler, one part bile. I need my anger. It is my Toblerone, my dope. I can't give it up entirely. So I have adjusted by learning to do the next best thing. I have tapped my inner stump-tail, and I have learned to reconcile, quickly, quickly. Ten minutes or less! Pick a flea, hang my head, beg for mercy, make an offering of chocolate. Call it rhesus peaces.
The additive strategy reflects the way nature works. She rarely subtracts or clears the deck. Instead she appends and expands. She thumbtacks on and spackles over. We are all little Romes, an amalgam of biocivilizations. Our cells are still yeasty in their basic design. We have perfectly functional genes that have evolved hardly at all in the 600 million years between us and fungus. We are old-fashioned monkeys and futuristic apes. We are sympathetic, canny, crude, and dazzling. We are profoundly aggressive, and we have many loci of control over that aggression. We feel our way to the narthex of love and think our way down its nave. We are like nothing else that has ever appeared on this thrashing blue planet, and we will become, in the next few centuries, like nothing we can fathom now. And we will do it all wearing our same old Stone Age genes.
Ernst Mayr, one of the grand figures of twentieth-century biology, is now in his nineties, and his eyes have become "a pale boiled blue," as the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald once described a character's eyes; but Mayr is still working, still writing, and still thinking too quickly for comfort. He told me recently that he believes human beings have stopped evolving genetically. We are stuck with ourselves, he insisted. We yam what we yam.

 

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