Animal Husbandry (23 page)
Authors: Laura Zigman
Or what I
should
do at work.
I shook my head with an air of secrecy and condescension. “No. Not like
this
.”
He put his cigarette out and picked up his bag. “Well, okay. I guess I’m off—off to elope with my new wife about whom you know nothing,” he said as he walked down the hallway to the front door.
I closed the curtain. “Whatever.”
Before I showered and washed my hair, I called Joan and told her to come over. And an hour later she did, arriving exactly when she said she would—at ten-thirty—a first for her in the arena of punctuality.
She looked at me expectantly. “Speak,” she said.
So I told her about male bowerbirds, who build elaborate nests and decorate them to attract females.
About the underwater love songs of male dolphins.
About how monkeys and dogs and even butterflies can smell out receptive females from miles away because of the allure of pheromones.
I told her how sexual behavior in humans goes through three distinct phases—pair formation, precopulatory activity, and copulation—but not necessarily in that order.
About how flies and birds lure females by giving them a nuptial offering of food to eat while they mate, and how oftentimes the male will take back the uneaten portion once their mating is complete so he can use it to attract more females.
And then I told her some of my half-gelled theories.
“You know how uncanny it is that there are so many similarities in the way men dump women? The things they say, the words they use, the order in which everything unfolds?”
Joan nodded. “Like Ray and Jason.”
“Not to mention Eddie.”
She nodded again.
“There’s an obscure term I came across which could explain it:
allelomimetic behavior
.”
Joan moved her lips and tried to pronounce it, but she couldn’t. I showed her the copy of the page from the scientific dictionary and then I read the definition out loud: “ ‘Of or characterized by imitativeness within a group: All the sheep in a flock, or all the fish in a school, or all the dogs in a pack, tend to do the same thing at the same time.’ ”
She looked at the piece of paper and then at me. “It’s like how all alien abductees draw the same picture of the alien that abducted them! As if it’s somehow part of the collective unconscious.”
“Right. Or like how all men seem to have gone to school
and taken some secret
break-up class
,” I said, “because they all say and do the same thing when they end a relationship, as if they were—”
“Genetically programmed.”
I flipped through the file and showed her another piece of paper. “Did you know there’s actually a word for the love of new things? It’s called
neophilia
.”
I flipped again and found a cover story from
Time
called “
The Chemistry of Love
.” “And because falling in love produces amphetaminelike chemicals, some people, and I quote, ‘
move frantically from affair to affair just as soon as the first rush of infatuation fades
’ and become
attraction junkies
.”
Finally I told her about the different methods of escape animals use—freezing, fleeing, zigzagging, the dash-and-hide, the dash-and-retreat.
“So I’m focusing on the two topics you specified, and I’m going to add allelomimetic behavior and something I’ve been working on called the myth of male shyness, if you think that’ll work.”
Joan nodded. “That’ll work.”
Then I asked her to look at a very, very rough draft of the article I’d done, just to make sure Dr. Goodall was on the right track. Joan stared intently and silently at the batch of yellow legal paper I’d ripped from the pad, letting the pages drop onto the floor one by one as she read them.
“Yes,” she said. “I like this track. This is a good track. Keep going on this track.”
So I did.
I spent the rest of the weekend writing, and on Monday morning, when I got to the office, I faxed Joan the complete article. We went over it that night on the phone so she could take it with her in the morning to her editorial meeting.
She called me immediately afterward.
“All the women in the room went crazy,” she said excitedly. “And when the meeting was over, we all went into the bathroom and smoked and traded war stories. The world is one big fucking Used-Cow lot, it seems.”
“What did Ben think?”
Joan laughed. “He looked
chagrined
. As if he’d just read the first chapter of his unauthorized biography.”
I present the article herewith in its entirety:
ARTICLE I:
THE OLD-COW–NEW-COW THEORY ALLELOMIMETIC BEHAVIOR, AND THE MYTH OF MALE SHYNESS
A
MEN’S TIMES
EXCLUSIVE
When MEN’S TIMES photographer Zoe Raider went to shoot DR. MARIE GOODALL, she found a small, absentminded woman wearing a white lab coat and a high-intensity examination light bulb strapped to her forehead, sitting behind her large, messy desk, looking as if she were waiting for a PBS documentary film crew to arrive. The office, with its faded diplomas, Bunsen burners, beakers, taxidermied apes and monkeys, walls of textbooks, and, of course, obligatory analysis couch, looks like it could belong to a psychologist, professor, or monkey scientist—and indeed DR. GOODALL considers herself to be all three. Dwarfed by the stacks of files and papers in front of her—the hundreds, if not thousands, of documented “cases” of male behavior she has studied during the course of
her thirty-five-year career—DR. GOODALL sits on the edge of her chair, excited at the opportunity of discussing her theories for the first time
.
NOTE TO THE READER FROM DR. MARIE GOODALL
:
When this male-oriented magazine contacted me to write about the human male, I was rather surprised—not only by the fact that the editors were aware of my existence as a recognized expert in the study and prevention of male behavior but also by the fact that they felt there was an apparent and somewhat urgent need for my findings and theories to appear in a general-audience publication, Whilst I have written a great many papers over the decades on this subject, I have, I must admit, written only for scientific journals. Allow me, then, to apologize in advance for the rather technical and clinical manner in which I address these topics
.
And so, let us begin with the Old-Cow–New-Cow theory, Allelomimetic Behavior, and the Myth of Male Shyness
.
T
he occurrence of a male tiring of his current female mate and leaving her for a new female mate is certainly not an aberrant occurrence in either the human kingdom or the animal kingdom, though it is far more accepted in the latter. While it is commonly known that most animal species are not monogamous (only three percent of mammals are categorized as such, in fact), and that their polygamy runs rampant at times, what is rarely known is just how rampant it is. Knowledge of this phenomenon as it appears in the animal kingdom should, I trust, help the human
female comprehend the phenomenon when it manifests itself in her own backyard, as it were.
Perhaps the clearest example of this can be found in the Coolidge Effect. If I may digress for just a moment, I generally like first to share with my students the rather amusing anecdote that gave the phenomenon its name before describing the particulars of the phenomenon itself. According to one of my favorite texts available on this topic,
The Great Sex Divide
by Glenn Wilson, the phenomenon was named as such as a result of an incident involving President and Mrs. Coolidge:
The story goes that President and Mrs. Coolidge were visiting a government farm in Kentucky one day and after arrival were taken off on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens she paused to ask her guide how often the rooster could be expected to perform his duty. “Dozens of times a day,” was her guide’s reply. She was most impressed by this and said, “Please tell that to the President.” When the President was duly informed of the rooster’s performance he was initially dumbfounded. Then a thought occurred to him. “Was this with the same hen each time?” he inquired. “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time,” was the host’s reply. The President nodded slowly, smiled and said, “Tell
that
to Mrs. Coolidge!”
The Coolidge Effect as it applies to the mating practices of sheep and common dairy cows is known by veterinary scientists and cattle breeders the world over, which is why farmers need have only one male to service all their sheep or
cows:
male resistance to repeating sexual contact with the same female
.
The details of the phenomenon were recounted in a landmark study by the researchers Beamer, Bermant, and Clegg in 1969:
On Day I of the study researchers presented a bull with a cow. Mating ensued.
On Day II of the study researchers presented the bull with the same cow. Mating this day did
not
ensue.
On Day III of the study researchers presented the bull with the same cow that had been visually disguised (data is inexact on precisely what was used to achieve this effect—most probably women’s clothing and undergarments in rather large sizes or a very big paper bag placed over the head). But again mating did not ensue.
On Day IV of the study researchers realized the bull was resistant to deceptive visual stimulus and proceeded to disguise the cow in a different manner: they smeared the vaginal odor of a fresh cow onto the vaginal area of the previously mated cow. While the bull’s interest was momentarily piqued, mating again did not ensue.
Undeniable hypothesis:
The bull desired a
New
Cow and would
not
mate twice with what he perceived to be the
Old
Cow.
With human males and females the Coolidge Effect manifests itself in a subtler though still apparent way. Most commonly it occurs when a male, after engaging in a romantic and sexual relationship with a female for a period of time—a month, three months, six months, a year or more—grows increasingly bored with his previously New Cow. In the vernacular this is usually referred to as the “itch.” The male will then begin to sniff around, if you will, for variety
and will pick from the somewhat wide selection of New Cows available to him one to his liking. Mating with this New Cow will ensue, which will promptly lead him to view the Cow he is primarily involved with as his Old Cow. In the majority of cases the male will leave the Old Cow to pursue a relationship with this New Cow, only to find, after a varying period of time, that this New Cow has gotten Old, and he will desire variety again and so repeat this process innumerable times. At present writing there is no set cure for this Old-Cow–New-Cow syndrome in either animals or humans, though my institute is working quite diligently in this pursuit.
T
his is a little known but crucial concept for the understanding of human male behavior.
Allelomimetic behavior
refers to the curious phenomenon observed when animals inexplicably behave in exactly the same way—that is, mutual mimicking: One group member does something, which leads another to do the same thing, and because others are now doing what the first one started doing, that first one continues. Birds in a flock fly together; fish in a school swim together; sheep and cattle in a herd follow one another; etc. The prevailing assumption at work here is that some intuitive and innate impulse produces the particular behavior in the first group member, and the allelomimetic impulse induces the others to follow suit.
In human males this principle is manifested quite often—most clearly in courtship and wooing methods used to attract females, as well as fleeing and abandoning strategies used to dispose of them. In fact, allelomimetic behavior is so frequent
and obvious in males that many females experienced in the ways of men have come to know that such a principle is at work, even if they are unaware of the scientific name for it.
At present writing there too is no set cure for allelomimetic behavior in either animals or humans, though again my institute is working quite diligently in this pursuit.
I
feel I must also comment on the very interesting and common myth of shyness in the male species, as it is one that has fascinated me, and many of my colleagues, I might add, for quite some time.
It is a rather curious phenomenon that usually manifests itself at the onset of a romantic relationship, when the male exhibits a series of convincing behaviors suggesting that he is, in layman’s terms, shy. The behaviors in question are quite common ones—awkwardness, trepidation, disbelief that the female has taken an interest in him—that do-I-dare-to-eat-a-peach demeanor, as T. S. Eliot so accurately described it, though it must be acknowledged that he was a notorious narcissist himself.
I have studied many such cases in the course of my research, and in each one a similar pattern has emerged: At the beginning of the romance the male is shy; at the end of the romance the male is
not
shy. In fact, if I may digress for just a moment, I observed this rather curious personality transformation firsthand once, many years ago, when I began my research. I was being pursued by a young chimp who seemed at the time (as I was not trained to recognize and diagnose the behavior as I am now) to be genuinely shy. The courtship
progressed, as it were, and once he was assured of my continued presence, he quite suddenly—and unshyly, I might add—displayed that he no longer wished to see me.
Naturally I was absolutely confounded by the abrupt change in his behavior, though luckily, of course, I was in the wild, where I had immediate and unlimited access to a large group of chimpanzees in whom I observed this rather subtle phenomenon time and time again. And it was this incident that compelled me to embark on the course of my life’s work: observation
and
prevention.
And so, yes, while the male does indeed seem shy—or, to be more precise, insecure—he is actually a narcissist in monkey’s clothing, because this apparent shyness belies the much more serious and deeply rooted feelings of unworthiness, low self-esteem, and fear of rejection. And
these
are the feelings that motivate the narcissistic male—
this
is what causes him to crave love and
this
is what compels him to seek attention from New Cow after New Cow
ad nauseam et infinitum
.