Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (22 page)

Oceans?

Psychologist Christine Harris has noted that Buss’s conclusions could easily be nothing more than confirmation of old news: that “men are more reactive to any form of sexual stimuli than they are to emotional stimuli [and] are more interested in, or better able to imagine, such stimuli.”10

The men get more agitated by the sex, in other words, simply because they imagine it more clearly than the women do.

When Harris measured the bodily responses of people being asked Buss’s questions, she found that “women as a group showed little difference in physiological reactivity,” but they still predicted, almost unanimously, that the emotional infidelity would be more disturbing for them. This finding suggests a fascinating disconnect between what these women
actually
feel and what they think they
should
feel about their partner’s fidelity (more on this later).

Psychologists David A. DeSteno and Peter Salovey found even more fundamental flaws in Buss’s research, pointing out that the subjects’ belief system comes into play when answering questions about hypothetical infidelity. They note that “the belief that emotional infidelity implies sexual infidelity was held to a greater degree by women than men,” and that therefore, “the choice between sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity [at the heart of Buss’s studies] is a false dichotomy….”11

David A. Lishner and his colleagues honed in on another weak point: the fact that subjects are given only two options: either thoughts of sexual infidelity hurt more or thoughts of emotional infidelity do. Lishner asked, what if both scenarios made subjects feel
equally
uncomfortable? When Lishner included this third option, he found that the majority of respondents indicated that both forms of infidelity were equally upsetting, throwing further doubt on Buss’s conclusions.12

Buss and other evolutionary psychologists who argue that some degree of jealousy is part of human nature may have a point, but they’re overplaying their hand when they universalize their findings to everyone, everywhere, always.

Human nature is made of highly reflective material. It is a mirror—admittedly marked by unalterable genetic scratches and cracks—but a mirror nonetheless. For most human beings, reality is pretty much what we’re told it is. Like practically

everything

else,

jealousy

reflects

social

modification and can clearly be reduced to little more than a minor irritant if consensus deems it so.*

Among the Siriono of Bolivia, jealousy tends to arise not because one’s spouse has lovers, but because he or she is devoting
too much time and energy
to those lovers. According to anthropologist Allan Holmberg, “Romantic love is a concept foreign to the Siriono. Sex, like hunger, is a drive to be satisfied.” The expression
secubi
(“I like”) is used in reference to everything the Siriono enjoy, whether food, jewelry, or a sexual partner. While “there are, of course, certain ideals of erotic bliss,” Holmberg found that “under conditions of desire these readily break down, and the Siriono are content to conform to the principle of ‘any port in a storm.’ “13

Anthropologist William Crocker is convinced that Canela husbands are not jealous, writing, “Whether or not Canela husbands are telling the truth about not minding, they join with other members in encouraging their wives to honor the custom … [of] ritual sex with twenty or more men during all-community ceremonies.” Now, anyone who can pretend not to be jealous as his wife has sex with twenty or more men is someone you do
not
want to meet across a poker table.

The cultures we’ve reviewed, from steamy jungles in Brazil to lakeside Himalayan foothills, have each developed mechanisms

for

minimizing

jealousy

and

sexual

possessiveness. But the opposite also happens. Some cultures actively
encourage
the impulse toward possessiveness.

How to Tell When a Man Loves a

Woman

Written by Percy Sledge and first recorded in 1966, “When a Man Loves a Woman” hit a cultural nerve. The song shot to the top of both the Billboard Hot 100 and R &B charts.

Another version, recorded twenty-five years later by Michael Bolton, also went straight to the top of the charts, and the song now sits at number 54 on
Rolling Stone’s
list of the five hundred greatest songs of all time. Nothing is more prominent than love and sex in Western media, and “When a Man Loves a Woman” is an example of the message whispered in romantic ears throughout the world.

What does Mr. Sledge have to say about a man’s love for a woman? What are the signs of true masculine love?

Copyright restrictions won’t allow us to quote the song’s lyric in full, but most readers know the words by heart anyway. To review, when a man loves a woman:

• He becomes obsessed and can’t think of anything else.

• He’ll exchange anything, even the world, for her company.

• He’s blind to any fault she may have, and will abandon even his closest friend if that friend tries to warn him about her.

• He’ll spend all his money trying to hold her attention.

• And last but not least, he’ll sleep in the rain if she tells him to.

We’d like to suggest an alternative title for this song: “When a Man Becomes Pathologically Obsessed and Sacrifices All Self-Respect and Dignity by Making a Complete Ass of Himself (and Losing the Woman Anyway Because Really, Who Wants a Boyfriend Who Sleeps Out in the Rain Because Someone Told Him To?).”

Similarly, “Every Breath You Take” sits at a respectable number 84 on
Rolling Stone’s
list of all-time great songs. One of the biggest hits of 1983, the song topped the U.K. charts for a month and the U.S. charts for two. It won Song of the Year, and The Police won that year’s Grammy for Best Pop Performance. To date, the song has logged in over ten million registered air plays on radio stations around the world. Again, we’re assuming you know the words. But have you ever
really
listened to them? Though often held up as one of the great love songs of all time, “Every Breath You Take” is not about love at all.

Sung from the perspective of a man who’s been rejected by a woman who refuses to acknowledge that she “belongs” to him, he says he’s going to follow her every step, watch her every move, see who she spends the night with, and so on.

This a
love song?
It should be #1 on Billboard’s ranking of

“Crazed & Dangerous Stalker Songs.” Even Sting, who wrote the song after awakening in the middle of the night when the line “every breath you take / every move you make” bubbled up from his subconscious, didn’t realize until later “how sinister [the song] is.” He suggested in an interview that he

may have been thinking of George Orwell’s
1984
—a novel about surveillance and control—certainly
not
love.

So is jealousy
natural?
It depends. Fear is certainly natural, and like any other kind of insecurity, jealousy is an expression of fear. But whether or not someone else’s sex life provokes fear depends on how sex is defined in a given society, relationship, and individual’s personality.

First-born children often feel jealous when a younger sibling is born. Wise parents make a special point of reassuring the child that she’ll always be special, that the baby doesn’t represent any kind of threat to her status, and that there’s plenty of love for everyone. Why is it so easy to believe that a mother’s love isn’t a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins asks the pertinent question with characteristic elegance: “Is it so very obvious that you can’t love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love (parents are reproached if they don’t at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food, of wine (love of Château Margaux does not preclude love of a fine Hock, and we don’t feel unfaithful to the red when we dally with the white), love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends …

why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?”14

Why, indeed? How would the prevalence and experience of jealousy be affected in Western societies if the economic dependence trapping most women and their children didn’t exist, leading female sexual access to be a tightly controlled

commodity? What if economic security and guilt-free sexual friendships were easily available to almost all men and women, as they are in many of the societies we’ve discussed, as well as among our closest primate cousins? What if no woman had to worry that a ruptured relationship would leave her and her children destitute and vulnerable? What if average guys knew they’d never have to worry about finding someone to love? What if we didn’t all grow up hearing that
true love
is obsessive and possessive? What if, like the Mosuo, we revered the dignity and autonomy of those we loved? What if, in other words, sex, love, and economic security were as available to us as they were to our ancestors?

If fear is removed from jealousy, what’s left?

Human beings will be happier—not when they cure cancer or
get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie
but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities
again. That’s my utopia.

UKRT VONNEGUT, JR.

According to E. O. Wilson, “all that we can surmise of humankind’s genetic history argues for a more liberal sexual morality, in which sexual practices are to be regarded first as bonding devices and only second as a means for procreation.”15 We couldn’t have said it better. But if human sexuality developed primarily as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands where paternity certainty was a nonissue, then the standard narrative of human sexual evolution is toast. The anachronistic presumption that women have
always
bartered their sexual favors to individual men in return for help with child care, food, protection, and the rest of it collapses upon contact with the many societies where women feel no need to negotiate such deals. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past. Yabba dabba doo.

* Real science offers one of the few—if not the only—reliable means of seeing beyond such cultural distortions, which makes it vitally important that we be fearless in rooting out cultural bias in research.

P A R T III

The Way We Weren’t

A central theme in our argument is that human sexual behavior is a reflection of both evolved tendencies and social context. Thus, a sense of the day-to-day social world in which human

sexual

tendencies

evolved

is

essential

to

understanding them. It’s hard to imagine the communal, cooperative social configurations we’ve described surviving long in the kind of world Hobbes envisioned, characterized by