Woman

by Natalie Angier

  Why, indeed. We must keep asking why, why, why, and asking why the answers that the hardcores offer sound so tinny, one-sided, and self-exculpating. Consider a brief evolutionary explanation for President Clinton's adulteries that appeared in The New Yorker, written by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales," Pinker wrote. "A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who inherited his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one. Thus, men should seek quantity in sexual partners; women, quality." And isn't it so, he says, everywhere and always so? "In our society, most young men tell researchers that they would like eight sexual partners in the next two years; most women say that they would like one. On several college campuses, researchers have hired attractive assistants to approach students of the opposite sex and proposition them out of the blue. What proportion says yes? Of the women, zero percent; of the men, seventy-five percent. (Many of the remaining twenty-five percent ask for a rain check.)"

  Let us hold a kaffeeklatsch about some of these statements, starting with the last. Women don't want to take a man up on his off-the-quad overture. Fancy that. Women don't want to take a strange and obviously aggressive man back to their dorm room or apartment for a quickie. Could it be that they are in fear of their life rather than uninterested in the pleasure a handsome man might bring them? And could it be that young women just don't scare men physically the way young men do women? If there were no legitimate fear among the women, surely at least a couple of them would have turned out to be of the "whore" phenotype that supposedly characterizes some women and said yes. Moreover, I wonder how many of the men who said "Count me in!" to their solicitor would have followed through to a bona fide act of intercourse, would not have been a little nervous when push came to shove, if you will, about this forward, lascivious, inappropriately behaving dame, and perhaps started wondering if they were setting themselves up for a private screening of Fatal Attraction? In other words, were the men for real, or was it bluster? And do men truly like sex with women when the women are in charge? What if the man fails to perform, if he proves impotent or ejaculates prematurely, and what if the woman who propositioned him expresses her disappointment or disgust rather than acting as women do in these circumstances and reassuring him, it's fine, she doesn't mind, it happens to the best of them? Will he be so eager to jump into bed with the next stranger, or will he feel shame—a powerful deterrent to sexual behavior that women know quite well indeed?

  Men say they want eight partners in two years. Women want but one. Yet would a man find the prospect of a string of partners so appealing if the following rules were applied: that no matter how much he may like a particular woman and be pleased by her performance and want to sleep with her again, he will have no say in the matter, will be dependent on her mood and good graces for all future contact; that each act of casual sex will cheapen his status and make him increasingly less attractive to other women; and that society will not wink at his randiness but rather sneer at him and think him pathetic, sullied, smaller than life? Until men are subjected to the same severe standards and threat of censure as women are, and until they are given the lower hand in a so-called casual encounter from the start, it is hard to insist with such self-satisfaction that, hey, it's natural, men like a lot of sex with a lot of people and women don't.

  Consider Pinker's philandering caveman who slept with fifty women. Just how good a reproductive strategy is this chronic, random shooting of the gun? A woman is fertile only five or six days a month. Her ovulation is concealed. The man doesn't know when she's fertile. She might be in the early stages of pregnancy when he gets to her; she might still be lactating and thus not ovulating. Moreover, even if our hypothetical Don Juan hits a day on which a woman is ovulating, the chances are around 65 percent that his sperm will fail to fertilize her egg; human reproduction is complicated, and most eggs and sperm are not up to the demands of proper fusion. Even if conception occurs, the resulting embryo has a 30 percent chance of miscarrying at some point in gestation. In sum, each episode of fleeting sex has a remarkably small probability of yielding a baby. Specifically, if we assume that the woman makes no effort at birth control—and this is a concession to the philanderer's point of view, for there is archaeological evidence that the use of rudimentary forms of contraception is quite ancient—the probability is one or two percent at best. ("In a chimpanzee," says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, "maybe one in 130 copulations results in a conception, and that's copulations around the time of ovulation.") And because the man is beating and running, he isn't able to prevent any of his one-night stands from turning around and mating with other men. The poor fellow. He has to mate with so many scores of women for his wham-bam strategy to pay off. And where are all these women to be found, anyway? Sure, today there are interstate highways connecting one city and its singles bars to the next, and there are six billion people in the world, half of them egg-bearers. But population densities during that purportedly all-powerful psyche-shaper the "ancestral environment" were quite low, and long-distance travel was dangerous and difficult.

  There are alternatives to wantonness, as a number of theorists have emphasized. If, for example, a man were to spend a bit more time with one woman rather than dashing breathlessly from sheet to sheet, if he were to feel compelled to engage in what animal behaviorists call mate-guarding, he might be better off, reproductively speaking, than the wild Lothario, both because the odds of his getting the woman during her fertile time would increase and because he'd be monopolizing her energy and keeping her from the advances of other sperm-bearers. It takes the average couple three to four months, or 90 to 120 days, of regular sexual intercourse to become pregnant. That number of days is approximately equal to the number of partners our hypothetical libertine needs to sleep with to have one of them result in a "fertility unit," that is, a baby. The two strategies, then, shake out about the same. A man can sleep with a lot of women—the quantitative approach—or he can sleep with one woman for months at a time, and be madly in love with her—the qualitative tactic. Forget about whether or not Romantic Joe will invest in any babies that come forth. He may just want to do what it takes to impregnate a woman whose ovulatory status he cannot be sure of, and to be her exclusive partner for the requisite "insemination episode," all factors operating under the chromosomal constraints that make human conception less assured than that of, say, a hamster or goat.

  The problem with the two strategies is that they require rather contradictory emotional backdrops in order to operate at peak efficiency. The quantitative approach demands emotional detachment. The qualitative approach requires the capacity to fall in love rather quickly, to be smitten, and to seek out the woman's company all the time, day after day, month after month. Now it's possible that these two reproductive strategies are distributed in discrete packets among the male population, with the result that some men are born philanderers and can never attach while others are born romantics and perpetually in love with love; but it's also possible that men teeter back and forth from one impulse to the other, suffering an internal struggle between the desire to bond and the desire to retreat, with the circuits of attachment ever there to be toyed with, and their needs and desires difficult to understand, paradoxical, fickle, treacherous, and glorious. It is possible, then, and for perfectly good Darwinian reason, that casual sex for men is rarely as casual as it is billed.

  Do men become infatuated with women, even women they have no intention of marrying? Of course they do. Men who see prostitutes often return to the same prostitute. Is the qualitative mating strategy the reason that men are hardly immune to romantic obsessions? Maybe, maybe not. I raise it in lawyerly style, as an objection to the glib assertion that men have a zest for noncommittal sex and women don't, and isn't it obvious why it is so? I'm disturbed by the ease with which
inert and inadequate interpretations of human sexual behavior become engraved in the communal consciousness, to the point where nobody questions the stereotypes any longer, nor offers alternative explanations, nor dares to suggest that change is possible, nor dares to suggest that love and lust are not the characterological property of either sex.

  There is so much left to be understood. Why do women have concealed ovulation, anyway? Why don't their buttocks turn bright red when they're fertile, as they do on a rhesus monkey? A standard proposal is that by keeping her ovulatory status a secret, a woman invites the long-term investment of a man and lures him to stay around day after day; and as I've said above, a man might be compelled to do so, in the hope of finally hitting a bull's-eye, a viable egg. But if the woman needs the man's extended investment, and if she can extract that investment only by disguising the current status of her fecundity, we might be surprised at the extreme visibility of the human pregnancy, which is more visible than that of any other female primate, particularly given the hair loss that has exposed the belly to public scrutiny. Even if a man stayed around for a few months until conception occurred, her pregnancy could be his cue that it was time to move on, which means that the woman would lose his help just when she needed him most, if need him she did. Men appear to be very tuned in to the state of a woman's waisdine. Several cross-cultural studies have shown that men have a preference for women with a waist that is at least 30 percent smaller than her hips. The ratio is what matters, not the absolute body size. The woman may have hips as wide as a hippo's, but if her waist is 30 percent narrower by comparison, she still rates as comely. A cinched-in waist is a feature unique to women. Men have waists and hips of similar circumference. So too do other female primates, which is part of the reason that their pregnancies are not terribly obvious. In women, the surest disruption to an alluring waist-to-hip ratio is not getting fat, for many women deposit their fat on their hips and thighs rather than on their bellies, but being with child. What is the good of having cryptic ovulation for the purpose of attracting the sustained attentions of a man if a woman then goes ahead and gives him a laughably easy visual clue that his job is done, he's impregnated her and can move on to narrower pastures?

  Perhaps a woman's body isn't designed to attract the long-term investment of a mate. A number of theorists have suggested that cryptic ovulation lends a woman a certain amount of control over her mating strategies, by making it more difficult for a man to monopolize her fecundity than it would be if she advertised her status during the few days when the egg is willing. A man attempting to claim exclusive rights to her must now attempt to guard the woman over an interval of weeks or months rather than days, and since the attention of even a vigilant male is likely to lapse now and again as the weeks pass, the woman can be freed to wander, thereby gaining whatever benefits philandering might bring. She can be freed to mate with several local males, thus confusing the issue of paternity and lessening the chance that one of them will commit infanticide, or increasing the total intake of male help for her offspring.

  Who knows the reason for cryptic ovulation, or any other salient feature of human sexuality? I don't—but neither do the evolutionary psychologists. They just sound as though they do, and disagreeing with them is like trying to tell a carnivore you're taking away its meat. Men want sex with many partners more than women do, and women want love more than men do. These are the truths that we hold to be self-evident. But they are not self-evident when you run them through the meat grinder of analysis. Why in the name of Demeter should a woman be prone to fall in love and hitch her future to the commitment of one man and forsake the possible contributions of other prospects if men are by nature so prone to abandon her? The answer is, they're probably not. They're probably prone to be opportunistic by nature, which is the nature of most intelligent, highly gregarious creatures. Human nature, in other words.

  If men today appear to be more interested in all manner of sexual stimuli than women are, if they are the major consumers of pornography and prostitution, and if they say in surveys they'd like to dabble around with as many gals as will approach them on the street with a clipboard in hand, we gals can only reply, It's a man's world, designed for the pleasures of men; and on those rare occasions when a female-friendly sexual nerve is tapped, females respond with crows and roars of hunger and delight. "Why are women so seldom whipped up into an onanistic frenzy by pictures of men?" Robert Wright asks. Except when they are. For example, Raul Julia, may he not be resting in peace, was in the mid-1970s one of the great sex symbols for New York's womankind. A poster of his face, with his dark, knowing, heavy-lidded eyes and his full, beestung lips, was plastered everywhere, advertising the Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, in which he played Mack the Knife. I was a teenager, and I remember stopping and staring at the poster frequently, feeling lust in my parts, and I remember talking about the poster to my friends, and I guess everybody must have been talking about that poster, because one of the alternative newspapers ran a story with the headline "Why Every Woman in New York Wants to Fuck Raul Julia." More recently, the actor Jimmy Smits played a similar sex-puppy role, and the producers of NYPD Blue must have realized as much, for they gave us not one but several episodes in which his naked butt was displayed.

  Oh, opportunity. Bill Clinton has affairs; Hillary Clinton does not (or so we're told). The funny thing is, it looks like Bill didn't always have to work that hard for his sex; sex had a way of finding him. (He's become a female chimpanzee!) Were handsome young interns hurling themselves at the first lady? Or were they intimidated rather than aroused by her power? Former congresswoman Patricia Schroeder has observed ruefully that powerful middle-aged women are not exactly a turn-on for men. We can't deny that young people are as a rule prettier than older people, and if an older man can attract a younger woman, we can see why he might be tempted to indulge. But if the older woman is unable to manage likewise, her innate desire and temptation have nothing to do with it. Assuming that our sexual drive is adapted to maximize our fitness at the time when such fitness counts—for women, during the years of their peak fertility, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight—then the basic machinery of that drive would be our gift or burden for our entire adult life. In other words, even though a woman of forty-five is considerably less fertile than a woman of twenty-two, she still feels, in some cloaked part of her soul, like a greedy young woman. One of the commonest symptoms of neurodegenerative disease and stroke in older women is the release of sexual inhibitions. The women lose their "dignity." They become dirty old ladies. Lynn Johnston gave a rare voice to an old lady's lewdness in her comic strip For Better or for Worse when she showed an elderly woman, her health failing, being lifted from her bed into a stretcher by two strapping young ambulance workers. "My, you two boys are strong—and handsome, too!" the woman says with a grin, at which her middle-aged daughter exclaims, "Mom!" In the next panel, the old woman's thought balloon is "I've always wanted to make passes at handsome young men—and now I'm finally free to do so." Freed by dint of grave illness; the character died soon afterward.

  We don't have to argue that men and women are exactly the same, or that humans are meta-evolutionary beings, removed from nature and slaves to culture, to reject the perpetually regurgitated model of the coy female and the ardent male. Conflicts of interest are always among us, and the outcomes of those conflicts are interesting, more interesting by far than what the ultra-evolutionary psychology line has handed us. Patricia Gowaty, of the University of Georgia, sees conflict between males and females as inevitable and pervasive. She calls it sexual dialectics. "Human mating systems are characterized by conflict from start to finish," she says. Karl Marx saw workers and managers as locked in an eternal struggle over who controls the means of production. The thesis of sexual dialectics is that females and males vie for control over the means of reproduction. Those means are the female body, for there is as yet no such beast as the parthenogenetic man. Women are under selective pressure
to maintain control over their reproduction, to choose with whom they will mate and with whom they will not—to exercise female choice. If they make bad mating decisions, they will have less viable offspring than if they are clever in their choices. Men are under selective pressure to make sure they're chosen or, barring that, to subvert female choice and coerce the female to mate against her will. "But once you have this basic dialectic set in motion, it's going to be a constant push-me, pull-you," Gowaty says. "That dynamism cannot possibly result in a unitary response, the caricatured coy woman and ardent man. Instead there are going to be some coy, reluctantly mating males and some ardent females, and any number of variations in between.

  "All of these strategies and counterstrategies are going on in real time, so that we have responses associated with learning and experience rather than as a result of coded genetic modules," Gowaty says. "The ecological problems that one sex has to solve are produced by the other sex. Nothing is fixed. Until we incorporate that notion, of the dynamic and dialectic pressures underlying human mating systems, we'll never get to the real meat of human behavior, and we'll continue repeating the extreme, and extremely boring, parodies.

  "I think that female choice has to give some viability benefits—that is, a female will choose to mate with a male whom she believes, consciously or otherwise, will confer some advantage on her and her offspring. If that's the case, then her decision is contingent on what she brings to the equation. For example, some theorists talk about the 'good genes' model of mate selection, the idea that a female looks for a male who exhibits signs of having a superior genotype. The 'good genes' model leads to oversimplified notions that there is a 'best male' out there, a top-of-the-line hunk whom all females would prefer to mate with if they had the wherewithal. But in the viability model, a female brings her own genetic complement to the equation, with the result that what looks good genetically to one woman might be a clash of colors for another."