Woman

by Natalie Angier

  Maybe the man's immune system doesn't complement her own, for example, Gowaty proposes. There's evidence that the search for immune variation is one of the subtle factors driving mate selection, which may be why we care about how our lovers smell; immune molecules may be volatilized and released in sweat, hair, the oil on our skin. We are each of us a chemistry set, and each of us has a distinctive mix of reagents. "What pleases me might not please somebody else," Gowaty says. "There is no one-brand great male out there. We're not all programmed to look for the alpha male and only willing to mate with the little guy or the less aggressive guy because we can't do any better. Some women might find it exciting to be with the little guy. He might be a fabulous lover. She might like him for all the subliminal reasons of chemistry that we find hard to articulate. But the propaganda gives us a picture of the right man and the ideal woman, and the effect of the propaganda is insidious. It becomes self-reinforcing. People who don't fit the model think, 'I'm weird, I'll have to change my behavior.'"

  It is this danger, that the ostensible "discoveries" of evolutionary psychology will be used as propaganda, that makes the enterprise so disturbing. And evolutionary psychologists sometimes do dispense advice. Robert Wright is persuaded that the madonna-whore dichotomy is "rooted firmly in the male mind." Not just his mind, or the minds of his like-minded friends, but the male mind. Thus he gently and generously advises women who want to get married to abide by the old verities and resist the sexual overtures of a suitor, lest their easy capitulation "stifle any budding feelings of love" the man may have had for them. Consciously or unconsciously, he says, men put women to the test. They try to get women into bed, and if the women agree too readily, that's it, the women are tramps and can't be trusted. "Women who would like a husband and children have been known to try the Emma Wedgwood plan for landing a man," he writes, referring to Mrs. Charles Darwin. "In its most extreme form, the plan runs as follows: if you want to hear vows of eternal devotion right up to your wedding day—and if you want to make sure there is a wedding day—don't sleep with your man until the honeymoon." But where is the evidence that women who "give in too easily" do not get married, while those who remain chaste do? There is no such evidence, and Wright admits as much. Nevertheless, the principle of delayed gratification is a sound one, he insists. "Some women have found that a move of some distance toward austerity may make sense" (emphasis in original). But how long is this "some distance toward austerity" supposed to be? What will it take to calm a man's cuckold-control monitor? No sex until the third date? The third month of dating? A year? Oh dear. Every man has one, it seems, but the sizes are all different. What is a millennial gal to do? Maybe she should just ask the fellow. How long is it, sir? How long, oh lord, how long?

  In fact, women who start trudging down the path of austerity for the sake of proving to men their "goodness," chastity, and marriageability may find their Cinderella slippers splattered with all sorts of unpleasant effluvia. A full concordance with the familiar portrait of female modesty may demand other behavioral concessions beyond keeping our legs tightly crossed—for example, not seeming overtly clever. Smart girls have always been told that they should try to hide their intelligence, that men don't find bright, outspoken women terribly appealing. Could the man's fear of female intelligence be linked to his ostensibly innate fidelity surveillance equipment, reflecting his worry that a shrewd woman will figure out how to cheat on him the moment his back is turned? I have no data to support this proposition. But it makes sense, doesn't it? So if you're going to start advising a woman to act virtuously, even when she doesn't feel particularly virtuous, why not go the distance and advise her to seem docile and insipid as well? Ladies, if you want your Mrs. degree, you'll have to forgo the Ph.D.

  I might also point out that by the very principles to which hardcore evolutionary psychologists subscribe, it's a waste of time to listen to any man's advice on how to catch a man, for Wright himself says that men are selected to be extraordinarily "treacherous," more treacherous than males in most species are, and to lie to women constantly, and to be so good at their lies that they themselves believe them to be the truth. Why then should a woman believe a man who tells her that she should be good to win a man's heart, and that she shouldn't believe a man who swears to her as he tries to yank off her clothes that yes, he'll still love her in the morning?

  As Gowaty sees it, biologists have yet to develop good theoretical models to explain variations in female strategies. "It's been an uphill battle in behavioral ecology to get people to the point where they don't think of female animals as all coming from the same cookie cutter and having the same needs," she says. "For bluebirds, we might talk about variations in metabolic rate, foraging skills, or the local abundance of insects. For humans, it might be a variation in the ability to remember where the tubers are that you need to eat. Evolutionary psychologists like to talk about the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Well, we don't have time machines, so to say what this ancestral environment may have been is a real puzzle. But if we look around us at the phenotypes we see among modern humans, it's safe to say that whatever the EEA was, it surely selected for an enormous amount of variation. We're not all virgins, we're not all whores."

  While the strategies and means may differ from one woman to the next, the basic ecological problems that we must solve have always been fairly straightforward: gaining access to the resources we need to survive and reproduce. As Gowaty puts it, "We're still foragers at heart, though today we may forage at Kroger's rather than in the bush. We're still concerned with retaining control over mate choice. Society constrains our choices dramatically. If we don't get equal pay for equal work, that deficiency affects our ability to forage at Kroger's, which in turn influences our choice of mate. What has feminism been about but equity issues and reproductive issues? That's what we've been talking to each other about for the last thirty years."

  These are the issues at the heart of feminism. They are also the obsessions of any female transient at the Gaia Arms Hotel, whether feathered, furred, or depilated. Who says that feminism and evolutionary biology must inevitably spit on each other's slippers? The hardcore evolutionary psychologists see feminism as a myopic and possibly doomed enterprise, a Utopian prayerbook that denies ancient human drives and the fundamental discordance between male and female opportunities and limitations. If their depictions of men and women sound stereotyped, that is because they are, and for a reason. In the Darwin-o-gram reckoning of human nature, a stereotype is not an intellectual pitfall to guard against; it's an opportunity! What is a stereotype if not an expression of a potentially universal truth, which means it could be the signpost of an adaptation, a trait that might have conferred selective advantage on those who bore it? All of which merits further exploration by the distribution of a questionnaire to a couple of hundred willing college students to see whether or not they believe the stereotype to be true.

  But there are many scientists and scholars who denounce the unilateral version of neo-Darwinism that has trampled across the campus of public opinion like a pack of fraternity brothers on a panty raid, feeling no humbleness for want of evidence or for the many exceptions to their book of rules. There are plenty of evolutionary biologists who know that their effort to understand human nature is far, far from over, is a neonate who has yet to find its way to its mother's teat. There are female primatologists who have spent too many years watching female primates carry on like ... well, like stereotypical gay men to accept the prefabricated image of the coy female, however airbrushed with concessions and caveats the image has lately been. There are ornithologists who have observed birds living in family arrangements that remind them of human families, with the father there and contributing and the grandparents and cousins and uncles nearby; and they have seen female birds refusing to act like gentle bluebirds of happiness, and they have cried out for better models to account for the extraordinary variation flapping its wings before them.

  Variation and flexi
bility are the key themes that get set aside in the breathless dissemination of evolutionary psychology. "The variation is tremendous, and is rooted in biology," Barbara Smuts said to me. "Flexibility itself is the adaptation." Females vary. So too do males. Smuts has studied olive baboons, and she has seen males pursuing all sorts of mating strategies. "There are some whose primary strategy is dominating other males, and being able to gain access to more females because of their fighting ability," she says. "Then there is the type of male who avoids competition and cultivates long-term relationships with females and their infants. These are the nice, affiliative guys. There's a third type, who focuses on sexual relationships. He's the con-sorter. He's not around females when they're pregnant or lactating, but when they're in estrus, he knows how to relate to them in a way that decreases the females' motivation to go after other guys. The strategy that a male pursues is not related to status or age. A high-status male can be an affiliative male, while a male who's low in the hierarchy may stake his future on his fighting power. Instead, the differences in mating strategy seem to be born largely of temperament, of innate differences in personality and physiology. And as far as we can tell, no one reproductive strategy has advantages over the others."

  Men are at least as complicated as baboons—aren't they? Their temperaments vary, and their life circumstances vary, and so too must their reproductive tactics. "Some men have resources to offer, and they may tend toward promiscuity," says Smuts. "Some men can offer help with child care. One strategy is not necessarily a better route to reproductive fitness than the other. The man who is helping a woman take care of the children won't necessarily benefit if he suddenly decides to try the promiscuous strategy." The cost of his adultery may be greater than the small odds that he will sire an extra child through his philandering. Not only will his disloyalty distract him from his paternal duties, possibly leading to a poorer outcome for his existing offspring, but his wife may herself become less devoted to the relationship and start dallying around.

  Men have tried to circumvent this problem with the creation of the double standard, the notion that it's acceptable for a man to commit adultery but iniquitous for his wife to do so. The double standard is the ultimate attempt by males to have it all, to have the guaranteed, true-blue reproducer at home and the slot machines that you play on the side. And evolutionary psychologists have argued that women are willing to accept the double standard provided the man keeps providing. They claim that surveys show that men and women feel differently about threats to the primary relationship: men, they say, are most outraged at the thought of sexual infidelity in a mate, while women are less disturbed at the idea of a sexual infraction and more distressed at the thought of emotional infidelity in a husband. Their interpretation of the discrepancy is that a man's reproductive success is compromised by the possibility of being unwittingly saddled with another man's offspring, while a woman's success is most jeopardized if her husband leaves her for another love. Thus, the theory goes, it is adaptive for men to feel insane sexual jealousy and women to dread emotional betrayal. But for the life of me I can't see how a woman can "know," in that Stone Age way she supposedly knows, the difference between a husband's harmless dalliance and a serious threat to her marriage, or how she can trust a man who has cheated on her sexually to be emotionally reliable and to stick around long enough to pay for college tuition. I can imagine how a woman might put up with bad behavior because she has no choice, because she is too poor to leave a rotten marriage and make it on her own.

  It's hard to know what we really want to do beneath the multiple sheaths of compromise and constraint. Let's turn again to olive baboons. Female baboons, as they start heading toward estrus, become outrageously promiscuous. "I have seen them literally hop from one guy to the next," says Smuts. "They'll mate with ten different males in the space of an hour." But as the female's day of ovulation proper approaches, the males around her become ever less tolerant of her dabblings and begin to constrain her behavior. "You see a dramatic shift at peak estrus, from radical promiscuity to the female being with one male," says Smuts. The male she is with might be a rugged fighter type, an affiliator, or a lubricator; the point is, a male has claimed her, and males can make their position felt, for they are much bigger than the females and have a wicked set of slashing canines. Rebecca Dowhan, a student of Smuts's, wanted to know how a female would behave during peak estrus, the moment of truth, if not constrained by a single male. Working with a population of captive baboons, she took a female who had already formed an exclusive estrus consortship with one male, and she put the female in an area with that male and two other familiar males. The males were in separate cages, so the female could interact with each one, but they could not restrict her movements. How did the female respond to this unprecedented degree of freedom, a sexual sovereignty that would not exist for natural-born female baboons? She reverted to her Lotharia ways, fraternizing first with one male, then jumping to the next for a quick groom. She showed no preference for her consort—the male who had chosen her. The thing she seemed to crave was diversity.

  We don't know why a female baboon bothers with being promiscuous, what she gets from all the effort. What we do know is that she must get something, for she works at it wildly unless strong-armed into good behavior. Most female animals are promiscuous. They go to great lengths to be promiscuous and to avoid being coopted by a mate-guarding male. Scientists often are flummoxed by the female sex drive. They can't always find good Darwinian justification for all the erotic energy. Male ejaculations are so genomically well endowed; why does a female get rapacious and take the time and expose herself to the risk of predation and disease to gather more than her spermic share? Every so often, though, the scientists find irrefutable, quantitative proof that promiscuity pays. A seven-year study of Gunnison's prairie dogs, for example, showed that females who mated with three or more males in a breeding season had a 100 percent conception rate and gave birth to an average of 4.5 pups, while females that mated with only one male had a 92 percent conception rate and an average litter of 3.5 pups. We can't say why the extra matings made for surer and bigger broods, but they did, and consequently female prairie dogs do everything in their power to resist males intent on keeping them down in the burrow and monopolizing their favors.

  Humans don't have litters, yet still women philander, and sometimes it does a body, and the fruits of that body, demonstrable good. The hardcore evo-psycho brigade insists that males never invest in babies of whom they have the slightest doubt of paternity. But is the premise uniformly true, and has it always been true, even when humans lived in small bands of foragers who had yet to start worrying about property rights and the siring of undisputed heirs? The evidence brays otherwise. Among a number of traditional societies of lowland South America, people believe in "partible paternity"—the idea that a child can have more than one biological father. They believe that a child is a sort of spermic quilt, and that the multiple ejaculates of different men make for better and sturdier children than the discharge of one fellow alone can. In such cultures, married women often take a lover or three during pregnancy, and all of those lovers are considered fathers to the baby, with concordant responsibilities to show up with at least the occasional speared fish. Among the Ache foragers in eastern Paraguay, for example, the majority of women count on their consorts to help protect and provide meat for their offspring. In interviews with 17 Ache women, anthropologists Kim Hill and Hillard Kaplan found that each of their 66 children was attributed to an average of 2.1 possible progenitors. The Ache go so far as to recognize three different categories of fatherhood: one refers to the man to whom a woman is married when her child is born; the second, to the man or men she had extramarital relations with just before or during her pregnancy; and the third, to the man whom the woman believes actually inseminated her.

  A similar state of affairs holds for the Barí people of Venezuela and Colombia, foragers and simple horticulturists who plant manioc and supplement the
ir starchy diet with fish and game. More than two thirds of Barí women engage in extramarital sex during pregnancy, and their children benefit significantly from the practice. None of this is done clandestinely. When a woman is giving birth, she tells the midwife who her lovers were, and the midwife goes out afterward to announce to each of the men, "Congratulations. You have a child." The men are expected to help their partible offspring in hard times, and usually they do. Barí children with two or more fathers to their name have an 80 percent chance of surviving past the age of fifteen. For those with just a primary father, the survival rate is 64 percent.

  What is in it for the Barí husbands? Why do they tolerate their wives' peccadilloes? For one thing, they have their affairs as well, usually with other married women. For another, their wives are not supposed to be promiscuous unless they are already pregnant, so presumably the husbands are the biological fathers of most, if not all, of their wives' offspring.

  "We can hypothesize about the origins of partible paternity," says Stephen Beckerman, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the Barí. "It's possible that females took control of the etiology, that it's working mainly to their benefit, and that men have no 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."