by Terry Gould
Notwithstanding the theoretical monogamous benefits of concealed ovulation, it should be noted that hidden ovulation is common among promiscuous primates, and the feminist anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has theorized that it evolved to facilitate promiscuity. The female langur monkey in India has no sexual swelling, but when outside males show up to challenge the alpha male of their troop, the females begin mating with all the outsiders long before the old alpha is overthrown and a new one installed. The usual routine among langurs and some other primates is for the new dominant male to murder all the infants sired by the old alpha and Hrdy suggests that by “confusing” paternity through promiscuity and non-estrus receptivity, the females thereby save their young. Another explanation is that the langur females are simply thrilled by the prospect of sexual variety after being repressed by a single dominant male for so long. That would have sounded perfectly logical to Mary Jane Sherfey.*
Despite Sherfey, despite Hrdy, and despite no hard evidence that hidden ovulation led to a relatively low female sex drive and a high level of “choosiness,” the standard model still held firm well into the 1980s. True, in the wake of changing female sexual behavior in human society a number of evolutionary biologists had modified the model to acknowledge that human and nonhuman female primates were assertive beings, with sexual agendas of their own, but they tended to judge the naturally promiscuous behavior of female primates—human and nonhuman—by the size of male testicles, not female desire. Males who had a lot to fear from the competition of other sperm in the female’s womb had evolved large testicles to produce copious amounts of ejaculate to swamp their rivals. Males who had little to fear from rivals had little testicles. Human testicles were somewhere between the relatively small proportions of the gorilla, who dominated a harem in his well-defended terrain and almost never had to deal with the infidelity of his consorts, and the relatively large testicles of the appropriately named Pan satyrus, the chimpanzee. Even in the case of those grandly endowed satyric primates, however, the theoreticians maintained that while females could be promiscuous (as it was noticed human females could be), they still invested far more heavily in offspring than males did; and thus, they had to be far more discriminating in their choice of males than males were in their choice of females—in short they had to be less driven to pursue sexual variety.
It wasn’t until 1993, with the publication of Female Choices, that the anthropologist Meredith Small effectively rattled the standard model along Sherfian lines (although she never mentioned Sherfey by name). A few years before, she’d gone to the south of France to study a group of Barbary macaque monkeys living on a twenty-acre reserve. She wanted to test the standard model regarding female mate choice. “I knew that they mated with several males,” she wrote, “but presumably they were more choosy when ovulation was imminent. I intended to observe the choices my females made and to discover why they preferred certain males over others.”
What she found was female sexual responsiveness taken to its ultimate, Sherfian conclusion. “Yes, these females were aking choices, but they seemed to choose every male in the group, one after another, and there was no selectivity during the time when ovulation might be occurring,” she reported. “If Barbary females are supposed to be selective about which males would father the next batch of infants, I asked myself, why are they moving from male to male with apparent indiscriminate abandon…? The day I watched a Barbary female copulate with three different males in the span of six minutes, I knew that it was time to re-evaluate the current concept of female choice. Presumably the reason Barbarys didn’t fit the standard model was because the model had some significant flaws.”
Small’s book came out just before Baker and Bellis published their physical observations of the “sperm wars” being waged in the reproductive tract of females, so she did not harness their explanations of the benefits of promiscuity for the female and the effect of infidelity on male ejaculatory response. But as Small studied the mating behavior of many primates—from the group-sex-oriented bonobos to the supposedly monogamous gibbons—a startling pattern emerged. Barbarys were not aberrations. “The only consistent interest seen among the general primate population is an interest in novelty and variety,” she reported. “Although the possibility of choosing for good genes, good fathers, or good friends remains an option to female primates, they seem to prefer the unexpected.”
Even female gibbons—long held as our moral equivalents in sex and thus our close kin in the primate world—were cheating on their lifelong mates. Indeed, at the risk of being beaten or killed by jealous males, most female primates would copulate with skulking, low-ranking males despite the fact that they’d just had the pick of the high rankers. This utterly violated sexual-selection theory.
“The stalwart females continued to stake out these low rankers and put up with abuse from other males,” Small noted. “This behavior is perhaps the clearest evidence of some sort of female preference, and the preference seems to be for Variety…. In fact, the search for the unfamiliar is documented as a female preference more often than is any other characteristic our human eyes can perceive.”
As I’ve mentioned before, the champion in the search for sexual variety in the primate world is the bonobo chimpanzee, whose behavior Small first saw on a video shown by Frans De Waal to a national conference on the apes. The video “silenced a room of three hundred primatologists and journalists,” Small wrote. If you have ever seen a five-second clip of that film on television—the sum total regulatory bodies will probably ever allow on a non-X-rated channel—you have an inkling why. Watching bonobos have sex is very much like watching humans. “There is no escape, we are looking at an animal so akin to ourselves that the dividing line is seriously blurred,” De Waal marveled.
It is probably for that reason that bonobos have appeared so often in the news since De Waal first began making colleagues such as Small aware of his research on the little-known ape in the 1990s. They are as close to us as our aggressive, violent other cousin, the common chimpanzee, but somehow they seem more human to people. And that is probably a good sign for swingers. If Mary Jane Sherfey had known about bonobos, she quite likely would have used them to reinforce her theories of female sexuality—at the same time modifying the juxtaposition of words like “impelling, aggressive eroticism.” Because while the bonobo is maximally erotic, there is little that is impelling or aggressive about it. Tellingly, the sexuality of the bonobo was reported in journals as far back as the 1950s—but the embarrassed few who noticed must have decided not to spread the word.
Sex for a group of bonobos is so casual, yet so tied in with every aspect of their day-to-day existence, that to set it apart from life, as we think we do in our own society, would be to misread their use of pleasure, which can be summed up as follows: there is no fighting over sex, and sex is used to stop fights. If they come across a choice bit of food in their native range in Zaire, and the bonobos are unsure who will get it, they all start having sex. Females grasp each other face to face and rub their vulvas to orgasm. Both sexes gather round and play feelie. Males “fence” each other with their erect penises. Females felate males, males perform cunnilingus on females, and males and females have intercourse, often face to face, which the females seem to prefer, probably because the vulva is situated between the legs rather than toward the back as with the common chimpanzee. All of this sex goes on at once, mind you, and afterward the good feeling is so complete that the food is shared with minimum conflict.
Again, tellingly, we seem now to be ready for a message bonobos could have given us forty years ago had we been ready to hear it. “Just imagine that we had never heard of chimpanzees or baboons and had known bonobos first,” De Waal wrote in 1995. “We would at present most likely believe that early hominids lived in female-centered societies, in which sex served important social functions and in which warfare was rare or absent.”
As Sherfey would have been interested to see, bonobo society is clearly a matriarch
y. “Females often dominate males” is the exclamatory news primatologists now proclaim when reporting on bonobos, a jaw-dropping fact considering that “male dominance is the standard mammalian pattern” in all but two species. As with humans, bonobo males are 15 percent larger than the females, yet the males are frankly afraid of pushing them lest they provoke a rare but collective attack. Alliances are made among females on behalf of their young, whom they nurse for four years, having sex all the while with other females to cement these alliances. The females do exhibit sexual swellings but they are proceptive most of the month and copulate in such a self-willed, ongoing fashion with so many males that it is obvious even the top-ranking females play no favorites with an ostensible alpha male—which they should be doing, according to the standard model. And while it is true that both sexes have a pecking order—and bonobos are no angels—their society is too egalitarian to say that top rankers arbitrarily “rule.” It is a rare dispute that is not defused by sexual pleasure. Less than 2 percent of DNA separates us from the bonobo and only two and a half million years separates them from the hominids displayed in the New York diorama. One theory has it that since the time hominids branched off from their common ancestry line with chimps some six million years ago, the bonobo has evolved less from the progenitor of our species than has the war-making common chimpanzee—whose negative behavioral traits, including sexual jealousy and a propensity for political scheming, we have long regarded as the antecedents of our own.
It should come as no surprise that swingers have adopted the group-sex-oriented and casually lesbian bonobo as their mascot. But bonobos differ from lifestylers in that they do not appear to form nuclear families; in addition the males are sexual with one another, which, as I’ve noted, is taboo among swingers. Nevertheless, anyone who has ever heard of swingers and bonobos easily makes the connection. In Female Choices Meredith Small cheekily replicated a swinger ad in a mock “personals” section of a newspaper she called the Simian Times: “Swingers of All Sexes and Ages—join our bonobo sharing group, meet new folks, free-for-all fun.”
Based on her survey of the entire primate world, and her anthropological knowledge of human culture, Small reached several conclusions regarding female sexual choice. All but one—a final end-page kicker—were in line with the cultural climate of the early nineties.
First, primate females were choosing to be promiscuous. It was part of their mating strategy: “From the point of view of the female, she should always be the new girl on the block. If a male’s sexual excitement, and thus potency, is highest when he experiences a new female, it’s to the female’s advantage to be that new female. Females want novel males as much as novel males want them.”
Second, the standard model of evolutionary theory was tied more to culture than to the facts: “The notion still prevails that females don’t enjoy sex as much as males do and that females go about mating at a slow pace, refusing more males than they choose. This prediction of female behavior is supported, as I have shown, not with what females really do, but with evolutionary theory—females should be selective, nonsexual.”
Third, there were social advantages to promiscuity: “The extended swellings of female bonobos and the fact that they have sex any time and anywhere is what makes the relationship between males and females equivalent.”
Fourth, what primate females were up to had definite implications for humans: “Because we share with nonhuman primate females many of our broad patterns of behavior, we may also share our sexual nature.”
Fifth (in perfect accordance with Sherfey), the high level of human female sexuality had throughout history placed a knife to the throat of assured male paternity, and this had caused women problems: “The information on human females demonstrates a certain insatiability for sex. This insatiability is so strong, some suggest, that males must restrict female sexuality, and most cultures do so in one way or another…. Part of that restriction may lie in convincing women that they are biologically less sexual and less intrigued by different sexual partners than are males…. The ‘double standard’ is really a statement about the power to control (or attempt to control) rather than about differences in male and female sexuality.”
Small didn’t think coercive “wife swapping” was the pathway to female freedom. All she was looking for was a recognition of the sexual equality of men and women. And so, lastly, she concluded her book with a startling bit of advice for women: “The demands of parenting have selected for a particular social system and have given men more power over our reproductive decisions than they should have. We should, perhaps, follow the example of our bonobo sisters, who have parlayed their sexual nature into equality with males.”
Small’s conclusions violated the standard model. But, as Sherfey had said about Freud’s clitoris-to-vagina “transfer” theory, the standard model had “only a questionable basis in biology” to begin with.
As Skala, Leslie, and I took the same tour of the crowded Annex that we’d taken with Jodie when it was empty, we couldn’t help noticing that the actual “sex part” of fastlane swinging was neither impelling nor aggressive. It was certainly far less frenzied than, say, a pornograpic movie depicting Sherfian group sex where “intense, insatiable eroticism” reigned—though the feelings described by those words were obviously present in some of the participants. Generally speaking, these fastlane swingers—even the handful who were experiencing something homologous to Sherfey syndrome—were quite as good-humored and sensibly garrulous with one another as in the banquet hall. Most of the couples either knew one another as club members or had appreciated what they had seen on first meeting. Their eyes weren’t glazed over with perverse self-abasement, nor did they seem to be straining to pull nails out of walls with their teeth as they participated in their polygon arrangements. Around the crackling firepit, on the complicated Eros Seats, in the blue light of the white-curtained Sultan’s Tent, and on the Victorian couch of Miss Daisy’s Academy, the couples did in fact look quite similar to the sculptures on Kajuraho’s temples—although it should be remembered that those sculptures depict group sex in which everyone is smiling. Skala observed that the whole environment reminded him less of an orgy house than of a fitness gym where with great gusto everyone performs publicly and vocally, free from remorse. “This is quite fantastical,” he said when we were back on the first level, where we beheld an arrangement of twisting backs and shoulders on the elaborate tiers of couches in the video room. Beth and Frieda were the objects of attention of Konrad, a “helping” Edith, and Sol—and seemed to have been so for some time. They had their arms around their lovers and every now and then they raised their heads in full consciousness and laughed. Meanwhile, Larry was sitting on the edge of the action cooing to his wife, Beth, even as she rocked slowly with Konrad.
By the time we walked back outside to the central area, the erotic masseur had set up his table and was pleasuring a woman with Swedish massage while her husband looked on. The husband was so delighted by his wife’s enjoyments that almost the moment she got off the table he took her passionately on the couch of the firepit. When I walked back into the video room to check on our tablemates, Larry was hotly making love to Beth—more hotly than Konrad had. There was no question the polyamorous rite of “watching” was heightening the coupling of these couples. Their voyeuristic behavior points to a central paradox of males in the lifestyle: “Jealousy,” as Brian Gilmartin put it, “becomes a sexual turn-on.”
The almost universally shared reaction to jealousy by men in the lifestyle is particularly hard to understand because it seems to violate how all men are biologically programmed to react to spousal infidelity. Until quite recently, from a biological point of view, it was actually easier to understand how women could accept their swinging husbands than it was to understand the reaction of men to their swinging wives. “If indeed a man’s great Darwinian peril is cuckoldry, and a woman’s is desertion, then male and female jealousy should differ,” Robert Wright wrote in The Moral Ani
mal. “Male jealousy should focus on sexual infidelity, and males should be quite unforgiving of it; a female, though she’ll hardly applaud a partner’s extracurricular activities, since they consume time and divert resources, should be more concerned with emotional infidelity…. These predictions have been confirmed—by eons of folk wisdom and, over the past few decades, by considerable data.”
The data is actually confirmed in the lifestyle—for women. One of the foundational convictions of longtime swingers is that friendly sex between lifestylers poses no real threat of emotional infidelity to a marriage; thus, in lifestyle theory, the greatest threat of “social sexuality” should be lessened for wives. And according to their own testimony, it is. “These people,” Gilmartin reported, “do not see deep, long-lasting friendships with their swinging partners as competitive with the committed type of love characteristic of a sound marriage. Friends who see each other very often are regarded as ‘loving’ one another, but in a noncommitted way.” In the culture of veteran female lifestylers, then, a husband’s “noncommitted” sex is appreciated by her as part of the all-around social warmth attendant to swinging in a safe environment; when it is interpreted by her as posing an emotional threat to her marriage, she either talks to her husband and calls a halt to the proceedings or, as mentioned, she embraces the rival woman bisexually and “confirms” that the threat is unwarranted. Either way, she usually (not always) resolves the issue.
For a man, however, his wife’s lack of “love” for a sex partner should not mitigate against his automatic reaction. “What drives men craziest is the thought of their mate in bed with another man,” Wright observed. “They don’t dwell as much as women do on any attendant emotional attachment, or the possible loss of the mate’s time and attention—Husbands tend to respond to infidelity with rage; and even after it subsides, they often have trouble contemplating a continued relationship with the infidel.”