Darwin and the Double Standard

We accept these truths as self-evident, that all men are created equal and that given a choice of several females, the red-blooded male wants them all. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey reported that 72 percent of married men yearned for extramarital affairs. "The human male," he wrote, "would be promiscuous . . . throughout the whole of his life if there were no social restrictions." And he needed a survey to tell him that. Men often speak of the joy of conquest, the mysterious quality that makes a new woman appear especially exciting, a quality that fades (at least temporarily) after she has been bedded. Most men will attest to the sweet delight of making love to a new woman for the first, second and third times. (First nights are often spectacular performances.) Something comes over you. Of course, if you are caught by your spouse or roommate, you may be at a loss to explain just what it was that did come over you. Some men (continued on page 160)Double Standard (continued from page 109) invoke the double standard: A man's got to do what a man's got to do; it's natural.

The women's lib movement has challenged the notion that men are compelled by their gender to be rogues. Women have demanded equal rights and have sought affairs of their own. They have cloaked their attempt at sexual freedom in rhetoric, have confessed their unhappiness in consciousness-raising sessions and have belabored, in studies such as the Hite Report, their inability to have orgasms. Perhaps they are defying biology. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature. Recent scientific theory suggests that there are innate differences between the sexes and that what's right for the gander is wrong for the goose.

The double standard is based on the assumption that variety is the spice of life, at least for males. Is there something about an untried female that is innately arousing, or is that all a male-chauvinist game? Experiments with animals (the four-legged kind, not the freshmen from the Deke House) clearly point out that even a sexually exhausted male can be rearoused by a new female. Psychologist Gordon Bermant studied this phenomenon in sheep and found that when a vigorous young ram is placed in a pen with a receptive ewe, he will copulate with her about seven times in the first hour. If the ewe is removed after every ejaculation and a fresh female is substituted, the ram will copulate 14 times in the first half hour. After which he will light up a well-deserved cigarette.

The stimulating effect of changing partners is known in psychology journals as the Coolidge Effect, a term invented by Frank A. Beach to commemorate a widely repeated anecdote about Silent Cal, our 30th President. It appears that the President and Mrs. Coolidge were visiting a Government farm. They were taken on separate tours. Upon arriving at the chicken coops, Mrs. Coolidge paused to ask if the rooster copulated more than once a day.

"Dozens of times," the caretaker replied.

"Please tell that to the President," Mrs. Coolidge requested.

When the President passed the coops and was told of the rooster's virile record, he inquired, "Same hen every time?"

"Oh, no, Mr. President. A different hen every time."

The President nodded slowly, then said, "Please tell that to Mrs. Coolidge."

Experiments have demonstrated that the Coolidge Effect exists in male rats, dairy bulls, rhesus monkeys, Indian water buffalo, turkeys and other species---though no comparable Grace Coolidge Effect has been observed in the females of those species. Is there a Coolidge Effect in humans? There has been no published research on the topic, though not for lack of willing volunteers. However, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is easier to screw three women in one night than the same woman three times in one night. Ask any male veteran of Plato's Retreat.

Feminists might argue that the Coolidge Effect is the result of sexist upbringing. They claim that if boys and girls were raised alike, the sex roles and responses of adulthood would disappear. Not in this life, ladies. For millions of years, males and females have evolved in different directions. For all intents and purposes, they are almost like two separate species, governed by separate natural impulses. It's time to face the facts.

In 1858, Charles Darwin proposed a theory of evolution based on natural selection. Roughly translated, this theory suggests that nature is one vast breeding experiment. Only the fittest survive to mate and pass on their genes. From the winners' circle to the stud farm, the individuals who survive the competition father the next generation, and so on.

It is a male-oriented theory. Darwin noted that the most striking differences between males and females in many animal species were (1) that males often fought with one another over females, but females rarely fought over males, and (2) that males were usually eager to mate with any female but females were very choosy in selecting a mate. In the past few years, a new branch of science---known as sociobiology---has arisen that seeks to explain those innate differences in terms of genetics. Sociobiologists believe that we are descended not from a long line of fighters and winners but from a long line of ancestors who had one thing in common: They were lovers. Our male forebears were those who managed to persuade reluctant females to mate, to produce their offspring. Any types of behavior that did not contribute to successful seduction (and reproduction) have died out. We are what is left; and we are what we are because, to a certain extent, women control the mating game. They say yes. They say no. Males fight one another over females, not because they like to or are innately aggressive but because that is what impressed their great-great-grandmothers. Strategies that lead to successful reproduction are passed down through the genes. Most human behavior can be explained as what we have to do to get laid, to ensure that our genes are passed to the next generation and that our species survives.

The name of the game is reproduction. Females tend to be more choosy because they are descendants of women who played their cards carefully, who didn't accept sex from just any stranger but who, instead, waited for the right male---the male who would provide the best chance of producing surviving offspring.

Males are also driven by their genes to reproduce: They tend to be more promiscuous because, in times past, that was their best way to reproduce the most offspring. If you get caught fooling around, don't say the Devil made you do it. It's the devil in your DNA.

Sociobiologists believe that males and females behave differently because they have evolved differently. And that difference stems from the biological machinery by which our genes are reproduced. The human female entrusts her genes to one big egg a month. The male produces thousands of sperm per minute. One ejaculation contains nearly half a billion sperm, enough to fertilize the female population of the United States four times over. In the biological economy, eggs are expensive and sperm are cheap. So the two sexes have naturally evolved different ways to spend them. Girls are discriminating comparison shoppers and boys are impulse buyers and sexual spendthrifts. The behavior is bone-deep if not deeper. It is not readily influenced by such recent innovations as birth control or the E.R.A. movement.

The male investment in sex is usually a small one. In most animals, a male's commitment to reproduction ends after the sex act. He is understandably more casual about sex. A female, by contrast, puts a great deal of her biological energy into creating a single egg cell. Once it is fertilized, she begins the age-old sequence of pregnancy, birth, nursing and infant care. For a human female, that may mean a commitment of ten years or more. She wants to invest the egg wisely; therefore, her best strategy is to play a waiting game---to wait for the right time and the right mate. Females have evolved to be discriminating and choosy because of the stiff penalties for making sexual mistakes. To take a stark example, if a female robin committed the indiscretion of mating with a male blue jay, she would obviously lose the investment she had made in her egg and perhaps (continued on page 208)Double Standard (continued from page 160) waste an entire breeding season. Therefore, over the ages, her genes have refined the ability to discriminate, to recognize unerringly a male of her own species.

It a male makes a sexual mistake, the cost is slight. A few moments of his time and a small amount of sperm, which his body will replace in a few hours, anyway. A sex act that fails to fertilize an egg has virtually no effect on the ultimate quantity of genes a male will reproduce, so there has been no evolutionary reason for males to develop the fine discrimination system females have. They will make it with anything that moves and, having made it, move on.

Breed bulls are so indiscriminate they will mount a wooden frame that bears only a remote resemblance to a cow and ejaculate into it. (That is how cattle breeders obtain samples of bull semen.) Human males are more apt than females to practice unproductive sex---homosexuality, celibacy, bestiality---the kind of sex acts that can't possibly lead to reproduction. Consider the following monolog by Lenny Bruce:

Guys detach. It has nothing to do with liking, loving. You put guys on a desert island and they'll do it to mud. Mud! If a woman caught her husband with mud, she'd be outraged: "Eeeeekkk. Don't talk to me, you piece of shit, you. Leave me alone. Go with your mud, you, have fun. You want dinner? Get your mud to make dinner for you."

The name of the game is reproduction, and success is measured in the number of your genes that make it into future generations. The final score. There is an obvious difference between males and females in the upper limit of reproductive success: A male can produce more children in a lifetime than a female can. It has been reported that King Mongkut of Siam had some 9000 wives and concubines. If he fathered only one child by each of them, he would still have passed on over 130 times more of his genes than the world's most fertile woman. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the motherhood champ as a Russian peasant woman who gave birth to 69 children in 27 deliveries---16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets.)

The mating game is not as one-sided as we have painted it. Men do not simply ride roughshod over submissive females. Over the years, women have evolved an equally successful strategy for reproduction. It is called the pair bond. The reward for monogamy is love; the penalty for promiscuity, jealousy. Have you ever wondered why men who commit adultery fly into a rage if they find that their wives have done the same? Why do men want to marry virgins, while women do not? Sociobiology offers some answers.

Fatherhood

Men may be more promiscuous than women, but they are extremely unpromiscuous in comparison with virtually every other type of male animal. The love-'em-and-leave-'em strategy is effective for most species, but not for men. Among their closest living relatives---the chimpanzee and the gorilla---the adult males are fathers in name only. They don't contribute directly to raising their offspring. In fact, they have no way of knowing which young are their own.

Among the thousands of species of mammals, the male typically abandons the female after sex and has nothing further to do with his offspring. Not so with humans (and a handful of exceptional mammals---foxes, marmosets and gibbons and, perhaps, some varieties of beaver and nycterid bat): The male and the female stay together, support each other and pool their resources to raise their common young. All around the world, people pair off and males help take care of their children. Fatherhood is a powerful motivating force for men.

Why are human males unusual? Sociobiologists claim that their behavior evolved because it helped them reproduce more. Sometime after our ancestors split off from the other primates, males who tended to love and stay must have begun to produce more offspring than those who loved and left.

In the animal kingdom, the mating system that most closely resembles our own is found---believe it or not---in birds. About 95 percent of birds are so-called monogamous species: A male and a female stay together, keeping all other adults away, at least through a breeding season and sometimes for life.

It may seem farfetched to compare humans to birds, because we're so far apart on the phylogenetic scale. But in the areas of courtship, reproduction and general sex relations, birds are more similar to us than any other animals, including apes and monkeys. We understand birds at a gut level---they make sense to us. It is no accident that parents, asked where babies come from, often turn to the "birds and bees" for harmless homilies about Momma and Poppa Robin.

The conditions that gave rise to pair bonding and the complications that accompany it follow striking parallels in both species. For one thing, the pair bond seems to have evolved for similar reasons: the relatively long period when the young are helpless and need constant parental care; the diet that includes animal protein, which the young cannot obtain for themselves but which one parent must find and bring back, and the constant risk of predators that could kill any young left unguarded. For either species to exist, two parents had to work together. If either should abandon the other before their young were able to fend for themselves, the offspring would probably die. So both sexes have a vested interest in mating in a pair bond rather than some other system---that's what makes it work.

Anthropologists tell us that for about 99 percent of the time our species has been on earth, our ancestors lived in small groups in which males and females were economically interdependent, cooperating to raise their common young. It was that kind of male and female that contributed the greatest share to the human gene pool. A few males may have employed the old mammalian strategy of abandoning their partners after sex, but overall, they left relatively few offspring.

They did leave a few, however. The promiscuity game was a long shot for the male, but the option was always open. If he was lucky, the abandoned female might succeed in raising his offspring alone, or with help, possibly by tricking another man into thinking the child was his. When that happened, the "Don Juan" got a fast rise in his reproductive success. For a male, then, human or bird, the optimum reproductive strategy is to establish a pair bond and guard it jealously, but not to pass up an opportunity for adultery if it comes along.

The pair bond is an endlessly shifting, fascinating mating system based on an inherent conflict of interests: Each member depends on a partner's behavior in order to advance his or her own reproductive success, but the partners are of different sexes, with different options and vulnerabilities. Male and female have different opportunities to take advantage of the system and different penalties for being taken advantage of. The ways in which each sex deals with those conflicting interests---the strategies, counterstrategies and countercounter-strategies that have evolved to maximize payoffs and minimize losses---constitute the greatest plot lines of literature, legend and soap opera.

For a male, the biggest risk is cuckoldry: for a female, it's desertion. A man may find himself contributing to the survival of young that are not his own. A woman may find that her mate has flown the coop, leaving her to raise the children alone.

When a male enters a pair bond, he gives up the opportunity to sire a lot of children in order to concentrate his efforts on a few who he knows are his own. The key word is knows. Any male who was fooled into supporting another man's offspring ultimately reproduced less than his share of genes, and the tendency to be easily fooled died out. We are primarily descended from males who were not cuckolded. We have inherited some of the tactics that helped these males assure their own paternity.

Being cuckolded---even once---can drastically alter a male's reproductive success, so it is understandable why men are so sensitive to female infidelity. When a man learns that his wife has had a lover, we expect him to be enraged. If he kills the lover, the courts in some states are predictably lenient. The homicide isn't justifiable---just understandable.

We can even identify with the sensitivities of male birds. Pigeon racing, a popular sport in Europe, was recently rocked by scandal. It seems that the West Germans had added a new dimension to the competition. Before a race, they would taunt a male pigeon by letting him see a rival male in a cage near his mate. On race day, these "married" males would fly home at record-breaking speeds, often taking fatal risks. This tactic would never motivate a horse or a dog to race faster, of course, but it works for a pigeon and we know why all too well. We empathize so strongly with the pigeon's urgent drive to prevent cuckoldry that we consider his prerace treatment cruel, even though it involved no direct physical harm. (Angry officials at the West German Animal Protection League have already published a protest against these "torture" tactics.)

Human males have tried many ways to prevent cuckoldry. One of the surest, perhaps, is to stay with a mate at all times, keeping her barefoot and pregnant. Some have used more drastic means, ranging from chastity belts to moats and eunuchs; others swear that a color TV and a subscription to Photoplay works as well to keep a spouse out of mischief.

The best way to avoid cuckoldry is to choose a female who isn't likely to commit it. Enter the virgin. A virgin has two attractions for the male: First, she isn't already pregnant with somebody else's offspring. (In some species of birds, a male will wait a judicious amount of time after the pair is formed before mating with his female to make sure she is not already carrying fertilized eggs.) Second, she has no previous sexual experiences she'll be tempted to repeat. Any evidence of a female's fidelity---her devotion to him or lack of interest in other males---should attract him as a sign that she is not likely to cuckold him later. In choosing a permanent partner, he may steer clear of a female who seems "too easy," one who has an active sex appetite herself or is too blatantly sexy in public, thereby arousing other males. Any signs of readiness for motherhood should also appeal to him---from a love of babies and children to the breasts, hips and other signs of physical maturity that will contribute to high reproductive success for him. It isn't that the male consciously seeks that kind of woman. He is descended from males who paired with such women and reproduced successfully by them, and so, to some degree, he will share their attractions and aversions. He will look for a girl just like the girl who married dear old granddad.

As we mentioned earlier, reproduction is a game run by women. They blow the whistle. They call the fouls. The big risk for a paired female is not cuckoldry or infidelity but desertion. If her mate occasionally has sex outside the pair, that won't necessarily hurt her own reproductive success, so long as he remains committed to the pair bond. A female is probably less threatened by her mate's adultery than he is by hers; the two sexes seem to differ in the amount of infidelity they will tolerate in their partners.

The biggest harm that can come to a female's reproductive success is that her mate leaves her and she has to raise their young alone, without his support. The female has been selected to be most sensitive to signs of potential desertion and to do whatever she can to prevent it---even offering a husband sexual opportunities inside the pair that he might otherwise seek elsewhere. The human female is unique among animals in being sexually receptive at times when she is not fertile---throughout the monthly cycle, during pregnancy and after the menopause. Foreplay, face-to-face intercourse, large sensitive genitals and intense orgasms all differentiate us from our nearest primate relatives and give us more intense personal enjoyment from sex than we would need if procreation were its only purpose. It seems that our sexiness evolved as a way of reinforcing the pair bond and keeping couples together. The female's readiness for unproductive sexual intercourse at odd times of the month may be part of an eons-old strategy to discourage male desertion.

How can a female tell beforehand how a male will behave after a baby arrives? Female birds have a rather straightforward approach: They mimic the begging gestures of a fledgling to see how the male reacts. During the courtship ritual of the common tern, the male catches fish and feeds them to the female. Both to the naturalists who have studied this behavior and to the female terns, the male's courtship feeding is a reliable predictor of his performance in feeding the chicks.

It isn't surprising that a human female is attracted to a male who "babies" her, rushes to comfort her when she cries and knows the best restaurants in town.

Love is just as much a part of the human genetic code as the pair bond is, because love is the glue that keeps a pair together, even when children are absent. Like hunger, sleep and sex, love is a powerful motivation system that makes us want to do the very thing that we must do to keep ourselves and our species alive.

The monogamous birds seem to share an emotion similar to love---an attachment between mates, even when no eggs are present. They appear to experience a deep depression when a mate is absent and they shriek with what can only be described as unutterable joy upon their reunion. Their emotion appears so close to our own that we don't hesitate to call some of them love birds. Love apparently evolved as an integral part of the pair bond. Bickering parents sometimes say that they are keeping a loveless marriage together until the kids are old enough to fend for themselves. It is ironic that pressures for fulfilling parental obligations should have come this far: The emotion of love apparently evolved to keep couples together for the sake of the children, while making them feel as if they were following their own interests.

Female Power

Monogamy is advantageous for females. It evolves as a stable system, though, only when it is also advantageous for males. Polygyny (many wives) is usually in a male's best genetic interest, yet it exists as a regular mating system only when it is also advantageous for females.

Feminists see polygyny as just another way men oppress and take advantage of women. But this sells women short. Except in societies where they were treated like chattel with no personal rights, polygyny could not survive as a mating system unless females had something to gain by it---notably, access to resources that would ultimately benefit their children. Wherever polygyny is permitted (in about 80 percent of the world's cultures, by one estimate), in most of these societies, it is practiced only by the wealthiest, most powerful males. Average males can afford only one wife, if that. Our Western culture is an exception to the world-wide pattern, in that simultaneous polygyny is against the law. What we have developed, instead, is a form of sequential polygyny in which wealthy males often divorce middle-aged wives and marry younger women. (They may act like the banker Henny Youngman describes: the man who tired of his 40-year-old wife and tried to exchange her for two 20s.)

There is a striking parallel in some monogamous bird species---red-winged blackbirds, for example. The male blackbird who is able to dominate the richest feeding grounds and the best nesting sites, may actually support three or four or even up to eight females simultaneously, treating each as a separate pair bond. There comes a point where the female's interests are best served if she becomes the second or third mate of a rich male, rather than the single mate of a poorer one.

"Ladies' choice" is a powerful factor in evolution. Whenever females choose males on the basis of a particular trait, evolution produces two correlated changes in later generations: 1. Females become more and more attracted to that trait, because they are the descendants of females who chose males who had it; and 2. males come to have more of that trait than ever before, because they are descended from the males who were most readily chosen.

It is not surprising, then, that the human female, after centuries of marrying up, has come to see money, power and status as attractive in a man. These features, more than mere physical appearance or bedroom prowess, make a male attractive---even sexy. The end product of all this is today's male, who is oriented toward achieving status, accumulating money and gaining power: a male who thinks those are important goals, though he may not be able to explain why he strives for them.

Females should not be too hasty in criticizing men for being caught up in political games or for being obsessed with wealth and power. After all, those are the very criteria by which females have been choosing men all these eons, to better their own genetic interests. And so it can be argued that over the generations, females have actually wrought a change in the human male---creating a new breed of man, the kind they've always wanted.

The future evolution of our species depends on the reproductive success of those living today: meanwhile, for a few generations, at least, we will continue to deal with some innate predispositions our ancestors left, as mementos.

This article has dealt with the sociobiology of sex differences---probably the most controversial chapter of this controversial science---but it should be noted that, in the final analysis, the differences between male and female are few and trivial when compared with the similarities. The differences are genetic, but they aren't rigid or inevitable. They are more like tendencies, and cultural pressures can override any of them.

The clearest example of that today is the widespread practice of birth control, which directly contradicts all the predispositions for making babies that we have accumulated throughout tens of thousands of generations of human evolution. Birth control has created a different world from the one in which our mating strategies evolved; it is probably the most powerful selective force in our sexual history.

The question for the future is this: How do people who use birth control differ from people who do not? One important difference is the desire to have children. People who tend not to want children will tend not to have them and their genes will be weeded out of the pool. People who do want children will not use birth control and will thereby become the forebears of humanity's future. As optional birth control becomes widespread, we may logically expect future generations to contain more parental people---people more attracted to children, more interested in raising and caring for them---than we see today.

Birth control's prevalence attests to the power of social learning. Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson has said that environmental influences, not genes, play the major part in shaping human behavior; his belief is that genetic influences might play the predominant role in about ten percent or less of our actions.

For some, that figure---any figure---is too high, because they are committed to the presumption that inheritance plays no part in shaping human behavior. To admit that ten percent or one percent or any fraction of our lives is determined by biology is to imply the unthinkable: that some are born different from others and that, therefore, all people are not created equal. For those critics, environment and environment alone determines all human behavior---including, presumably, the behavior of burying one's head in the sand.

"Sociobiologists believe that males and females behave differently because they have evolved differently."