Man and Woman, Part Seven: Prisoners of Culture

in today's world, we all want to be single, sexy and contraceptively safe--but does any of that really fool mother nature?

Future Shock. A world controlled by a giant, inter-locking nervous system of computers. Population: between seven and eight billion. Information: doubling every five years. In the West, robots replace laborers and even skilled workers. Unemployment becomes not temporary but permanent. The average work week is 15 hours long. The group is now the most important social unit. Continuous cities stretch between New York and Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. And there are enough nuclear armaments on earth to destroy our local system of planets or to light up a new sun.

Such is the world, say some futurists, that the children now entering elementary school will inherit when they leave college around the year 2000. And it's a world toward which our culture is even now hurtling us. "It's as if we were in a jet plane rushing forward at gigantic speed," says Stanley Lesse, neurologist, psychiatrist and editor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy. "It's no use looking out of the side windows anymore, because by the time we register it, the present scenery is already in the past. To have a clear perspective of the present, then, we have to look ahead. We have to look at the future. For the culture is moving too fast to focus totally on today."

The culture is moving too fast. Everywhere one looks, the signs are beginning to show--especially, as Lesse and others say, in the relations between the sexes. They seem to bear the brunt of a more general anxiety. In a recent nationwide small-sample study, George Serban of New York University Medical Center found us to be a population heavily dependent on tranquilizers, sedatives and mood-changing drugs and riddled with stress, anxiety and depression. Sex, he says, lies at the root of it. Confusion over the new sexual permissiveness is a prime source of anxiety--in fact, the most significant predictor of stress: 53.8 percent of men and 81.8 percent of women are disturbed by it. But close behind come "the new social roles of the sexes" and "inter-actions with other people." More than half of the single women and almost half of the single men studied are under moderate to severe stress due to "the superficiality of their emotional relationships" and the insecurity caused by them. Marriage seems to leave Americans no better off. Loss of interest and a "general resentment" mean that only 23 percent of the women and 37.9 percent of the men studied are content with their marriages.

The question we want to ask in this last chapter of Man and Woman is, Why? What is there about this particular developing Western culture that seems to make men and women so uneasy, so dissatisfied with one another? Human beings, after all, are marvelously adaptable creatures. They are obsessive makers of cultures and civilizations. And they are born into the world with an underdeveloped brain, capable of assimilating, learning and growing into virtually any sort of environment. What is it about today, then--and the future into which we are rushing--that is so threatening to the relationships between us?

In the previous articles of this series, we've explored the biology and the brain of men and women, the long evolutionary journey they've taken together and the separate evolutionary programs and constraints that are likely to influence their abilities and their behavior. Human beings, though, are both biological and cultural; they pass on not just genes but also knowledge and institutions from generation to generation. And in this installment, we'll be looking at the different sort of evolution that involves: cultural evolution. As we've seen, biological evolution moves at an extremely slow pace; in that sense, we are still the hunter-gatherers who roamed the earth until 15,000 years ago (if hominid life is counted as a single day, then our movement into settled communities was six minutes ago). But cultural evolution--the gathering burst of knowledge that's ushering in the new age of cybernation and enforced leisure--has, in our recent history, begun to move faster and faster. And, as one scientist says, it's now moving so fast that university seniors can no longer understand the attitudes and aspirations of incoming freshmen. The real question we have to ask, then, is whether or not our cultural evolution, as it flashes forward, is forcing us as men and women into roles for which we are biologically ill equipped. Could it be, in this, the last quarter of the 20th Century, that the culture we have inherited and are accelerating toward is finally at odds with the conservative legacy of our biological evolution? Has what we're being taught to want and are being asked to become come unmoored from who we are? Are we as hagridden by stress as Serban and Lesse think we are?

That is a controversial question to ask and an extremely difficult one to answer. It's controversial because it suggests that we may not be able just to go with the flow, taking on, willy-nilly, the shape that the culture requires of us; we may have to pay--may already be paying--a considerable price. Even to entertain such an idea strikes at the heart of our fondly held belief that we can instantly transform ourselves into new men and new women, happy partners in some future paradise of absolute sexual equality. That, quite simply, may not be possible without considerable personal and social upheaval--because of the basic differences in our biologies. Those differences, bred in the bone and the brain and the blood, may not be exorcised from the human spirit until science takes away from future men and women the drive toward sex and reproduction that will have been responsible for their being born.

As we've said, the question of friction between culture and biology is a hard one even to try to answer. Not only are our basic drives and instincts buried deep under a welter of individual experiences and behaviors but those different experiences and behaviors are also played on by many forces in the society--advertising, the media, contraception, fluctuating populations, constantly changing industrial and economic climates. So if we're going to find anything useful to say about what's going on between men and women, we'll have to tease apart all the influences at work on us and see how they hang together to affect our current attitudes toward one another.

We think it's worth the try, because stress and anxiety aren't the whole story. Yes, it's true that an army of psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, census takers and best-selling authors has pelted us with convincing, fright-ening accounts of how things have gone wrong. The news from the sexual front is of the rise in single-person and single-parent households and the boom in the divorce industry--of how men and women don't trust one another and don't want commitment from one another anymore. But listen again to those voices, pay closer attention to those and other reports, and you'll hear a different song. For all the fuss and the bother that the media play up, the ideal in this society is still to get married and have children and live happily with another person--against. apparently, all the odds. Everyone is hoping for the right man or woman to appear. And neither men nor women want spontaneous, casual sex anywhere near as often as they're supposed to. Instead, they want integrity, sensitivity, kindness and understanding.

What's going on here? Are the men and women of today simply dumb optimists, hoping against hope for something that's no longer available? Or is there coming through the static and the turbulence of these changing times a still-clear call from biology? A few scientists are beginning to ask that question.

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The first thing we have to do if we're to see through the thick mist of this culture is to challenge a few myths that are fundamental to how we think about ourselves. The first is that our generation, having invented sex, is the most problematically sexy bunch of folks ever to come down the pike. That's just not true. Yes, Americans have never had much time for the past: Huck Finn said he had no taste for the Bible, it being full of dead people and all. But if you want to find a time not unlike our own, you don't have to go back as far as the Bible, just to the Twenties. "In the past 50 years," the newspapers of the time were much given to pronouncing, "the divorce rate has increased by 1500 percent. The birth rate is falling. And men and women are marrying late, if at all. The position of women," they used to clarion, "is being radically altered. And there is today a revolution in morals, spurred by the invention of the new rubber condom. Statistics show, alas, that both premarital sex and extramarital sex are up. And the family--yes, the family--is in crisis."

Sound familiar? "The fact is," says Alice Rossi, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, "it was the parental generation of today's young adults that was the aberrant one. They were the ones who, after the Depression and World War Two, settled down to the business of peopling the suburbs and having babies. They were family oriented and family obsessed. And today they hold the power in this society. They control hiring policies. They complain about the young. What they don't see is that their own parents' generation, which is now retired, was much like the younger generation of today. They were the Kinsey generation, the generation that was the first to tell us about sex in America. And what they told us was happening was very much like what is happening today."

Rossi is one of those rare scientists trying to find some common ground between the social sciences and biology. And even though she is herself a feminist, she has taken much flak for her efforts from her feminist colleagues.

"All right," she says, "so we're not as entirely new as we think. Now we can look beneath the surface of the similarities between this generation and the generation of the Twenties and see if we can find any important differences between them. And I think we can. Take premarital sex, for instance. In the Twenties, though it was widespread, it meant sex between couples who, by and large, knew that if pregnancy occurred, they'd get married. Premarital sex was limited, in other words, to couples who intended to get married and who usually did. Now, of course, the picture is quite different. So-called premarital sex today starts very early and has little to do with marriage. And a woman, by the time she comes to marriage, is likely to have had several sexual partners instead of just one. She can compare her husband's sexual performance with others she has known. And, in the long run, that may have the effect of lowering the threshold for a woman's taking sexual partners outside the marriage as well. I think this puts a strain on today's marriages that simply wasn't there before.

"The thing you have to remember," Rossi continues, "is that men can be cuckolded and women cannot; a woman always knows that a child is hers. That fundamental biological imbalance lies at the heart of all sexual exchange between men and women. It lies at the heart of marriage. Marriage, after all, is essentially a trade-off, a consequence of this biological imbalance--the extra resources the male provides in order for the female to bear and raise children in return for a guarantee, hedged about by all sorts of social restrictions, that the children are actually his. What happens when the guarantee is weakened and made less believable? You have stress--stress that affects all our sexual relations. And you have extreme, biologically rooted ambivalence in men about such issues as abortion, female sexuality and the economic independence of women."

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Everyone agrees that the new pattern of premarital sex in women is, to a large degree, the result of advances in (continued on page 232)Man and Woman(continued from page 160) contraceptive technology. And here we come to the second myth that we want to challenge: the idea that female contraception is the best thing to happen for women since they secured the vote and that it has no social consequences except a grand new freedom for both men and women.

"No one has any real idea of what the personal and social effects of widely available female contraception may be," says Lionel Tiger, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. "Take the pill, for instance. We just don't know what it means for a woman to walk around in a state of technical pseudopregnancy for most of her reproductive life. And scientists are trying to find better pills rather than studying the long-term effects of the ones they've already invented. Nor do we know what effect this state may have on the man or the men a woman is with. It may have a considerable effect, if my and my colleagues' experiments with macaque monkeys are anything to go by. Macaques are a lot like us in many ways: They mate all year round and the males pair off with specific females. But in one of our experiments, a breeding male was simply not interested in his favorite females when we put them on the pill. The male was, if you like, turned off."

In a series of books written with and without his friend and colleague Robin Fox, Tiger has continually stressed that human beings are animals; complicated animals, maybe, but--like all other animals--part of nature and subject to biological constraints. And he believes that female contraception is, in subtle ways, interfering with and undermining those constraints. "Look," he says, "in human evolution, in human history, the possibility of pregnancy has always been one form of control that men have exercised over women and one kind of lever by which women have gotten what they wanted from men--I don't want to be cynical about this; I just want to describe one aspect of the reality. And the reality is that the possibility of pregnancy has been the issue around which men and women have traditionally organized their sexual transactions and their responsibility for one another. Now let's look at what's happening today. For the first time in history, the human female can be totally in charge of our genetic and reproductive future. She's taken over a responsibility that used to be shared. How does that make the male feel? And how does it make her feel? What's happened in the past two decades is that the female has taken control of the issue of whether or not she gets pregnant. As far as men are concerned, she has separated sex from reproduction and absolved them of any responsibility for reproduction. In effect, she's liberated the male but not herself. Let's face it: How many men even ask about contraception anymore?

"The irony, then," says Tiger, "is that what is seen as freeing is actually imprisoning. Women now feel a terrible guilt if they get pregnant, as if it's their fault, as if the man had nothing to do with it. And they often have abortions, with psychological consequences that we know little about. At the same time, a man really does have less confidence in his paternity if a pregnancy occurs. It's a vicious circle." Tiger throws up his hands. "Responsibility and guilt in women. A forced irresponsibility--and bravado and cruelty--in men. It's no wonder that many women feel angry and ambiently bitter about contraception."

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The third myth is created in part by belief in the two others: Given that we've been liberated by contraception (myth two) and are now able to enjoy entirely new sexual opportunities (myth one), then (according to myth three) the life of the single person today is the best possible life, because it's happy, self-contained, independent and allows for sex without the dead weight of commitment. That's what most married people in this society must believe, given their much-touted dissatisfaction with their present arrangement. And that's what most singles seem to believe, even though most of them will admit they can't find such a great life for themselves.

In a recently published book, Singles: The New Americans, Jacqueline Simenauer and David Carroll analyze the results of an elaborate poll and a questionnaire designed to explore--through a representative sample of 3000--the lives, emotions and attitudes of the unmarried. And some of their conclusions fairly leap off the page. Most people, for example, frankly and openly dislike the singles bars they frequent. Forty percent of the women have suffered physical or mental abuse as the result of meetings made in them. And the men--well, the men tend to be rather aggressive when they go to them because, they admit, they have no respect for the sort of women who go there.

Equally interesting is what Simenauer and Carroll have to say about the intensely traditional values that singles, beneath all the supposed frolic and glitter, actually maintain. Seventy-five percent of the men questioned are indifferent or opposed to sleeping with a woman on the first date. Neither men nor women seem to like casual sex. Instead, they want commitment--in fact, marriage. About half of the women and more than a third of the men think that living together is a less than satisfactory option, precisely because "lack of commitment stops it from being totally fulfilling." In other words, singles aren't singles because they're having such a wonderful time; the largest proportion of them are singles because they haven't found the right mate. Marriage or remarriage, it seems, is almost always their goal. And the price they pay for their so-called freedom--they say themselves--is loneliness.

But if the singles life, for all its freedom, is lonely, unsatisfying and incomplete, why are so many people inexorably drawn to it? What forces are there in this society that impel people to do something that they don't seem, at bottom, to want to do--to delay or decamp from their marriages and stay out there alone?

One underlying force is obviously the uneasiness and the mistrust between men and women that Rossi and Tiger talk about: the stress caused in all our relationships by female sexuality, contraception, the loss of assurance in paternity and the arrogance of the liberated male. The result is that men and women find it hard to find a partner to trust, and they don't trust--and ultimately break with--the partner they've got.

But there are other forces at work in our culture that underwrite and underline the lack of trust and, at the same time, peddle the myth of the singles life. They can best be focused in one word: media. As one woman in Simenauer and Carroll's book puts it, "The concept of a singles lifestyle is the invention of the 'free market' of the United States, purely in order to sell more useless products, for example, 'natural make-ups,' hair blow driers, deodorants, singles clubs, singles vacations, bar life, and so on, ad nauseam."

Two singles buy twice as much as one couple--it's nearly as simple as that. And a man and a woman who are single are much more likely than a married couple to be both at work. Even when she is married, though, it remains desirable for a woman to work--so that she'll continue and even increase her level of consumption. The result is the confection of one of the most persistently peddled images of our culture: the working, carefree and essentially single woman, freed from the drudgery of home and motherhood, freed from attachment to any one man and freed from any and all biological constraints on behavior. No matter that the image is one that men, deep within themselves, find unsettling. No matter that such a lifestyle--easy come, easy go--is actually very difficult for most women to enjoy. What's important, as Barry Day, vice-chairman of McCann-Erickson World-wide, says, is that "the American working woman has an earning power of 115 billion dollars a year. She outspends her nonworking sister two to one. Thirty percent of all new insurance policies are taken out by women. Twenty-five percent of all American Express card holders are women. And 20 percent of all airline tickets are now bought by and for women. The working woman is the fastest-growing sector of the market."

If you think that's fine--women's work promotes their independence and buttresses their social equality with men--obviously we have to agree with you. But it's the image we're talking about, not the humdrum, usually boring and underpaid reality. And the image of the new woman--constantly displayed as strong, sexually adventurous and luxuriantly self-contained--does have, like it or not, personal and social effects that strike at the heart of the biologically defined roles of men and women and disturb the contract between them. First, as we've seen, it glamorizes the singles life for both men and women, shedding over it an unreal and unsustainable glow. Second, it devalues by implication pregnancy and motherhood, as well as the cooperation and the commitment necessary for the getting and raising of children. And it has helped produce a generation of women who are intensely conflicted: when working, when not working and especially, Rossi says, when faced in their early 30s with the prospect of future childlessness. The singles life may have been fine to that point. The working life may have been satisfying to that point. But the biological drive toward reproduction, which governs the sexual relations between men and women, can then be heard as an insistent voice calling for something a lot less glamorous than the new woman's life, something a lot more central to our evolution.

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Three myths--and a little reality, we hope. But it's time to step back from all the confusions and complications of our culture, with its clamor about equality, and review the idea of equality in biological and evolutionary terms. What are the essential roles of men and women, beneath all the myths and masks and conflicts?

To state the case bluntly, there is no human society on earth in which men and women are fully equal. The reason is simple: Man and woman have different reproductive life spans and different investments to make in the central and crucial process of reproduction. A woman has to commit to it the resources of her entire body when young, while a man can get away with supplying just one sperm cell--at any age. In 1/100th of a second, he can provide more of his reproductive contribution than she can provide of hers in a lifetime. The inequality is fundamental.

All the way through nature, it's the same story, of course. The female of the species always makes bigger and more expensive reproductive cells. And in mammals, she goes even further--actually carrying her developing young inside her and taking on all responsibility for incubating and nourishing them. Very unselfish, you may think. But, in fact, it's precisely this that puts the female in charge of the reproductive show--it's what constitutes her special power. For it gives her control over the ultimate evolutionary resource, the thing males must get access to if their genes are to continue into the next generation--her egg, her reproductive machinery, herself. She becomes the most important commodity in nature. And, in the catbird seat now, she is free to choose, free to demand of males whatever it is she wants in exchange for it: good genes, good territory, good provisions, good protection. If males are to get to her, they have to do whatever she requires of them--to line up for her inspection, to compete, to build, to court her and to defend her and her offspring.

For every species, the rule is the same: Sex, reproduction and whatever it takes to help the female and her offspring survive are inextricably linked in a genetic program that is ultimately dictated by the female. For it is she who takes on most of the physical responsibility for the continuation of the species. Whatever qualities she chooses in a male--and whatever qualities there are in her that encourage her to make a successful choice--are then bred into the future population, becoming part of the general blueprint that governs the sexual and the reproductive behavior of both males and females.

In many species, the female's choosiness has resulted in an arrangement by which males are forever competing with one another for sex with her. This polygamy is of huge advantage for her, for it means that throughout her reproductive life she can constantly trade herself upward. She can make sure that the genes her offspring get from males come only from winners. Her offspring, then, have a better chance of being winners, too.

But in a few species--most prominently our own--a new element has entered into the terms of the sexual contract: Male parenting, which humans provide in greater measure than any other species, is actually a remarkable step forward for the female, a vast improvement over the old fight, hit and run system. For it frees her from having to take sole responsibility for providing for her offspring. And it allows her to have more infants than she otherwise could.

It comes, however, with a price tag. For if male parenting is to be established as a pattern, the female must give up some of her old power. She has to do something to correct the biological imbalance. In other species we've talked about, it doesn't much matter to males whose children are whose--assurance of paternity isn't part of the polygamous package. But if a male is to be expected to provide resources over the long haul of human child rearing, then he needs some guarantee that the children are actually his. That is the key element in the human sexual trade-off that Rossi talks about--the trade-off that governs our sexual and reproductive behavior. And for hundreds of thousands of human generations, it has been built into our genetic program: resource-producing males and faithful, mothering females coming together and remaining together for the sake of their children. That's why the human male is bigger and stronger than the female. That's why the human female tends to marry an older, more reliable male. And that's why the human brain--allowed to develop slowly in the dependent infant as a result of the parents' joint provision and protection--is so uniquely adaptable.

As far as the genetic program that governs our sexual relationships is concerned, then, we're still stuck with something very old, in which the drive toward sex and the drive toward reproduction are essentially the same. yes, males have a tendency to play around--but that's because in evolution they could get away with fathering a child they didn't have to take care of. And no, they don't marry promiscuous women--because in their own women, they want some assurance of paternity. Yes, polygamy is still found in human cultures; but that's because women in evolution, needing resources, risked nothing by joining a wealthy man's collection of wives. And, no, women don't seem to want to play around as much as men, because evolutionarily speaking, they still have much more to lose.

The point is that despite all our modern sexual arrangements, we're still locked together in an evolutionary twostep for which we are differently primed. That doesn't mean, of course, that biology makes men and women socially unequal. On the contrary. In the huntergatherer society in which we evolved, there was a clear division of labor but no lack of equality. The more expendable males took care of attack and defense, protection against predators and the hunt--providing the rich stocks of protein that mothers and growing children needed. But the females, besides bearing and raising children, gathered the other elements in the diet--the plants and the fruits, the insects and the small animals. They cooked: they no doubt made clothes; and they exercised their own special power as mothers through elaborate kinship systems. When the first Christian missionaries arrived in North America, they were horrified by what they found among the "savages"--the unexpected prestige and importance of women in many tribes.

They were horrified because their own culture, the culture they were peddling to the Indians, had virtually enslaved women. And that's the heart of this particular matter: It's culture that produces inequality, not biology. When agriculture took over from the earlier hunting-gathering way of life, the new system gave a new importance to men, since they were bigger and stronger and not tied down by child rearing. The power of women began to ebb, for land and property--suddenly central to human life--were now passed down through the male line. And women became chattel, required to bear the large numbers of children necessary to work the land. No longer was a woman an important part of her own kinship system. Instead, she was literally farmed out to her husband's family. She and her children belonged to him. There were few compensations in this state of affairs.

Two hundred years ago, though, human culture took a turn. It entered the industrial phase and, little by little, began to free Western women from their isolation and slavery. For the industrial phase, as it developed, needed not slaves but educated, intelligent, individual workers. Women became important as educators and mothers, preparing the generation of the future for the necessary business of work and consumption. Men, of course, were still crucial to industry because of their size and their strength. They still fought the wars. But women began to be surrounded by elaborate rituals of respect. They were seen as the providers of a vital support system, and motherhood was glorified. After 15,000 years, say Tiger and Fox, something like the equality of the hunting-gathering community reappeared.

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And when we look at Western culture today, what do we see?

"Well," says Lesse, "we're no longer primarily an industrial society at all. We're rapidly becoming a postindustrial. cybercultural society in which males no longer have any natural advantage based purely on size and strength. Their size and strength are increasingly unnecessary to industry. They're also becoming obsolete as the unique fighters of wars. They're no longer the one necessary provider. And they're no longer involved in the issue of whether a woman becomes pregnant or not. This is something that's already profoundly affecting the relationships between men and women. I think it has to do with the rise in male homosexuality. I also think it has to do with the increasingly large number of male patients I see who have no respect for their maleness."

For the past 20 years, Lesse, a stocky, broad-faced man in his 50s, has been poring over the great forces at work in our society in an attempt to identify present psychological stress and the future demands that will be made on us as men and women. It's a difficult--some would say impossible--task.

"Everything, you see, hangs together with everything else," Lesse says. "It's all interconnected. Big business, for example, no longer needs the high turnover of replacement workers that the nuclear family used to provide. So motherhood, children and the idea of family are downgraded. Work has become necessary for women--and the idea of their working has become glamorized. At the same time, though, other phenomena are appearing. Because the population is growing more slowly, the industrial base faces a more limited rate of growth. And this is gradually translating into shorter work hours--which means more hours of leisure. Leisure, then, is now equated with consumption. The home is devalued. And men and women are portrayed as more and more alike, with the same needs and aspirations and desire to consume. A wedge has been driven between the working woman and the nonworking family woman; the latter may be looked upon with disdain in the not-too-distant future."

Lesse concludes, "All of these economic and social forces--work patterns, the decline of manufacturing, the increase in leisure time, automation and advertising--hang together. And they interlock with other forces from which they can't really be separated: political forces, religious forces, changing technology, the rise of feminism. Even the shifts in population."

If the word demographics stimulates nothing more in you than a yawn, then you'd better wake up. For demographics--the study of population shifts and patterns--means that if you've just entered the work force, you're in terrible trouble: By the end of the century, when you'll still be working, you're going to have a massive population of older people to pay for. If you think taxes and Social Security are high now, just wait.

Demographics, too, has had an incredibly important part to play in the gathering conflict between men and women. "Everybody knows," says Tiger, "that in the years of World War Two, comparatively few children were born--which means comparatively few males. And everybody knows that after the war, huge numbers of children were born--which means huge numbers of females. What were the social and sexual effects of that rise in population? I think there were several.

"Women, remember, tend to marry older men; that's rooted in our biology. The effect of this baby boom, however, is that we now have a large population of women facing a much smaller supply of these appropriate older men. So what happens? Well, the biological pattern is seriously disrupted. Women are either forced to marry much older men, who've been recycled by divorce--that becomes desirable and the divorce rate goes up--or forced to remain on the job market for much longer than they ordinarily would. They have only two other options. They can marry men in their own age bracket, who have inadequate resources, so they have to keep working; or they can decide not to get married at all unless the right man comes along. Chances are he won't, given this demographic pressure. So those women who wait--and face competition from younger women--have to take all their satisfactions from their careers. And if they have ever wanted children, they're likely to face, in their early 30s, a considerable crisis.

"You see, then," Tiger continues, "how complicated consequences can arise from something as simple as a shift in population. The rise in divorce, the stresses in marriage. Men, as the limiting resource, being spoiled and women, against the odds, having to cope with the double demands of work and family. Women no longer trusting men to serve their reproductive interests. The rise of feminism. Now put those things together with contraceptive technology, liberalized abortion laws and economic pressures, and what have you got?" He pauses for a moment and then answers his own question. "A challenge. A provocation. But not something that's easily reassuring."

Not easily reassuring, certainly. But not, perhaps, quite the chaos it seems. For, as we've tried to suggest throughout this article--and in the others of this series--the clear call from biology can still be heard beneath the din. The old partnership of men and women is still with us. Women are, in fact, already giving up the pill in droves, feeling instinctively, perhaps, that artificially manipulating their biology is the wrong way to interfere with Mother Nature. And men are increasingly trying to exercise their rights as fathers--demanding to be involved in decisions about abortions and wanting more responsibility and more access to their children after divorce. The natural-childbirth movement is growing stronger. And the condom, which Tiger calls "the only social contraceptive we have," is making something of a comeback. A man and a woman still want, it seems, what they've always wanted--the comfort of each other, responsibility to each other and to their children.

The call from biology, though, has been considerably weakened by this culture. And if it's to be amplified in the future, there's one thing we all--both men and women--have to do. We have to give back to human reproduction the social meaning it once had. We have to rethink our attitude toward motherhood.

In the 17th Century, Louis XIV wanted an unimpeded view of his mistress as she gave birth--so she gave birth supine. He also insisted that palace births be attended not by a midwife but by a male doctor. And from that point on, the die was cast. Little by little, all the processes of motherhood and mothering were invaded by males: first by obstetricians, then by psychologists, advertisers, nutritionists, sociologists and Dr. Spock. Mothers no longer knew best. They were drugged during childbirth, placed in a most difficult and dangerous position during labor and told that their milk was unnecessary, not nutritious enough for a growing child. After birth, they became the nervous, self-conscious prey of every expert and every child-market huckster who had a product to sell. Finally, feminists--fighting for necessary rights in the workplace--delivered what was almost a coup de grâce. Motherhood is not innate, they cried; it's just a temporary inconvenience. Have a child, but then get back to your career. Mothers, after all, aren't that important. Any child minder will do.

The problem is, that not only compounds a consider arable injustice done to women, it's also untrue. There's now a bewildering variety of evidence that long-term mother-child attachment was of crucial importance in the evolution of our species and that this attachment is subserved today by neural and hormonal mechanisms in every female. They are basic to her biological design. Some of those mechanisms govern the way a woman is attracted to babies in general, the way she carries a child close to her heartbeat and the way a mother is automatically prepared for milking by her infant's cry. Others help control the pain of childbirth--which should take place, most naturally, with the mother standing or squatting. Still others regulate the automatic bonding of mother and child after birth--by sight, sound and smell. There's evidence now that if a child is taken away from its mother for too long at this stage, the result may be incomplete or absent bonding--a complaining baby and a distraught, sometimes cruel mother.

And then, of course, there's the business of suckling. It has recently been found that human mother's milk contains--in addition to the nutrients that help an infant grow and protect it against infection--a substance much like morphine, which keeps the infant calm and happy and, perhaps, hooked on Mother. It also contains protein levels that are characteristic of a species that gives not widely spaced breast feedings, as we do in the West, but virtually continuous suck. That pattern of feeding is characteristics of the !Kung as they're known, can tell us something about a style of mothering that may be central to the biology of our species.

"Mel Konner of Harvard University has shown that !Kung women have almost constant physical contact with their newborn infants," says Rossi, "more than 70 percent of the time, as against 25 percent or less in Western societies. There's virtually continuous, rather than periodic, nursing among !Kung women. And lactation continues until the child is four or five. The motherchild relationship is highly sensual, and their social system does everything to support it. The gap between births is about four years--continuous lactation acts as a natural contraceptive. And the children enter a multi-age heterosexual play group when they're three or four years old.

"I don't believe," Rossi continues, "that Western women should be imprisoned by their biology in such a regimen. But I do think there are biological constraints on the relationship between child and mother: In no known society is the mother normally replaced as the primary-care giver, and if it happens, there is always conflict. In our society, we separate children from mothers in cribs and strollers, nurseries and child-care centers. And we isolate the child-mother unit almost completely. There's no social support for them. Motherhood, as a result, is experienced as a stressful and difficult role. And it's no wonder that it's seen less and less as an acceptable one."

Rossi concludes: "The question must be, then: Might we be making cultural demands of women and children that are alien to their biological needs? And, if so, what might be the signs of stress? Children who are hyperactive, fear change and have problems with emotional relationships? Parents who are dissatisfied with their children and become poor role models or even child abusers? Working women who, as it is, simply can't balance out the separate attractions and separate demands of career and motherhood? We don't know. But we ought to think very carefully about the problem, because we may have to change some of our institutions to come in line with what may be a crucial biologically inherited role. Businesses may have to be persuaded to make their job descriptions and schedules much more flexible to accommodate the working mother and, if she's married, her husband. For how business continues to find jobs is by the old standard--of a man with a wife at home. And it may have to confront and revive its expectations of what a full-time working mother and father can contribute to it. It may have to provide, by law, much longer maternal and paternal leave. And bigger and better child-care facilities may not be the only adequate answers to the problems of the working parents. They may make the parents' life easier, it's true, but they may mean that parents and children have to go on paying a price--a price that, as a species, we cannot afford."

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The children. The future. The cybernated society toward which our cultural evolution is hurtling us, like "a jet plane rushing forward at gigantic speed." How can we make that society one in which men and women can live together harmoniously? The first answer is that men should remember the terms of the original evolutionary contract by which the female transferred to the male some of her power. They should remember that in order to receive, they have to give. They should remember male parenting. In this context, that doesn't mean simply providing resources. Nor does it mean simply taking care of children and helping around the house. It means making sure that women in general are provided with something they need: a society flexible enough to grant them equality of opportunity in the workplace but at the same time give them special respect and special treatment as potential and actual mothers.

The second answer is that women, too, should remember the terms of the contract. They should remember that it is from their role as mother that they derive their special power. Whether or not women, as individuals, decide to be mothers, it is the value of motherhood that makes of them a real community, a real sisterhood. Men have been bent out of shape in this culture, as women should appreciate. And they won't easily give up their traditionally held privileges unless women can offer them something in return. What that something may be--a fuller involvement in the processes of reproduction, new directions for the institutions that dominate men's lives, women organizing as mothers to save the planet from destruction--isn't easy to predict. But women, as mothers, as the continuers of the species, must take the lead.

The third answer is that both men and women must learn to appreciate and to understand the differences between them--all the differences in brain and body and inheritance, in ability, fragility and immunity that we've been talking about in this series. Those differences are at the heart of our biology. They're the driving force of our biological evolution and the creators, between them, of our cultural evolution. They are what tie man and woman together in such a delicate, interdependent balance. If we ignore the differences, if we pretend they don't exist, we in effect cut ourselves off from one another--and from the possibility of solving together the problems of the future.

This is the final installment of our seven-part series "Man and Woman," but we will continue to report on sex and the sexes as further research is concluded. Later this year, we intend to publish an analysis of our introductory sex questionnaire; the response has been astonishing, and we're confident that you'll find the results enlightening.