Woman: An Intimate Geography (59 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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BOOK: Woman: An Intimate Geography
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Do women find older men innately attractive? Is it the men's alpha status? Or could it be something less complimentary to the male, something like the following that an older man is appealing not because he is powerful but because in his maturity he has lost some of his power, has become less marketable and desirable and potentially more grateful and gracious, more likely to make a younger woman feel that there is a balance of power in the relationship? The rude little calculation is simple: He is male, I am female advantage, man. He is older, I am younger advantage, woman. By the same token, a woman may place little value on a man's appearance because she values something else far more: room to breathe. Who can breathe in the presence of a handsome young man, whose ego, if expressed as a vapor, would fill Biosphere II? Not even, I'm afraid, a beautiful young woman.
In the end, it matters not the reason why older men have access to younger women. As long as they do, some of them will partake. If they need Viagra to partake, they will petition their urologists forthwith. And women will feel cheated and pissy about the disparity in options of the middle-aged. What is important to question, and to hold to the fire of alternative interpretation, is the immutability and adaptive logic of the discrepancy, its basis in our genome rather than in the ecological circumstances in which a genome manages to express itself. Evolutionary psychologists insist on the innate discordance between the strength of the male and the female sex drive. They admit that many nonhuman female primates gallivant about rather more than we might have predicted before primatologists began observing their behavior in the field more, far more, than is necessary for the sake of reproduction. Nonetheless, the credo of the coy female persists. It is garlanded with qualifications and is admitted to be an imperfect portrayal of female mating strategies, but then, that little matter of etiquette attended to, the credo is stated once again.
"Amid the great variety of social structure in [ape] species, the basic theme . . . stands out, at least in minimal form: males seem very eager for sex and work hard to find it; females work less hard," Robert Wright says in
The Moral Animal
. "This isn't to say the females don't like sex. They love it, and may initiate it. And, intriguingly, the females of the species most closely related to humans chimpanzees and bonobos seem particularly amenable to a wild sex life, including a variety of

 

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partners. Still, female apes don't do what male apes do: search high and low, risking life and limb, to find sex, and to find as much of it, with as many different partners, as possible; it has a way of finding them.'' In my view, female chimpanzees do search high and low and risk life and limb to find sex with partners other than the partners who have a way of finding them. As we have seen, DNA studies of chimpanzees on the Ivory Coast show that half the offspring in a group of closely scrutinized chimpanzees turned out not to be the offspring of the resident males. The females of the group didn't rely on sex "finding" its way to them; they proactively left the local environs, under such conditions of secrecy that not even their vigilant human observers knew they had gone, and became impregnated by outside males. They did so even at the risk of life and limb their own, and those of their offspring. Male chimpanzees try to control the movements of fertile females. They'll scream at them and hit them if they think the females aren't listening. They may even kill an infant they think is not their own. We don't know why the females take such risks to philander, but they do, and to say that female chimpanzees "work less hard" than males do at finding sex is not supported by the data.
Evo, psychos pull us back and forth until we might want to sue for whiplash. On the one hand we are told that women have a lower sex drive than men do. On the other hand we are told that the madonnawhore dichotomy is a universal stereotype. In every culture, there is a tendency among both men and women to adjudge women as either chaste or trampy. The chaste ones are accorded esteem. The trampy ones are consigned to the basement, a notch or two below goats in social status. A woman can't sleep around without risking terrible retribution, to her reputation, to her prospects, to her life. "Can anyone find a single culture in which women with unrestrained sexual appetites
aren't
viewed as more aberrant than comparably libidinous men?" Wright asks rhetorically. Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary if they disobey their "natural" inclination toward a stifled libido. The diagnosis of "nymphomaniac" is never made on a man. Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do, yet it is not low enough. No, there is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse that cultures everywhere have had to gird against it by articu-

 

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lating a rigid dichotomy with menacing implications for those who fall on the wrong side of it. There is still enough lingering female infidelity to justify infibulation, purdah, claustration. Men have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques, and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature the female libido. How can we know what is "natural" for us when we are treated as unnatural for wanting our lust, our freedom, the music of our bodies?
"It seems premature to attribute the relative lack of female interest in sexual variety to women's biological nature alone in the face of overwhelming evidence that women are consistently beaten for promiscuity and adultery," Barbara Smuts has written. "If female sexuality is muted compared to that of men, then why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?"
Why, indeed. We must keep asking why, why, why, and asking why the answers that the hardcores offer sound so tinny, one-sided, and self-exculpating. Consider a brief evolutionary apologia for President Clinton's adulteries that appeared in
The New Yorker
, written by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales," Pinker wrote. "A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who inherited his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one. Thus, men should seek quantity in sexual partners; women, quality." And isn't it so, he says, everywhere and always so? "In our society, most young men tell researchers that they would like eight sexual partners in the next two years; most women say that they would like one. On several college campuses, researchers have hired attractive assistants to approach students of the opposite sex and proposition them out of the blue. What proportion says yes? Of the women, zero percent; of the men, seventy-five percent. (Many of the remaining twenty-five percent ask for a rain check.)"
Let us hold a kaffeeklatch about some of these statements, starting with the last. Women don't want to take a man up on his off-the-quad overture. Fancy that. Women don't want to take a strange and obviously aggressive man back to their dorm room or apartment for a quickie.

 

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Could it be that they are in fear of their life rather than uninterested in the pleasure a handsome man might bring them? And could it be that young women just don't scare men physically the way young men do women? If there were no legitimate fear among the women, surely at least a couple of them would have turned out to be of the "whore" phenotype that supposedly characterizes some women and said yes. Moreover, I wonder how many of the men who said "Count me in!" to their solicitor would have followed through to a bona fide act of intercourse, would not have been a little nervous when push came to shove, if you will, about this forward, lascivious, inappropriately behaving dame, and perhaps started wondering if they were setting themselves up for a private screening of
Fatal Attraction
? In other words, were the men for real, or was it bluster? And do men truly like sex with women when the women are in charge? What if the man fails to perform, if he proves impotent or ejaculates prematurely, and what if the woman who propositioned him expresses her disappointment or disgust rather than acting as women do in these circumstances and reassuring him, it's fine, she doesn't mind, it happens to the best of them? Will he be so eager to jump into bed with the next stranger, or will he feel shame a powerful deterrant to sexual behavior that women know quite well indeed?
Men say they want eight partners in two years. Women want but one. Yet would a man find the prospect of a string of partners so appealing if the following rules were applied: that no matter how much he may like a particular woman and be pleased by her performance and want to sleep with her again, he will have no say in the matter, will be dependent on her mood and good graces for all future contact; that each act of casual sex will cheapen his status and make him increasingly less attractive to other women; and that society will not wink at his randiness but rather sneer at him and think him pathetic, sullied, smaller than life? Until men are subjected to the same severe standards and threat of censure as women are, and until they are given the lower hand in a so-called casual encounter from the start, it is hard to insist with such self-satisfaction that, hey, it's natural, men like a lot of sex with a lot of people and women don't.
Consider Pinker's philandering caveman who slept with fifty women. Just how good a reproductive strategy is this chronic, random shooting of the gun? A woman is fertile only two or three days a month. Her

 

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ovulation is concealed. The man doesn't know when she's fertile. She might be in the early stages of pregnancy when he gets to her; she might still be lactating and thus not ovulating. Moreover, even if our hypothetical Don Juan hits a day on which a woman is ovulating, his sperm has only a 20 percent chance of fertilizing her egg; human reproduction is complicated, and most eggs and sperm are not up to the demands of proper fusion. Even if conception occurs, the resulting embryo has a 25 to 30 percent chance of miscarrying at some point in gestation. In sum, each episode of fleeting sex has a remarkably small probability of yielding a baby. Specifically, if we assume that the woman makes no effort at birth control and this is a concession to the philanderer's point of view, for there is archaeological evidence that the use of rudimentary forms of contraception is quite ancient the probability is less than one percent. ("In a chimpanzee," says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, "maybe one in 130 copulations results in a conception, and that's copulations around the time of ovulation.") And because the man is beating and running, he isn't able to prevent any of his one-night stands from turning around and mating with other men. The poor fellow. He has to mate with so many scores of women for his wham-bam strategy to pay off. And where are all these women to be found, anyway? Sure, today there are interstate highways connecting one city and its singles bars to the next, and there are six billion people in the world, half of them egg-bearers. But population densities during that purportedly all-powerful psyche-shaper the "ancestral environment" were quite low, and long-distance travel was dangerous and difficult.
There are alternatives to wantonness, as a number of theorists have emphasized. If, for example, a man were to spend a bit more time with one woman rather than dashing breathlessly from sheet to sheet, if he were to feel compelled to engage in what animal behaviorists call mate-guarding, he might be better off, reproductively speaking, than the wild Lothario, both because the odds of his getting the woman during her fertile time would increase and because he'd be monopolizing her energy and keeping her from the advances of other sperm-bearers. It takes the average couple about four months, or 120 days, of regular sexual intercourse to become pregnant. That number of days is approximately equal to the number of partners our hypothetical libertine needs to sleep with to have one of them result in a "fertility unit," that is, a baby.

 

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The two strategies, then, shake out about the same. A man can sleep with a lot of women the quantitative approach or he can sleep with one woman for months at a time, and be madly in love with her the qualitative tactic. Forget about whether or not Romantic Joe will invest in any babies that come forth. He may just want to do what it takes to impregnate a woman whose ovulatory status he cannot be sure of, and to be her exclusive partner for the requisite "insemination episode," all factors operating under the chromosomal constraints that make human conception less assured than that of, say, a hamster or goat.
The problem with the two strategies is that they require rather contradictory emotional backdrops in order to operate at peak efficiency. The quantitative approach demands emotional detachment. The qualitative approach requires the capacity to fall in love rather quickly, to be smitten, and to seek out the woman's company all the time, day after day, month after month. Now it's possible that these two reproductive strategies are distributed in discrete packets among the male population, with the result that some men are born philanderers and can never attach while others are born romantics and perpetually in love with love; but it's also possible that men teeter back and forth from one impulse to the other, suffering an internal struggle between the desire to bond and the desire to retreat, with the circuits of attachment ever there to be toyed with, and their needs and desires difficult to understand, paradoxical, fickle, treacherous, and glorious. It is possible, then, and for perfectly good Darwinian reason, that casual sex for men is rarely as casual as it is billed.
Do men become infatuated with women, even women they have no intention of marrying? Of course they do. Men who see prostitutes often return to the same prostitute. Is the qualitative mating strategy the reason that men are hardly immune to romantic obsessions? Maybe, maybe not. I raise it in lawyerly style, as an objection to the glib assertion that men have a zest for noncommittal sex and women don't, and isn't it obvious why it is so? I'm disturbed by the ease with which inert and inadequate interpretations of human sexual behavior become engraved in the communal consciousness, to the point where nobody questions the stereotypes any longer, nor offers alternative explanations,

 

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