Sex And The Scientist

Note to the delicately nurtured:  this post is slightly R-rated.

A long-ago TV documentary on the sexual politics of a troop of baboons showed the dominant male, huge and ill-tempered, lording it over his unfortunate subjects.  He chased the other males, swatted the babies who dared approach him, and grabbed food from the females.  This, the investigating scientist intoned, was natural selection at work, Gaia's way of ensuring that the next generation would be endowed with the best possible set of genes.  In order to be able to spread his DNA as widely as possible, the alpha male had to be big, aggressive, and mean.

Did I mention that the scientist in charge was a man?

Then some years later another ethologist went out and studied baboon sexual politics, and found that many of the lower-ranking males were peace-loving, friendly types who would share their food with females and help them when they got into scrapes.  And when the females went into heat, it was the nice guys they sneaked off into the bushes with, while the alpha male was busy snarling and swatting and stomping around.

Did you guess that this researcher was a woman?

When E.O. Wilson's theory of sociobiology emerged in the 1970s, it seemed to confirm all the stereotypes about male and female sexuality.  If humans are only the gene's strategy  for reproducing itself, it makes sense that men, who theoretically can father infinite numbers of children, would desire infinite numbers of sexual partners.  Women, on the other hand, can produce only one child a year at most, so they are programmed for monogamy.

Despite my admiration for E.O. Wilson, I always found his theory, when applied to human sexuality, unsatisfactory.  It failed to explain, for instance, women's sexual stamina--a woman can have sex with five men in five minutes, but the equivalent is not true for a man. And the theory provided a handy, science-based excuse--"my genes made me do it"--for male infidelity.

Now the old notion that men are programmed for polygamy and women for monogamy is being looked at again.  And this time, some of the scientists doing the looking are women  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/what-do-women-want-by-daniel-bergner.html?pagewanted=1).

One of these researchers, primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, thinks that women's anatomy might be specifically designed for sex with multiple partners within a single sexual episode --the slower pace at which a female reaches climax, for example, could be meant to ensure this, which in turn would maximize the chances of conception.  This would also, to my mind, guarantee her lots of help in the care and feeding of the resulting baby....

My point here is not to debunk the stereotypes of male and female sexuality, which most women have always suspected were false anyway.  My point is to celebrate the long-overdue entrance of women in these fields, so that a different view of the world is gradually emerging, one that reflects the perceptions and experiences of the other half of humanity.

As to where--in the male view, or the female view, or somewhere in between--the real, empirical, unequivocal truth lies...that, of course, we will never know.

Not-So-Noble Savages

I recently read Napoleon Chagnon's Noble Savages, an account of his years of anthropological field work among the Yanomamo tribes of Venezuela and Brazil. 

Blithely summarizing here:  Chagnon takes a Darwinian, socio-biological approach to anthropology.  This means that he regards the behavior of the Yanomamo, one of the last remaining Stone Age cultures, as an expression of the competition for reproductive advantage that has fueled the evolution of all other species on the planet.  And he thinks that our ancestors behaved pretty much as the Yanomamo do.

It is the scariest book I have read in a long time. 

Since a woman cannot have more than one child every nine months, having more than one husband is not necessarily to her genetic advantage  On the other hand, it is in a man's interest to have as many wives, and thus as many children, as possible. Yanomamo men who have killed other men enjoy superior status.  They have more wives than men who have not killed, and sire an average of three more offspring.

Because some men have several wives, and because among the Yanomamo significantly more boys are born than girls, there is a chronic shortage of women.  This, you would think, would redound to the women's advantage--men would go to great lengths to seduce them, bringing them flowers or feathers or food.  But it doesn't work that way.  Men use their daughters and nieces as currency, establishing complex systems of exchange and alliance that will in turn give them maximum access to their exchange partners' female relatives.

 Adult men are in constant competition for women.  They spend their lives both trying to get more wives, and guarding the ones they have from other men.  This is a lot like what happens when deer go into rut in the fall, except that bucks calm down after a few weeks, and they do not abuse the females.

Yanomamo villages regularly raid each other, not for food or land or machetes but for women.  At any given time, approximately a quarter of the women residing in a village have been abducted.   These abductions are brutal:  the kidnappers grab the woman by one arm and her "defenders" grab the other, and a tug of war ensues that leaves the woman, regardless of who wins, in a sorry state.  Gang rapes are common.  If a party of hunters comes across a woman and her husband from another village in the forest, they restrain the husband and rape the woman.

What with the need to get more women so as to sire more children on the one hand, and to keep other men from impregnating his wife on the other, a Yanomamo man is under a lot of stress.  He takes this out on the woman, with the excuse that she deserves punishment for her supposed infidelities. Chagnon describes the disfiguring marks of their husband's abuse that Yanomamo women bear.  Unable to dispatch her with a gun, the husband beats his wife with his fists and burns her with logs from the fire. He hacks at her with an ax or a machete.  He shoots curare-tipped arrows at non-vital parts of her body...unless he misses and hits a vital organ, in which case she dies.  And nobody in the tribe thinks anything of this.

If, as Chagnon believes, our ancestors lived  pretty much like the Yanomamo, isn't it a miracle that human females, bound to their muscularly superior males, ever evolved to walk upright and use language, let alone get master's degrees in business administration?

Just after I finished Chagnon's book the Oscar Pistorius story broke.  And it struck me as ironic that, even inside a body which, transformed by twenty-first century technology, illustrates the apex of human evolution, a Stone Age male lurks and rages.