The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (12 page)

Just to add a trifle more ruthlessness to this strategy: the male may actually encourage the early sex for which he will ultimately punish the woman. What better way to check for the sort of self-restraint that is so precious in a woman whose children you may invest in? And, if self-restraint proves lacking, what faster way to get the wild oats sown before moving on to worthier terrain?

In its extreme, pathological form — the Madonna-whore complex — this dichotomization of women leaves a man unable to have sex with his wife, so holy does she seem. Obviously, this degree of worship isn't likely to have been favored by natural selection. But the more common, more moderate version of the Madonna-whore distinction has the earmarks of an efficient adaptation. It leads men to shower worshipful devotion on the sexually reserved women they want to invest in — exactly the sort of devotion these women will demand before allowing sex. And it lets men guiltlessly exploit the women they don't want to invest in, by consigning them to a category that merits contempt. This general category — the category of reduced, sometimes almost subhuman, moral status — is, as we'll see,
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a favorite tool of natural selection's; it is put to especially effective use during wars.

In polite company, men sometimes deny that they think differently of a woman who has slept with them casually. And wisely so. To admit that they do would sound morally reactionary. (Even to admit as much to themselves might make it hard to earnestly assure such a woman that they'll still respect her in the morning — sometimes a vital part of foreplay.)

As many modern wives can attest, sleeping with a man early in courtship doesn't doom the prospect of long-term commitment. A man's (largely unconscious) assessment of a woman's likely fidelity presumably involves many things — her reputation, how she looks at other men, how honest she seems generally. And anyway, even in theory the male mind shouldn't be designed to make virginity a prerequisite for investment. The chances of finding a virgin wife vary from man to man and from culture to culture — and to judge by some hunter-gatherer societies, they would have been quite low in the ancestral environment. Presumably males are designed to do the best they can under the circumstances. Though in prudish Victorian England some men may have insisted on virgin wives, the term Madonna-whore dichotomy is actually a misnomer for what is surely a more flexible mental tendency.
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Still, the flexibility is bounded. There is some level of female promiscuity above which male parental investment plainly makes no genetic sense. If a woman seems to have an unbreakable habit of sleeping with a different man each week, the fact that all women in that culture do the same thing doesn't make her any more logical a spouse. In such a society, men should in theory give up entirely on concentrated parental investment and focus solely on trying to mate with as many women as possible. That is, they should act like chimpanzees.

The Madonna-whore dichotomy has long been dismissed as an aberration, another pathological product of Western culture. In particular, the Victorians, with their extraordinary emphasis on virginity
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and their professed disdain for illicit sex, are held responsible for nourishing, even inventing, the pathology. If only men in Darwin's day had been more relaxed about sex, like the men in non-Western, sexually liberated societies. How different things would be now!

The trouble is, those idyllic, non-Western societies seem to have existed only in the minds of a few misguided, if influential, academics. The classic example is Margaret Mead, one of several prominent anthropologists who early this century reacted to the political misuses of Darwinism by stressing the malleability of the human species and asserting the near absence of human nature. Mead's best-known book, Coming of Age in Samoa, created a sensation upon its appearance in 1928. She seemed to have found a culture nearly devoid of many Western evils: status hierarchies, intense competition, and all kinds of needless anxieties about sex. Here in Samoa, Mead wrote, girls postpone marriage "through as many years of casual love-making as possible." Romantic love "as it occurs in our civilisation," bound up with ideas of "exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity," simply "does not occur in Samoa."
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What a wonderful place!

It is hard to exaggerate the influence of Mead's findings on twentieth-century thought. Claims about human nature are always precarious, vulnerable to the discovery of even a single culture in which its elements are fundamentally lacking. For much of this century, such claims have been ritually met with a single question: "What about Samoa?"

In 1983 the anthropologist Derek Freeman published a book called Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Freeman had spent nearly six years in Samoa (Mead had spent nine months, and hadn't spoken the language when she arrived), and was well versed in accounts of its earlier history, before Western contact had much changed it. His book left Mead's reputation as a great anthropologist in serious disarray. He depicted her as a naif, a twenty-three-year-old idealist who went to Samoa steeped in fashionable cultural determinism, chose not to live among the natives, and then, dependent for her data on scheduled interviews, was duped by Samoan girls who made a game of misleading her. Freeman assaulted Mead's data broadly — the supposed dearth of status
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competition, the simple bliss of Samoan adolescence — but for present purposes what matters is the sex: the purportedly minor significance of jealousy and male possessiveness, the seeming indifference of men to the Madonna-whore dichotomy.

Actually, on close examination, Mead's point-by-point findings turn out to be less radical than her glossy, well-publicized generalizations. She conceded that Samoan males took a certain pride in the conquest of a virgin. She also noted that each tribe had a ceremonial virgin — a girl of good breeding, often a chief's daughter, who was carefully guarded until, upon marriage, she was manually deflowered, with the blood from her hymen proving her purity. But this girl, Mead insisted, was an aberration, "excepted" from the "free and easy experimentation" that was the norm. Parents of lower rank "complacently ignore" their daughters' sexual experimentation.
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Mead granted, almost under her breath, that a virginity test was "theoretically" performed "at weddings of people of all ranks," but she dismissed the ceremony as easily and often evaded.

Freeman raised the volume of Mead's more hushed observations and pointed out some things she had failed entirely to note. The value of virgins was so great in the eyes of marriageable men, he wrote, that an adolescent female of any social rank was monitored by her brothers, who would "upbraid, and sometimes beat" her if they found her with "a boy suspected of having designs on her virginity." As for the suspected boy, he was "liable to be assaulted with great ferocity." Young men who fared poorly in the mating game sometimes secured a mate by sneaking in at night, forcibly deflowering a woman, and then threatening to disclose her corruption unless she agreed to marriage (perhaps in the form of elopement, the surest way to avoid a virginity test). A woman found on her wedding day not to be a virgin was publicly denounced with a term meaning, roughly, "whore." In Samoan lore, one deflowered woman is described as a "wanton woman, like an empty shell exposed by the ebbing tide!" A song performed at defloration ceremonies went like this: "All others have failed to achieve entry, all others have failed to achieve entry... . He is first by being foremost, being first he is foremost; O to be foremost!"
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These are not the hallmarks of a sexually liberated culture.
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It now appears that some of the supposed Western aberrations that Mead found lacking in Samoa had if anything been suppressed by Western influence. Missionaries, Freeman noted, had made virginity testing less public — performed in a house, behind a screen. In "former days," as Mead herself wrote, if the tribe's ceremonial virgin was found at her wedding to be less than virginal, "her female relatives fell upon and beat her with stones, disfiguring and sometimes fatally injuring the girl who had shamed their house."
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So too with the Samoan jealousy that, Mead stressed, was so muted by Western standards: Westerners may have done the muting. Mead noted that a husband who caught his wife in adultery might be appeased by a harmless ritual that, as she depicted it, would end in an air of bonhomie. The male offender would bring men of his family, sit outside the victimized husband's house in supplication, offering finery in recompense, until forgiveness was forthcoming and everyone buried the hatchet over dinner. Of course, "in olden days," Mead observed, the offended man might "take a club and together with his relatives go out and kill those who sit without."
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That violence became less frequent under Christian influence is, of course, a testament to human malleability. But if we are ever to fathom the complex parameters of that malleability, we must be clear about which is the core disposition and which is the modifying influence. Time and again, Mead, along with her whole cohort of mid-twentieth-century cultural determinists, got things backwards.

Darwinism helps set the record straight. A new generation of Darwinian anthropologists is combing old ethnographies and conducting new field studies, finding things past anthropologists didn't stress, or even notice. Many candidates for "human nature" are emerging. And one of the more viable is the Madonna-whore dichotomy. In exotic cultures from Samoa to Mangaia to the land of the Ache in South America, a reputation for extreme promiscuity is something men actively avoid in a long-term mate.
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And an analysis of folklore reveals the "good girl/bad girl" polarity to be a chronically recurring image — in the Far East, in Islamic states, in Europe, even in pre-Columbian America.
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Meanwhile, in the psychology laboratory, David Buss has found
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evidence that men do dichotomize between short-term and long-term mates. Cues suggesting promiscuity (a low-cut dress, perhaps, or aggressive body language) make a woman more attractive as a short-term mate and less attractive as a long-term mate. Cues suggesting a lack of sexual experience work the other way around.
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For now, the hypothesis that the Madonna-whore dichotomy has at least some inherent basis rests on strong theoretical expectation and considerable, though hardly exhaustive, anthropological and psychological evidence. There is also, of course, the testimony of experienced mothers from many eras who have warned their daughters what will happen if a man gets the impression that they're "that kind of girl": he won't "respect" them anymore.

The Madonna-whore distinction is a dichotomy imposed on a continuum. In real life, women aren't either "fast" or "slow"; they are promiscuous to various degrees, ranging from not at all to quite. So the question of why some women are of one type and others of the other has no meaning. But there is meaning in the question of why women are nearer one end of the spectrum than the other — why women differ in their general degree of sexual reserve. And for that matter, what about men? Why do some men seem capable of unswerving monogamy, and others so inclined to depart from that ideal to various degrees? Is this difference — between Madonnas and whores, between dads and cads — in the genes? The answer is a definite yes. But the only reason the answer is definite is that the phrase "in the genes" is so ambiguous as to be essentially meaningless.

Let's start with the popular conception of "in the genes." Are some women, from the moment their father's sperm meets their mother's egg, all but destined to be Madonnas, while others are almost certain to be whores? Are some men equally bound to be cads, and others dads?

For both men and women, the answer is: unlikely, but not impossible. As a rule, two extremely different alternative traits will not both be preserved by natural selection. One or the other is usually
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at least slightly more conducive to genetic proliferation. However marginal its edge, it should win out, given enough time.
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That's why almost all of the genes in you are also in the average inhabitant of any land in the world. But there is something called "frequency-dependent" selection, in which the value of a trait declines as it becomes more common, so that natural selection places a ceiling on its predominance, thus leaving room for the alternative.

Consider the bluegill sunfish.
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The average bluegill male grows up, builds a bunch of nests, waits for females to lay eggs, then fertilizes the eggs and guards them. He is an upstanding member of the community. But he may have as many as 150 nests to tend, a fact that leaves him vulnerable to a second, less responsible kind of male, a drifter. The drifter sneaks around, surreptitiously fertilizes eggs, and then darts off, leaving them to be tended by their duped custodian. At a certain stage in life, drifters even don the color and behavior of females to mask their covert operations.

You can see how the balance between drifters and their victims is maintained. The drifters must do fairly well in reproductive terms; otherwise they wouldn't be around. But as this success makes their fraction of the population grow, the success itself diminishes, because the relative supply of upstanding, exploitable males — the drifters' meal ticket — shrinks. This is a situation in which success is its own punishment. The more drifters there are, the fewer offspring per drifter there are.

In theory, the drifter fraction of the population should grow until the average drifter is having as many offspring as the average upstanding bluegill. At that point, any shift in the fraction — growth or shrinkage — will change the value of the two strategies in a way that tends to reverse the shift. This equilibrium is known as an "evolutionarily stable" state, a term coined by the British biologist John Maynard Smith, who, during the 1970s, fully developed the idea of frequency-dependent selection.
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Bluegill drifters, presumably, long ago reached their evolutionarily stable fraction of the population, which seems to be about one fifth.