The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (21 page)

This change had begun by the turn of the century, and it reached dramatic proportions after midcentury. The American divorce rate, which was level during the 1950s and early 1960s, doubled between 1966 and 1978, reaching its present level. Meanwhile, as escape from marriage became simple and commonplace, the incentive for men (and, in a probably less dramatic way, for women) to enter one was being dulled. Between 1970 and 1988, though the average age of a woman upon (first) marriage was rising, the number of eighteen-year-old girls who reported having had intercourse grew from 39 to 70 percent. For fifteen-year-olds it went from one in twenty to one in four.
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The number of unmarried couples living together in the United States grew from half a million in 1970 to nearly three million in 1990.

Hence the double whammy: as easy divorce creates a growing population of formerly married women, easy sex creates a growing population of never-married women. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of American women aged thirty-five to thirty-nine who had never been married rose from one in twenty to one in ten.
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And of women in that age group who have gotten married, about a third have also gotten divorced.
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For men, the figures are even more severe. One in seven men aged thirty-five to thirty-nine has never married; as we've seen, serial monogamy tends to leave more men than women in that condition.
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Still, women may be the bigger losers here. They are
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more likely than men to want children, and a forty-year-old unmarried childless woman, unlike her male counterpart, is watching her chances of parenthood head briskly toward zero. And as for the relative fortunes of formerly married men and women: in the United States, divorce brings the average man a marked increase in standard of living, while his wife, along with her children, suffers the opposite.
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The Divorce Actof 1857, which helped legitimize marital breakup in England, was welcomed by many feminists. Among them was John Stuart Mill's wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, who, until the death of her first husband, had been trapped in a marriage she detested. Mrs. Mill, who seems never to have been a great enthusiast for sexual intercourse, had painfully come to believe "that all men, with the exception of a few lofty minded, are sensualists more or less" and that "women on the contrary are quite exempt from this trait." To any wife who shared her distaste for sex, Victorian marriage could seem like a series of rapes punctuated by dread. She favored divorce on demand for the sake of women.

Mill too favored divorce on demand (assuming the couple had no children). But his view of the matter differed from hers. He saw wedding vows as a constraint less on the wife than on the husband. The strict marriage laws of the day, Mill observed, with great insight into the likely origins of institutionalized monogamy, had been written "by sensualists, for sensualists, and to bind sensualists."
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He was not alone in this view. Behind opposition to the Divorce Act of 1857 was a fear that it would turn men into serial monogamists. Gladstone opposed the bill because, he said, it "would lead to the degradation of woman."
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(Or, as an Irish woman would put it more than a century later: "A woman voting for divorce is like a turkey voting for Christmas.")
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The effects of easy divorce have been complex, but in many ways the evidence supports Gladstone. Divorce is very often a raw deal for women.

There's no point in trying to turn back the clock, no point in trying to sustain marriages by making the alternative virtually illegal. Studies show that the one thing harder on children than divorce is for parents to stay together even though locked in mortal combat.
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But surely there shouldn't be a financial incentive for a man to get divorced; divorce shouldn't raise his personal standard of living, as it now usually does. In fact, it seems only fair to lower his standard of living — not necessarily to punish him, but because that's often the only way to keep the living standards of his wife and children from plunging, given the inefficiencies of two households compared to one. If financially secure, women can often be happy rearing children without a man — happier than they were with him, sometimes, and happier even than he'll be after he's gotten used to the grass on the other side of the fence.

There is a difference of opinion over how much "respect" women get in the modern moral climate. Men think they get lots. The portion of American men saying women are better respected than in the past went from 40 percent in 1970 to 62 percent in 1990. Women disagree. In a 1970 survey, they were most likely to call men "basically kind, gentle, and thoughtful," but a 1990 survey conducted by the same pollster found women most likely to describe men as valuing only their own opinions, trying to keep women down, preoccupied with getting women into bed, and not paying attention to household affairs.
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Respect is an ambiguous word. Maybe those men who consider women well "respected" mean that women have been accepted at work as worthy colleagues. And maybe women are indeed getting more of this kind of respect. But if by respect you mean what the Victorians meant when they urged respect for women — not treating them as objects of sexual conquest — then respect has probably dropped since 1970 (and it certainly has since 1960). One interpretation of the above numbers is that women would like to have more of this second kind of respect.

There's no clear reason for a sharp trade-off between the two; no reason that feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in insisting on the first kind of respect, had to undermine the second (which, actually, they said they also wanted). But, as things happened, they did. They preached the innate symmetry of the sexes in all major
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arenas, including sex. Many young women took the doctrine of symmetry to mean they could follow their sexual attractions and disregard any vague visceral wariness: sleep with any man they liked, without fear that his sexual interest didn't signify comparable affection, without fear that sex might be more emotionally entangling for her than for him. (Some feminists practiced casual sex almost out of a sense of ideological commitment.) Men, for their part, used the doctrine of symmetry to ease themselves off the moral hook. Now they could sleep around without worrying about the emotional fallout; women were just like them, so no special consideration was necessary. In this they were, and are, aided by women who actively resist special moral consideration as patronizing (which it sometimes is, and certainly was in Victorian England).

Lawmakers, meanwhile, took sexual symmetry to mean that women needed no special legal protection.
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In many states, the 1970s brought "no-fault" divorce and the automatically equal division of a couple's assets — even if one spouse, usually the wife, hasn't been on a career track and thus faces bleaker prospects. The lifelong alimony that a divorced woman could once expect may now be replaced by a few years of "rehabilitative maintenance" payments, which are supposed to give her time to launch her career recovery — a recovery that, in fact, will extend beyond a few years if she has a few children to tend. In trying to get a more equitable deal, it won't help to point out that the cause of the breakup was her husband's rampant philandering, or his sudden, brutal intolerance. These things, after all, are nobody's fault. The no-fault philosophy is one reason divorce is literally a profitable enterprise for men. (The other reason is lax enforcement of the man's financial obligations.) The height of the no-fault vogue has now passed, and state legislatures have undone some of the damage, but not all.

The feminist doctrine of innate sexual symmetry wasn't the only culprit, or even, initially, the main one. Sexual and marital norms had been changing for a long time, for many reasons, ranging from contraceptive technology to communications technology, from residential patterns to recreational trends. So why dwell on feminism?
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Partly because of the sheer irony that (perfectly laudable) attempts to stop one kind of exploitation of women aided another kind. Partly, too, because, though feminists didn't single-handedly create the problem, some of them have helped sustain it. Until very recently, fear of feminist backlash was far and away the main obstacle to an honest discussion of differences between the sexes. Feminists have written articles and books denouncing "biological determinism" without bothering to understand biology or determinism. And the increasing, if belated, feminist discussion of sex differences is sometimes vague and disingenuous; there is a tendency to describe differences that are plausibly explicable in Darwinian terms while dodging the question of whether they are innate.
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The "Darwin plan" for staying married — and, indeed, the general thrust of this chapter so far — may seem to presuppose a simple picture: women love marriage, men don't. Obviously, life is more complicated than that. Some women don't want to get married, and many more, once married, are far from bliss. If this chapter has stressed the male mind's incongruence with monogamous marriage (and it has), it's not because I think the female mind is a perpetual font of adulation and fidelity. It's because I think the male mind is the largest single obstacle to lifelong monogamy — and certainly the largest such obstacle that emerges distinctly from the new Darwinian paradigm.

The incongruence between the female mind and modern marriage is less simple and clear-cut (and, in the end, less disruptive). The clash isn't so much with monogamy itself as with the social and economic setting of modern monogamy. In the typical hunter-gatherer society, women have both a working life and a home life, and reconciling the two isn't hard. When they go out to gather food, child care is barely an issue; their children may go with them or, instead, stay with aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. And when mothers, back from work, do care for children, the context is social, even communal. The anthropologist Marjorie Shostak, after living in an African hunter-gatherer village, wrote: "The isolated mother burdened
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with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life."
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Most modern mothers seem to find themselves well to one side or the other of the (reasonably) happy medium that a hunter-gatherer woman naturally strikes. They may work forty or fifty hours a week, worry about the quality of day care, and feel vaguely guilty. Or they may be full-time housewives who rear their children alone and are driven nearly mad by monotony. Some housewives, of course, manage to build a solid social infrastructure even amid the transience and anonymity of the typical modern neighborhood. But the unhappiness of the many women who don't is virtually inevitable. It's no surprise that modern feminism gathered such momentum during the 1960s, after post-World War II suburbanization (and so much else) had diluted the sense of neighborhood community and pulled the extended family apart; women weren't designed to be suburban housewives.

The generic suburban habitat of the fifties was more "natural" for men. Like many hunter-gatherer fathers, vintage suburban husbands spent a little time with their children and a lot of time out bonding with males, in work, play, or ritual.
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For that matter, many Victorian men (though not Darwin) had the same setup. Although lifelong monogamy per se is less natural for men than for women, one form that monogamous marriage has often taken, and still often takes, may be harder on women than on men.

But that's not the same as saying that the female mind threatens modern monogamy more than, or as much as, the male mind. A mother's discontent seems not to translate into breakup as naturally as a father's. The ultimate reason is that, in the ancestral environment, seeking a new husband once there were children was seldom a genetically winning proposition.

To make modern monogamy "work" — in the sense both of enduring and of leaving husband and wife fairly happy — is a challenge of overwhelming complexity. A successful overhaul might well entail tampering with the very structure of modern residential and vocational life. Any aspiring tamperers would do well to ponder the social environment in which human beings evolved.
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People weren't, of course, designed to be relentlessly happy in the ancestral environment; there, as here, anxiety was a chronic motivator, and happiness was the always pursued, often receding, goal. Still, people were designed not to go crazy in the ancestral environment.

Notwithstanding the discontents of modern marriage, many women aspire to find a lifelong mate and have children. Given that the current climate doesn't favor this goal, what are they to do? We've talked about how men might behave if they want marriage to be a sturdier institution. But giving men marriage tips is a little like offering Vikings a free booklet titled "How Not to Pillage." If women are closer than men to being naturally monogamous, and often suffer from divorce, maybe they are a more logical locus for reform. As George Williams and Robert Trivers discovered, much of human sexual psychology flows from the scarceness of eggs relative to sperm. This scarcity gives women more power — in individual relationships, and in shaping the moral fabric — than they sometimes realize.

Sometimes they do realize it. Women who would like a husband and children have been known to try the Emma Wedgwood plan for landing a man. In its most extreme form, the plan runs as follows: if you want to hear vows of eternal devotion right up to your wedding day — and if you want to make sure there is a wedding day — don't sleep with your man until the honeymoon.

The idea here isn't just that, as the saying goes, a man won't buy the cow if he can get the milk for free. If the Madonna-whore dichotomy is indeed rooted firmly in the male mind, then early sex with a woman may tend to stifle any budding feelings of love for her. And, if there are such things as "mate-ejection modules" in the human mind, sustained sex without issue may bring — in the man or the woman — a cooling toward the other.