The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (22 page)

Many women find the Emma strategy abhorrent. To "trap" a man, some say, is beneath their dignity; if he has to be coerced into marriage, they'd rather do without him. Others say the Emma
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approach is reactionary and sexist, a revival of the hoary demand that women carry the moral burden of self-control for the sake of the social order. Still others say this approach seems to presume that sexual restraint for a woman is easy, which it often is not. These are all valid reactions.

There is one other common complaint about the Emma strategy: it doesn't work. These days much sex is available to men for little commitment. Not as much as a few years ago, maybe, but enough so that, if any one woman cuts off the supply, alternatives abound. Prim women sit at home alone and bask in their purity. Around Valentine's Day of 1992, the
New York Times
quoted a twenty-eight-year-old single woman who "lamented the lack of romance and courtship." She said, "Guys still figure if you don't come across, someone else will. It's like there's no incentive to wait until you get to know each other better."
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This, too, is a valid point, and a good reason why a one-woman austerity crusade isn't likely to bring great rewards. Still, some women have found that a move of some distance toward austerity may make sense.
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If a man isn't interested enough in a woman, as a human being, to endure, say, two months of merely affectionate contact before graduating to lust, he's unlikely to stick around for long in any event. Some women have decided not to waste the time — which, needless to say, is more precious for them than for men.

This mild version of the Emma approach can be self-reinforcing. As more women discover the value of a short cooling-off period, it becomes easier for each of them to impose a longer one. If an eight-week wait is common, then a ten-week wait won't put a woman at much of a competitive disadvantage. Don't expect this trend to reach Victorian extremes. Women, after all, do like sex. But expect the trend, which seems already to be under way, to continue. Much of today's incipiently conservative sexual climate may come from a fear of sexually transmitted diseases; but, to judge by the increasingly clear opinion of many women that men are basically pigs, a part of the new climate may come from women rationally pursuing self-interest in recognition of harsh truths about human nature. And one generally safe bet is that people will continue to pursue their
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self-interest as they see it. In this case, evolutionary psychology helps them see it.

There is another reason trends in sexual morality — whether toward or away from sexual reserve — may be self-sustaining. If men and women are indeed designed to tailor their sexual strategies to local market conditions, the norm among each sex depends on the norm among the other. We've already seen evidence, from David Buss and others, that when men deem a woman promiscuous, they treat her accordingly — as a short-term conquest, not a long-term prize. We've also seen evidence, from Elizabeth Cashdan, that women who perceive males to be generally pursuing short-term strategies are themselves more likely to look and act promiscuous: to wear sexy clothes and have sex often.
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One can imagine these two tendencies getting locked in a spiral of positive feedback, leading to what the Victorians would have called ongoing moral decline. A proliferation of low-cut dresses and come-hither looks might send the visual cues that discourage male commitment; and as men, thus discouraged, grow less deferential toward women, and more overtly sexual, low-cut dresses might further proliferate. (Even come-hither looks that show up on billboards, or in the pages of Playboy, might have some effect.)
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If things should for some reason begin moving in the other direction, toward male parental investment, the trend could be sustained by the same dynamic of mutual reinforcement. The more Madonnaish the women, the more daddish and less caddish the men, and thus the more Madonnaish the women, and so on.

To call this theory speculative would almost be an understatement. It has the added disadvantage of being (like many theories of cultural change) hard to test directly. But it does rest on theories of individual psychology that are themselves testable. The Buss and Cashdan studies amount to a preliminary test, and so far the two pillars of the theory hold up. The theory also has the virtue of helping to explain why trends in sexual morality persist for so long. Just as Victorian prudishness, at its high-water mark, was the culmination
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of a century-long trend, it seems to have then receded for a long, long time.

Why does the long, slow swing of the pendulum ever reverse? The possible reasons range from changes in technology (contraceptive, for example) to changes in demographics.
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It's possible too that the pendulum may tend to reverse when a large fraction of one sex or the other (or both) finds its deepest interests not being served and begins to consciously reevaluate its lifestyle. In 1977 Lawrence Stone observed, "The historical record suggests that the likelihood of this period of extreme sexual permissiveness continuing for very long without generating a strong backlash is not very great. It is an ironic thought that just at the moment when some thinkers are heralding the advent of the perfect marriage based on full satisfaction of the sexual, emotional and creative needs of both husband and wife, the proportion of marital breakdowns, as measured by the divorce rate, is rising rapidly."
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Since he wrote, women, who have much leverage over sexual morality, have, in apparently growing numbers, asked basic questions about the wisdom of highly casual sex. Whether we are entering a period of long growth in moral conservatism is impossible to say. But modern society doesn't exude an overwhelming sense of satisfaction with the status quo.

Many judgments have been rendered about Victorian sexual morality. One is that it was horribly and painfully repressive. Another is that it was well suited to the task of preserving marriage. Darwinism affirms these two judgments and unites them. Once you have seen the odds against lifelong monogamous marriage, especially in an economically stratified society — in other words, once you have seen human nature — it is hard to imagine anything short of harsh repression preserving the institution.

But Victorianism went well beyond simple, general repression. Its particular inhibitions were strikingly well-tailored to the task at hand.

Perhaps the greatest threat to lasting marriage — the temptation of aging, affluent, or high-status men to desert their wives for a younger
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model — was met with great social firepower. Though Charles D ens did manage, amid great controversy and at real social cost leave his wife, he forever confined contact with his mistress to secret meetings. To admit that his desertion was, in fact, a desertion would have been to draw a censure he wasn't willing to face.

It's true that some husbands spent time in one or another of London's many brothels (and housemaids sometimes served as sexual outlets for men of the upper classes). But it's also true that male infidelity may not threaten marriage so long as it doesn't lead to desertion; women, more easily than men, can reconcile themselves to living with a mate who has cheated. And one way to ensure that male infidelity doesn't lead to desertion is to confine it to, well, whores. We can safely bet that few Victorian men sat at the breakfast table daydreaming about leaving their wives for the prostitute they had enjoyed the night before; and we can speculate with some confidence that part of the reason is a Madonna-whore dichotomy planted deeply in the male psyche.

If a Victorian man did more directly threaten the institution of monogamy, if he committed adultery with "respectable" women, the risk was great. Darwin's physician, Edward Lane, was accused in court by a patient's husband of committing adultery with the patient. In those days, this sort of case was so scandalous that the
Times
of London carried daily coverage. Darwin followed it closely. Perhaps conveniently, he doubted Lane's guilt ("I never heard a sensual expression from him"), and he worried about Lane's future: "I fear it will ruin him."
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It probably would have, if the judge hadn't exonerated him.

Of course, in keeping with the double standard, female adulterers drew even stronger censure than their male counterparts. Both Lane and his patient were married, yet her diary recounted a post-tryst conversation between them that allocated blame in the following proportions. "I entreated him to believe that since my marriage I had never before in the smallest degree transgressed. He consoled me for what I had done, and conjured me to forgive myself."
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(Lane's lawyer convinced the court that her diary was a mad fantasy, but even if so, it reflects prevailing morality.)
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The double standard may not be fair, but it does have a kind of rationale. Adultery per se is a greater threat to monogamy when the wife commits it. (Again: the average man will have much more trouble than the average woman continuing a marriage with a mate known to have been unfaithful.) And if the husband of an adulterer does for some reason stay in the marriage, he may start treating the children less warmly, now that doubts about their paternity have arisen.

Conducting this sort of brisk, clinical appraisal of Victorian morality is risky. People are inclined to misunderstand. So let's be clear: clinical isn't the same as prescriptive; this is not an argument on behalf of the double standard, or any other particular aspect of Victorian morality.

Indeed, whatever contribution the double standard may have once made to marital stability by offering a vent for male lust, times have changed. These days a high-powered businessman doesn't confine his extramarital affairs to prostitutes, or to maids and secretaries whose cultural backgrounds make them unlikely wives. With women more widely in the workplace, he will meet young single women at the office, or on a business trip, who are exactly the sort he might marry if he had it to do all over again; and he can do it all over again. Whereas extramarital activity in the nineteenth century, and often in the 1950s, was a sheerly sexual outlet for an otherwise committed husband, today it is often a slippery slope toward desertion. The double standard may have once bolstered monogamy, but these days it brings divorce.

Even aside from the question of whether Victorian morality would "work" today, there is the question of whether any benefits would justify its many peculiar costs. Some Victorian men and women felt desperately trapped by marriage. (Although when marriages seem inescapable, almost literally unthinkable, people may dwell less on shortcomings.) And prevailing morality made it hard for some women to guiltlessly enjoy even marital sex — not to mention the fact that Victorian men weren't known for their sexual sensitivity. Life was also hard for women who wanted to be more than ornaments, more than an "Angel in the House." The Darwin sisters reported to Charles with some concern about brother Erasmus's budding, if ambiguous, friendship with the author Harriet Martineau, who didn't fit meekly
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into the feminine mold. Darwin, upon meeting her, had this impression: "She was very agreeable and managed to talk* on a most wonderful number of subjects, considering the limited time. I was astonished to find how little ugly she is, but as it appears to me, she is overwhelmed with her own projects, her own thoughts and own abilities. Erasmus palliated all this, by maintaining one ought not to look at her as a woman."
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This sort of remark is one of many reasons we shouldn't try to recreate Victorian sexual morality wholesale.

There no doubt are other moral systems that could succeed in sustaining monogamous marriage. But it seems likely that any such system will, like Victorianism, entail real costs. And although we can certainly strive for a morality that distributes costs evenly between men and women (and evenly among men and among women), distributing the costs identically is less likely. Men and women are different, and the threats that their evolved minds pose to marriage are different. The sanctions with which an efficient morality combats these threats will thus be different for the two sexes.

If we are really serious about restoring the institution of monogamy, combat, it seems, will indeed be the operative word. In 1966, one American scholar, looking back at the sense of shame surrounding the sexual impulse among Victorian men, discerned "a pitiable alienation on the part of a whole class of men from their own sexuality."
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He's certainly right about the alienation. But the "pitiable" part is another question. At the other end of the spectrum from "alienation" is "indulgence" — obedience to our sexual impulses as if they were the voice of the Noble Savage, a voice that could restore us to some state of primitive bliss which, in fact, never was. A quarter-century of indulging these impulses has helped bring a world featuring, among other things: lots of fatherless children; lots of embittered women; lots of complaints about date rape and sexual harassment; and the frequent sight of lonely men renting X-rated videotapes while lonely women abound. It seems harder these days to declare the Victorian war against male lust "pitiable." Pitiable compared to what? Samuel Smiles may seem to have been asking a lot when he talked about spending one's life "armed against the temptation of low indulgences," but the alternative isn't obviously preferable.
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The intermittently moralistic tone of this chapter is in a sense ironic. Yes, on the one hand, the new Darwinian paradigm does suggest that any institution as "unnatural" as monogamous marriage may be hard to sustain without a strong (that is, repressive) moral code. But the new paradigm also has a countervailing effect: nourishing a certain moral relativism — if not, indeed, an outright cynicism about moral codes in general.