Tiger Woods, $100M. Eliot Spitzer, loses governorship, but "wife stands by him". David Vitter, wife "stands beside him", and since IOKIYAR, re-elected. Then, there are the preachers. And now
China's exploding wealth has created a culture of secret mistresses and second wives. Now officials are putting marriage records online so lovers and spouses can check for cheaters.
State media on Wednesday said Beijing and Shanghai will be among the first places to put marriage databases online this year. The plan is to have records for all of China online by 2015.
Why? None of these guys is stupid. They all had some idea of the potential consequences of their actions, and acted anyway. And now a whole country want's to put on the Web, "cheaters". Why?
Or, turn the question around. Why should there be "consequences"? Why is there all of this legal, monetary and social coercion to encourage/force people to be monogamous? Why are there ceremonies, receptions, blenders and other kitchen appliances, given to people who agree to monogamously marry? Pretty much because monogamy is unnatural for humans as a species. If your husband sees you jogging for exercise, he's not likely to demand a divorce. If your wife sees you eating onion rings, she's not going to insist on $250/hr. marriage counseling. But FSM help you if you're caught even kissing with someone who's "off limits". You've "forsaken all others", and you're in big trouble.
Forsaking all others...what does that mean? If I see as stranger bleeding at an accident site, I'll ignore you? Does that mean, if you are a co-worker with a project to finish I'll refuse to help you? If you're my nephew/niece I won't drive you and your crew to the Chuck E. Cheese? (2) Of course not. What it means, and the only thing it means is that, no matter how much I like you, no matter how much I support you, no matter how much I love you, if I'm already married, I can't fuck you. The odd part about writing this, is that, as a male, it's less important to me than if I was writing this as a female. Because monogamy is more detrimental to females than it is to males. Because, that's how we evolved.
Anyone who thinks Adam and Eve rode to Church on dinosaurs should probably leave now. A lot of what follows comes from Sex at Dawn. Go to the book's own website, now because I figure the authors will count that as "fair use". It will save you from reading the (short) rant I have left in this diary. And, it's a hoot.
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How did we evolve? As immediate return foragers.(1) Eat what you get today, tomorrow is another day. Live for today, look, a dead caribou we can scavenge, or, hey look, blueberries! Which means the accumulation of "stuff" or wealth was contra-productive. More junk to carry, and as a we all share together, even if I have an "unlucky day", the odds of actually going hungry are slim. Hoarding food is shameful, gets one shunned, and really, why bother? "Personal property" is stuff like a musical instrument, art supplies, such as ochre, and medicinal supplies carried by those who know how to use them. Nothing particularly heavy, nothing that can't carried comfortably.
Foragers divide and distribute meat equitably, breastfeed one another's babies, have little or no privacy from one another, and depend on each other for survival. As much as our social world revolves around notions of private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins in the opposite direction, toward group welfare, group identity, profound interrelation and mutual dependence.
[snip]
We believe this sharing behavior extended to sex as well. A great deal of research from primatology, anthropology, anatomy and psychology points to the same fundamental conclusion: human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent all of the past few million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults have had several sexual relationships at any given time. This approach to sexuality probably persisted until the rise of agriculture and private property no more than ten thousand years ago. In addition to voluminous scientific evidence, many explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists support this view, having penned accounts rich with tales of orgiastic rituals, unflinching mate sharing, and an open sexuality unencumbered by guilt or shame.(3)
That's how we evolved. And yet, we want to believe that the way we are now is the way we were then. We want to believe that the "nuclear family" has existed since we came down from the trees. We want to project 1960s America onto our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We laugh at the conservatives when they build museums to Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs, but we project our own "family values" on our nomadic, foraging ancestors. Please read the websites posting of "Flinstonization". And, anyone remember "The Jetsons? We are an insular society that has a problem imagining family/social units different from our own. Great Googly-Moogly, I sincerely hope we're not living like "The Jetsons" when we actually have flying cars.
Readers familiar with the recent literature on human sexuality will be familiar with what we call the standard narrative of human sexual evolution (hereafter shortened to "the standard narrative"). It goes something like this:
- Boy meets girl.
- Boy and girl assess one another’s mate value from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities:
a) He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience, and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources.
b) She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health, and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children (known as male parental investment).
- Boy gets girl: assuming they meet one another’s criteria, they "mate," forming a long-term pair bond—the "fundamental condition of the human species," as famed author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed:
a) She will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving (vigilant toward signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection)—while keeping an eye out (around ovulation, especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband.
b) He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities (which would reduce his all-important paternity certainty—while taking advantage of short-term sexual opportunities with other women (as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful).
All of the above is deeply ingrained in "modern" society. "Paternal certainty" was so important to early Jewish society, that there was a Law that basically said, if your brother died without having a son, you were required to boink his wife, so that she would have a child and carry on your brother's name. Then, there's the other side to that coin; there's the Jerry Springer Show where it seems so much worse if a wife is caught in an affair with her husband's brother, as opposed to just a "regular" affair. At least, if she get's pregnant with her husband's brother's child, there's a lot more "parental certainty" than if it's with your regular random guy. (n.b. I have known two families where the dad knows for a certainty that the kid is not his. Kid's fine. Dad's fine. Mom's fine. One sibling not so okay, thinks it's weird that her brother is black. Also, last time I checked in with either family was about 15 years ago. But "parental certainty"?
Folks I hung with, not that big a deal. Kids need shelter, food, support, love and education. I'd import my commercial for foster care here, but the website seems to be down. Let me say now that we would be better off as immediate return foragers, because our "lost" kids would be taken care of. Because there wouldn't be a parental certainty" they'd just be kids that needed to be taken care of.
What's better, that there be one "alpha-male" that can provide for you, and if he dies you and your child/children are screwed? Or, you have some kids, and if someone in the group of males you boinked while having those kids, one of the males dies? R.H. Heinlein discussed the possibilities in a more formal setting,
Line Marriage: Though many authors have worked with polyandry, polygamy, and group marriage, Heinlein presented this as an alternative that has the major advantages of never dying, never having a situation where the children are left uncared for or unloved, and preserving capital resources from generation to generation. Presented in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as the convict’s solution to an environment that had no security and where individuals had no ‘rights’, this idea seems so solid I would not be surprised if some attempt was made to institute this form of marriage in the near future. (Bolds added by me, MoL)
My point here, is that, this is what Heinlein presented as a possible future; our distant past. If you're a member of a group who doesn't have an idea of paternal certainty, do you value children less? I would tend to doubt it unless you're a lion/tiger/"pootie" (what an odd expression here on dKos, where did it come from?) or other heartless, selfish feline species. But primates are different. We moved from the African Savannah, through the Arabian peninsula, and into Eurasia at least 50k years ago. Best guess that we got to Australia, 46-41k years ago. These folks carried on their accustomed lifestyles, and managed quite well. Presented above, what their lifestyle was probably like. And their lifestyle worked for a long time, and it didn't look like the "Flintstones." Only with the development of "agriculture", did the accumulation of wealth become possible, and then only did "monogamy" start looking like a good idea. Or "polygyny". And really, how well has that worked out for us? Quincineras, dowries, alimony...makes no sense to me.
Social status? If we don't have it because of having the biggest pile of stuff or sole, exclusive ownership of reproductive rights over the female with the biggest boobs? I have no clue, but we might start here,
As to her analysis, Artemova is compelled to glean over the economic structure theory and states that delayed-return subsistence is not the only structure that creates "long-term, load-bearing relationships" and that the hierarchy Woodburn describes does not actually answer the question of why there is gender inequality. The assumption is just that it exists and is perpetuated by the economic structure. Beyond describing why the economic structure cannot be responsible for the inequality seen in Aboriginal society, Artemova does not address why it is also not applicable in the immediate-return societies, the African and Asian foragers. Rather, her argument states that economic structure does not prove inequality so there must be some other reason.
I'm less critical of Artimova's conjecture than the editor's. Mostly because delayed-return subsistence is really what started us along the path of not just monogamy, but denial of health care, and a whole lot of other stuff this community seems to care about. But the whole wiki is worth a look through.
Quick hit from the website:
Researchers have confirmed what most men already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females. A quick peek at the online offerings at Adult Video Universe lists over nine hundred titles in the Gangbang genre, but only twenty-seven listed under Reverse Gangbang. You do the math. Why would the males in a species that’s been wearing the shackles of monogamy for 1.9 million years be sexually excited by scenes of groups of men ejaculating with one or two women?
And one other thing, my last "allowed" passage from the book, under fair use.
If it's true that multiple mating was common in human evolution, the apparent mismatch between the quick "male orgasmic response" and the so-called "delayed" female response makes sense (note how female response is "delayed" only if the male's is assumed to be "right on time"). The male's quick orgasm lessens the chances of being interrupted by predators or other males (survival of the quickest!), while the female and her child would benefit by exercising some promiscuous control over which spermatozoa would be likely to fertilize her ovum.
There's a lot of other stuff in the book. Let me quote a letter and response from our hero, Dan Savage.(I added the bolds)
My husband of eight years confessed to wanting to watch me with another man. I found a guy, and he agreed to a full STD screening—at my husband's suggestion and our expense—so that we wouldn't have to use condoms. I was worried about how my husband would react to the reality, but he loved every minute—he loved it a little too much. My husband had sex with me after our "guest" left. I still had our guest's semen inside me. Is my husband gay? Is that what cuckolding is all about? He didn't touch the other guy, but what the fuck?
Spouse Expressing Concern Over Newly Disclosed Sexuality
"Far from being an indication of homosexuality, your husband's turn-on goes back to the roots of male heterosexual experience," says Christopher Ryan, coauthor of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality.
Before Ryan walks us through what's so straight about your husband dipping his dick in another man's spunk, SECONDS, let me get this off my chest: Sex at Dawn is the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948. Want to understand why men married to supermodels cheat? Why so many marriages are sexless? Why paternity tests often reveal that the "father" isn't? Read Sex at Dawn.
Check out the rest of the column, it's well worth the read. Really. It's only a click away.
All of which is just fun. Christopher Ryan, Ph.D. & Cacilda Jethá, M.D have made a convincing argument that we, as a species have not evolved to be monogamous. And BTW, the swans, penguins, whatever you bring along? Not so much. The species that win are the ones who mix up their gene pool a LOT. We were, and still are a species that mixes up our genes a lot, and really, YAY! (I'm past the gene mixing thingie, I'm an old guy, but really, you kids go ahead. I'll be watching the TV loud, so I won't hear anything....)
Thanks for reading what is essentially a rant against what most people here seem to believe. And, if you're someone who believes Adam and Eve rode a dinosaur to church, then I really really thank you for reading this far.
Update: Umm...wow...all of these comments, no recs, okay but how many of the comments have anything to do with the diary itself? Why are people commenting on the throwaway China line, as opposed to the premise of the diary? Or Adam and Eve riding dinosaurs? This diary actually had a point, and the point was, "What do you think of monogamy?" Read the links, and if anyone actually wants to respond to the diary, thank you.
Update II: sorry to everyone who put the time in to comment. I've been more involved in the Gifford shootingto pay attention to my own diary. I will respond, or actually add another diary on the subject.
(1)) Environments such as Alaska and Lapland are excluded from this analysis, we are examining the time period before homo sapiens developed agriculture, not the period when homo sapiens "colonized" actively hostile environments.
(2) Okay, that last one? I may bail on that one; forsaking a van full of screaming kids headed to the Chuck E. Cheese may not be that hard a call.
(3) Two paragraphs from the book's intro, used under "fair use".