10 myths about monogamy: Natural need or imposed rule
Our whole culture is built on the idea of a union of men and women. - so strong that even LGBT people at the forefront of demographic change often unknowingly copy this relationship model. But where did the idea of the desirability of the nuclear family come from, although many within its framework sooner or later become crowded and boring? We understand whether the most common ideas about monogamy and the arguments in its favor are true.
Man is monogamous by nature
Studies by ethnographers and anthropologists of behavior in different cultures show an incredible variety of sexual and marital behavior in people. In Russia, until the last century, daughter-in-law was widespread. The teenagers of the island of Mangaya, with the approval of the whole community, practice promiscuity, and the boys are trained to satisfy their partners. On the island of Trobriand in Melanesia, ritual orgies are common when women are looking for men for sex and in case of refusal threaten to bite off their eyebrows. Indian people Muria build dormitories for children and young people, and they do what they want and with whom they want. The Chugach nationality (Alaska) has polygyndandria: the brothers marry women sisters from the same family, and when one of them goes hunting, the rest remain with the woman’s temporary husbands. In Tibet, polyandry and polygamy are common, depending on the region and access to resources.
The Matriarchal Moso nationality in China gives a girl of 13 years her own room with a separate entrance, they basically do not have a marriage, the woman’s sexual life is secret and is a purely personal matter. The customs of Moso have survived to the present day; Marco Polo, who appeared there in 1265, has his first mention. And in 1769 James Cook arrived in Tahiti and found that the locals had sex in public and are happy to invite sailors from the Cook crew to participate. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that even if monogamy is an innate human trait, its cultural traditions are suppressed with such ease that it is useless to appeal to natural inclinations.
Monogamy - the child of morality and the achievement of civilization
Well, let monogamy is not natural, but we are not savages what, but highly developed beings, with ease capable of moral twin relationships, right? Does not look like it. The church, the state and social institutions for centuries have protected and imposed restrictions on sexual behavior, severely punished non-fulfillment, but this does not stop people — it doesn’t matter who you are or how you will pay for it. Even if you are an American president or a British prince. The Catholic Church pays unbelievable sums to hundreds of victims, because the highly qualified priests were unable to remain faithful to their left or right hand. In modern China, "third girls" are a stratum of prestigious professional mistresses for wealthy men.
According to VTsIOM polls, a quarter of Russians call a common cause of divorce a betrayal of a partner - this is the first thing that comes to people’s mind, and for good reason. When the tabloids report the breakup of the next star couple, they immediately accept the bets who went first to the left. We believe that monogamy is good, and real actions are bad, but it turns out that everyone is incapable of behaving "as expected", regardless of place of residence, age and social status.
Women are naturally monogamous, but men are not
A common version of polygamous men, to whom women are given for the sake of sustenance and emotional intimacy, but never look around, is invented by Victorian gentlemen. Darwin and other owners of sufficient incomes, decent education, and the mass of free time have made an invaluable contribution to the development of the natural sciences in general and the study of the origin of species in particular. However, their explanations of the collected material were sinned by cognitive distortions inspired by education. To the question in the format "Can a female human, this pure angel in a crinoline and without her own income, eagerly desire physical contact with different males?" The answer was, of course, negative. In the representation of gentlemen, a woman was born for loyalty, and sex was tolerated only out of love for the motherland.
Subjective factors of perception affect the assessment so much that since the XIX century, the myth has only gotten stronger, despite several serious objections. First, why do women need these cheaters and how do you manage to maintain intimacy with those who lie and cheat? Secondly, how can one explain the existence of monogamous homosexual male couples? Thirdly and most importantly, with whom do men change, if a woman needs only one partner, and the others are not at all interested in her?
Women cheat on men with polygamous alpha males for the sake of better genes
The stereotype is the opposite: only men are monogamous, though not all, but only “not courageous enough”. Women of the same polls are liars who use the resources of faithful husbands to raise children conceived from secret macho lovers who, in turn, do not differ in loyalty either. Sexist fantasies about greedy manipulators, sucking up all the juices from several men at once, are very popular among injured lovers of conspiracy theories, as well as aggressive supporters of the antifeminist movement and the misogynist Oleg Novoselov.
But it is better to turn to the facts: in developed countries, about half of the children (in Russia, every third) are born to unmarried mothers without any support for parasitism on faithful and caring earners. And in families where the husband is and he believes his wife, on average only 2% of the children are from a passing fellow, Asya Kazantseva says in "Who would have thought! How the brain makes us do stupid things." Moreover, the picture again differs depending on cultural characteristics: in Mexico, this figure is 11%, among religious Jews it is 0.4%. Does not pull on a universal model.
Monogamy is natural for women because they are not very interested in sex.
It would be more correct to say that women are not very interested in being defenseless, deprived of the opportunity to earn and forced to take care of children alone. As soon as women got access to education, work, social protection, effective contraception and independent decisions, it turned out that they were very interested in sex. Moreover, women need more sex than men: they need more time to achieve orgasm than men, and they are capable of multiple orgasms. How an excited woman should be able to repeat immediately after an orgasm, and again and again, the man is often satisfied with one discharge. Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth, notes that a woman is able to roll any man and she will be short, and almost all of her life is capable of it, unlike a man who has been abandoned in a few decades, and daily use is limited .
Ovulation in women is hidden and does not manifest itself externally, unlike animals, we can and want sex at any time of the menstrual cycle, even on days when the possibility of conception is drastically reduced, but the partner never knows for sure. A woman has a clitoris - an organ that is not adapted for anything more than to obtain sexual pleasure. A woman may even learn how to get an orgasm from stimulating almost any part of the body and incredibly diversify sexual pleasure. Bisexuality is more common among women than among men, and women's sexual experience can be much wider than masculine, including mystical ecstatic experiences without special practices and psychoactive substances. The homo sapiens female is the sexually most gifted creature on the planet, and her interest in sex drops sharply only when it means serving the interests of a man on demand and without taking into account the needs of a woman.
But even in conditions not conducive to the development of desire, natural female sexuality erupts. Women are put on a veil and are stoned for adultery, left without money, children and family protection, millions of girls around the world still have their genitals mutilated to reduce libido. Unsatisfied desire has long been classified as hysteria, witches burned, corsets, chastity belts and uncomfortable shoes limited mobility and the ability to escape from surveillance - and the myth that the woman does not need sex is implanted, she is ready to provide it only in exchange for various benefits. However, somehow we survived without losing desire.
Monogamy is cost effective: it drags the mammoth, it sweeps the cave
The evolutionary benefits of monogamy are often spoken in the context of nursing offspring. When a person became erect and with a big clever head, he had to be born practically underdeveloped and completely independent, and then matured for years, hanging on his parents neck. It is logical to assume that a woman forced to breastfeed cannot get enough food for herself, she needs a breadwinner and an assistant, and the division of labor is natural in the production home cell and the sex-for-food model (created by Owen Lovejay, in Russia, popularized by the Paleontological Institute of RAS Alexander Markov).
However, it is even more logical to go and see how the tribes of hunters and gatherers live, having lived in a primitive state to our days. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond shows examples of research on two different continents - in Paraguay and Tanzania: female gatherers without exhausting labor provide themselves and children with enough food, and its caloric content is even higher than that of a hunter. Hunters bring meat not to the wife and children, but to the whole village. And they do the right thing - in small communities, cooperation and the ability to rely on neighbors at a difficult time is extremely important. If a hunter always brings loot to everyone, then when, say, he breaks his leg, neither he nor his family will be left without meat.
By the way, women in the studied villages regularly go for a walk, but their marriages do not suffer at all. And women prefer adultery for successful hunters, and there is a theory that they hunt, including to show their prowess and get an affair on the side, and not at all for the sake of a beloved and common cave.
A man needs confidence in his own fatherhood
The value of paternity appeared relatively recently - during the transition from hunting and gathering to the cultivation of land. Before that (about 95% of the time of existence of a person as a species), people lived in monstrous by our standards in poverty and almost without property, but they didn’t get too tense. The women of Kung-san bushmen from the Kalahari desert now spend about 15 hours a week searching for food for the whole family - two working days in our usual numbers. The rest of the time they sleep, go to visit other villages, have fun, perform rituals and do handicrafts. But the transition to agriculture made possible the emergence of a noticeable surplus of products and began the battle for natural resources. The female reproductive function has also become a resource, because children are hands, and the more hands on the field, the richer the household.
Friedrich Engels, after reading the classic work of Lewis Henry Morgan, the founder of the theory of social evolution, "The ancient society, or the study of the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization," wrote his own - "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State". According to Engels, agriculture gave birth to the owner, the ability to leave an inheritance demanded a native heir, and the reproductive function of a woman turned into a profitable object of sale, so they took control of female sexuality and invented monogamy for it.
But the collectors did not touch the idea of personal paternity, and how could they know about the intricacies of conception and fetal development? Modern collectors, who have not been touched by the benefits of secondary education, often practice general paternity, when all men of a tribe take care of all children. For example, Donald Pollock, a Kulin tribe researcher, found out that they believe that a pregnancy begins when a woman picks up enough seed, she needs to be literally pumped up with sperm. Therefore, a woman has sex with everyone she likes, hoping to get some attractive qualities for her child from everyone. And the men of the aforementioned Mozo consider their sister’s children only as their own children.
For a child, such an approach is much more beneficial than being in a monogamous pair family - someone will always take care of him, which means that the chances of survival increase sharply. So, the evolution and survival of a person as a species is on the side of women's disordered connections and various models of distributed fatherhood, and monogamy and the demand of only one official father is the invention of patriarchy.
Monogamy - a way for men to ensure the transfer of their genes
Not at all. If the partner is infertile, the partners have a serious genetic incompatibility, or they are carriers of the same recessive genes that can ruin their offspring, monogamy only spoils everything. In a world without genetic analysis, it’s much smarter to have sex with different women, one of them will give birth to your children, and one of those will survive.
It makes sense for a woman to have sex with different men for the same reason: if a man is infertile, either incompatible, or gives unviable offspring, her own genes are not passed on to descendants, and besides, she only receives extra labor from the birth of early dying children, and If it is impossible to get pregnant and feed the child - too exhausting frequent menstruation. Malcolm Gladwell cites studies by Beverly Strassman, explaining how, until the last couple of hundred years, no more than a hundred menstruation occurred throughout the entire life of a regularly giving birth and breastfeeding woman. Now - about 400, other calculations tend to 500 (affects the earlier onset of the first menstruation, before it occurred at 16, rather than 12-13, as it is now). Even the squabble effect of premenstrual syndrome, some researchers explain the need to scare a partner to clear a place for other men and finally stop bleeding (however, there are other versions).
Well-known anthropologist Helen Fisher in his work explains in detail how a person was created by cooperation, cooperation and a tendency to avoid conflicts within the community. Fisher is an adherent of evolutionary monogamy, but in fact her calculations are more logical than the justification of promiscuity. To the model of social softness, a man received a unique tool in the struggle to promote his own genes, namely, the large penis - the largest and thickest (in the erect state) among all hominids. In apes, the penis in relation to the size of the body is smaller, the smaller the free behavior of females. For example, gorillas keep harems and haremowers - huge and strong, in order to scare off potential volunteers from their females, and their penis are tiny and coitus purely symbolic. In addition, the shape of the head of a human member, according to some researchers of sexual behavior, is also due to the task of “scooping up” the sperm of the previous visitor of the vagina during the process (Judy Dutton writes in more detail in the book Love and Sex. How we deal with them).
We used to think that men, by nature, dream of being the first woman, but in general, nature hints that it would be good to be the last every day - no matter how many there were before you. Thus, the competition between different males for reproductive reproduction is preserved, and it remains possible to effectively maintain social balance.
Parenting monogamy is the only way to survive for posterity.
In the conversation "for monogamy" as an argument, you can hear a story about how all the same male monkeys kill cubs born by a female from another father. But people also kill, and not just strangers, so let's not blacken monkeys. In addition, apes are not a homogeneous mass, among them many species with a variety of sexual strategies. For example, only gibbons are monogamous, live in pairs, not large companies, like humans, and rarely have sex - only for reproduction. Small unlucky gorillas-losers have nothing left at all, but the aged owner of the harem will easily push the younger and stronger, the females will not miss him. Male chimpanzees can fight for a female. Зато бонобо, ближе всех стоящие к человеку на эволюционной лестнице, практикуют матриархат, беспорядочный секс и общее отцовство, единственные среди человекообразных обезьян занимаются сексом лицом к лицу и даже придумали сексуальное взаимодействие между самками. Они трутся гениталиями и так устанавливают мир и любовь в своём обществе - до такой степени, что среди самцов бонобо крайне низкий уровень стресса.
Знаменитый исследователь приматов Франс де Вааль уверяет, что истоки человеческой морали у обезьян искать можно и нужно, но вообще-то эволюции на нравственность наплевать, она просто перебирает новые и новые возможности, а выживают те, кому повезло, и существующая стратегия срабатывает в текущих условиях. And do not forget about all the same distortions of perception. For example, we regard the behavior of gibbons as loyalty to a partner, but gibbons do not have the consciousness and culture that allow them to make an ethical choice in favor of loyalty - they simply follow the reproductive strategies inherent in them. At the same time, the "cuckolds" bonobos will never understand the concept of promiscuity, but the mortality rate of the males is two times lower than that of the pugnacious chimpanzees.
Only monogamy provides such necessary emotional intimacy.
Every time we talk about the antipodes of monogamy, indiscriminate connections with unfamiliar people, the danger, the inevitable condemnation of society and the tragic end come to mind. However, our ancestors lived on a planet with an incredibly low density of human population and could meet no more than 150 people in their entire life. 150, the so-called Dunbar number, describes the maximum number of friendships a person can maintain at the same time. Christopher Ryan and Casilda Zheta in the book "Sex at the Dawn of Civilization. The Evolution of Human Sexuality from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day" indicate that even now tribes with more than 150 people are divided into two, because life in such a community requires tight friendships.
150 (that is, the upper limit) seems to be a large number, but if you have sex with absolutely all of them with whom you intersect in age, sympathy and sexual orientation, this will not exceed the average in the number of connections of an ordinary resident of a big city. Moreover, in the community, you can sleep with different people, and share with them the education of children, and homework, and getting food, which only strengthens communication and understanding. Even modern polyamors often strive for stable relations with a minimum number of participants, and swingers are often friends with families.
The desire for novelty and change of partners, so inherent in man, does not cancel the modern ideal of a deep personal connection, providing satisfaction from life and moral support. We all need love and intimacy, but it’s time to admit that sex is not the price of relationships, not the way to build a family, that it can be nothing meaningful pleasure or, conversely, strengthen existing friendships. Sex is a part of life that we can use as we want or not at all. However, the certainty that one partner will automatically make someone happy and at the same time is obliged to rejoice in monogamy and not want anything else is not at all realistic.
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 via WikiArt
