The Queen - Matt Ridley

There are significant differences, including the fact that human beings tend to have a much more uneven distribution of dominance, power, and resources within the colony: But they still share the principal feature of all:colonial birds: monogamy, or at least pair bonds, plus rife adultery rather than polygamy. The noble savage, far from living in contented sexual equanimity, was paranoid about becoming, and intent on making his neighbor into, a cuckold. Little wonder that human sex is first and foremost in all societies a private thing to be indulged in only in secret. The same is not true of bonobos, but it is true of many monogamous birds.

One reason the high bastard rates of birds came as such a shock was that few naturalists had ever witnessed an adulterous affair between two birds—they do it in private: 39

THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER

Cuckoldry paranoia is deep-seated in men. The use of veils, chaper-ones, purdah, female circumcision, and chastity belts all bear witness to a widespread male fear of being cuckolded and a widespread suspicion that wives, as well as their potential lovers, are the ones to distrust: (Why else circumcise them?) Margo Wilson and Martin Daly of McMaster University in Canada have studied the phenomenon of human jealousy and come to the conclusion that the facts fit an evolutionary interpretation. Jealousy is a "human universal, " and no culture lacks it: Despite the best efforts of anthropologists to find a society with no jealousy and so prove that it is an emotion

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The Red Queen

introduced by pernicious social pressure or pathology, sexual jealousy seems to be an unavoidable part of being a human being.

The Demon, Jealousy, with Gorgon frown

Blasts the sweet flowers of pleasure not his own, Rolls his wild eyes, and through the shuddering grove Pursues the steps of unsuspecting Love:'°

Wilson and Daly believe that a study of human society reveals a mindset whose manifestations are diverse in detail but

" monotonously alike in the abstract. " They are "socially recognized marriage, the concept of adultery as a property violation, the valua-tion of female chastity, the equation of 'protection' of women with protection from sexual contact, and the special potency of infidelity as a provocation to violence: " In short, in every age and in every place, men behave as if they owned their wives ' vaginas:"

Wilson and Daly reflect on the fact that love is an admired emotion, whereas jealousy is a despised one, but they are plainly two sides of the same coin—as anybody who has been in love can testify: They are both part of a sexual proprietary claim: As many a modern couple knows, the absence of jealousy, far from calming a relationship, is itself a cause of insecurity. If he or she is not jealous when I pay attention to another man or woman, then he or she no longer cares whether our relationship survives: Psychologists have found that couples who lack moments of jealousy are less likely to stay together than jealous ones:

As Othello learned, even the suspicion of infidelity is enough to drive a man to such rage that he may kill his wife. Othello was fictional, but many a modern Desdemona has paid with her life for her husband's jealousy. As Wilson and Daly said: " The major source of conflict in the great majority of spouse killings is the husband 's knowledge or suspicion that his wife is either unfaithful or intending to leave him. " A man who kills his wife in a fit of jealousy can rarely plead insanity in court because of the legal tradition in Anglo-American common law that such an act is "the act of a reasonable man: "'

This interpretation of jealousy probably seems astonishing-MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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ly banal. After all, it is only putting an evolutionary slant on what everybody knows about everyday life. But among sociologists and psychologists it is heretical nonsense. Psychologists have tended to see jealousy as a pathology to be discouraged and generally thought shameful—as something that has been imposed by that eternal villain "society " to corrupt the nature of man: Jealousy shows low self-esteem, they say, and emotional dependency. Indeed it does, and that is exactly what the evolutionary theory would predict. A man held in low esteem by his wife is exactly the kind of person in danger of being cuckolded, for she has the motive to seek a better father for her children. This may even explain the extraordinary and hitherto baffling fact that husbands of rape victims are more likely to be traumatized and, despite themselves, to resent their raped wives if the wife was not physically hurt during the rape: Physical hurt is evidence of her resistance: Husbands may have been programmed by evolution to be paranoidly suspicious that their wives were not raped at all, or "asked for it.'

Cuckoldry is an asymmetrical fate. A woman loses no genetic investment if her husband is unfaithful, but a man risks unwittingly raising a bastard: As if to reassure fathers, research shows that people are strangely more apt to say of a baby, "He (or she) looks just like his father, " than to say, "He (or she) looks just like his mother "—and that it is the mother ' s relatives who are most likely to say this:" It is not that a woman need not mind about her husband 's infidelity; it might lead to his leaving her or wasting his time and money on his mistress or picking up a nasty disease: But it does imply that men are likely to mind even more about their wives' infidelity than vice versa: History and law have long reflected just that: In most societies adultery by a wife was illegal and punished severely, while adultery by a husband was con-doned or treated lightly: Until the nineteenth century in Britain, a civil action could be brought against an adulterer by an aggrieved husband for "criminal conversation: "" Even among the Trobriand islanders, who were celebrated by Bronislaw Malinowski in 1927 as a sexually uninhibited people, females who committed adultery were condemned to die:'°

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This double standard is a prime example of the sexism of society and is usually dismissed as no more than that. Yet the law has not been sexist about other crimes: Women have never been punished more severely than men for theft or murder, or at least the legal code has never prescribed that they be so. Why is adultery such a special case? Because man 's honor is at stake? Then punish the adulterous man as harshly, for that is just as effective adeterrent as punishing , the woman. Because men stick together in the war of the sexes? They do not do so in anything else. The law is quite explicit on this: All legal codes so far studied define adultery

" in terms of the marital status of the woman. Whether the adulterous man was himself married is irrelevant. "" And they do so because "it is not adultery per se that the law punishes but only the possible introduction of alien children into the family and even the uncertainty that adultery creates in this regard: Adultery by the husband has no such consequences. "48When, on their wedding night, Angel Clare confessed to his new wife, Tess, in Thomas Hardy 's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that he had sown his wild oats before marriage, she replied with relief by telling the story of her own seduction by Alec D 'Urberville and the short-lived child she bore him: She thought the transgressions balanced.

" Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel:"

" You—yes you do."

"But do you not forgive me? "

"0 Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another: My God—how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque—prestidigitation as that! "