Feminist Theory

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Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous Amanda Rees Feminist Theory 2000 1: 365 DOI: 10.1177/14647000022229281 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fty.sagepub.com/content/1/3/365

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Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous

Amanda Rees University of York

FT Feminist Theory Copyright ©2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) vol. 1(3): 365-370. [1464-7001 (200012)1:3; 365-370; 015105]

Ally McBeal has become something of an icon for modern, twentysomething or thirtysomething career women. Smart, friendly and economically successful, she and her friends find it hard to attract men who are willing to commit to them. Lack of a partner for the Ally McBeals of this world doesn’t just imply the absence of masculine attention, but the presence of very real emotional turmoil and self-doubt; having a husband or a boyfriend, it would seem, is the real mark of success. Why should this be so? Evolutionary psychologists think they have the answer. Michael Ghiglieri argues that . . . a woman who pursues an economic career not only absents herself from raising a family, but also makes herself less attractive to men interested in marrying a future mother who will raise their children carefully and not be financially independent. (Ghiglieri, 1999: 26)

Such a woman also places herself in direct competition with men for the limited resources that men wish to obtain in order to support their potential families – that is, rather than a potential mate, she becomes a direct threat to male reproductive success. In addition, ‘most women are born programmed to want to raise a family far more than they are driven to wrestle in the political arena’ (1999: 25). It would seem unsurprising then, that Ally McBeal and her ilk feel unfulfilled in their professional lives. Regardless of what ‘most women want’, most feminists will recoil violently from statements like the above. But it’s worth examining the nature of the argument a little more closely if we want to appreciate what’s going on here. Evolutionary psychology, as it relates to the roles of men and women in society, is based on the Darwinian theory of natural and sexual selection and the concept of parental investment developed initially by Robert Trivers. Natural selection refers to the fact that more offspring are born in any generation than can possibly survive to reproduce, and those that survive will be those individuals who are best fitted to the environment in which they live. Parental investment centres on the idea that, if these offspring are to survive, they must be cared for by one or both of their parents, and that, in most species, this parental care is not shared equally between the sexes.1 Whichever sex invests most in the survival of the


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Feminist Theory 1(3) offspring will be sought after as a reproductive resource by the other sex. In the case of social primates,2 the fact that females give birth to, suckle and raise children, while the male role is confined to fertilization, means that males will compete for access to females. By inseminating as many different females as possible without investing in childcare, males can vastly increase their reproductive success. A female can take care of only one infant at a time, and that care takes most of her time. According to evolutionary psychology, this differential parental investment is the source of the sexual division of labour in society. This is the new version of what has been called ‘biological determinism’, and it is a perspective on human behaviour that has so far managed to seduce a number of people, some of them quite influential. Books written in this tradition are to be found at the top of the popular science lists, and speakers explaining human behaviour in these terms can be heard with reasonable regularity on television and the radio. Some readers may find the ideas associated with evolutionary psychology familiar. I refer them to a book published not long after I was born – Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). Feminists fought against the attempt to ground human culture in human nature a quarter of a century ago – and now it seems that the time has come to do it again. A recently published book reflects the seriousness of the conflict between mainstream feminist approaches and evolutionary psychology. Thornhill and Palmer (2000) argue that feminist opposition to evolutionary psychology is dangerous, since it prevents an open discussion of the ultimate causes of male and female social difference (Concar, 2000: 47). Thornhill and Palmer argue that we will be unable to change how men and women act towards each other until we understand the evolutionary pressures that produced these relationships in the first place – we will not, for example, be able to prevent rape until we go beyond the ‘explanations of rape [which are] based more on ideology than on scientific evidence’ (Thornhill and Palmer, 2000: xi). The example of rape, and of male violence against women in general, is particularly arresting for anyone intrigued by the degree of hostility between feminism and evolutionary psychology. Although it is clear that Thornhill and Palmer, and Ghiglieri, are all appalled by the level of male violence against women and are genuinely eager to help eradicate it, their style of contribution is confrontational, to say the least. Their argument is as follows. Because of the pattern of unequal parental investment, men have been selected to seek multiple sex partners with minimum commitment, and sometimes it happens that sex is coerced.3 Women find rape horrific because it removes the ability to choose one’s partner, and therefore the father of one’s child. Partnered women find rape particularly difficult to deal with because they fear abandonment by their male partners – on the grounds that they have been deliberately unfaithful. On the other hand, men are more likely to rape if they cannot attract a woman in the first place, which, we are told, explains why young males who are less well endowed with socio-economic status commit rape more often than older men. They are also more likely to rape younger women


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Rees: Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous since age is strongly correlated with fertility in females. The ramifications of this approach are extensive, but the basic idea is that modern men are the descendants of males who gained a reproductive advantage by ‘stealing’ the reproductive capacity of some women in this way, and that they therefore also possess the potential to use rape as an element in their reproductive strategy. Although some women will find this argument offensive, there is something to be said for it. It does give us an apparently ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ explanation for why the legal system is and has been weighted against the victims of rape. According to Thornhill and Palmer, ‘attempts to reform rape laws have not taken into account various evolved human intuitions about human behaviour’ (Thornhill and Palmer, 2000: 196), among which lies the male fear of losing control of a woman’s reproductive capacity and therefore of the certainty of paternity. This would, they suggest, encourage a tendency to blame the victim, to suspect her of having invited the attack, and, in some cases, to see her partner as the real victim of the crime. Quite obviously, these are not novel observations; any feminist text on rape will describe these ‘intuitions’ and ground them firmly in the cultural structures of patriarchy. But, potentially at least, we have the opportunity to ground our critique, which is sometimes perceived as ‘ideological’, within the respectability of ‘orthodox biological science’. That is to say, the latter can be used to support feminist arguments rather than being assumed to attack them. Thornhill and Palmer make further suggestions about the content of rape education programmes – programmes that would teach young men why their sexual impulses are so powerful, and at the same time emphasize that ‘a young man’s evolved sexual desires offer him no excuse whatsoever for raping a woman’ (Thornhill and Palmer, 2000: 180). As part of stressing the power of human society to control human biological impulses, it might also highlight the penalties for rape – since part of the evolutionary argument is that a male will rape only where the cost–benefit outcome is greatly in his favour. Modern evolutionary psychologists are careful always to stress that the naturalistic fallacy is only a fallacy, that what is is not necessarily what ought to be. Despite these practical proposals, the authors are unlikely to receive the support of feminists; indeed, I suspect that the qualified praise of their argument put forward in the last two paragraphs will have caused readers to evert their lips and raise their hackles. This hostility is not surprising – and Thornhill and Palmer can expect no less, when a consistent theme of their book centres on the idea that feminists have been partially responsible for the perpetuation of rape in modern society because of their aversion to evolutionary theory. They can also expect no less when they ignore most of what feminist social science research has discovered about rape. To raise just one issue, is it really the case that only young, poor men rape? Or is it that they are the ones who usually get convicted? Thornhill and Palmer do recognize that wealthy men might rape women, but that aspect of their argument is so marginal as to be invisible for all practical purposes. Their dismissal of the social science literature becomes even more inappropriate


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Feminist Theory 1(3) when they recognize the importance of establishing both the proximate and the ultimate causes of rape;4 selection theory can deal only with the latter, so why the hostility towards the body of literature that tries to identify and explain the former? That mutual incomprehension can swiftly escalate to aggression and conflict will surprise no one; there is a need for both disciplines to recognize the fears and irritations of the other. On the one hand, evolutionary psychologists become justly angered by the fact that the social science sense of time is quite different from the biological: the length of time needed for natural selection to operate on a population stretches far beyond our short period of modernity. On the other, it is disingenuous at best for evolutionary psychologists to insist that, because biology is a natural science, it is innocent of ideological loading. The briefest examination of the history of biology will reveal examples of what Thornhill and Palmer call ‘the naturalistic fallacy’, and of the part that biology has had to play in politics, usually to the benefit of men and the detriment of women. Why, then, should we bother to make the effort to communicate, or even to register our opinions of the arguments? Well, not least because a selfaware, or reflexive, evolutionary psychology could have an interesting role to play in feminist theory. One of the techniques that the discipline uses to identify some of the universals of human behaviour is to try to establish whether or not such behaviour is seen in other animals. In particular, evolutionary psychology looks at our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes: the orang-utan, the gorilla and the chimpanzee. What it finds is that male violence is present in these species as well – that gorillas commit infanticide, that chimpanzee and orang-utan males coerce females into copulation – and it argues therefore that the ‘origins of human violence’ lie far back in the ape family. Male apes, in particular, have been selected for violence and aggression for a long time. But there is another species of great ape, which is not so well known – the bonobo. Bonobos are interesting, since, like the other great ape species, adolescent females out-migrate from their home group, whereas males remain in their natal band (Kano, 1992). What this means for the other great apes is that their social behaviour is based on a band of related, familiar males and semi-detached females whose strongest social bonds are with their children. In the rarely cited case of bonobos, however, while females still out-migrate, they enter new groups not on the arms of sexually excited males, but by attracting the attention of senior females, and persuading the senior females to make hoka-hoka with them (de Waal and Lanting, 1997). This is the Mongandu term for what primatologists call ‘G-G rubbing’, or ‘genito-genital rubbing’, involving two females lying next to each other and rubbing their clitorises together (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996: 209).5 In bonobos, females show strong social bonds which they express through sexuality – and male violence towards a female, should it occur, is countered by a concerted attack on the male in question from the other females. Male violence is very rare in bonobos (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). But this alternative social paradigm, presumably selected for, presumably present in the biological potential of


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Rees: Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous the ape line, is almost never referenced in accounts of the human origins of male violence.6 Recent accounts of homosexual behaviour in animals (Bagemihl, 1999) have shown the degree to which uncomfortable pieces of apparent evidence are ignored by mainstream writers. Bagemihl found that the literature on animal behaviour contained a number of examples of what seemed to be homosexual behaviour – that is, animals of the same sex apparently finding sexual pleasure in mutual contact. These examples, however, were rarely cited and largely ignored. They didn’t fit the image of heterosexual reproductive sex that is at the heart of modern evolutionary theory. Animal sexuality, Bagemihl stresses, can be extraordinarily varied in nature and should not be seen as solely directed towards genetic reproduction. But there seems to be a resistance on the part of the scientific community towards acknowledging this fact – perhaps because evolutionary explanations find it difficult to account for the ‘wasted’ reproductive energy of homosexual encounters. Whatever the explanation, the demonstration that facts can be carefully selected to fit theory, combined with the political uses of biology in the past, and the apparent ignorance of sociological (or proximate, if you prefer) explanations of human behaviour, goes some way towards explaining why social scientists and feminists are so hostile to the application of biology to the study of humanity. But we’re still biological beings. Our culture is a product of our brains, which are in turn a product of evolutionary natural selection. And the popular appreciation of evolutionary explanations of human behaviour is widening, and is probably already greater than that afforded to feminist arguments. Before we are again confronted with the conversation-stopping phrase, ‘it’s only natural, isn’t it?’, shouldn’t we start paying more attention to what evolutionary psychology has to say? Intellectual and pragmatic considerations both seem to demand this.

Notes 1. For example, in many bird species, the father takes most of the responsibility for childcare, whereas in most species of mammal, parental care is undertaken by the female. 2. Including Homo sapiens sapiens. 3. Thornhill and Palmer are not prepared to comment on whether natural selection has produced an actual adaptation for rape in man, or whether it is just a by-product of selective pressure for sexually eager males. 4. ‘Proximate’ refers to the immediate causes that produce an event or series of events, which can range from a particular complex of genes to an overindulgence in alcohol. ‘Ultimate’ explanations have to do with why such immediate causes might exist. As Thornhill and Palmer say, these explanations ‘are complements, not alternatives’ (Thornhill and Palmer, 2000: 4). 5. I should note that Wrangham and Peterson are among the few writers to discuss bonobos when talking about human evolution. 6. Ghiglieri, for example, says only that bonobos are less violent than chimpanzees.


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References Bagemihl, B. (1999) Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St Martin’s Press. Concar, D. (2000) ‘Opinion Interview’, New Scientist (19 February): 45–7. de Waal, F. and F. Lanting (1997) Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ghiglieri, M. (1999) The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence. Reading, MA: Perseus Books. Kano, T. (1992) The Last Ape: Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thornhill, R. and C. Palmer (2000) A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, E.O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wrangham, R. and D. Peterson (1996) Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. London: Bloomsbury. Amanda Rees is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York where she teaches on biology as politics. Her main research interest is the sociology of science, with particular emphasis on primatology. Address: Department of Sociology, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 4DH, UK. Email: [email protected]
