A species with a secret it can’t keep
Oscar Wilde said: “Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”
It’s a touchy subject, monogamy. The standard narrative is that men are born to cheat and women are born to complain about it. In other words, men are bullied into monotonous domesticity — created as they are to indiscriminately spread their seed.
The corollary is that women fervently yearn for the security of a monogamous relationship — their role being to safeguard the perpetuation of the human race.
Of course, this only makes sense if there are more women than men wandering the earth, which was the case in the olden days when bears, tigers and dinosaurs got the better of the hairier sex. “Mate and run” could have been the injunction back then.
Being socially, materially and intellectually diminished by patriarchy, women, the story goes, have had to rely on men to provide for them and their children, which has turned them into lying, manipulative gold-diggers out to trap the best man they can get. And once they have him, lordy lord, he’d better stay handcuffed to the bedpost … and not for erotic reasons.
What do men get out of this arrangement? I’ve often wondered. A hot meal and a cold beer every evening? Not a great deal, but then I’ve heard more than one man say, “I’m not really getting my money’s worth, and so it should be perfectly acceptable to look for gratification elsewhere.”
Nowadays, these notions are being chucked out the window as fast as Harvey Weinstein’s forced removal from Hollywood. The good news is that the dismal version of sexuality — men as deceitful cads and women as sullivant wardens — is being challenged.
The bad news, as Christopher Ryan puts it in his book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, is that the amoral agencies of evolution have created in us a species with a secret it just can’t keep.
“Homo sapiens evolved to be shamelessly, undeniably, inescapably sexual,” he writes.
And that is why monogamy is such hard work. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it into these highfalutin German words, “Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will” — one can choose what to do, but not what to want … and “want” is a human strong suit.
Unrequited yearnings lead to all manner of psychological pitfalls. “How has the incessant, grinding campaign of socioscientific insistence upon the naturalness of sexual monogamy … failed to rid even the priests, preachers, politicians, and professors of their prohibited desires?” asks Ryan.
But what’s the alternative? Being cool about sharing your sexual partner? Doesn’t feel right to me — despite my fervent belief in the naturalness of poly-mating.
So while monogamy leaves a lot to be desired, until there’s a better option, I’ll be whipping out the handcuffs. ● LS