*
Most famously in Nora Ephron’s film Heartburn.
CHAPTER TEN
Jealousy: A Beginner’s
Guide to Coveting Thy Neighbor’s Spouse
[Once] marriage ... becomes common, jealousy will lead to the inculcation of female virtue; and this, being honoured, will tend to spread to the unmarried females. How slowly it spreads to the male sex, we see at the present day.
CHARLES DARWIN1
In a traditional Canela marriage ceremony, the bride and groom lie down on a mat, arms under each other’s heads, legs entwined. The brother of each partner’s mother then comes forward. He admonishes the bride and her new husband to stay together until the last child is grown, specifically reminding them not be jealous of each other’s lovers.
SARAH BLAFFER HRDY2
A printer’s error in 1631 resulted in Bibles that proclaimed, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Though not a biblical injunction, a common thread running through many of our examples of S.E.Ex. (Socio-Erotic Exchanges, if you’ve forgotten) is the explicit prohibition against relations with one’s habitual partner(s), sometimes even under threat of death. Why would that be?
Since these rituals have developed in unrelated cultures throughout the world, they probably serve important functions. Internal conflict represented an existential threat to profoundly interdependent groups like those in which our ancestors lived for thousands of generations. Ritualized, socially sanctioned, sometimes even obligatory S.E.Ex. reduced disruptions caused by jealousy and possessiveness while blurring paternity. It’s not surprising that small-scale societies highly dependent upon trust between individuals, generosity, and cooperation evolve and promote ways of enhancing these qualities while discouraging behavior and beliefs that would threaten group harmony and survival for group members.
It bears repeating that we are not attributing any particular nobility or, for that matter, ignobility to foragers. Some behaviors that seem normal to contemporary people (and which are therefore readily assumed to be universal) would quickly destroy many small-scale foraging societies, rendering them dysfunctional. Unrestrained self-interest, in particular, whether expressed as food-hoarding or excessive sexual possessiveness, is a direct threat to group cohesion and is therefore considered shameful and ridiculous.
Photo: Christopher White,
www.christopherwhitephotography.com
Is there any doubt that societies can reshape such impulses?
Right now, girls’ necks are being elongated ring by brass ring in parts of Thailand and Burma to make them more appealing to men. Clitorises are being cut away and labia sewn together in villages all over North Africa to dampen female desire, while in glamorous California, reduction labioplasty and other cosmetic vaginal surgeries have recently become a booming business. Elsewhere, the penises of boys are being circumcised or split open in ritualistic subincision. You get the point.
A few Native American tribes of the upper plains had an agreed-upon sense of beauty that led them to strap small planks of wood to their infants’ still-pliable foreheads.4 As the child grew, the straps would be tightened, as an orthodontist realigns a bite, bit by bit. It’s unclear how much brain damage, if any, resulted from this practice, but the otherworldly conical heads that resulted scared the bejesus out of neighboring tribes and white fur trappers in the area.
| Field sketch by Paul Kane5 |
And that may well have been the point, if you will. If their otherworldly appearance gave them a protective advantage by scaring potential enemies, it’s not hard to see how such a fashion statement could have evolved. From savoring saliva beer or cow blood milkshakes to wearing socks with sandals, there is little doubt that people are willing to think, feel, wear, do, and believe pretty much anything if their society assures them it’s normal.
Social forces that convince people to stretch their necks beyond the breaking point, schmush the heads of their infants, or sell their daughters into sacred prostitution are quite capable of reshaping or neutralizing sexual jealousy by rendering it silly and ridiculous. By rendering it abnormal.
The evolutionary explanation for male sexual jealousy, as we’ve seen, pivots on the genetic calculus underlying paternity certainty. But if it’s a question of genes, a man should be far less concerned about his wife having sex with his brothers—who share half his genes—than with unrelated males. Gentlemen, would you be far less upset to find your wife in bed with your brother than with total a stranger? Ladies, would you prefer your husband have an affair with your sister? Didn’t think so.6
We mentioned David Buss in our discussion of mixed mating strategies earlier, but most of his work concerns the study of jealousy. Buss doesn’t buy the notion of sharing food or mates, conceptualizing both in terms of scarcity: “If there is not enough food to feed all members of a group,” he writes, “then some survive while others perish.” Similarly, “If two women desire the same man ... one woman’s success in attracting him is the other woman’s loss.” Buss has little doubt that evolution is “a zero-sum game, with the victors winning at the expense of the losers.”
Far too often, the debate over the nature of human sexuality seems like a proxy war between antagonistic politico-economic philosophies. Defenders of the standard narrative see Cain’s gain as Abel’s loss, period. “That’s just how life is, kid,” they’ll tell you. “It’s human nature. Self-interest makes the world go round, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s a dog-eat-dog world and always has been.”
This free-market vision of human mating hinges on the assumption that sexual monogamy is intrinsic to human nature. Absent monogamy (individual male “ownership” of female reproductive capacity), the I-win-you-lose dynamic collapses. As we outlined above, Buss and his colleagues get around the many glaring flaws in the theory (our extravagant sexual capacity, ubiquitous adultery in all cultures, rampant promiscuity in both our closest primate relatives, the absence of any monogamous primate living in large social groups) with pretzel logic and special pleading about Homo sapiens’ internally conflicted, self-defeating “mixed mating strategies.” Twist and stretch.
Buss and his colleagues have conducted scores of cross-cultural studies designed to confirm that men and women experience jealousy differently from each other, in consistent gender-specific ways. These researchers claim to have confirmed two important assumptions underlying the standard narrative: that men are universally worried about paternity certainty (hence, his mate’s sexual fidelity is his main concern), while women are universally concerned with access to men’s resources (so a woman will feel more threatened by any emotional intimacy that might inspire him to leave her for another woman). These gender-specific manifestations of sexual jealousy would appear to strongly support the standard narrative.