Historians have long considered the abduction of Helen to Troy to be no more than a pretext for territorial confrontation between the Greeks and the Trojans: But can we be so confidently condescending? Perhaps the Yanomamo really do go to war over women, as they say they do. Perhaps Agamemnon 's Greeks did, too, as Homer said they did. The Iliad opens with and is dominated by a quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, the cause of which is Agamemnon's insistence on confiscating a concubine, Briseis, from Achilles in compensation for having to give back his own concubine, Chry-seis, to her priest-father who has enlisted Apollo's aid against the Greeks: This dissension in the ranks, caused by a dispute over a woman, nearly loses the Greeks the whole war, which in turn has been caused by a dispute over a woman:
In preagricultural societies, violence may well have been a route to sexual success, especially in times of turmoiclass="underline" In many different cultures the captives taken in war have tended to be women rather than men. But echoes reach into modern times. Armies have often been motivated as much by the opportunities that victory would present for rape as they have been by patriotism or fear.
Generals, recognizing this, turned blind eyes to the excesses of their troops and were sure to provide camp followers: Even in this century, access to prostitutes has been a more or less recognized purpose of shore leave in navies: And rape accompanies war still. In Bangladesh, during a nine-month occupation by west Pakistani troops in 1971, up to 400,000 women may have been raped by soldiers." In Bosnia in 1992, the reports of organized rape camps for Serbian soldiers became too frequent to ignore. Don Brown, an anthropologist in Santa Barbara, recalls his days in the army: "Men talked about sex night and day; they never talked about power.'
::: 206:::
The Red Queen
MONOGAMOUS DEMOCRATS
The nature of the human male, then, is to take opportunities, if they are granted him, for polygamous mating and to use wealth, power, and violence as means to sexual ends in the competition with other men—though usually not at the expense of sacrificing a secure monogamous relationship: It is not an especially flattering picture, and it depicts a nature that is very much at odds with modern ethical preferences—for monogamy, fidelity, equality, justice, and freedom from violence: But my task is description, not prescription: And there is nothing inevitable about human nature: In The African Queen, Katharine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart,
" Nature, Mr Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above: "
Besides, the long interlude of human polygamy, which began in Babylon nearly four thousand years ago, has largely come to an end in the West: Official concubines became unofficial mistresses, and mistresses became secrets kept from wives: In 1988, political power, far from being a ticket to polygamy, was jeopar-dized by any suggestion of infidelity: Whereas the Chinese emperor Fei-ti once kept ten thousand women in his harem, Gary Hart, running for the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth, could not even get away with two.
What happened? Christianity? Hardly: It coexisted with polygamy for centuries, and its strictures were as cynically self-interested as any layman's: Women's rights? They came too late. A Victorian woman had as much and as little say in her husband 's affairs as a medieval one: No historian can yet explain what changed, but guesses include the idea that kings came to need internal allies enough that they had to surrender despotic power.
Democracy, of a sort, was born. Once monogamous men had a chance to vote against polygamists (and who does not want to tear down a competitor, however much he might also like to emulate him?), their fate was sealed.
Despotic power, which came with civilization, has faded again: It looks increasingly like an aberration in the history of POLYGAMY AND THE NATURE OF MEN
::: 207 :::
humanity. Before "civilization" and since democracy, men have been unable to accumulate the sort of power that enabled the most successful of them to be promiscuous despots. The best they could hope for in the Pleistocene period was one or two faithful wives and a few affairs if their hunting or political skills were especially great: The best they can hope for now is a good-looking younger mistress and a devoted wife who is traded in every decade or so.
We're back to square one.
This chapter has kept its focus resolutely on the male. In doing so it may seem to have trampled on the rights of women by ignoring them and their wishes: But then so did men for many generations after the invention of agriculture. Before agriculture and since democracy, such chauvinism was impossible; the mating system of humans, like that of other animals, was a compromise between the strategies of males and females. And it is a curious truth that the monogamous marriage bond survived right through despotic Babylon, lascivious Greece, promiscuous Rome, and adulterous Christendom to emerge as the core of the family in the industrial age. Even in the most despotic and polygamous moment of human history, mankind was faithful to the institution of monogamous marriage, quite unlike any other polygamous animal.
Even despots usually had one queen and many concubines. Explaining the human fascination with monogamous marriage requires us to understand the female strategy as closely as we have understood the male one. When we do, an extraordinary insight into human nature will emerge. That is what the next chapter is about: Chapter 7
MONOGAMY AND THE
NATURE OF WOMEN
SHEPHERD: Echo, I ween, will in the wood reply, And quaintly answer questions: shall I try?
ECHO: Try:
What must we do our passion to express?
Press:
How shall I please her who never loved before?
Be Fore:
What most moves women when we them address?
A dress:
Say, what can keep her chaste whom I adore?
A door.
If music softens rocks, love tunes my lyre: Liar.
Then teach me, Echo, how shall I come by her?
Buy her.
—Jonathan Swift, À Gentle Echo on Woman "
In an astonishing study recently undertaken in Western Europe, the following facts emerged: Married females choose to have affairs with males who are dominant, older, more physically attractive, more symmetrical in appearance, and married; females are much more likely to have an affair if their mates are subordinate, younger, physically unattractive, or have asymmetrical features; cosmetic surgery to improve a male 's looks doubles his chances of having an adulterous affair; the more attractive a male, the less attentive he is as a father; roughly one in three of the babies born in Western Europe is the product of an adulterous affair: If you find these facts disturbing or hard to believe, do not worry: The study was not done on human beings but on swallows, the innocent, twittering, fork-tailed birds that pirouette prettily around barns and fields in the summer months. Human beings are entirely different from swallows: Or are they?'
THE MARRIAGE OBSESSION
The harems of ancient despots revealed that men are capable of making the most of opportunities to turn rank into reproductive success, but they cannot have been typical of the human condition for most of its history. About the only way to be a harem-guarding potentate nowadays is to start a cult and brainwash potential concubines about your holiness. In many ways modern people probably live in social systems that are much closer to those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors than they are to the conditions of early history.