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 a deterrent 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. "48 When, 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, Angeclass="underline" "
" 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! "
Clare left her that night:
COURTLY LOVE
Human mating systems are greatly complicated by the fact of inherited wealth. The ability to inherit wealth or status from a par-MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN
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ent is not unique to man. There are birds that succeed to the ownership of their parents ' territories by staying to help them rear subsequent broods: Hyenas inherit their dominance rank from their mothers (in hyenas, females are dominant and often larger); so do many monkeys and apes. But human beings have raised this habit to an art. And they usually show a much greater interest in passing on wealth to sons than to daughters. This is superficially odd: A man who leaves his wealth to his daughters is likely to see that wealth left to-his certain granddaughters: A man who leaves his wealth to his sons is likely to see the wealth left to what may or may not be his grandsons. In the few matrilineal societies there is indeed such promiscuity that men are not sure of paternity, and in such societies it is uncles that play the role of father to their nephews: 49
Indeed, in more stratified societies the poor often favor their daughters over their sons. But this is not because of certainty of paternity but because poor daughters are more likely to breed than poor sons. A feudal vassal 's son had a good chance of remaining childless, while his sister was carted off to the local castle to be the fecund concubine of the resident lord. Sure enough, there is some evidence that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Bed-fordshire, peasants left more to their daughters than to their sons.'°
In eighteenth-century Ostfriesland in Germany, farmers in stagnant populations had oddly female-biased families, whereas those in growing populations had male-biased families: It is hard to avoid the conclusion that third and fourth sons were a drain on the family unless there were new business opportunities, and they were dealt with accordingly at birth, resulting in female-biased sex ratios in the stagnant populations."
But at the top of society, the opposite prejudice prevailed.
Medieval lords banished many of their daughters to nunneries."
Throughout the world rich men have always favored their sons and often just one of them. A wealthy or powerful father, by leaving his status or the means to achieve it to his sons, is leaving them the wherewithal to become successful adulterers with many bastard sons. No such advantage could accrue to wealthy daughters.
This has a curious consequence: It means that the most
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successful thing a man or a woman can do is beget a legitimate heir to a wealthy man. Logic such as this suggests that philanderers should not be indiscriminate: They should seduce the women with the best genes and also the women with the best husbands, who therefore have the potential to produce the most prolific sons: In medieval times this was raised to an art: The cuckolding of heiress-es and the wives of great lords was considered the highest form of courtly love: Jousting was little more than a way for potential philanderers to impress great ladies: As Erasmus Darwin put it: Contending boars with tusks enamel'd strike, And guard with shoulder shield the blow oblique;
While female bands attend in mute surprise, And view the victor with admiring eyes: So Knight on Knight, recorded in romance,