Sex at Dawn полностью

Meanwhile, within a few blocks of the London classrooms where he lectured, untold numbers of infants whose existence threatened to expose the colossal error at the heart of Malinowski’s “unquestioningly correct principle” were being sacrificed, quite literally, in foundling hospitals. The situation was no less horrific in the United States. In 1915, a doctor named Henry Chapin visited ten foundling hospitals and found that in nine of them, every child died before the age of two. Every child.¹³ This dark fate awaited inconvenient children born throughout Europe. In her memoir of middle-class life in early twentieth-century Germany, for instance, Doris Drucker describes the village “Angel-maker,” who received babies from unwed mothers and “starved the little children in her care to death,” while the unwed, now childless mother was hired out as a wet nurse to upper-class families.¹⁴ How efficient.

Horrifying as it is to contemplate, widespread infanticide was not limited to Malinowski’s day. For centuries, millions of European children had been passed through discreet revolving boxes set into the walls of foundling hospitals. These boxes were designed to protect the anonymity of the person leaving the child, but they offered scant protection to the infant. The survival rate in those institutions was little better than if the revolving boxes had opened directly into a crematorium’s furnace. Far from being places of healing, these were government- and church-approved slaughterhouses where children whose existence might have raised inconvenient questions about the “naturalness” of the nuclear family were disposed of in a form of industrialized infanticide.¹⁵

In his book Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, historian Robert S. McElvaine gets off a few “capital howlers” of his own, writing, “the general trend in human evolution is undeniably toward pair bonding and lasting families. Pair bonding (albeit often with some backsliding, especially by men) and the family are,” he insists, “the exceptions notwithstanding, among the traits that characterize the human species [emphasis added].”¹⁶

Sure, forget all the backsliding and the many exceptions, and you’ve got a real strong case!

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Malinowski’s position remains deeply embedded in both scientific and popular assumptions about family structure. In fact, the whole architecture of what qualifies as family in Western society is based on Malinowski’s insistence that each child everywhere has always had just one father.

But if Malinowski’s position has won the day, why is poor Morgan’s intellectual body still being regularly disinterred for further insult? Anthropologist Laura Betzig opens a paper on conjugal dissolution (failed marriage) by noting that Morgan’s “fantasy [of group marriage] . expired on encountering the evidence, and a century after Morgan . the consensus is that [monogamous] marriage comes as close to being a human universal as anything about human behavior can.”¹⁷ Ouch. But in truth, Morgan’s understanding of family structure was no “fantasy.” His conclusions were based upon decades of extensive field research and study. Later, a bit less wind in her sails, Betzig admits that “there is still, however, no consensus as to why” marriage is so widespread.

That’s a mystery all right. We’ll see that anthropologists find marriage wherever they look mainly because they haven’t quite decided what it looks like.

*

Where nonparents act in a parental role.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Making a Mess of Marriage, Mating, and Monogamy

Marriage is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid Happiness.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

When Albert Einstein proclaimed that E=mc , no physicists asked each other, “What’s he mean by E?” In the hard sciences, the important stuff comes packaged in numbers and predefined symbols. Imprecise wording rarely causes confusion. But in more interpretive sciences such as anthropology, psychology, and evolutionary theory, misinterpretation and misunderstanding are common.

Take the words love and lust, for example. Love and lust are as different from each other as red wine and blue cheese, but because they can also complement one another splendidly, they get conflated with amazing, dumbfounding regularity.

In the literature of evolutionary psychology, in popular culture, in the tastefully appointed offices of marriage