Sex at Dawn полностью

We can agree that birds sing and bees dance only as long as we remember that their singing and dancing has almost nothing in common with ours—from motivation to execution. We use identical words to signify very different behaviors. It’s the same with marriage.

People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to long-term pair bond rather than marriage is no better. As Donald Symons put it, “The lexicon of the English language is woefully inadequate to reflect accurately the texture of human experience.. To shrink the present vocabulary to one phrase—pair-bond—and to imagine that in so doing one is being scientific ... is simply to delude oneself.”⁹

Even if we overlook the ubiquitous linguistic confusion, people who consider themselves to be married can have strikingly different notions of what their marriage involves. The Ache of Paraguay say that a man and woman sleeping in the same hut are married. But if one of them takes his or her hammock to another hut, they’re not married anymore. That’s it. The original no-fault divorce.

Among the !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) of Botswana, most girls marry several times before they settle into a long-term relationship. For the Curripaco of Brazil, marriage is a gradual, undefined process. One scientist who lived with them explains, “When a woman comes to hang her hammock next to her man and cook for him, then some younger Curripaco say they are married (kainukana). But older informants disagree; they say they are married only when they have demonstrated that they can support and sustain each other. Having a baby, and going through the fast together, cements a marriage.”¹⁰

In contemporary Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there is a form of marriage known as Nikah Misyar (normally translated as “traveler’s marriage”). According to a recent article in Reuters:

Misyar appeals to men of reduced means, as well as men looking for a flexible arrangement—the husband can walk away from a misyar and can marry other women without informing his first wife. Wealthy Muslims sometimes contract misyar when on holiday to allow them to have sexual relations without breaching the tenets of their faith. Suhaila Zein al-Abideen, of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Medina, said almost 80 percent of misyar marriages end in divorce. “A woman loses all her rights. Even how often she sees her husband is decided by his moods,” she said.¹¹

In the Shia Muslim tradition, there is a similar institution called Nikah Mut’ah (“marriage for pleasure”), in which the relationship is entered into with a preordained termination point, like a car rental. These marriages can last anywhere from a few minutes to several years. A man can have any number of temporary wives at the same time (in addition to his “permanent wife”). Often used as a religious loophole in which prostitution or casual sex can fall within the bounds of religious requirements, there is no paperwork or ceremony required. Is this, too, marriage?

Apart from expectations of permanence or social recognition, what about virginity and sexual fidelity? Are they universal and integral parts of marriage, as parental investment theory would predict? No. For many societies, virginity is so unimportant there isn’t even a word for the concept in their language. Among the Canela, explain Crocker and Crocker, “Virginity loss is only the first step into full marriage for a woman.” There are several other steps needed before the Canela society considers a couple to by truly married, including the young woman’s gaining social acceptance through her service in a “festival men’s society.” This premarital “service” includes sequential sex with fifteen to twenty men. If the bride-to-be does well, she’ll earn payments of meat from the men, which will be paid directly to her future mother-in-law on a festival day.

Cacilda Jetha (coauthor of this book) conducted a World Health Organization study of sexual behavior among villagers in rural Mozambique in 1990. She found that the 140 men in her study group were involved with 87 women as wives, 252 other women as long-term sexual partners, and 226 additional women on an occasional basis, working out to an average of four ongoing sexual relationships per man, not counting the unreported casual encounters many of these men likely experienced as well.