Sex at Dawn полностью

Among the Warao, a group living in the forests of Brazil, ordinary relations are suspended periodically and replaced by ritual relations, known as mamuse. During these festivities, adults are free to have sex with whomever they like. These relationships are honorable and believed to have a positive effect upon any children that might result.

In his fascinating profile of the Piraha and a scientist who studies them, journalist John Colapinto reports that “though [they] do not allow marriage outside their tribe, they have long kept their gene pool refreshed by permitting their women to sleep with outsiders.”¹²

Among the Siriono, it’s common for brothers to marry sisters, forming an altogether different sort of Brady Bunch. The marriage itself takes place without any sort of ceremony or ritual: no exchanges of property or vows, not even a feast. Just rehang your hammocks next to the women’s and you’re married, boys.

This casual approach to what anthropologists call “marriage” is anything but unusual. Early explorers, whalers, and fur trappers of the frigid north found the Inuit to be jaw-droppingly hospitable hosts. Imagine their confused gratitude when they realized the village headman was offering his own bed (wife included) to the weary, freezing traveler. In fact, the welcome Knud Ramusen and others had stumbled into was a system of spouse exchange central to Inuit culture, with clear advantages in that unforgiving climate. Erotic exchange played an important role in linking families from distant villages in a durable web of certain aid in times of crisis. Though the harsh ecology of the Arctic dictated a much lower population density than the Amazon or even the Kalahari Desert, extra-pair sexual interaction helped cement bonds that offered the same insurance against unforeseen difficulties.

None of this behavior is considered adultery by the people

involved. But then, adultery is as slippery a term as marriage.

It’s not just thy neighbor’s wife who can lead a man astray,

but thine own as well. A well-known moral guide of the

Middle Ages, the Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine),

written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves

his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone

else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.”

The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love

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his wife with his judgment, not his affections.” Vincent of Beauvais would have enjoyed the company of Daniel Defoe (of London), famous still as the author of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe scandalized Britain in 1727 with the publication of a nonfiction essay with the catchy title Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom. Apparently that title was a bit much. For a later edition, he toned it down to A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. This was no desert island adventure but a moralizing lecture on the physical and spiritual dangers of enjoying sex with one’s spouse.

Defoe would have appreciated the Nayar people, native to southern India, who have a type of marriage that doesn’t necessarily include any sexual activity at all, has no expectation of permanence, and no cohabitation—indeed the bride may never see the groom again once the marriage ritual has been performed. But since divorce is not permitted in this system, the stability of these marriages must be exemplary, according to the anthropological surveys.

As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universal: sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage.

Now consider the confusion created by the words mate and mating. A mate sometimes refers to a sexual partner in a given copulation; other times, it refers to a partner in a recognized marriage, with whom children are raised and all sorts of behavioral and economic patterns are established. To mate with someone could mean to join together “till death do us part,” or it could refer to nothing more than a quickie with “Julio down by the schoolyard.” When evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women have different innate cognitive or emotional “modules,” which determine their reactions to a mate’s infidelity, we suppose that this refers to a mate in a long-term relationship.