The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley

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.44 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 condoned 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.”45 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.