The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley

Our sex lives are very different from those of our cousins. If we were like orangutans, women would live alone and apart from one another. Men, too, would live alone but each would visit several women (or none) for occasional sex. If two men ever met, there would be an almighty, violent battle. If we were gibbons, our lives would be unrecognizable. Every couple would live miles apart and fight to the death any intrusion into their home range—which they would never leave. Despite the occasional antisocial neighbor, that is not how we live. Even people who retreat to their sacred suburban homes do not pretend to remain there forever, let alone keep out all strangers. We spend much of our lives on common territory, at work, shopping, or at play. We are gregarious and social. We are not gorillas, either. If we were, we would live in seraglios, each dominated by one giant middle-aged man, twice the weight of a woman, who would monopolize sexual access to all the women in the group and intimidate the other men. Sex would be rarer than saints’ days, even for the great man, who would have sex once a year, and would be all but nonexistent for the other males.9 If we were hairless chimpanzees, our society would still look fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial, and aggressive toward other groups than those we belong to. In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist, and belligerent, whi...

which we are. Adult males would spend more time trying to climb the political hierarchy than with their families. But when we turn to sex, things would begin to look very different. For a start, men would take no part at all in rearing the young, not even paying child support; there would be no marriage bonds at all. Most women would mate with most men, though the top male (the president, let us call him) would make sure he had droit du seigneur over the most fertile women. Sex would be an intermittent affair, indulged in to spectacular excess during the woman’s estrus but totally forgotten by her for years at a time when pregnant or rearing a young child. This estrus would be announced to everybody in sight by her pink and swollen rear end, which would prove irresistibly fascinating to every male who saw it. They would try to monopolize such females for weeks at a time, forcing them to go away on a “consortship” with them; they would not always succeed and would quickly lose interest when the swelling went down.