Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

Himba women asked her repeatedly, “Brooke, why do you sleep alone all night in your tent?” When she replied that it was because she was married, they laughed or shrugged and teased her. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a lover,” they insisted. “Aren’t you lonely in your tent by yourself, Brooke?” But this belief that a “lonely” woman can and should take a lover regardless of whether she’s married didn’t emerge from thin air. Certain ecological and environmental factors create a context where the conviction that it’s normal for a married woman to have sex with a man who is not her husband can take root. “The Himba have few heritable resources,” Scelza told me, “and fathers do not invest heavily in kids.” These realities mean that men are at less risk of misdirecting energy and investment to children not their own. In addition, Himba children help out around the compound, becoming net contributors to the group at a relatively young age compared to kids in other contexts, like the industrialized West, where kids are costly and burdensome to their parents. These differences mean that Himba men are motivated to tolerate paternity uncertainty—basically because it costs them very little, and even benefits them in some ways. Kids do chores, herd, and generally offset the cost of their keep and then some. And a Himba man’s wife’s lover often drops off food for the omoka child, further lowering the “cost” to the husband.