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

The piece, as many such pieces do, refers to a study conducted at Florida State University between 1978 and 1982 that found women propositioned by handsome male strangers are less likely to say yes than are men propositioned by attractive female strangers. But as critics of this study have already pointed out, women are more likely to get murdered by strangers with whom they have sex than men are. If they aren’t killed, they are more likely to become pregnant, get an STI, not have an orgasm, and be called names and looked at askance by neighbors and even friends who find out they’ve had casual sex.

Context is everything. If women were told, “Imagine you are propositioned by this guy, and there is no way he will kill you and there is no way he’ll be a jerk and it’s guaranteed that he’ll be skilled enough to give you an orgasm and you won’t get pregnant or get an infection or disease, and your mom will never know and neither will anyone in your dorm or neighborhood. He won’t make disparaging remarks about your body or gossip afterward. He will text you after or not, and want to see you again or not, depending on what you wish he would do.” And so on. These are the kinds of conditions we would have to engineer in order to get an accurate sense of what a woman’s sex drive might be like under circumstances conducive to actually feeling entitled to have and admit to having a sex drive. Until such a test exists, we need to consider the likelihood that we are only measuring men’s willingness to admit they are sexual compared to women’s willingness to do the same.

Some studies suggest that men who find out their wives are cheating are more likely to divorce them than are wives who discover their husbands have stepped out.

The Deetzes tell us that when Mary Mendame of Duxbury, wife of Robert Mendame, was accused of having sex with an “Indian” named Tinsin in 1639, she was whipped, compelled to wear an AD on her garments, and told that if she failed to comply, she would get her face branded. (Tinsin was, like Mary, “whipped at the cart’s tail.”) Had Mary been Mark, how differently things would have gone. For in the colonies of this period of the seventeenth century, a man, even if he were married, could have relations with an unmarried woman and be accused of the lesser crime of fornication. This was punishable by either a whipping or three days in prison and a ten pound fine. But having sex with a married woman was adultery: “adultery was viewed as the breaking of the marriage bond by the fact that the woman was married. The husband was not bound by the same constraints.” Having sexual relations with another man’s wife violated not just moral beliefs but his property rights, the Deetzes explain.

As property, women like Mary Mendame were not only their husbands’ concern but wards of the entire community. Their trespass was a trespass against their husbands, God, and law and order itself. And a man trespassing with such a woman was violating more than his individual vow to goodness and to his own wife, if he had one—he was tramping all over his neighbor’s possession while demeaning a social contract. But whether he was married or not, he was somewhat freer to indulge.

In spite of a widely embraced stereotype of the gold digger taking her hapless husband to the cleaners, women tend to fare markedly worse financially than men in the breakup of a marriage. In a 2008 study, the Institute for Social and Economic Research found that 27 percent of women fall into poverty post-divorce—triple the rate of men. Much of that has to do with women having left or never having entered the workforce in order to raise kids. But even those who work before, during, or after their marriage experience a 20 percent drop in income when their marriages end, on average (the poverty rate for women who are separated is a staggering 27 percent, just under three times the rate for separated men). And effects of this drop are long-lasting and profound: across the board, women’s incomes tend never to reach pre-split levels post-divorce. One report found that divorced women had assets valued at 90 percent less than their married peers.

Such concerns can reinforce what comes to look more like compulsory monogamy than a choice to remain sexually exclusive.

In the parlance of anthropology, Sarah, like most of us in the United States, lives in a state of ecological release. Nonetheless, she faced tremendous constraint—both internal and external—when it came to her sexual autonomy.

She had, albeit largely unconsciously, run a kind of mental calculus about upsides and downsides—anthropologists call these “life-history trade-offs”—and decided that, no, she wouldn’t.

Though we live in a state of ecological release, engineering a state of ideological release—freedom from censure, judgment, and self-judgment—is more complicated, particularly for women living in a culture brimming with double standards about female and male sexuality and misinformation about the hearts and libidos of women.

“A stranger who can desire anyone at all and desires you—that means something.”

Elaine is typical of affairs of the era and of her milieu. Married and in her mid-twenties, she met a man she felt an instant attraction to, Irwin, at a party at her uncle’s house. Not long after, they had sex in Irwin’s car (“I went down on him, in the car! I said to myself, If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it the whole way!”). Irwin told Elaine that he would never leave his wife, but Elaine had an agenda of her own, and after a meet-up or two in the city, she implemented a scheme: “I got more friendly with his wife, so that the four of us were together constantly.… There were times when Irwin and I were in New York and we’d fall asleep in a hotel, and we’d both be late coming home, and the four of us [all] had [a date] that night, and [my] husband and [his] wife never put it together.” Elaine would go shopping with Irwin’s wife and then see him at night and say, “Ugh, what your wife bought!”

Elaine and Nancy and Co. found their basherts by design. The bridging or “mate-switching” strategy is one women can use when ecological and environmental conditions are right: when they have kin or peer support to buffer them from blowback—think of Elaine’s dad slipping her cash or her girlfriend helping her move out. Or when the ideology in place and the division of labor dictates that dependent women should segue from one man to another or, in Druckerman’s apt formulation, from the protection of their fathers to the protection of a series of husbands and lovers. Or when a powerful figurehead—at the time, President John F. Kennedy—is doing it and so is everybody else.

Elaine’s, Nancy’s, and Loretta’s adult kids from their first marriages, on the other hand, are appalled by their mothers’ pasts; the women complained that in some cases their children wouldn’t even speak to them. The generational divide—about how mothers should behave and about the acceptability of affairs—is in this case an unbridgeable gulf.

Elaine and Nancy and Barb and Loretta, and their friends Yvonne and Linda and Alice, lived in a different sexual culture than Sarah does. They also said “I do” when young and relatively inexperienced, and proceeded to have interesting sex lives after. Today, we’ve reversed things: we have sexual experiences and then “settle down.”

Annika’s story brings home the way many circumstances of women’s lives that seem unrelated to their sexuality—childcare options, labor-force participation, family and peer networks—can actually determine the most intimate choices they make.

Annika was warm, open, and engaging, with chicly messy blonde hair and an infectious sense of humor. She was Scandinavian and had moved to a wealthy suburb of Chicago with her family as a teen. The transition was jarring. “I was used to a high level of independence and maturity. At home, my friends and I could go out to lunch on our school lunch hour and have a beer,” she said. “But in the US, I had to bring a note from my mother if I was late for school because I was stuck in traffic. It was so infantilizing and confusing!”

Sexual standards were just as bewildering. Back at home, Sex Ed “was practically demonstrated.” She laughed. A lot of information was imparted, in great detail, beginning before adolescence. What Annika didn’t learn at school, she heard from her mother, who spoke to her honestly about sex.

“Where I’m from, you see [women’s breasts] in ads, on billboards. There’s not the same shameful feeling there is here. Where I’m from, prostitution is legal, for God’s sake, and that was always my baseline.”

“At home, kids my age decided to have sex and sometimes girls even had sleepovers at home with their boyfriends. Our parents knew and let it happen. But here—it was very secretive. Lots of kids were doing it, but girls especially weren’t talking about it. It was a very gossipy environment. There were scary rumors about two girls at school having abortions. Well, what do you expect? Nobody talked about birth control! People went to parties and got really drunk and had sex there. It was a big change to wrap my mind around.”

Sex, specifically Dan wanting it less than Annika did, was also an issue. “It made me feel…rejected and undesirable. He said it was because he had low testosterone or because he was tired. For a while I was just occasionally having sex with guys I met through work or at a party. I would not have been sleeping with other guys if our sex life had been great, honestly. I felt like I deserved to have a sex life.”

Like Alicia Walker’s interview subjects, Annika used undisclosed extra-pair sex as a “workaround” strategy in order to stay in a sexless relationship.

Like Sarah and Druckerman’s ladies in Florida, Annika was living what Marta Meana calls “erotic self-focus.” When others saw her as sexy and hot, she did too. Wanting to be wanted, and withering when she was unwanted (or, in the case of Meana’s study participants, wanted) by one man in perpetuity drove Annika and may drive us in ways we might not want to admit but cannot deny.

“In my country there’s really good daycare and all kinds of support for women after they have the baby. Here, in comparison, there’s nothing.”

In a perfectly instructive example of how women are abetted and constrained by their ecological and environmental circumstances, the assertive and confident Annika was hobbled nearly beyond recognition by her adopted country’s lack of support for families with young children and new mothers in particular, and by patrilocal patterns of residence that had her far from her parents and other kin support. Annika’s girlfriends played a vital role in filling the gaps, but they had stresses and challenges of their own, with most of them as isolated and financially dependent on their husbands as Annika was on hers.

Meanwhile, her sex life with Dan had ceased entirely. He told her the travel left him exhausted. “Once in early April I said I wanted to have sex for my birthday, which is in mid-April, because we hadn’t had sex once since Christmas!”

When their youngest started kindergarten, Annika’s life was upended. Dan had a long-time girlfriend, he confessed, and he had moved them out to the suburbs in order to have more time with her. Most of the time he had been “traveling for work,” he had actually been with his girlfriend.

The momentous change in female fortune was put into motion approximately ten to twelve thousand years ago, in the Jordan Valley of the Fertile Crescent in what is today the Middle East. There, a shift in human activity was under way. Hunter-gatherers began to domesticate plants, increasingly depending on food they grew rather than food they foraged for subsistence.

No longer needing to range far and wide for sustenance, we built permanent villages, establishing larger, denser communities than ever before in order to be close to the crops and those who harvested them, and complexifying our endeavors beyond “merely” foraging for survival.

People lived as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before they began to plant crops and domesticate animals. Once this happened, however, the transition to modern civilization was rapid and fundamental.

Archaeological evidence and human remains suggest that the shift from foraging to farming was anything but a straightforward improvement for our ancestors on measures like lifestyle and health. Indeed, the popular anthropologist and author Jared Diamond, pulling no punches, has called the shift to agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered” and “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Our new diet—carbohydrate intensive, iron deficient—led to reduced growth and development. It didn’t help that soil depletion and soil exhaustion eventually created crops low in nutrients. Meanwhile, neighboring farmers competed for resources, including water and farmland. Such competition and food storage birthed the concept of property; this in turn led to conflict over who controlled it. Living in close proximity to other humans, farm animals, and human and animal waste exposed our Holocene ancestors to new diseases—TB, syphilis, and nonspecific bone infections, to name a few—and polluted their water sources. Heavy dependence on a diet of grains changed facial morphology—smaller jaws meant malocclusions of teeth and infections that created serious health threats.

Three linked beliefs—that a woman is a man’s property; that a woman’s place is in the home; and that women especially ought to be more “naturally” monogamous—are seeds that were planted in our early harvests. Stranger still, a woman’s most personal decisions were transformed into a matter of public concern and her sexual autonomy subjected to social control and legislation, owing to the ox and the horse.

Farming made women more sedentary and easier to control than your average ranging, roaming female forager, who was likely to spend a good part of several days per week far from her husband or partner. In a more subtle but no less effective shift from female autonomy, being less active on the farm increased a woman’s fat stores and jacked up her fertility, which in turn shortened interbirth intervals. This meant having more children more quickly and even more dependence on men for subsistence for oneself and one’s now more numerous dependent offspring.

There is growing consensus among anthropologists that we evolved not as monogamous dyads but as cooperative breeders. In this way of life, loose bands of men and women raised young collectively, and very likely mated with multiple partners as well. Such an arrangement conferred many benefits. Multiple mating established and continually reinforced social bonds, so there were low levels of conflict. Enhanced cooperation meant all were more likely to look after one another and their young, thus improving each individual’s reproductive fitness (the odds that their offspring would go on to produce offspring). There’s ample supporting evidence of this theory among present-day hunter-gatherers and foragers, many of whom raise their young cooperatively and whose mating patterns are less strictly monogamous than our own, as well as in historical documents about aboriginal peoples everywhere from North America to the South Pacific.

Such living practices continued among indigenous people in many contexts worldwide, giving women a measure of social and sexual autonomy that both bewildered and scandalized European settlers who stumbled upon them.

Fascinated by the iron objects the Europeans brought with them, and accustomed to forging social bonds with sex, Tahitian women indulged with the sailors so frequently that soon Wallis’s entire crew was sleeping on the boat’s deck at night: they had traded all the nails from which to hang their hammocks for sexual favors.

James Cook was scandalized by the sight of Tahitians going at it in broad daylight, with neither the sense of decorum nor concerns about privacy he himself felt. The older Tahitian women apparently called out good-humored and salty instructions to a young girl who was having sex with a young man in full view of Cook’s crew and an assembly of Tahitians; Cook noted, with considerable shock, that she hardly seemed to need their advice.

There are also assemblies of all the girls in a town at a sick woman’s couch, either at her request according to…[a vision] or dream she may have had, or by order of the Oki [shaman] for her health and recovery. When the girls are thus assembled they are all asked, one after another, which of the young men of the town they would like to sleep with them the next night. Each names one, and these are immediately notified by the masters of the ceremony and all come in the evening to sleep with those who have chosen them, in the presence of the sick woman, from one end of the lodge to the other, and they pass the whole night thus, while the two chiefs at the two ends of the house sing and rattle their tortoise-shells from evening till the following morning, when the ceremony is concluded.

The Huron considered premarital sexual relations to be perfectly normal and engaged in them soon after puberty…Girls were as active as men in initiating these liasons [sic]…Young men were required to recognize the right of a girl to decide which of her lovers she preferred at any one time. Sometimes, a young man and woman developed a longstanding, but informal, sexual relationship. This did not prevent either partner from having sexual relations with other friends.

In stark contrast, in cultures more intensely agrarian than the Wyandot and their aboriginal predecessors, a woman was likely to leave the support system of her own family to live with an unrelated man—her husband—and his kin. And live in a situation of more or less privacy with him and his kin network. Today, nearly 70 percent of agricultural and post-agricultural societies are patrilocal.

Some writings in the bible promoted the idea of a woman leaving her father and mother to be with her husband. This is in line with the patriarchal views of the writers.

Isolated from their families of origin and invested alloparents, with higher fertility rates and more dependent children than their non-farming ancestors, women had every reason to conform to these beliefs and to yield to implicit and explicit rules about female propriety. And in contexts where couples broke from larger groups to live on their own, yet another layer of protection was stripped away, rendering women more dependent than ever on the goodwill and support of their male partners.

Privacy cloaked male actions, freeing men of supervision and releasing them from direct accountability to a greater social unit.

Part of farming’s legacy is that, among other things, it “gendered” us in fundamental, comprehensive, and long-lasting ways.

In hoe agriculture worldwide, women weed, till, and aerate the soil—all crucial steps to ensuring a successful crop. And because the hoe can easily be picked up and put down, these women could keep an eye on kids who were outside pitching in at the same time. Working in concert with men and performing the essential work of primary production gave women clout and a meaningful say in personal, family, social, and political matters.

Economists and sociologists tell us that the agriculture practices that prevailed in a given area had a long tail. In some parts of Southeast Asia where women played such a vital part in the agricultural economy, they also retained the advantages of matrilineal inheritance and matrilocal living, or “female philopatry”—another way of saying they stayed with their families of origin in the place where they were born. It also meant men basically had to “audition” their way into a marriage and then live surrounded by a wife’s kin, so that checks against power imbalances and male control of and violence toward women were built into the society at the most basic level.

In contrast, where there was irrigated agriculture with male philopatry—that is, where men stayed with their families of origin and women moved to them—women did not fare so well.

But nowhere, it seems, are conditions more dire for women than where plough agriculture prevails. Or prevailed. Wherever there was plough use for intensive agriculture, the fate of women took a turn for the disempowered, even abject. They became uniquely dependent, their autonomy comprehensively undermined, circumscribed, and in many cases even extinguished by a rudimentary piece of equipment and the host of social changes it ushered in.

In addition to requiring upper body strength, ploughing activity, which also introduced the unpredictability and relative danger of large animals, was incompatible with childcare. These two aspects of plough farming led to a new and rigidly gendered division of labor: men outside doing the farming; women specializing in secondary production, including childcare and food preparation inside the home. This distinction—outdoor/primary production versus indoor/domestic/secondary production—in turn gave rise to beliefs about the “natural role of women,” including that they should be “inside the home,” that mothers were “just naturally” primary parents, and that a woman’s labor was less vital to subsistence and income than a man’s.

In newly stratified settings where women were no longer primary producers, their fortunes were literally reversed. Now, instead of paying bride wealth—an amount exchanged for the privilege of marrying someone’s daughter—men could demand dowries, and parents were obliged to pay others to take their daughters away and make them their wives.

A preoccupation with virginity also arose with use of the plough and the gendered division of labor that put women below men. Anthropologist Shere Ortner has observed that female chastity literally has a monetary value in some highly stratified societies where a low-ranking family’s only strategy to move up may be a daughter’s marriage into a higher-ranking family. And so “enforcement of virginity…becomes a family affair guarded violently by men and mythopoetically by women,”