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

Initially in the Middle East and then worldwide in plough contexts, heavy jewelry, restrictive, elaborately decorative clothing, and long fingernails all communicated that a women did not work—it would be impossible to—and by extension, that her husband was wealthy and successful.

Separation of the sexes, a widespread practice in the Middle East by 2000 BC, kept women out of public view and allowed high-ranking men to demonstrate to the world that they were so rich their wives and daughters not only didn’t have to work; they didn’t even need to leave the house. This, like their ornamentation, was an explicit demonstration of their surplus value and shored up the idea that they were property rather than people or producers, costly objects to maintain by men wealthy and powerful enough to do so. Conveniently and not coincidentally, literal containment and separation from men—as in a zenana, or “women’s quarters,” of a household, inner areas where no men were allowed—was also a way to ensure women could not stray sexually. Beware, everything from laws, moral beliefs, and literature now suggested to men, “lest the seeds of others be sown on your soil.”

if women were wayward, progeniture might be muddled in ways that mattered as never before: fathers might bequeath wealth, land, and power itself to sons not their own. Female monogamy—coerced, enforced, mythologized, celebrated, institutionalized, legislated—became the bedrock without which this new version of society, in which resources were passed down from patriarch to patriarch, would crumble.

Baal was a god of the earth and of fertility, likely based at least in part on earlier fertility goddesses. And in Jezebel’s native Phoenicia, royal women were commonly high priestesses with active roles in temple and palace relations. Jezebel represented not just the old ways but a pre-plough version of ultimate female power. Jezebel was also, by many accounts, a cosmopolitan and pragmatic polytheist, like many Phoenicians of her time and economic class, and believed that religious tolerance was important and efficacious.

As the story is written and rewritten in the age of the plough, there are repeated metaphors of adultery and out-of-control female desire to describe the worship of any other than the One God, who was represented as the rightful Husband of a wayward Bride Israel. When she “cheats” with other gods, she is denounced for adultery.

Judea is “infatuated by profligates with penises as big as those of donkeys, ejaculating as violently as stallions.”

Her story dramatizes how, once anxieties about inheritance and paternity took hold in plough-centric contexts, authoritarian versions of possessive husbands were deified, and deities began to draw their conceptual power from what husbands felt compelled and emboldened by a newish world order to be. Female autonomy became ever more linked to cultural disorder and ever more perilous for its individual practitioners.

Just as meddling with the distribution of grain could lead to famine, a woman’s adultery could result in illegitimate children, the thinking went, and only legitimate children were allowed to become Athenian citizens. Thus it was an offense with social consequences for married female citizens and men other than their husbands to have sex. This meant the transgression had to be “aired” in public, at once atoned for and displayed to the adulterers and the world at large as a matter of concern to all, and the site of rightful intervention.

Where there is or has been plough agriculture, the effects are deep and wide-ranging: these societies have markedly lower levels of female participation in politics and the labor force, and they rank high on the embrace of markedly gender-biased attitudes. Perhaps most remarkably, the researchers discovered that even generations later and thousands of miles away, in utterly changed ecologies and regardless of religion, income, and intervening progress—medical improvements, economic development, technological change, and the production structure of an economy—we continue to reap attitudes sown by historical use of the plough.

The study’s authors point out that norms persist after the economy moves out of or beyond plough agriculture in part because these biases—“A woman’s place is in the home” among them—are reinforced not only by individuals who learn from their parents and grandparents but also by a given society’s policies, laws, and institutions.

Finally, plough-culture beliefs about the role and “natural place” of women are inherently “sticky,” the study authors observe—they persist because it’s faster and easier to act on them than it is to evaluate every situation and decision based on, for example, an individual’s personality, merit, or qualification. It’s much more efficient to simply decide, informed by beliefs already in place, “Women aren’t good at X.”

The study controlled for dozens of other potentially determining factors: What if already-sexist cultures chose the plough? Does religion have as great an effect as the plough? And so on. But a thorough regression analysis led them to rule out these other potential factors and to conclude that, in fact, it was the plough itself that did women in, by creating conditions of female oppression. Further proof: the researchers found that anywhere in the world that was a better environment for growing plough-negative crops, such as maize, sorghum, tree crops, and root crops, today has more equality of gender roles and attitudes, as well as increased female social and labor force participation.

A public education (read propaganda) campaign was quickly undertaken, based on the primary objection of farmers who turned eager female workers away: they were wearing pants. Thousands of US and British government pamphlets and posters were put into production; they showed women in skirts and dresses ploughing fields, with messages beneath such as “God Speed the Plough and the Woman Who Drives It” and “Get Behind the Girl He Left Behind Him,” with the ghostly outline of a soldier behind a woman standing in a field (she was wearing trousers, but perhaps as a concession to male outrage, she was yielding a “womanly” hoe, rather than “manning” a plough). After the world wars, a genre of jokes about “farmers’ daughters” flourished. The farmer’s daughter as a stock character was dumb and sexy.

Not only is the plough to thank or to blame for our monthly menstrual cycle; in our evolutionary prehistory, anthropologist Beverly Strassmann has found, our fat levels were lower from the constant effort of gathering, and so our cycle was more of a quarterly event. But our understanding that we “belong” to one man at a time if we are heterosexual women, or one person at a time if we are not, is something else we can pin on the plough. So are everyday realities like women being raised to sit with our legs crossed—what is between them is not ours to advertise or act upon, any more than outdoor space is our legacy or right to take up or even inhabit.

What looks like propriety is, from another angle, a culturally specific form of social censure, a lesson relentlessly and falsely imparted as “etiquette.”

infidelity is a cultural universal—anthropologist Helen Fisher, who began studying it in the 1980s, told the New York Times in 1998, “There exists no culture in which adultery is unknown, no cultural device or code that extinguishes philandering.”

the Himba are remarkable in their relative openness about their extra-pair involvements. Married people discuss their “affairs” more freely among themselves than we do, certainly, and also speak about them with anthropologists like Scelza, probably because there is little reason not to: the Himba are one of the rare cultures where there is not the kind of taboo against adultery that we have and might expect to be “universal.”

More extraordinary still, unlike many societies where only male infidelity is tolerated, women too are relatively open about having affairs.

Women with sex drives, asserted this well-respected thought leader of his time (who also believed that masturbation depleted life energies and contributed to illness), were exceptional: …the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally…There are many females who never feel any sexual excitement whatever. Others, again, immediately after each period do become, to a limited degree, capable of experiencing it; but this capacity is often temporary, and will cease entirely till the next menstrual period. The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and domestic duties are the only passions they feel.

Darwin’s view of sexual selection and Acton’s take on female sexuality culminated in Krafft-Ebing’s apocalyptic vision of what would happen if we undid such an order of things, which he offered up in 1886: “If a woman is normally developed mentally, and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and family impossible.”

until men were off to Europe and the South Pacific for World War II in the early 1940s. Then, with holes in the industrial labor force, American women took jobs in factories and shipyards; others ran offices and their households. It was a world without men, a world of burgeoning female competence and confidence, even in traditionally male arenas like heavy manufacturing. Women wore jeans and made bombs in factories, with Rosie the Riveter exhorting them all along, “We Can Do It!” Female agency, aptitude, and autonomy were not merely tolerated; they were encouraged, nurtured, and publicly extolled as patriotic. Between 1940 and 1944, female labor force participation grew by nearly half. And with most men away, women weren’t just working in factories, rising to the top in their office jobs, and generally running the show.

1948—when troops had returned home and were readjusting to a social world that had been radically reordered. How would men be reintegrated into a universe in which they had been, for a time, not only absent but irrelevant? For starters, men needed their jobs in manufacturing and industry back. And so women would have to give them up. Society mobilized to get them to do just that—through shame, guilt, and a propaganda program about the social importance of stay-at-home wives and mothers.

In primitive times women clung to the strongest males for protection. They did not take any chances with a nobody, low-status male who did not have the means to house them, protect them, and feed them and their offspring. High-status males displayed their prowess through their kick-ass attitudes. They were not afraid to think for themselves and make their own decisions. They did not give a crap about what other people in the tribe thought. That kind of attitude was and still is associated with the kind of men women find attractive. It may not be politically correct to say, but who cares. It is common sense and it is true and always will be.

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Might copulating with multiple males allow the female to “game” paternal certainty and plant a seed of confusion, so to speak? After all, by mating multiply, a female langur was engineering the possibility that these lethal males, potential killers of her infant, had actually sired it. And this, Hrdy realized, would make it less likely that a male would kill the infant that might be his. The only way to fool the males was to mate polyandrously, sometimes even in rapid sequence with numerous partners. Not only was this not “unnatural,” it was beneficial, Hrdy asserted, suggesting that female langurs bred multiply as a form of insurance.

Later, Hrdy hypothesized that such mating behavior, which she reframed as “assiduously maternal”—behavior likely to keep her baby alive—and now widely reported for many species of primates, could under other circumstances actually increase the odds that males, even more than one “possible father,” would protect, care for, and even provision her infant. All in all, given the right ecological and social circumstances, mating with multiple males might be very beneficial to females indeed.

“Those monkeys are deranged,” she recalls a prominent physical anthropologist saying dismissively of her work and her 1977 book on the topic, The Langurs of Abu. It was easier for that anthropologist, and anthropology in general, to pathologize an entire troop of langurs and dismiss Hrdy’s many months of meticulous fieldwork than it was to concede that males might operate selfishly rather than for the “good of the species.”

In her 1981 book, The Woman That Never Evolved, Hrdy took aim even more directly at the passive, coy, monogamous female hypothesis, suggesting that observational data demonstrated it simply wasn’t the case in many primates, including humans, and that Darwin’s notion that retiring, disinterested, exclusivity-craving females drove sexual selection by seeking the one “best” male was more based in wishful thinking and social convention than in actual primate behavior.

One colleague writing in the Quarterly Review of Biology equated her hypothesis that female primates benefited from mating with multiple males with “parapsychology.” Others made it more personal, accusing her of projecting. “So, Sarah, put another way, you’re saying you’re horny, right?” one colleague inquired. (Hrdy called this “one of the more mortifying moments of my life.”) But her work also opened the floodgates for more research that challenged the status quo.

It turned out there were non-procreative benefits of multiple mating for females as well. By copulating with a slew of males when she wasn’t in estrus or fertile—basically by having sex recreationally—a female primate could deplete the sperm available to rival females. She could recruit males to her social group, thus having more potential caregivers and protectors and provisioners. She could trade sex for resources or “friendship.”

Sure, we have been portrayed not infrequently over the last centuries by science, medicine, and art as the passive, comparatively disinterested sex. But biology suggests a vastly different backstory, a tale of passionate, voluptuous pleasures and sometimes of tremendous risk-taking in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction. Our bodies are designed for sin; they are hedonists even when we’re not.

has more than eight thousand nerve endings, meaning it has fourteen times the density of nerve receptor cells as the most sensitive part of a man’s penis, also called the glans. That makes the clitoris epically more responsive and excitable than the tip of the penis.

Meanwhile, the little bud that stands at attention, the clit we thought we knew, is merely the ticket to the roller-coaster ride and serves no greater or lesser purpose than to make us feel good. The entirety of what is now known as the “female erectile network” (FEN) or “internal clitoris” snakes back nearly to our anus on either side; extends along our labia, which swell with pleasure; and includes our urethral sponge (previously called the G-spot) and something called the perineal sponge too.

And women, unlike men, can have orgasm after orgasm. “Women don’t require a refractory period like men do, so we’re able to stay aroused longer and have [subsequent orgasms] with little effort,” says Rachel Carlton Abrams, MD, co-author of The Multi-Orgasmic Woman.

the average time for a woman to orgasm from intercourse after stimulating foreplay ranges from ten to twenty minutes, while for men it is two and a half to eight minutes. “The only hard and fast facts regarding time to orgasm are that there is a range, and women take longer on average, and that it’s faster from self-stimulation.” And it’s not uncommon for women to fear they are taking “too long,” Gordon observes. There is no doubt that this latter fact is at least in part a symptom of a culture-wide failure to tell women that great sex is our right, and that we are entitled to “release” as we have been taught men are. Among heterosexuals, there is a significant “orgasm gap” as well as a sexual entitlement gap: one study found that when it comes to sex with a familiar partner, heterosexual men come a hefty 22 percent more often than women do. (Bisexual women fare no better than straight women, while lesbians come out on top, experiencing orgasm nearly 75 percent of the time during partnered sex.) Another study found that in first-time hookups, straight men have over three orgasms for every orgasm a straight woman has.

The unpredictable nature of orgasm—will we or won’t we?—may drive us to constantly seek its fulfillment. We know that when it comes to playing slot machines, we become addicted not by getting what we want every time but by the happenstance nature of our win.

Consistent fulfillment doesn’t stoke desire the way the hope and anticipation of unpredictable fulfillment does. It is intermittent reinforcement, with its non-pattern pattern of the occasional jackpot, researchers tell us, that keeps us coming back for more.

In addition, the fact that stimulation that leads to orgasm is cumulative is something that has long intrigued primatologists, including Hrdy. We experience a sense of “buildup” as we draw nearer to climax, and it takes time, particularly from intercourse.

This specific cluster of characteristics defining female orgasm may well have helped make the human female, under certain conditions, a restless and relentless sexual adventuress. Our ancestors, like many non-human primates today, including our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, may well have regularly consorted with several males in rapid succession...

Given all the advantages of mating multiply, it makes sense that there might be this “variable reward system” in response to sustained, even cumulative, stimulation, unpredictable and delightful, that over millions of years has kept female primates soliciting successive copulations.

For the human female cervix, like that of a promiscuous macaque who may breed with ten males or more in rapid succession, actually serves not so much to block sperm, as was previously believed, as to busily filter and assess it, ideally several different types of it from several different males, simultaneously. It evolved not as a simple barrier but to sort the weak and bad and incompatible sperm from the good, suggesting by its very presence that there was a need to do such a thing—i.e., that females were mating multiply. Such a wondrous bit of equipment also partially buffers the female in possession of it against making a poor mate choice in the heat of the moment—our cervix is there to help us judge who’s eligible when our eyes fail us.

Moaning and groaning may be an ancient script of sorts, by which we communicate to any other males in hearing range, “Receptive and ready just as soon as this is over!”

To consider the clitoris and the nature of female orgasm and the cervix too, as well as male equipment and the way we have sex, is to confront not just the vague possibility but the likelihood that women are made for sexual gratification and for pursuing it, and for mating multiply, in ways that men—who come and are done—are not. Female biology suggests that women are built for sexual experimentation, for reckless days and heedless nights, putting us in conflict with our current cultural container, to put it mildly.

There is no one way of having sex we “evolved” for—we are flexible sexual and social strategists.

In the field of primatology, from Hrdy’s game-changing multiple-mating and infanticide hypothesis and insights about the nature of female orgasm to Barbara Smuts’s unexpected observations about female olive baboons who choose mates from among numerous male “friends” to Meredith Small’s assertion that the single most observable characteristic among female non-human primates is a preference for sexual novelty, presumptions that female monogamy is timeless and essential have taken a beating.

For example, on the Mosuo practice of sese, or “walking marriage,” in southwestern China, wherein women live with their kin and sexual partners slip into their rooms at night. Mosuo men do not support their offspring financially or socially (it’s a woman’s brother who “fathers,” so that Mosuo uncles are “dads”). And women are permitted to have multiple marriages.

There are polyandrous arrangements in rural Tibet, where a woman may be married to several male siblings, a strategy that is thought to make it more efficient to farm the challenging mountainous terrain in order to provision kids and adults alike, and to prevent skirmishes over land inheritance. But it also benefits women, in an unstinting climate, to have several related “father figures” invested in her child’s (and by extension her own) well-being.

When it is difficult for a single man to make adequate provisions for a family. When historic and economic change make it hard for men to, say, hunt and conditions are not right for farming, women may need more than one man to help them keep their kids alive and healthy.

Countries with high poverty levels like Jamaica.

When women have a high level of autonomy. If she has her own resources, for example, or contributes meaningfully to the survival of the family or group with what she provides, or if she has financial autonomy, a woman is much more likely to have sexual autonomy as well.

When there are few accumulated or heritable resources, as among foragers and horticulturalists. With no riches and no property to pass along, the issue of rightful inheritance—that is, the preoccupation of which child belongs to which man—may pale in importance relative to other concerns, such as the cohesion of the group. It also means there will be less perceived need to control whether a woman is monogamous or not.

Women in partible paternity cultures like the Aché and the Bari have sex with several men over the course of their pregnancy, and these men in turn support her and the baby when it is born.