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

In these contexts, a woman who is monogamous may well be considered prudish, selfish, and deserving of condemnation. But a woman who lines up too many fathers will find that uncertain fathers are reluctant to help. The optimal number of fathers under the environmental and ecological conditions that prevail where the peoples who believe in partible paternity live appears to be two, Hrdy tells us. A notable exception: the Canela of central Brazil, where a woman may have ritual sex with twenty or more men during community ceremonies, leaving her with many “fathers” to choose from and rely upon.

In partible paternity societies, child-rearing, unsurprisingly, often becomes a collaborative endeavor, with many adults looking out for a child’s well-being. Anthropologists call this collective raising of kids “cooperative breeding,” and many believe it is both the “how” and “why” not only of female multiple mating but also of the survival and success of Homo sapiens, when other hominins bit the dust. It was not the monogamous heterosexual pair bond that made us who we are today and ensured that we would endure, they argue, but the shared raising of offspring by multi-member groups and females who mated multiply.

Mating and leaving means creating the possibility that the female will mate with another male, and also that his sperm failed to do the job, or that he will not be there to try again if the pregnancy does not result in a healthy offspring. Many scientists have recently come to believe that, given all these factors, the range in male and female lifetime reproductive success actually tends to be equal.

For all these reasons—costly sperm, the difficulty of having and guarding multiple females, the difficulty of conception, the high likelihood that a gestation may fail, the fact that dependent offspring may do better with paternal care than without—inseminating and running was never such a great strategy. The idea of naturally polygamous males and naturally monogamous females (guys who favored multiple mating over care and gals who wanted the one “right” guy) was cast increasingly in doubt in the decades after Sarah Hrdy’s insights about strategically promiscuous female langurs.

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.

In addition, Himba men do not pay a high bride-price for their wives; and their cows are not passed down patrilineally, a practice that would create the possibility that a father might bequeath his cows to another man’s child.

Moreover, if a married man is at a remote cattle station with his girlfriend, the benefits of guarding his wife at home in order to prevent her from taking a lover of her own become prohibitive. It’s impossible to be in two places at once and extremely difficult to watch over an autonomous woman from a distance. It’s also pretty unpleasant to obsess over it. It is better and less “expensive” in every sense for a man to develop a tolerant attitude, and enjoy a girlfriend at the cattle station or in town who may, after all, bear him a child of his own. It also might serve him to have someone else watching out for his wife in his absence.

In her research, Scelza discovered something else. Reviewing her data, she realized there were no omoka children born to women in love matches. Of the seventy-nine women she interviewed who had chosen their own husbands, not a single one had an omoka child. Meanwhile, there were omoka children in nearly a quarter of arranged marriages.

In the face of coercion—being compelled to marry a man they have not themselves selected—their counterstrategy is to do what they are asked to do but also to do what they want.

It is a glorious rebuttal to the Darwin-Bateman paradigm and a blow to the insistence that men and women are naturally one way or another socially and sexually because of who they are biologically.

Himba woman who exercise unconstrained choice, marrying the men they pick themselves and then choosing to stay true to them, have lower reproductive success.

It’s possible, for example, that these monogamous women simply have lower fertility, or their partners do. But the possibility that monogamy may be straight up disadvantageous in particular contexts, including among the Himba, is a distinct, compelling, and game-changing notion.

Is monogamy a privilege or a prison for women? Is it a choice, or does it subvert choice? Is it a luxury or a deprivation? The lesson of the Himba and the omoka child is: it depends. On context.

In many species of non-human primates, these scientists discovered, a female will initiate copulations much more frequently than a male does—often by presenting her posterior. But that is only the beginning of her assertiveness. Sitting next to a male she has chosen and giving him a “Let’s get this party started” grimace may be followed, if he is insufficiently ardent, by grooming him. A female macaque, Linda Wolfe and Meredith Small tell us, may then leap on this favored male, rubbing her genital area back and forth over his torso. And Darwin would have blushed at the antics of the lion-tailed macaque female, who will pester a male over and over if he is unresponsive, pulling his hair, screeching, and jumping up and down in front of him. When that doesn’t work, female lion tails have been observed vocalizing and literally writhing on the ground in sexual frustration and impatience, waiting for the male to get a clue and get busy with her already. Female ruffed lemurs, meanwhile, approach and slap males to get their sexual services, while female capuchins will chase males, emitting high-pitched whistling, whining vocalizations and smacking them, once they catch up, to prompt them to mount and copulate. A capuchin female may be so busy soliciting males that she does not eat during her days-long sexual peak. Mating replaces food as the greatest necessity and highest priority in her life. This is the “demure” and “reticent” sex.

For most female primates, a single copulation with one male is just the warm-up. When they are sexually receptive and sometimes even when not, they may seek out copulation after copulation with numerous males, one after the other, often in rapid sequence.

Small summarizes that a thirst for novelty is the single most observable trait among all the sexual behaviors, preferences, and drivers of female primates. In fact, female primates couldn’t be further from reluctant breeders or seekers of “intimacy” with a single “best” mate, or dead set on doing it with “the alpha.”

And not a few of them like to get busy with other females. Linda Wolfe discovered that roughly 75 percent of the two troops of female macaques she studied regularly mounted or were mounted by other females. Female langurs also have sexual encounters with other female langurs; in three thousand hours of observation of a troop in India, researchers found that there were no females who didn’t.

Bonobos are harder still to find in their native habitat and even harder to study. Because they live in an area with a long history of political unrest and violence, for decades it was impossible for primatologists to observe them in any sustained way. It’s only within the last quarter century or so, thanks to fieldworkers in Congo and others, including Parish, who study them under human care in zoos, that anyone got a handle on who and what they are. There was no bonobo gene sequencing until 2012, at which point we learned that bonobos are more closely related to humans than they are to gorillas and at least as closely related to us as are chimps.

“Bonobo muscles have changed the least [from our common ancestor], which means they are the closest we can get to having a ‘living’ ancestor,”

posturally, bonobos resemble humans quite a bit, especially with their tendency to walk bipedally. Like us, they have sex ventrally, or face-to-face, something very rare in other primates.

Researchers say that in doing so, bonobos follow the same “empathic gradient” that humans do, offering support to kin, friends, and acquaintances.

human and bonobo babies have extraordinarily similar laughs when they are tickled.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about bonobos, and without question the most remarked upon thing about them, is their sexual practices. Basically, they seem to have sex consta...

Moments after the film began, the room fell utterly silent as the assembled took in the spectacle of these primates having sex more times and in more positions and combinations than most humans in any culture could even imagine. Their creativity, apparent appetite, and lack of inhibition were stunning. Small describes watching bonobo sex as “like watching humans at their most extreme and perverse.”

When she used a projector to show a close-up of a female bonobo’s anogenital swelling covered in ejaculate from several different males, a male primatologist in the audience turned to her mentor, Frans de Waal, and demanded (I like to imagine in an outraged, hoarse whisper), “How can such a delicate young lady speak about such things?”

Bonobos are also what we might consider indiscriminate about the sex of their partners. Adult male bonobos copulate with any number of females every day but are just as happy to massage the penises of other adult males in their troop or another troop, or stand rump to rump and rub their scrotal sacs together. Younger bonobos, both male and female, are fond of French kissing and fellatio. Adult female bonobos, for their part, enjoy being mounted by males and not infrequently mount them as well. Females equally or even more eagerly practice what primatologists term (rather uninspiredly) “G-to-G contact,” which is just an easier way of saying “genito-genital contact.” Lying on top of each other, or facing each other while lying on their sides, the females press and grind their vulvas together in pursuit of pleasure. Which they find. Their clitorides—which are larger than a human female’s and more externalized—become engorged, and they often shriek as they rub against each other. It feels good enough that they do it roughly every two hours on average. In fact, field scientists have documented many instances when female bonobos ignored the overtures of males in order to indulge in this type of girl-on-girl action.

a bonobo knuckle-walked over to me, clearly curious. I surmised from the chart of photos I had been studying that her name was Lisa. She seated herself at the window and stared at me. I stared back. A family with a toddler and a baby in a stroller stood next to me. Lisa stuck her finger up her anus, pulled out a greenish-yellow dollop of feces, and considered it. Then she popped it into her mouth and chewed with gusto.

She told me about experiments she had recently begun with the bonobos in Stuttgart, playing video of them and humans doing various things to figure out which videos and activities they preferred watching (in a follow-up interview, she told me they had loved videos of humans doing modern dance and hated videos of leopards, humans dancing like snakes, and the zoo’s vet, which moved them to kick and slap the video monitor). I was surprised that bonobos liked watching bonobo videos.