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

As the authors of the Harvard-UCLA plough study put it succinctly, “Part of the importance of the plough arises through its impact on internal beliefs and values.” We live the plough’s unforgiving legacy every day, an inheritance that, for many of us, has come to feel logical or natural. It is not. 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.”