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

Every sensible woman got a back door man. —Sara Martin, “Strange Lovin’ Blues,” 1925

Women lust and women cheat. And it sets us aflame. Shere Hite took a hit, received death threats, and eventually went into exile in Europe after suggesting that 70 percent of us do. Other statistics range from as low as 13 percent to as high as 50 percent of women admitting they have been unfaithful to a spouse or partner; many experts suggest the numbers might well be higher, given the asymmetrical, searing stigma attached to being a woman who admits it.

I intended to date these guys one at a time, to break it off neatly with one before moving on to another, until I found The One I would marry, in the semi-accepted tradition of serial monogamy. That’s what people did.

Under particular, not uncommon ecological circumstances, promiscuity was a smart reproductive strategy, a way for a female early hominin or human to increase the likelihood of getting high-quality sperm and becoming pregnant while maximizing the chance that numerous males might be willing to support her during pregnancy and help provision her and her offspring once she gave birth.

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino is a perennial seller. So is The Ethical Slut, a how-to for the woman who wants to get sex outside of monogamy in a way that is principled, nay virtuous (it seemed all my divorced girlfriends and friends in their twenties were reading it). In The New Monogamy, Tammy Nelson, a guru for those who struggle with the issue of sexual exclusivity, deftly redefines monogamy as a frequently difficult practice, like yoga, that requires commitment.

As with open relationships, the dyad is the primary relationship for swingers; they invite others into their established relationship whose boundaries, while sometimes malleable, are more or less clear. The hierarchy is unambiguous: the established pair bond is the home base.

Nashoba experimental community, founded by Frances Wright in 1826, which brought together freed blacks and whites “to work and make love” on a large farm as a way to confront racism.

And one sixteen-year longitudinal study of a representative sample of more than eleven thousand adults showed not only that marriage has little impact on health or happiness but that any positive effects of marriage are likely attributable to a more positive evaluation of one’s life rather than improvement on concrete measures.

In 2013, some new data emerged from the GSS: women were roughly 40 percent more likely to be cheating on their husbands than they had been in 1990. Meanwhile, their husbands’ rates of infidelity hadn’t budged.

A third experiment in Chivers’s lab suggested yet another surprise: that straight women were not as turned on by the idea of sex with a male friend as they were by the idea of sex with a long-term partner or a total stranger.

She asked me to think about how, when we get dressed for an evening out, women often discount the opinion of our long-term male partners. And not just because our partners are afraid to tell us that the dress does, in fact, make us look fat. “He just doesn’t have a lot of credibility. You’re all he’s got. He doesn’t see you the way you want to be seen! But admiration from someone you know less well, or from a stranger—that has an impact!”

As did a 2017 study of more than eleven thousand British men and women, aged sixteen to seventy-four, which found women who lived with a partner were twice as likely as cohabiting men to lose interest in sex.

But perhaps most surprisingly, the majority of women in Walker’s sample reported that they were otherwise happily partnered or married, and that these affairs were a way for them to remain in their primary relationships. They were not looking for an exit strategy or a new husband. They did not seek emotional connection or companionship. They wanted a solution to a dilemma: they felt unable or were unwilling to end their sexless or sexually unsatisfying partnerships or marriages, but they also wanted great sex.

Avery, forty-five, explained what she sought in an OP (outside partner) and how she vetted candidates: “I ask penis size, availability, and what kind of associations they are looking for, what sex acts they enjoy. And that’s all in the first email.” Heather, thirty-three and partnered, told Walker, “In an OP, I want (this sounds shallow) a big cock, stamina, knowledge of female anatomy, and discretion.” The women also had clear ROE (rules of engagement). They avoided men who seemed emotionally needy or who seemed to want relationships rather than liaisons. They had complicated primary partnerships and wanted to keep their affairs simple and purely sexual.

The findings of Chivers, Meana, and Walker point to possibilities that are at once freeing and disquieting. What if it’s women, not men, who struggle especially with monogamy? What if women are the comparatively decadent sex, asphyxiating in sexually exclusive relationships, whereas men in the aggregate are more amenable to it?

Sarah had been married for nearly a decade when she met Paul one evening at a restaurant halfway across the country from the town she called home. They were both traveling on business, and as she waited for her coworker to show up, Sarah and Paul discovered they lived within a few miles of each other, had kids about the same age, and had attended the same school. They said their good nights when Sarah’s colleague arrived, but Paul emailed her the next day. Sarah felt a thrill she hadn’t experienced in years as she read it. The message itself was tame, but, she told me, “the fact that he was basically telling me, by being in touch, that he was interested in me—that was exciting.”

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.

In fact, all the older women in the “Florida-via-northeastern-suburbs group” married the men with whom they’d had affairs. A few went on to have additional affairs and husbands. Anthropologists might characterize the Florida group’s particular style of having an affair as “bridging.” Among women worldwide who have extra-pair involvements, some do it as a way to test out a potential mate while still garnering the benefits—mostly material, but also companionship and partnership in child-rearing, plus enhanced social status—of being coupled.

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.”

Annika got too much out of her affairs to stop—including the variety and novelty of sexual experience she craved. “I think no matter how hard you try and how exciting it is, even when your marriage is good—and mine wasn’t, at least in the sex department—you still miss that thing where you’re so excited, and it’s so new, and you can’t eat or sleep, you’re having such an intense time emotionally and sexually with this entirely new person. That’s what I kept going after, what I couldn’t say no to.”

I also thought of the work the anthropologist Beverly Strassmann did in Mali, where women are compelled by tradition to repair to menstrual huts when it’s that time of the month. In this way, Strassmann determined, men are able to “count back the days” from their wives’ periods to the approximate date of ovulation. And figure out whether they are being true. It’s an effective form of constraint; the rate of extra-pair paternity in this region of Mali is one of the lowest in the world.

A growing number of anthropologists tell us the pitiless and unlikely agent of this transformation was not individual men or women. It was not politics or politicians. It was not the rise of the nation-state or even organized religion. It was agriculture.

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.

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.

Anthropologist Agustín Fuentes tells us that one study of forty-six different meta-analyses shows that among the differences between the sexes that we tend to think of as “essential,” there are only a very few that hold across cultures. !Kung boys focus on tasks as well as !Kung girls. Girls in three Middle Eastern countries—Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—outpace boys in math. But worldwide, men have greater grip strength, throwing velocity, and throwing strength than women. For these reasons men suddenly had and continue to have a physical advantage in plough-farming settings. 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.

Such a spectacularly humiliating fall, capped by the assertion that “they shall not say, ‘Here lies Jezebel,’” was necessary in a text like the Old Testament, which was at pains to undo the legitimacy of previous religions and social arrangements. A certain amount of overkill was required to thoroughly void the authority of the prior world order, one embodied by a woman with power who attempted to backseat drive a patriline and who worshipped the old, established way. 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.

In ancient Greece, where the most widely cultivated crop was wheat—the most plough-positive of all crops—adultery was considered a serious crime, with repercussions at the level of couple, family, and the state. The man committing adultery with a married female citizen could be murdered on the spot, with a likely reprieve for his killer; the wife was immediately and automatically divorced. Interestingly, from 470 BC onward, the price for interfering with the transport of grain was also death. 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.

These fates were less terrifying than that of the adulterous, vengeful, and ambitiously unsympathetic Clytemnestra as told by Aeschylus in The Oresteia, the 458 BC tragedy and cautionary tale. Clytemnestra repartnered over the course of her husband Agamemnon’s long absence during the Trojan War, rendering her the polar opposite of the faithful, monogamous, and good wife of Odysseus, Penelope. Clytemnestra was enraged that Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods on his battleship in a bid for favorable winds. During his long absence, the text implies, she took solace in her power to rule Argos, and in sex with her illegitimate “husband” Aegisthus. Again, she was no Penelope, who held her ardent suitors at bay by weaving and unweaving at her loom for years. Upon Agamemnon’s return with his lover Cassandra, who crouched and lowed outside, knowing what was to come, Clytemnestra purred her welcome, drew a bath for her husband—and proceeded to ax or stab him to death. But rather than being protected by the ages-old rule of cyclical justice represented by the Furies, who sided with Clytemnestra because she was avenging the murder of her child, she was murdered by her own son, Orestes, at the urging of Apollo. Apollo then successfully argued his case against the Furies, absolving his client of the crime he had committed in Athenian court. There could be no more literal enactment of a new world order that did not tolerate women taking matters—whether sexual or...

legal—into their own hands.

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.

Anthropologists might marvel to learn that in one corner of the peculiar economic and social ecology of the industrialized, post-plough West, women who are no longer virgins feel compelled to re-create that condition. They are supposed to pull off something along the lines of the miracle of the immaculate conception—to be multiparas, or women who have had more than one child, with the bodies and vaginal elasticity of nulliparas, women who have never given birth. They want not to surgically replace or fortify their hymens (as some women in the Middle East feel pressured to do before their wedding nights) but to “rejuvenate” their own eroded value in an environment where women may be conditionally respected for other things—beauty, motherhood, intelligence—but are arguably ultimately objects for enhanced male pleasure.

Sociologist Rae Blumberg has pointed out that it is only in this one type of agrarian society, and for less than 3 percent of Homo sapiens’ history, that women have been transformed from competent, self-sufficient primary producers who make their own decisions relatively autonomously into secondary producers and costly consumers who are, in some circumstances, fundamentally dependent on men. Female chimps and bonobos, our closest relatives, never stop foraging for themselves and their offspring. Female hunter-gatherers often continue to gather while pregnant; some even nurse and gather simultaneously. Mbuti women in the Ituri rainforest and Aka women of the Central African Republic are competent net hunters, working on their own and alongside their husbands to provision their families. All these practices give important clues about our evolutionary prehistory: dependence is new. It is human females of the Anthropocene—even and perhaps especially those living in the industrialized West post-plough—whose well-being and in some cases very lives are uniquely contingent on the support of males.

In their ancestral lands in the far north of the Kunene River region of Namibia—a country bordered by Angola above, Botswana to the east, South Africa below, and first the Namib Desert and then the Atlantic Ocean along its western edge—live the Himba. They are the region’s last seminomadic people, pastoralists who grow calabash, millet, and maize but also depend on the milk and meat of the goats, sheep, and cattle they raise. The Himba live in compounds of two dozen or so people, in huts of mud and cow dung, around which they build fences of mopane wood to contain their livestock. But they move often, setting out whenever grazing conditions decline. Only an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Himba remain in Northern Namibia and across the border in Angola, after surviving near extermination by German colonizers in the early 1900s, intermittent years of devastating drought, and the bloody Namibian revolution of the 1980s.

The paradigm that females are sexless and decorous protectors of the hearth prevailed for decades, even in the face of intervening generations of abolitionists, suffragettes, and crusaders from Ida Wells to Margaret Sanger critiquing it with their pointed activism. And while flappers—originally a derogatory English term for prostitute—made real strides by boisterously presuming the liberties and freedoms that suffragists and others attempted to engineer through lobbying, legislation, and political protest, with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, historians of the era tell us, these pioneering young disruptors were bludgeoned back into propriety. In fact, even working outside the home was suspect for the next decade, and women who tried might well be subjected to public censure, “taking jobs from men.” Making matters still more difficult for women of color, between 1932 and 1933, 68 percent of jobs posted by the Philadelphia Employment Bureau stipulated the jobs were “white only,” doubling down on the discrimination.

From female macaques in captivity who craved sexual variety so much that they grew listless and depressed if keepers didn’t cycle in new males every three years; to ostensibly “monogamous” female gibbons who copulated with other males when their partners were out of sight; to female chimps who risked their lives attempting to join new troops in order to copulate with novel males—there was good reason, primatologists including Meredith Small, Alison Jolly, Barbara Smuts, and Jeanne Altmann argued, to reexamine with a critical eye the presumed “universal” sex differences in sexual and reproductive strategy based on Bateman’s principle. Females had a lot more agency than previously supposed. Under a variety of circumstances they did mate multiply and they did benefit from it.

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.” Of course Hrdy’s female langurs didn’t have some conscious endgame. They didn’t mate multiply because they figured, “Hmmmm, better confuse the issue of paternity and line up multiple possible ‘dads’ to protect my baby” instead of attack it. Nor did other primate females think, “Boy, would I ever like to increase my odds of heterozygosity” or “get some really good genes,” or—in species where male support is essential—get several males to care for or provision her offspring, thinking, “I need to line up several providers.” Females solicited males because they were conditioned to additional matings that might feel good. And it felt good because of the way ancestral female primates were built.

Yet even just the part of the clit we can see, the glans—think of it as the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps better, the mouth of a simmering volcano—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.

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.

Consider the size of a human male’s testicles. They are larger than those of gorillas, whose teeny-tiny balls relative to their body size suggest that only a small amount of sperm was needed to successfully inseminate a female, who is unlikely to have other potential mates (gorillas live in social formations some primatologists still call “harems”—a male and multiple females). A man’s testicles, in contrast, are proportionally larger, arguably more like those of chimps and bonobos, whose females are notoriously promiscuous. Logically, when dealing with a female consorting with multiple males, you need a lot of sperm to compete with other sperm inside the vaginal canal. The more you can squirt, the better.

Primatologist Zanna Clay actually studied chimp vocalizations during sex and learned it is a way females effectively signal to males, “Here I am, and I’m interested in you, other guys!” even during the act of copulation itself. 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!”

There is no one way of having sex we “evolved” for—we are flexible sexual and social strategists. But our essence, if we can be said to have one, is likely less matron and more macaque. Female infidelity is a behavior with one foot in the present day and the other in our ancient past, linked to anatomy, physiology, and reward seeking. And the best mother is the one who, when circumstances are right, does what it takes to line up allies who will be well disposed toward her offspring. She might do so on her back, or with her rump in the air.

And there are many more societies with “non-classical polyandry” in which women have multiple partners simultaneously or over time, with very little or no social censure. Ethnographic evidence of such informal polyandry has been reported in a total of 53 societies (and primatologist and anthropologist Meredith Small, in a survey of 133 societies, said there was not a single one without female infidelity). By 2000, Sarah Hrdy asked, “Why is polyandry so rare in humans?” and immediately amended her question by posing another: “Or is it?” Hrdy observed that “informal polyandry”—women having multiple partners at the same time or in succession—is a reality, period.

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. And the worldwide ethnographic data show she may well use it to have simultaneous or successive partners, rather than one.

In her work among the Pimbwe of Tanzania, where divorce is a matter of one partner moving physically out of the house, with no additional legal or formal proceedings, UC Davis human behavioral ecologist Monique Borgerhoff Mulder discovered yet another reality that challenged the Bateman paradigm. Through interviews and recording of reproductive histories, she documented that, directly contradicting Bateman’s oft-cited assertions, multiple mating increased the reproductive success of Pimbwe women (meaning it increased the number of their children who survived to go on themselves to reproduce), but not of Pimbwe men. Borgerhoff Mulder further concluded that “polyandry is everywhere…but we think of it as polygyny.”

Namely: harems are rare in the primate world, conception is statistically rare as well, and rates of miscarriage are high. How likely is it that a male hits the timing of conception just right in a single copulation? Or in multiple copulations with multiple females? Not very. And since such a significant number of pregnancies across species end in miscarriage, stillbirth, and fatal breech births, the math gets even more unfavorable for the male who ejaculates and disappears. 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.

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. For all these reasons, a Himba man has very little to lose if his wife has a lover or even a child by another man.

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.

Omoka children and the high rate of extra-pair paternity among the Himba prove that Himba women are what Hrdy wants us to understand all primate females, including women, to be: not essentially retiring and naturally monogamous because of our biology but creatures who live at the intersection of biology and culture and ecology, making us “flexible and opportunistic individuals who confront recurring reproductive dilemmas and trade-offs within a world of shifting options.”

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. Female chimps in one group averaged 3.6 daily copulations while in estrus, and never with just one male; an Indian female rhesus was observed soliciting four different males in less than two hours. A female chacma baboon would be unimpressed by her rhesus cousin’s appetite; chacmas have been observed to mate with three males in three minutes. Unconstrained, woolly spider monkey and Barbary macaque females will copulate with just about every male they encounter. While these behaviors may seem undiscriminating, they are anything but: what really gets our non-human primate female cousins going is a fellow who hasn’t been around long, or even better, a total stranger.

As mentioned previously, Kim Wallen and his colleagues at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center know it’s important to introduce new males into their macaque population; otherwise the females lose interest in sex entirely. Even supposedly “monogamous” gibbon females hook up with new males when their mates are out of sight. 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.” Indeed, Small suggests that it is difficult for us humans to wrap our minds around “just how little importance nonhuman female primates attach to knowing a male before they mate with him.” Au contraire, our primate sisters are sexual adventuresses, driven by the thrill of the unknown and unfamiliar.