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 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.”