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seem to have trampled on the rights of women by ignoring them and their wishes. But then so did men for many generations after the invention of agriculture. Before agriculture and since democracy, such chauvinism was impossible; the mating system of mankind, like that of other animals was a compromise between the strategies of males and females. And it is a curious truth that the monogamous marriage bond survived right through despotic Babylon, lascivious Greece, promiscuous Rome and adulterous Christendom to emerge as the core of the family in the industrial age. Even in the most despotic and polygamous moment of human history, mankind was faithful to the institution of monogamous marriage, quite unlike any other polygamous animal. Even despots usually had one queen and many concubines. Explaining the human fascination with monogamous marriage requires us to understand the female strategy as closely as we have understood the male one. When we do an extraordinary insight into human nature will emerge. That is what the next chapter is about.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Monogamy and the Nature of Women

SHEPHERD: Echo, I ween, will in the wood reply,

And quaintly answer questions: shall I try?

ECHO: Try.

What must we do our passion to express?

Press.

How shall I please her, who ne’er loved before?

Be Fore.

What most moves women when we them address?

A dress.

Say, what can keep her chaste whom I adore?

A door.

If music softens rocks, love tunes my lyre.

Liar.

Then teach me, Echo, how shall I come by her?

Buy her.

Jonathan Swift, ‘A Gentle Echo on Woman’

In an astonishing study recently undertaken in western Europe, the following facts emerged: married females choose to have affairs with males who are dominant, older, more physically attractive, more symmetrical in appearance and married; females are much more likely to have an affair if their mates are subordinate, younger, physically unattractive or have asymmetrical features; cosmetic surgery to improve a male’s looks doubles his chances of having an adulterous affair; the more attractive a male is the less attentive he is as a father; roughly one in three of the babies born in western Europe is the product of an adulterous affair.

If you find these facts disturbing or hard to believe, worry not. The study was not done on human beings at all. It refers entirely to swallows, the innocent, twittering, fork-tailed birds that pirouette prettily around barns and fields in the summer months. Human beings are entirely different from swallows. Or are they?1

The Marriage Obsession

The harems of ancient despots revealed that men are capable of making the most of opportunities to turn rank into reproductive success, but they cannot have been typical of the human condition for most of its history. About the only way to be a harem-guarding potentate nowadays is to start a cult and brainwash potential concubines about your holiness. In many ways modern people probably live in social systems that are much closer to those of their hunter-gatherer ancestors than they are to the conditions of early history. No hunter-gatherer society supports more than occasional polygamy; and the institution of marriage is virtually universal. People live in larger bands than they used to, but within those bands the kernel of human life is the nuclear family: a man, his wife and children. Marriage is a child-rearing institution: wherever it occurs the father takes at least some part in rearing the child even if only by provision of food. In most societies, men strive to be polygamists; but few of them succeed. Even in the polygamous societies of pastoralists, the great majority of marriages are monogamous ones.2

It is our usual monogamy, not our occasional polygamy, that sets us apart from other mammals, including apes. Of the four other apes (gibbons, orang-utans, gorillas and chimpanzees), only the gibbon practises anything like marriage. Gibbons live in faithful pairs in the forests of south-east Asia, each pair living a solitary life within a territory.