The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [117]
The Demon, Jealousy, with Gorgon frown
Blasts the sweet flowers of pleasure not his own,
Rolls his wild eyes, and through the shuddering grove
Pursues the steps of unsuspecting Love40
Wilson and Daly believe that a study of human society reveals a mindset whose manifestations are diverse in detail, but ‘monotonously alike in the abstract’. They are ‘socially recognised marriage, the concept of adultery as a property violation, the valuation of female chastity, the equation of “protection” of women with protection from sexual contact and the special potency of infidelity as a provocation to violence’. In short, in every age and in every place, men behave as if they owned their wives’ vaginas.41
Wilson and Daly reflect on the fact that love is an admired emotion, whereas jealousy is a despised one, when they are plainly two sides of the same coin – as anybody who has been in love can testify – for they are both part of a sexual proprietary claim. As many a modern couple knows, the absence of jealousy, far from calming a relationship, is itself a cause of insecurity: if he or she is not jealous when I pay attention to another man or woman, then he or she no longer cares whether our relationship survives. Psychologists have found that couples who lack moments of jealousy are less likely to stay together than jealous ones.
As Othello learnt, even the suspicion of infidelity is enough to drive a man to such rage that he may kill his wife. Othello was fictional, but many a modern Desdemona has paid with her life for her husband’s jealousy. As Wilson and Daly said: ‘The major source of conflict in the great majority of spouse killings is the husband’s knowledge or suspicion that his wife is either unfaithful or intending to leave him.’ One of the reasons a man who kills his wife in a fit of jealousy can rarely plead insanity in court is precisely because of the legal tradition in Anglo-American common law that such an act is ‘the act of a reasonable man’.42
This interpretation of jealousy probably seems astonishingly banal. After all, it is only putting an evolutionary slant on what everybody knows from everyday life. But among sociologists and psychologists it is heretical nonsense. Psychologists have tended to see jealousy as a pathology, to be discouraged and generally thought shameful – as something that has been imposed by that eternal villain ‘society’ to corrupt the nature of man. Jealousy shows low self-esteem, they say, and emotional dependency. Indeed it does, and that is exactly what the evolutionary theory would predict. A man held in low esteem by his wife is exactly the kind of person to be in danger of being cuckolded, for she has the motive to seek a better father for her children. This may even explain the extraordinary and hitherto baffling fact that husbands of rape victims are more likely to be traumatized and, despite themselves, to resent their raped wives if the wife was not physically hurt during the rape. Physical hurt is evidence of her resistance. Husbands may have been programmed by evolution to be paranoiacally suspicious that their wives were not raped at all, or ‘asked for it’.43
Cuckoldry is an asymmetrical fate. A woman loses no genetic investment if her husband is unfaithful, but a man risks unwittingly raising a bastard. As if to reassure fathers, research shows