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that people are strangely more apt to say of a baby, ‘he (or she) looks just like his father’ than to say ‘he (or she) looks just like his mother’ – and that it is the mother’s relatives who are most likely to say this.44 It is not that a woman need not mind about her husband’s infidelity: it might lead to him leaving her, or wasting his time and money on his mistress, or picking up a nasty disease. But it does imply that men are likely to mind even more about their wives’ infidelity than vice versa. History, and law, have long reflected just that. In most societies, adultery by a wife was illegal and punished severely, while adultery by a husband was condoned, or lightly treated. Until the nineteenth century in Britain, a civil action could be brought against an adulterer by an aggrieved husband for ‘criminal conversation’.45 Even among the Trobriand Islanders, who were celebrated by Bronislaw Malinowski in 1927 as a sexually uninhibited people, females who committed adultery were condemned to die.46

This double standard is a prime example of the sexism of society, and is usually dismissed as no more than that. Yet the law has not been sexist about other crimes: women have never been punished more severely than men for theft or murder, or at least the legal code has never prescribed that they be so. Why is adultery such a special case? Because man’s honour is at stake? Then punish the adulterous man as harshly, for that is just as effective a deterrent as punishing the woman. Because men stick together in the war of the sexes? They do not in anything else. The law is quite explicit on this: all legal codes so far studied define adultery ‘in terms of the marital status of the woman. Whether the adulterous man was himself married is irrelevant.’47 And they do so because ‘it is not adultery per se that the law punishes, but only the possible introduction of alien children into the family and even the uncertainty that adultery creates in this regard. Adultery by the husband has no such consequences.’48

When, on their wedding night, Angel Clare confessed to his new wife, Tess, in Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, that he had sown his wild oats before marriage, she replied with relief by telling the story of her own seduction by Alec D’Urberville and the short-lived child she bore by him. She thought the transgressions balanced.

‘Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel.’

‘You – yes you do.’

‘But do you not forgive me?’

‘O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case. You were one person; now you are another. My God – how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque – prestidigitation as that!’

Clare left her that night.

Courtly Love

Human mating systems are greatly complicated by the fact of inherited wealth. The ability to inherit wealth or status from a parent is not unique to man. There are birds that succeed to the ownership of their parents’ territories by staying to help them rear subsequent broods. Hyaenas inherit their dominance rank from their mothers (in hyaenas, females are dominant and often larger); so do many monkeys and apes. But human beings have raised this habit to an art. And they usually show a much greater interest in passing on wealth to sons than to daughters. This is superficially odd. A man who leaves his wealth to his daughters is likely to see that wealth left to his certain granddaughters. A man who leaves his wealth to his sons is likely to see the wealth left to what may or may not be his grandsons. In the few matrilineal societies, there is indeed such promiscuity that men are not sure of paternity, and in such societies it is uncles that play the role of father to their nephews.49

Indeed, in more stratified societies, the poor often favour their daughters over their sons. But this is not because of certainty of paternity, but because poor daughters are more likely to breed than poor sons. A feudal vassal’s son had a good chance of remaining childless, while his sister was carted off to the local castle to be the fecund concubine of the resident lord. Sure enough,