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By Root 252 0

simultaneous unions between one woman and multiple husbands) is legal in a few societies. In fact, polygyny was accepted in the great majority of traditional human societies before the rise of state institutions. However, even in officially polygynous societies most men have only one wife at a time, and only especially wealthy men can acquire and maintain a few wives simultaneously. The large harems that spring to mind at the mention of the word polygamy, such as those of recent Arabian and Indian royalty, are possible only in the state-level societies that arose very late in human evolution and that permitted a few men to concentrate great wealth. Hence the generalization stands: most adults in most human societies are at any given moment involved in a long-term pair bond that is often monogamous in practice as well as legally.

Still another cause for bristling may have been my description of human marriage as a partnership for the joint rearing of the resulting babies. Most children receive more parental care from their mothers than from their fathers. Unwed mothers form a significant proportion of the adult population in some modern societies, though it has been much harder for unwed mothers to rear children successfully in traditional societies. But the generalization again holds: most human children receive some parental care from their father, in the form of child care, teaching, protection, and provision of food, housing, and money.

All these features of human sexuality—long-term sexual partnerships, coparenting, proximity to the sexual partnerships of others, private sex, concealed ovulation, extended female receptivity, sex for fun, and female menopause—constitute what we humans assume is normal sexuality. It titillates, amuses, or disgusts us to read of the sexual habits of elephant seals, marsupial mice, or orangutans, whose lives are so different from ours. Their lives seem to us bizarre. But that proves to be a species-ist interpretation. By the standards of the world’s 4,300 other species of mammals, and even by the standards of our own closest relatives, the great apes (the chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan), we are the ones who are bizarre.

However, I am still being worse than zoo-centric. I am falling into the even narrower trap of mammalo-centrism. Do we become more normal when judged by the standards of nonmammalian animals? Other animals do exhibit a wider range of sexual and social systems than do mammals alone. Whereas the young of most mammal species receive maternal care but no paternal care, the reverse is true for some species of birds, frogs, and fish in which the father is the sole caretaker for his offspring. The male is a parasitic appendage fused to the female’s body in some species of deep-sea fish; he is eaten by the female immediately after copulation in some species of spiders and insects. While humans and most other mammal species breed repeatedly, salmon, octopus, and many other animal species practice what is termed big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death. The mating system of some species of birds, frogs, fish, and insects (as well as some bats and antelope) resembles a singles bar—at a traditional site, termed a “lek,” many males maintain stations and compete for the attention of visiting females, each of which chooses a mate (often the same preferred male chosen by many other females), copulates with him, and then goes off to rear the resulting offspring without his assistance.

Among other animal species, it is possible to point out some whose sexuality resembles ours in particular respects. Most European and North American bird species form pair bonds that last for at least one breeding season (in some cases for life), and the father as well as the mother cares for the young. While most such bird species differ from us in that pairs occupy mutually exclusive territories, most species of sea birds resemble us further in that mated pairs breed colonially in close proximity to each other. However, all these bird