Matt Ridley

with the effect that all the stepfathers might be the father. As a result, there is only one circumstance in which a male chimp can be certain an infant he meets is not his: when he has never seen the female before. And as Jane Goodall found, male chimps attack strange females that are carrying infants and kill the infants. They do not attack childless females.'

Hrdy 's problem is solved. Female promiscuity in monkeys and apes can be explained by the need to share paternity among many males to prevent infanticide. But does it apply to mankind?

The short answer is no. It is a fact that stepchildren are sixty-five times more likely to die than children living with their true parents,' and it is inescapable that young children often have a terror of new stepfathers that is hard to overcome: But neither of these facts is of much relevance, for both apply to older children, not to suckling infants. Their deaths do not free the mother to breed again.

Moreover, the fact that we are apes can be misleading. Our sex lives are very different from those of our cousins. If we were like orangutans, women would live alone and apart from one another. Men, too, would live alone but each would visit several women (or none) for occasional sex. If two men ever met, there would be an almighty, violent battle. If we were gibbons, our lives would be unrecognizable. Every couple would live miles apart and fight to the death any intrusion into their home range—which they would never leave: Despite the occasional antisocial neighbor, that is not how we live: Even people who retreat to their sacred suburban homes do not pretend to remain there forever, let alone keep out all strangers. We spend much of our lives on common territory, at work, shopping, or at play. We are gregarious and social.

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The Red Queen

We are not gorillas, either. If we were, we would live in seraglios, each dominated by one giant middle-aged man, twice the weight of a woman, who would monopolize sexual access to all the women in the group and intimidate the other men: Sex would be rarer than saints' days, even for the great man, who would have sex once a year, and would be all but nonexistent for the other males.'

If we were hairless chimpanzees, our society would still look fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial, and aggressive toward other groups than those we belong to: In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist, and belligerent, which we are. Adult males would spend more time trying to climb the political hierarchy than with their families. But when we turn to sex, things would begin to look very different. For a start, men would take no part at all in rearing the young, not even paying child support; there would be no marriage bonds at all: Most women would mate with most men, though the top male (the president, let us call him) would make sure he had droir du seigneur over the most fertile women: Sex would be an intermittent affair, indulged in to spectacular excess during the woman 's estrus but totally forgotten by her for years at a time when pregnant or rearing a young child. This estrus would be announced to everybody in sight by her pink and swollen rear end, which would prove irresistibly fascinating to every male who saw it: They would try to monopolize such females for weeks at a time, forcing them to go away on a 'consortship' with them; they would not always succeed and would quickly lose interest when the swelling went down: Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles has speculated on how disruptive this would be to society by imagining the effect on the average office of a woman turning up for work one day irresistibly pink.'°

If we were pygmy chimps or bonobos, we would live in groups much like those of chimps, but there would be roving bands of dominant men who visited several groups of women. As a consequence, women would have to share the possibility of paternity still more widely, and female bonobos are positively nymphomaniac in MONOGAMY AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN

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their habits. They have sex at the slightest suggestion and in a great variety of ways (including oral and homosexual) and are sexually attractive to males for long periods. A young female bonobo who arrives at a tree where others of the species are feeding will first mate with each of the males in turn—including the adolescents— and only then get on with eating. Mating is not wholly indiscriminate, but it is very catholic.

Whereas a female gorilla will mate about ten times for every baby that is born, a female chimp will mate five hundred to a thousand times and a bonobo up to three thousand times. A female bonobo is rarely harassed by a nearby male for mating with a more junior male, and mating is so frequent that it rarely leads to conception: Indeed, the whole anatomy of male aggression is reduced in bonobos: Males are no larger than females and spend less energy trying to rise in the male hierarchy than ordinary chimps. The best strategy for a male bonobo intent on genetic eternity is to eat his greens, get a good night 's sleep, and prepare for a long day of fornication.'

THE BASTARD BIRDS

Compared to our ape cousins, we, the most common of the great apes, have pulled off a surprising trick. We have somehow reinvented monogamy and paternal care without losing the habit of living in large multimale groups: Like gibbons, men marry women singly and help them to rear their young, confident of paternity, but like chimpanzees, those women live in societies where they have continual contact with other men: There is no parallel for this among apes. It is my contention, however, that there is a close parallel among birds: Many birds live in colonies but mate monogamously within the colony: And the bird parallel brings an altogether different explanation for females to be interested in sexual variety. A female human being does not have to share her sexual favors with many males to prevent infanticide, but she may have a good reason to share them with one well-chosen male apart from her husband.

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The Red Queen

This is because her husband is, almost by definition, usually not the best male there is—else how would he have ended up married to her? His value is that he is monogamous and will therefore not divide his child-rearing effort among several families. But why accept his genes? Why not have his parental care and some other male ' s genes?

In describing the human mating system, it is hard to be precise. People are immensely flexible in their habits, depending on their racial origin, religion, wealth, and ecology: Nonetheless, some universal features stand out: First, women most commonly seek monogamous marriage—even in societies that allow polygamy.

Rare exceptions notwithstanding, they want to choose carefully and then, as long as he remains worthy, monopolize a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him. Second, women do not seek sexual variety per se. There are exceptions, of course, but fictional and real women regularly deny that nymphomania holds any attraction for them, and there is no reason to disbelieve them. The temptress interested in a one-night stand with a man whose name she does not know is a fantasy fed by male pornography: Lesbians, free of constraints imposed by male nature, do not suddenly indulge in sexual promiscuity; on the contrary, they are remarkably monogamous: None of this is surprising: Female animals gain little from sexual opportunism, for their reproductive ability is limited not by how many males they mate with but how long it takes to bear, offspring. In this respect men and women are very different.

But third, women are sometimes unfaithful. Not all adultery is caused by men. Though she may rarely or never