Female Promiscuity

The Christian ideal is that a woman should reserve her sexual favours to only one man with whom she enters into a permanent union called holy matrimony which will end only upon the death of either partner to the union and that the sole purpose of sexual intercourse is the procreation of children. Any sexual activity which falls outside of such narrowly defined limits is regarded as a "sin" against God and man. Christianity has dominated Europe for nearly 2000 years. Such values are deeply embedded in Western civilization. But in reality, they are often honoured more by their breach than by their strict observance. Even nowadays, there are still many Christians who still honestly honour such values but their number is dwindling by the day. More often Christians can only afford to pay lip service to such values. However, such values are a source of perpetual suffering for those struggling between the desires of the body and the demands of their religion.

Freud has documented the plight of many such late 19th century Viennese women caught between guilt and "illicit" sexual pleasure. What do anthropology and socio-biology have to tell us about female promiscuity? I  turn to an article called "Sex and the Mating Game" which is the record of an interview of Sarah Blaffer Hdry. She had already written a number of books on various related topics: The Blackman of Zinacantan: A Central American Legend (1972) ("BZ"), The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction (1977) ("LA"), The Woman that Never Evolved (1981) ("WWNE") with Glenn Haussfater (eds) Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives (1984)("ICEP"). The article concerned is part of a book called Reinventing the Future by Thomas A Bass.(1994).

According to Darwin, all females want the one best male but after years of study, Hdry found that numerous females are observed to solicit male after male and laid to rest the myth of the coy female biologically fated to monogamy and sexual passivity. In LA, she found that the sacred hanuman monkeys of India are masterful sexual strategists.  In BZ, she analyzes the Mayan myth of the bat-demon H'ik'al, a fiendish spirit who takes vengeance on "misbehaving women". But in LA, Hrdy discovered that the females habitually drifted away from the alpha male's harem to steal copulation with other roving males, who once they took over a harem would often kill all the unweaned infants, thereby bringing the females back into heat and readying them to produce new offspring by himself. To prevent the alpha male from doing that, the females deliberately fraternize and have sex with many other males whilst they are pregnant to confuse and baffle the alpha male as to the true paternity of her offsprings to ensure their survival and they breed with the infanticidal male partly also because they want to compete with other females in having breeding success! Of course, in the human context, many women have to resort to lies until they are found out unless they have got a particularly tolerant male husband.

In WWNE, Hrdy says that what makes us different from animals is our ability to deliberately work to counter what our "nature" predisipose us to. In ICEP, Hrdy laid to rest the former idea that monkeys commit infanticide only in areas where there is food scarcity. In the Langurs, the males were klling the offsprings of females who had bred with other males and she lists 5 types of infanticides: infanticide as a food (e.g. fish and insects) or to increase food supply and hence the chance of survival of those remaining, (e.g. Belding's ground squirrel where a female eliminate another female's infants thus making the latter abandon her burrow and vacate it for her own brood), the alpha male eliminating younger potential competition for access to females,( e.g langurs), competition by females for nurturing males ( e.g jicana female will sometimes move from one male nest site to another to lay eggs and sometimes destroying the eggs of other females so that the male, which has the job of tending to the young, will tend to her young) occasional human infanticide by mothers when they  know that there are not sufficient resources to feed all her children in some primitive hunter gatherer-socieities and finally panic killing (eg. a mouse being disturbed during her birth so that she fears that there is no chance of the baby surviving.). But most of these cases do not apply to human beings but still sometimes, we may see shadows of similar motives operating in human societies in extreme conditions.

To Hdry, the female clitoris is curently not adaptive because if the female orgasm evolved as some argue, to cement pair bonding and enhance marital relations, you would expect it to be as reliable as male orgasm because a male has an orgasm everytime he ejaculates but only 30% of the women had orgasms from copulation alone. She needs a lot of caresses and foreplay.

To Hdry, the idea that somehow orgasm makes it easier for the female to be satisfied by one male is nonsense. But she agrees that female promiscuity is not socially adaptive in our society because a woman has a lot more to lose than to gain. If she is right, then to me, the reason why it may not be socially adaptive is probably that the current values of our society are still largely male values: competition, rivalry, jockeying for position of power and influence under which women are regarded as male "trophies" rather than human beings in their own right, with their own needs, social, pyschological and biological peculiar to their gender, like their need to feel protected, cared for, to be appreciated in themselves and not merely for their social function or roles as daughters, mothers, home makers, "live in whores" rather than as wives or even literally as professional whores etc. Is that why we now have so many unhappy women in our midst?