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The Sunday Times, Page 4
When an older is tempted by a young girl
Over lunch the other day, a friend said her husband had turned 50, and spoke about how men usually would have their mid-life crises after they turned 50.
She mentioned that two of her husband's peers had traded in their wives for younger models. At her husband's birthday party, a friend had jested: "A man doesn't want to wake up to his grandmother. He wants to stay a young man forever".
My friend related all of this matter-of-factly over her foie gras. She is a good 10 years younger than her husband and is still attractive, so she has no cause to worry.
I did her no favour though by pronouncing, if rather pompously: "Man is genetically programmed to be polygynous. It takes a supreme act of will or cold calculation to resist an opportunity that presents itself to him to make another copy of his genes. It is his most natural drive."
The man who calculates what he would stand to lose by his act to seize the opportunity, whether it is for a moment of pleasure, or for a lull-blown affair, or even an other marriage, will not see it as cold calculation as such but as rationalisation and conscience, even love:
I have a stable family and a secure career, I cannot afford to throw them away. My wife may be older, familiar as an old pair of shoes, and not half as vivacious as this sweet young thing, whose innocent eyes and taut body promise so much unexplored territory. But no, it is an uncertain future with this younger woman and even a fling may cost me time and energy I cannot afford. I would pass, stay with the safe. It is good enough to know that I can still have it if I wanted it. So call me boring, but do not call me immoral.
So he overcomes a temptation and his decision makes him feel himself a stronger man-and deservedly so.
But if he is a very successful man in his milieu as well as a man with high self-esteem, then he will find that temptations will keep popping up, especially during unguarded moments, both from unexplainable urges within, and from women whom he comes into contact with, who send him unmistakable signals of their availability.
Unlike him, a man with moderate self-esteem is less distracted by such temptations because he has fewer chances at extramarital dalliance. And unlike him, he is more likely to feel insecure about his mate's fidelity. So he focuses more energy and attention on his family. He makes a more committed, if less desirable (from the genetic point of view), husband.
Meanwhile, the man with extremely low self-esteem is going to be continuously frustrated by women: he is a rapist in the making.
Monogamy, I told my friend as I finished my second glass of wine and as she tucked into her apple pie with ice-cream, actually came about not so much to protect women but to ensure that men get to have a mate each.
In a polygynous culture, the best men might just take all the available women, leaving the lesser men with none, as is pointed out by the two authors of the book The Winner-Take-All-Society (1995).
"The most bitterly fought winner-take-all contest in the entire animal kingdom is for access to mates."
And "for humans and other animals, the most intense of these struggles are typically among males.
"Females, who in most species, invest heavily in the gestation and care of offspring, have limited reproductive capacity relative to males, whose only contribution in many instances consists of cheaply manufactured sperm cells."
And since in the Darwinian scheme of evolution by natural selection, each individual's goal is to transmit as many copies of its genes as possible to the next generation, the battles for access to females can get very bloody indeed, with enormously high stakes. In one species of seals, for example, 4 per cent of the breeding-age males sire almost 90 per cent of all surviving offspring.
More than 85 per cent of past and present human societies for which data are available were polygynous. In these societies, high-ranking males often take numerous wives, and the biggest winners enjoy prodigious reproductive success.
So monogamy, which has evolved as an institution in most societies, is really "the ultimate positional arms control agreement", as the authors call it. It is a deal cut among men: One man apiece, to keep the peace.
Contrary to popular belief, most men are probably better off in a monogamous system and most women worse off, at least in Darwinian terms. This is suggested by journalist Robert Wright, in his critically acclaimed book on the new science of evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal (1994).
He offers a crude and offensive but nevertheless analytically useful model of the marital marketplace by ranking- isn't this so Singaporean?- in terms of their desirability as mates, say, 1,000 men and 1,000 women.
Suppose these 2,000 people live in a monogamous society and each woman is engaged to marry the man who shares her ranking. She would like to marry a higher-ranking man but they are all taken up by competitors who outrank her. The men would like to marry up too, but for the same reason cannot.
Suppose polygyny is suddenly allowed, and suppose a quite attractive but not overly bright female with a ranking of 400 dumps her fiance (male #400, a shoe salesman) and agrees to become the second wife of a successful lawyer (male #40).
All 600 women ranked after her move one notch up to fill the vacuum; they still get a husband all to themselves and a better one to boot. Meanwhile, 599 men wind up with a wife slightly inferior to their former fianceesñand one man gets no wife at all.
In real life, there would be more than one woman who will choose to be the second or third wife of a higher-ranking male. But even if there is no stampede for the top men, many women, even those who will choose not to share a husband, have their options expanded. By the same token, many men lower down the scale will suffer.
Educated career women- such as those of you who have read this far, perhaps with growing fury- will find it hard to accept that women today will still want to share husbands if given a choice.
But they have never been in a factory worker's position, taking home $5 a day and going home to a one-room flat where the husband has slept in all day waiting for her to come home to cook him dinner.
My lunch-mate, finishing her coffee serenely, did not articulate the one response that I find almost immediate among my younger colleagues whenever I stray into the subject, which is: All this Darwinian crap is just a convenient excuse for male philandering and dignifying it as a biochemical compulsion is an easy cop-out. Where is the morality then?
Wright's answer at the end of his wonderfully illuminating book is: We are potentially moral animals but we are not naturally moral animals. To be moral animals, we must realise how thoroughly we are not.
If you buy Darwin's doctrine, you will spend your life in deep suspicion of your motives. That is the first step towards a non-selfish morality.
The second step is to keep this newly learned cynicism from poisoning your view of everyone else.
In Wright's words: "To pair harshness towards self with leniency towards others; to somewhat relax the ruthless judgement that often renders us conveniently indifferent to, if not hostile to, their welfare; to apply liberally the sympathy that evolution has meted out so stingily."
"TELL that to a woman whose husband has abandoned her," said a colleague when I tested this column on her.
I do not have the "correct" response to that. Perhaps the woman who accepts the Darwinian logic of natural selection would find it easier to cope with her loss than one who does not. Likewise too, if it is the other way round: the man who has to cope with his wife's desertion for another man whose genes are fitter, or who can ensure her offspring will be better taken care of.
Love is what remains in the memory, not hate- and life goes on.
