Should we love em & leave em?

[Liara Covert]

In many cases of the animal, bird and fish world, males typically initiate the traditional annual mating call or dance. The females are supposed to come running (flying or swimming). Do you ever notice the male species are often more colorful or distinctly marked to attract the female species? Male species often fight for the privilege of choosing a particular female. Every season, the goal is procreation. Take the sacrifices of antarctic penguin couples for their chance to create and hatch one egg, and 80% couples separate after a year (http://www.gdargaud.net/Antarctica/Penguins.html). Whether or not procreation succeeds, if mates survive a season, the process usually continues with new partners.

When it comes to human beings, men often work to attract a female, yet the females are usually expected to "dress up" to capture a male's attention. Perhaps, as Nicholas Blurton Jones, a UCLA anthropology and psychiatry professor, argues, marriage was invented by human males as a form of "mate-guarding." Having regular sex with one woman might be seen as less work with less threat of disease than roaming and trying to win multiple females, and such regularity may actually prove more effective for human reproduction. Do you think faithful partnerships are preferable to 'Don Juanism' if men seek to control the genetic lottery? Why do you think the gender mating roles appear somewhat reversed with other species?

[Antiventurecapital]

Originally Posted by Liara Covert

When it comes to human beings, men often work to attract a female, yet the females are usually expected to "dress up" to capture a male's attention. Perhaps, as Nicholas Blurton Jones, a UCLA anthropology and psychiatry professor, argues, marriage was invented by human males as a form of "mate-guarding." Having regular sex with one woman might be seen as less work with less threat of disease than roaming and trying to win multiple females, and such regularity may actually prove more effective for human reproduction. Do you think faithful partnerships are preferable to 'Don Juanism' if men seek to control the genetic lottery? Why do you think the gender mating roles appear somewhat reversed with other species?

Bizarre!

The traditional view is that marriage was created by women so that they have a reliable hunter/breadwinner to feed them and their kids. Finding food is a challenge when you have babies to take care of.

OTOH, most man would prefer to have a variety of partners.

Like I said, that's a bizarre statement.

[Liara Covert]

Thanks for your comment antiventurecapital. I've heard different opinions on the subject, including the idea women would actually prefer to have multiple partners and they feel men created marriage as a way to control them.

Consider the notion of the monogamous female and the promiscuous male. This pattern is supposed to be typical in both human and nonhuman primates. But field studies of nonhuman primates suggest that natural selection drives female primates to seek many male partners, argues primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hardy, author of "Mother Nature." In one group of female chimpanzees in West Africa, half of the offspring turned out not to have been sired by the males in residence.

In humans, female promiscuity has been explained by
1) no time for a relationship
2) fear of commitment
3) a fun activity
4) for revenge
5) to forget the ex-
6) don't know when to say no

Would you think male reasons to seek multiple partners would be different?

[Antiventurecapital]

Originally Posted by Liara Covert

Thanks for your comment antiventurecapital. I've heard different opinions on the subject, including the idea women would actually prefer to have multiple partners and they feel men created marriage as a way to control them.

They only claim that in Womyn's Studies and no where else.

[Angela]

Female promiscuity makes sense to me (and I'm not in a womyn's study group). One orgasm and men are out of commission for awhile -- just when women are getting started!

[Antiventurecapital]

This reminds me of something I saw a few years ago on TV. When we think of human fertility, we think of the human egg as being a stationary target towards which the sperm swim.

Egg = stationary. Sperm = mobile.

What I saw on TV was some confused woman, an engineer of some sort, explaining in a totally shell-shocked manner, how she had presented a lecture at some conference or symposium where she veered off wildly from engineering and tried to convince the audience that it's really the sperm which is dormant while it's the egg that is the mobile actor in fertilization. She was trying to establish some new engineering paradigm.

I will never forget the "poor misunderstood me" expression on her face as she recounted how the almost exclusively male audience of engineers just sat silently in disbelief.

My reaction was:

[homer]
Doh!
[/homer]

[Keith]

IIRC, it was Jared Diamond who pointed out that human females are (I think) unique amongst primates in that their fertile period is not externally visible.

This (in Jared's opinion) is probably an evolutionary adaptation to ensure that the male hangs around (to ensure he's achieved fertilisation and that noone else has done so), rather than just 'sowing his wild oats' and leaving.

Marriage presumably built up around this behaviour.

P.S. IMO, it's probably a mistake to think of marriage as something that was inflicted on women by men or vice versa. It's almost certainly a compromise of individual male, female and societal[1] needs.

[1] All things being equal, the more successful society is the one whose individuals aren't spending half their time pursuing mating behaviour rather than working.

[Erock]

Originally Posted by Angela

Female promiscuity makes sense to me (and I'm not in a womyn's study group). One orgasm and men are out of commission for awhile -- just when women are getting started!

Ugh, one thing I'm still pissed off about. I want to love women for hours!

[Antiventurecapital]

Originally Posted by Erock

Ugh, one thing I'm still pissed off about. I want to love women for hours!

You still can.

Trust me on this one.

[Michael Chui]

I'm currently reading a book entitled Myth of Monogamy and I'm in chapter 2. I'm ready to recommend it, though I think some of its views may be a touch dated at this point. It has been talking quite a bit about male strategies (that's the subject of chapter 2) regarding mating and it discusses both "Don Juanism" and "mate-guarding".

[Liara Covert]

I like the quote from Scientific American about the Myth of Monogamy:

Monogamists, this husband-wife team [Barash & Lipton-authors] says, "are going against some of the deepest-seated evolutionary inclinations with which biology has endowed most creatures, Homo sapiens included." Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and Lipton, a psychiatrist, note how rare monogamy is in the animal kingdom. One could not have been so sure about humans until the advent of DNA fingerprinting, which makes it possible to "specify, with certainty, whether a particular individual is or is not the parent." And a "key point" is that women as well as men stray from monogamous relationships. The argument leads one inevitably to ask why monogamy exists at all and why human societies show such concern about it?

The history of monogamy may surprise you:
http://www.patriarchywebsite.com/mon...no-history.htm