I think of them as sort Steel Magnolia Amazons-- and I wonder at
times why all their husbands died at such young ages.
You think of them as that, and then wonder why their husbands were so willing to check out early??
I don't know whether we are monogamous by nature -- I rather think not, because most of the simian lines evolution tells us we descended from have, I understand, a patriarchial troop relationship with one king gorilla or chimp or whatever and a number of females he breeds with. I think human women made us monogamous because, while a man could mate with a woman within minutes and be on his way, a woman was stuck with the task not only of carrying the child for nine months, during the latter of which she might have been hard pressed to find food, but she then had at least 10 years of child rearing, which would have been hard for single Moms in 2000 BC.
I heard an interesting theory at a recent conference which I want to think more about. This was a cultural biologist, and his theory was that when we started standing on two feet our pelvises narrowed, and that narrowed the birth canal, so humans started giving birth to infants who weren't fully developed and able to live on their own, but needed years of nurturing. He pointed out that with most species, the young are able to car for themselves after only a few months at most of care from the mother, maybe one year, but no more. Only humans have infants who aren't able to live on their own, Mowgli notwithstanding, until at least age 9 or 10, and generally closer to `12 or 13, even in a primitive culture. Because of this, the women needed men to stick around, and men wouldn't do that if they had to share the woman, so the women pressed monogamy and wouldn't let men breed with them unless the men were willing to stick around.
That was his basic theory. I don't know how valid it is, but it's a theory.
If that's all true, then monogamy isn't hard wired in us, and as we get more and more to the point when a women doesn't, physically, need a man to raise a child with her, marriage would become less important.
However, biological psychologists are also finding that children raised in one parent families on average do much worse than those raised in two parent families. I don't know of any research on multi-parent families -- there aren't a lot to study today!
Anyhow, that's a ramble, but I agree that Open Marriage didn't prove very popular. Why, I don't know. |
