Polysexuality Ch. 04

Also, as best I can tell, men are not having sex with lots of women because they want lots of children, but because something inside them craves sexual variety. Perhaps there is a genetic need for survival that makes all creatures do whatever it takes to maintain themselves through offspring. Perhaps that is driving our behavior without most of us realizing it. However, perhaps most creatures seek variety because they seek a certain kind of pleasure they get from it. Perhaps creatures are less driven by an unwitting genetic urge for continuation of the species (or of their own line) than by a well-recognized but genetically based love of good feelings—an urge with an immediate pay-off. This pleasure imperative has the same effect, but is less mysterious. Indeed, so long as creatures seek sexual pleasure, life will continue without any need of a genetic urge for maintaining the species. So long as creatures seek sexual pleasure, at least occasionally the result will be pregnancy and childbirth, even among a species with many ways of preventing pregnancy.

Women are not being monosexual because they want only a few children, though it may be that many stress monosexuality in order to keep food on the table, provided by their husbands. If the evolutionary speculation is true, women should want many partners, as some husbands are infertile. Polysexuality makes evolutionary sense (for an excellent and witty review of the current scientific thinking on this by a zoologist and a psychiatrist, see David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People [New York: W. H. Freeman, 2001]). Many systems of religious beliefs have strongly encouraged both monosexuality and many children, and this influences us.

In American culture, young people put great emphasis on being in love as the fundamental consideration leading to marriage. A great many divorces, particularly among people who have been married only a few years, are due to the feeling that they no longer love each other the way they did at first. This is one of many areas where understanding the polysexual orientation can be a great service to society.

Recently National Geographic published a cover story called "Love: The Chemical Reaction" (February 2006). Although it simplified the chemistry a great deal, it shared some interesting information. It claimed, essentially, that the complex of feelings of lust, passion, and romance we call being "madly in love" that often leads to marriage is not only chemically induced, but is not induced by the same chemicals that cause the feeling of warm, companionable friendship called love that people who have been happily married for years experience from day to day.

It's a little like the difference between being high on the methamphetimine called Ecstasy and taking a couple ibuprofen for pain relief. One fills you with wonderful feelings that are not your normal state and make it difficult to think rationally and be duly cautious, while the other makes it easier to be your real self with a minimum of pain. People who are "in love" are not entirely in their right minds or able to make clear-headed decisions about their future. It's as if they were high on Ecstasy. These are the people who are deciding to get married—imagining that they will remain high their entire life. As one might expect, teenagers who get married after "falling in love" are among those most likely to get divorced when they come to their senses.

Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher put a number of college students who had recently fallen "madly in love" in an MRI and watched what happened when she showed them photos of their love interest. She found that two particular areas of the brain lit up: the ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus. These areas, as the article puts it, are "home to a dense spread of receptors for a neurotransmitter called dopamine" (p. 35). Fisher claims that dopamine is what gives people the sensations linked to being "madly in love" (for more information, see Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love [New York: Henry Holt, 2004]; also see Charles Pasternak's critical review of the book at http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/love.asp; retrieved 31 January 2006).

Among other things, dopamine stimulates passion, pleasure, and the libido. Cocaine and amphetamines can both cause a surge in dopamine levels in the brain ("Dopamine," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine; retrieved 31 January 2006). If seeing one's passionate love interest sparks a somewhat similar response (though naturally, not artificially, as with drugs), it's no wonder that the feeling of falling in love is something like being high.

But as the poet A. E. Housman wrote about being drunk and seeing the world as it isn't, " 'tis pleasant till 'tis past: / The mischief is that 'twill not last." As Lauren Slater writes in National Geographic,

Biologically speaking, the reasons romantic love fades may be found in the way our brains respond to the surge and pulse of dopamine that accompanies passion and makes us fly. Cocaine users describe the phenomenon of tolerance: The brain adapts to the excessive input of the drug. Perhaps the neurons become desensitized and need more and more to produce the high . . . (p. 44).

That is to say, being madly in love is exhausting. Our brains get used to the extra dopamine, and eventually they stop reacting to it by making us feel passion and desire.

This explains why the romantic high that leads so many people to get married seldom lasts. Its end is a natural phenomenon, and no one is to blame. Sometimes it can be stimulated again: a glass of wine in front of a warm fire, a vacation to a resort in Jamaica. But the feeling will be temporary.

Even college graduates don't understand the transitory nature of romantic passion and are disappointed when it ends. What are teenage lovers who end their education with high school supposed to do? Far too often, they divorce, often in their mid-twenties after producing a child or two.

But the decrease in dopamine production needn't signal the end of a marriage. The high is over, for the most part, but true love is still growing. Instead of fire, there is warmth. Long-term love relationships, it seems, trigger the release of oxytocin, a hormone made in the brain (p. 48). Oxytocin induces uterine contractions. It also helps mothers bond with their babies. When oxytocin floods the brain, it makes people feel loving, warm-hearted, and trusting. It reduces pain, stress, and anxiety and may help lower blood pressure ("Oxytocin," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin; retrieved 31 January 2006). It's no wonder that research shows that happily married couples live longer than unhappy couples or singles.

Oxytocin is released when mothers nurse their babies. It's also released any time a woman's nipples are stimulated. Orgasm releases oxytocin for both men and women, and this helps explain why sex helps people bond with each other. Similarly, if a couple stops having sex, their sense of bonding may decrease. Oxytocin needs estrogen to work, so it works best in women. This is why women bond more easily than do men. Touching and hugging help to stimulate oxytocin, too (see Paul Byerly, "Oxytocin in Women: The Bridge Between Touch and Sex," http://www.themarriagebed.com/pages/biology/female/female-oxytocin.shtml; retrieved 31 January 2006).

It seems that oxytocin is readily available throughout life. In a healthy long-term relationship or marriage, it's produced when a couple touches, hugs, kisses, makes love, shares, eats together, chats, walks together, thinks warm thoughts about each other, or gazes into each other's eyes. Indeed, in a good marriage, oxytocin is being produced and causing bonding day by day.

Can the passion ever return? Can dopamine-caused romance once again infuse a marriage? Helen Fisher and her colleagues say it can. "Aron and Fisher also suggest doing novel things together, because novelty triggers dopamine in the brain, which can stimulate feelings of attraction" (p. 49; also see Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic [New York: HarperCollins, 2006]).

Many couples, possibly a million, indeed, have discovered that polysexuality can rejuvenate a marriage. The novelty of meeting new partners, whether separately or, even better, as a couple, stimulates dopamine, which causes romantic passion, and there is enough for not only the new partner but for the spouse. Many long-term swinging couples claim that their weekly or monthly visits to their favorite swing club gives them an erotic jolt that lasts for days and keeps their marriages fresh.

When they're done wrong, extramarital sex and premarital sex can seem cold and empty. However, if they are done right, not only is there dopamine leading to the renewed thrill of passion, but there is the warm bonding caused by oxytocin release during foreplay and intercourse. People who go to swing clubs often play with people they barely know, but when everything works well, a bond can develop from this intimacy that lasts for years and transcends the transitory bonding that happens in, say, a cocktail party. It's not as deep as what two long-term partners have, but it's special.

If a husband and wife share this with each other, they have friends in common, but they also have even more reason to stay together and stay in love. Their own love for each other increases as they play together. The chemicals help it happen. As people are fond of saying in some swing clubs, "The couple that plays together stays together." They not only have the bonding of oxytocin, but they have much more dopamine in their marriages than most couples, so the passion recurs more often.

If you are a monosexual, reading this, perhaps, to understand a polysexual spouse, what are you feeling right now? Are you beginning to sense that for the polysexual, whether male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, desiring or having multiple sex partners may not reflect at all unhappiness in a marriage? Your partner may feel nothing but love for you, be very happy being married to you, yet somehow crave more variety. The best explanation for the craving is gene and environment-induced polysexuality. Your partner may be struggling to deal with genetically natural and normal needs that our culture condemns for reasons that are partly valid, but needn't be.

I Want My Own Baby to Inherit My Property

Why is it that our cultural norm is monosexual monogamy when so many of us are genetically polysexual (though also monogamous)? Part of the reason is the way Christians over the centuries have interpreted the Bible, marginalizing many of the relevant Bible verses while placing undue emphasis on a few verses taken out of their cultural context. This will be explained later in the book.

Anthropologists and biologists will probably agree, however, that there is something in men, deeply ingrained over thousands of years, that makes them want to be certain that they are the fathers of children born to their wives. If we search the ancient laws of Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, China, and more, we find harsh laws against women who get pregnant by another man. We find similar laws among many more recent primitive cultures studied by anthropologists. Some may believe that men are more likely to be polysexual in orientation, but whatever the reason, men are also terrified of their wives being polysexual.

Perhaps this is because men have known their own desires and assume that their wives have similar desires. Perhaps, in centuries past, they've known they were having sex with other men's wives and feared other men would get to their own wives, as well.

In tribes practicing female circumcision, it seems this is done to lessen women's sexual pleasure so they will be less likely to take other lovers. The assumption is that wives will do whatever necessary to fulfill their needs because women are naturally polysexual. Their pleasure is less important to their husbands than their monosexuality, so they are circumcised. The requirement in many Islamic countries for women to keep their bodies and sometimes even their hair and face covered also seems to be due to men knowing their own hearts and being uncertain of the hearts of their wives. What cannot be seen is less likely to be desired.

In Bible times, we find, wherever people then were writing laws, men felt that the primary way of assuring a sort of immortality for themselves was by being remembered. They were most likely to be remembered by their descendents. Their descendents were most likely to remember them if the men owned land they could pass down to their descendents. Men imagined future generations of heirs blessing them for faithfully maintaining their inheritance and passing it on.

If a wife got pregnant by another man, it was possible that a husband could unwittingly leave his own inheritance to another man's son, a man who was not part of the family. Not only would a man's own memory wither, but the memory of his ancestors. He would be forgotten. (Jewish ideas of immortality through memory are based on this.) The assumption is that after a man died, his wife's lover would come forward and explain to the son who the real father was. Thus, having sex with another man's wife was in a way the ultimate theft, stealing a man's wife, property, children, memory, and immortality.

[BOX: What Do the Scientists Say?: Have husbands throughout history been right to worry about other men getting their wives pregnant? David M. Buss writes, "A female colleague of mine who wishes to remain anonymous told me that she discovered a 10 percent genetic cuckoldry rate, using DNA fingerprinting technology, in a study she was conducting on the genetics of breast cancer in the United States. So perhaps 10 percent of the readers of these pages have genetic fathers different from their putative fathers, products of their mother's clandestine infidelities." (The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating rev. ed. [New York: Basic Books, 2003], 236.)]

Throughout most of English literature there are accounts of men having sex with other men's wives. In Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" and "The Reeve's Tale," for example, written before 1400, medieval college students happily enjoy the wife of a carpenter and the wife and daughter of a miller (and the women enjoy them, too!).

Many of the old English and Scottish ballads sung for centuries where they were composed and then sung later in Appalachia deal with this, too. In "Matty Groves," for example, the wife of a lord spies handsome young Matty and drags him to her bed while her husband is off tending the sheep. The idea is that she wants sex, but her husband fears an heir not of his own blood and kills Matty. Surely songs like this had some basis in fact.

This is in part due, perhaps, to the fact that men often couldn't afford to marry until they were older; or after being widowed, having money and power, they married girls rather than women their own age. This was the so-called "May-December" marriage that was considered a sure recipe for a wife playing around. The sympathy of the audience was often with the wife because only a foolish old man would want a wife he was unable to satisfy. As the old man was also often relatively wealthy, there may have been audience jealousy involved, as well.

Shakespeare's plays are full of references to cuckolds, to husbands who "wear horns." In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Gratiano, hearing that his new wife and Bassanio's new wife have slept with a lawyer and his clerk, says, "What, are we cuckolds ere we have deserved it?" (V.i.265). He is assuming that women take lovers when their husbands prove unsatisfactory. In Othello, the supposedly cuckolded general says, "A horned man's a monster and a beast." Iago replies, "There's many a beast then in a populous city, and many a civil monster" (IV.i.62--63). Othello, of course, becomes a beast and murders his wife for an act she has not committed.

[BOX: In As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 3, the fool Touchstone decides to marry the "country wench" Audrey, who says, "I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul." Touchstone replies, "Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness! sluttishness may come hereafter." They will marry in the forest, among the "horn-beasts," such as deer. But "horn-beasts" leads Touchstone to comment on the likelihood of husbands "wearing horns" and to argue that it is indeed "more honorable" for a man to "wear horns" because horns are a form of defense, and a defended city with towers and wall is more honorable than an undefended village. He says,

Courage! As horns are odious, they are necessary. It is said, 'many a man knows no end of his goods': right; many a man has good horns, and knows no end of them. Well, that is the dowry of his wife; 'tis none of his own getting. Horns? Even so. Poor men alone? No, no; the noblest deer hath them as huge as the rascal. Is the single man therefore blessed? No: as a walled town is more worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor; and by how much defence is better than no skill, by so much is a horn more precious than to want.]

Whether or not many men in cities were cuckolded in Othello's day, Shakespeare and his audience believed they were. The word cuckold comes from the old French word for the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in some other bird's nest. (When a man placed his progeny in another man's wife, that other man was cuckolded or cuckooed, and somehow the injured party came to be called a cuckold, when the cuckoo parallel should actually refer to the man planting the heir in the nest.)

In the tales and songs of Spain and Italy, we also find this concern with men impregnating the wives of other men, and this was considered a matter of "honor" and a reason to kill. Such lovers as Casanova and Don Juan excelled at this, and the assumption was that a great many women were eager to enjoy these men. Whether they were or not, men believed they were. Again, the real concern behind the stated concern with honor was the integrity of inheritance: a man wanted to make sure that his heir was his own flesh and blood.

We might consider in this context the feudal droit du seigneur or "right of the first night." This was exercised in France until the French revolution (see the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities for an example) and in England during the middle ages. Lords claimed the feudal right to have sex with any girl who worked on their estates on her wedding night. (Whether they often exercised this right is questionable.) This was a matter of showing one's power over others: just when a man most wanted his new wife for himself, the lord took her. Beyond this, the nobility assumed that servant women were theirs for the taking. Also, breeding with the lord could improve the bloodline, so to speak. (In "The Miller's Tale," Chaucer writes that the pretty young wife Alison is good enough "For any lord to leggen [lay] in his bedde, / Or yit for any good yeman [yeoman] to wedde" (ll. 161--162). A working girl was fit for a lord to play with or for a working man to marry, but she shouldn't expect to marry the lord. We find a woman who did dream of marrying the lord in Thomas Hardy's 19^th century novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. It does not end happily.)

This is the cultural context from which our fear of "unfaithful" women developed. Were many women practicing polysexuals? Probably not. But men feared they might be because they knew they themselves were or would be if they had the courage and opportunity. This is probably related to the idea developed by biologists that men have a need for many partners, while women do not.