Monogamy Akin To Incest? Really?
A psychologist compares monogamy to incest while still making a case for "real love."
If you're on the fence as to whether or not you believe men enjoy monogamy than please, please, please read no further. If you'd like to continue on an idyllic thought path that married, monogamous sex remains hot after years of marriage then we suggest you shut your browser and watch The View. Monogamy Is Good, And It's Here To Stay
Psychologist and author, Christopher Ryan is what we could call a true believer that monogamy doesn't make biological sense. At one point on his blog for PsychologyToday.com he compares married couples to siblings and alludes to their sex as a form of incest. We don't really follow, but most married couples live together, so we guess that's sort of sibling-like, no?
(As scholarly as he may be, Ryan is unmarried but lives with his writing partner. So this may be a classic case of analyze the analyzer.)
He goes on to reference psychological studies and theories that back up the idea that men are so wired for variety that there isn't much us ladies can do, say, wear wigs or change outfits about. Rather it is a way of mixing up the gene pool, he says. Without men and their constant skirt-chasing and desire for new flesh we'd all live in an inbred society.
Sexual attraction is about bridging distance between people. Once they are together, the function of this desire has been fulfilled, and like all desires, its satisfaction lessens its intensity. We'd expect to find that males were eager for sex with their mates in the first few years, becoming steadily less so as time passed—regardless of how much love existed between the couple or how objectively attractive the woman remained.
This isn't to say Ryan isn't a hopeless romantic in his own right. He just doesn't know how sex got so intertwined into this silly "love" thing. Instead of getting wrapped up in sex, focus on when a man changes the lightbulb, feeds you soup while sick with the flu or mows the lawn. That's real love.
Sexual novelty is too important a part of erotic attraction for most men to be completely comfortable with simply stating that sex is all about love, period. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn't... Sure, sex can be a profound expression of love, but there are so many ways to express love. Many of them far from erotic. Think about the love expressed in caring for a disabled spouse for example. Or the love that goes into changing a baby's diapers day after day.
While we'd like to think men have evolved enough to keep it in their pants, this promiscuity he says is almost like mental illness. Unfortunately, if you're born with a penis it is your fate—carefully etched within the pages of Playboy, on strip club walls and porn sites.
Discussion
Did Isaac have more than one wife? The only one I remember is Rebekah.
Jacob, on the other hand, got it on with two wives and their respective servants. And then there is the story about Rachael pimping their husband's services to her sister/his first wife Leah.
I have often thought that the story of Genesis would make an interesting porno movie. The (money shot) story of Onan is even placed near the end!!
I’m not one to go after Evolutionary Psychology (EP), quite the contrary actually: I believe it’s a dimension that must be taken into account in analyzing human behaviors. However it’s not the only element; there are many others that according to the subject observed will have more or less relevance: geographic environment, local social norms, religion, economy, political ideologies, individual character…
Monogamy is not a women’s invention; it has been instituted as the legal norm in societies that were dominated by males long before women started to show any hint of feminist awareness. I think it’s very important to try to understand why men would want to instate a norm that is in contradiction with their “best” possible reproductive strategy (trying to fertilize a maximum number of women’s eggs to ensure their genes are spread).
I think there is a big practical reason to this: If monogamy was not the norm, a small proportion of men (the stronger and/or most powerful ones) would share the majority of women as their wives, while the weaker majority of men would have to compete against each other to get the minority of women left that were not chosen by the powerful men’s group. Moreover; arguably, those few women left would likely be the less attractive ones.
In other words, monogamy can be viewed as a male’s alternate reproductive strategy, which possibly goes against their “nature” but allows the majority of them to have a chance of procreating at all.
Another point is that seeking for multiple sexual partners is not motivated by reproduction purposes at a conscious level. It seems to me that this behavior responds to definite emotional “needs” that call to be fulfilled. Most typically, it’s something along the lines of “wanting to feel desired”, which exists for both women and men but might be more critical to resolve for men, in my opinion: while most women can observe at various degrees but arguably on a daily basis that they are sexually attractive (men ogling at them, trying to make contact and so on…), men rarely experience such situations and even when they happen, they don’t necessarily notice the signs. As a consequence, I think it’s fair to say that most men can’t assess their desirability unless they effectively achieve some kind of sexual interaction with the women who desire them.
The incest part is obscure to me. Incest in general is a taboo, but in a particular way that’s different from other taboos: it’s not necessarily a repulsive taboo like, for instance, the image of gay sex for people who are strongly straight. It’s more something like the “forbidden fruit” taboo (I’m not talking here about non-consensual, abusive incest): While straight people don’t commonly fantasize about having same-sex intercourse, it seems to me that fantasizing sex with a close-family member happens quite often. Browsing an erotica stories website (literotica.com) I was very surprised to discover that incest fictions rate quite high in the most-read stories ranking. Not that this has any scientific value for a statistic: the readers of the site are probably not a representative sample but still, it’s something striking… And I suspect that if it weren’t for the degenerative character of incestuous reproduction, incest would be much less taboo, and particularly between siblings.
Not only do I really fail to see how likely it would be for a married couple to start feeling like siblings, but even so, I’m not convinced that it would necessarily create sexual distance.
I agree with you about polygamy and men. I think monogamy as a social institution was pushed because it is more democractic. And I think that actually fits with evolutionary psychology. It's like the other male gorillas all got together and decided to overthrow the dominant one.
Missed the point of 'A kin to insest'......ewww; I mean that is why I did not get with my best friend in high school, because it would have been like getting with my brother. You know?
I am so sick of the 'guys can't help it because it is programmed to spread the seed'! Is this a nice way of saying erections happen? Women have a 'maternal time clock' that starts ticking around first period.....ummm as young as 10, and I found out that many babies male and females masturbate in the womb from a family physician. ~Please~! Hormones happen, and the levels of an individuals hormones is what determines their sex drive! As if women don't flirt, look, drool, etc! Wake up people! Hormones happen!
Maybe I'm the wrong person to speak, but I was very aware of sexual needs, desires, fetishes, etc before I was married. With this said, marriage is a commitment of love for ever, and if you read a lot of the media it says sex stops when people get married. So, what does sex have to do with love? Lack of sex with the one you love seems, to me anyway, to be the reason ~people~ cheat. Keep your married sex life spicy and fun, erotic, romantic, and loving; and the ~need~ to cheat will become obsolete!
I mean seriously I freaked when I found out the average American newly wed couple has sex twice a week, but the average long term married couple only has sex 1 or 2 times a month, and those married for more than 10 years only 3 or 4 times a year.
OMG! Shut my, griping and complaining 3 or 4 times a week after 23 years of marriage, mouth right up!
Just My 2cnts
Bright Blessings,
LyndaW
This is such utter nonsense it's hard to know where to begin.
Basically, men want to believe that they're all programmed to be wild Don Juans, so they use pseudo-science to try to support that idea. The idea that men are supposed to be rampant bulls doesn't even make sense from a biological standpoint. http://www.yourtango.com/node/22928
1) We are humans. We have evolved the ability to think and make rational choices because that helps our survival. We don't just grab any available partner. We have the ability to choose.
2) Human MALES are the ones who really need monogamy. Most of the time humans have sex, we are not fertile. We do not go into heat. This means that a guy having a one-night stand with a random female doesn't have that much chance of making a baby. The guy who keeps a woman and sleep with her a lot is the one who makes a baby.
Moreover, human babies and children need much more care than any other species. Getting a female human pregnant does not guarantee that your offspring will survive and reproduce. You need to stick around, feed the woman well, help out, and teach your children. The guys who fall in love with their sex partners are the ones who have more successful offspring.
Of course, the human male needs to keep other males away from his woman for this to work. Could he still cheat? Yes, but there are risk to that. His mate could cheat on him. His lover's mate could attack or kill him.
3) Most of the recent research on cheating as a way to have biodiversity has been about females cheating. When researchers started finding that many bird species were actually cheating, they were surprised that females would cheat. For female birds, cheating makes sense because you can get better or different sperm from a male other than your mate. You keep the monogamous guy supporting you, but you have some babies with superior sperm. Biodiversity it's the point for a cheating male. A cheating male gets to have back-up kids in case something goes wrong with his primary family.
4) Of course it's to the male's advantage to go on having sex with his partner. Early humans didn't have birth control. They kept having babies. More babies were needed to survive to adulthood. Most importantly, though, if he didn't keep his mate busy having sex, someone else would!
You are beyond intelligent. Thank you for the insight. So much makes sense now... monogamy DOES in fact help men... that is, mature ones that don't just think with their lower head.
This dude that hits up biology as pure biology..is one of those college freshmen that find something out new and goes ballistic on theories...
I say that, like many things in our complex world...it's probably a mix of a whole lotta things...that make the world go round
This is, quite possibly, the most absurd thing I have ever heard a person say. Why is it that there are people out there who must insist upon the idea that men are not "programmed" to be monogomous? There seems to be a group of people who believe that no matter how many millions of years have passed, the male instinct to "spread his seed" has not evolved to present day realities. The fact is that we have not lived in a stagnant civilization for hundreds of years and people have been able to travel the world around them and meet people who are not their relatives and are still choosing to be in monogomous relationships. I feel as though some people want to make excuses for wanting to have sex with someone besides the person they have committed to, and this excuse, ridiculous as it is, seems to be the most prevalent among men who want to have their cake and eat it, too.
