What Darwin Didn't Know About Sex (Part 1)
My PhD dissertation, read by half a dozen people (at most), was called “Human Sexual Behavior in the Pleistocene; A Challenge to the Darwinian View,” or something like that. (The truth is that I can’t even find a copy of the thing! ) Years later, when the dim dream of writing a book based on that research started to seem like a real-life possibility, I envisioned something focussed on how Darwin’s victorian upbringing and subsequent mind-set circumscribed his thinking about human sexual evolution — with dire consequences that resonate throughout discussions of sexuality over 150 years later.
The book was to be called What Darwin Didn’t Know About Sex. My editor thought the title would turn off people who would interpret that as a slight against Darwin, so we came up with something a bit less confrontational: Sex at Dawn.
Despite all that, I’m a huge admirer of Charles Darwin, my fellow Aquarian. Like everyone else, he was limited by the circumstances of his own life, but he was a brilliant, tormented, kind, deeply decent man who was tormented by the conflict between what he knew to be true and what he wished were true. I think we can all relate to that.
In celebration of Darwin’s birthday (February 12th, 1809), here is the first installment of a few relevant passages from Sex at Dawn, discussing Darwin’s brilliance and blind spots — and how they’ve become part of the standard narrative of human sexual evolution.
CPR
Despite his genius, what Darwin didn’t know about sex could fill volumes. This is one of them.
On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, a time when little was known about human life before the classical era. Prehistory, the period we define as the 200,000 or so years when anatomically modern people lived without agriculture and writing, was a blank slate theorists could fill only with conjecture. Until Darwin and others began to loosen the link between religious doctrine and scientific truth, guesses about the distant past were restricted by church teachings. The study of primates was in its infancy. Given the scientific data Darwin never saw, it’s not surprising that this great thinker’s blind spots can be as illuminating as his insights.
Though he certainly didn’t originate this narrative of the interminable tango between randy male and choosy female, Darwin beat the drum for its supposed “naturalness” and inevitability. He wrote passages like, “The female . . . with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male . . . [She] requires to be courted; she is coy, and may often be seen endeavoring for a long time to escape the male.” While this female reticence is a key feature in the mating systems of many mammals, it isn’t particularly applicable to human beings or, for that matter, the primates most closely related to us.
When not in the mood to worship the purity of his sisters, mother, daughters, and wife, a man was expected to purge his lust with prostitutes, rather than threatening familial and social stability by “cheating” with “a decent woman.”
In light of the philandering he saw going on around him, Darwin wondered whether early humans might have been polygynists (one male mating with several females), writing, “Judging from the social habits of man as he now exists, and from most savages being polygamists, the most probable view is that primeval man aboriginally lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men.”
Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker appears to be “judging from the social habits of man as he now exists” as well (though without Darwin’s self-awareness) when he bluntly asserts, “In all societies, sex is at least somewhat ‘dirty.’ It is conducted in private, pondered obsessively, regulated by custom and taboo, the subject of gossip and teasing, and a trigger for jealous rage.” We’ll show that while sex is indeed “regulated by custom and taboo,” the universal “dirtiness” is more a projection of Pinker’s mind than an observation of anthropological studies. There are multiple exceptions to every element of Pinker’s overconfident declaration.
Like all of us, Darwin incorporated his own personal experience— or its absence—into his assumptions about the nature of all human life.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles gives a sense of the sexual hypocrisy that characterized Darwin’s world. Nineteenth-century England, writes Fowles, was “an age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds—a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. . . . Where the female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by his ability to carve naked women. . . . Where it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate them.”
“To keep body and mind untainted,” explains Walter Houghton in The Victorian Frame of Mind, “the boy was taught to view women as objects of the greatest respect and even awe. He was to consider nice women (his sister and mother, his future bride) as creatures more like angels than human beings—an image wonderfully calculated not only to dissociate love from sex, but to turn love into worship, and worship of purity.” When not in the mood to worship the purity of his sisters, mother, daughters, and wife, a man was expected to purge his lust with prostitutes, rather than threatening familial and social stability by “cheating” with “a decent woman.” Nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed that “there are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone; and what are they if not sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?”
Charles Darwin was certainly not unaffected by the erotophobia of his era. In fact, one could argue that he was especially sensitive to its influence, inasmuch as he came of age in the intellectual shadow of his famous—and shameless—grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who had flouted the sexual mores of his day by openly having children with various women and even going so far as to celebrate group sex in his poetry. The death of Charles’s mother when he was just eight years old may well have enhanced his sense of women as angelic creatures floating above earthly urges and appetites.
Psychiatrist John Bowlby, one of Darwin’s most highly regarded biographers, attributes Darwin’s lifelong anxiety attacks, depression, chronic headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and hysterical crying fits to the separation anxiety created by the early loss of his mother. This interpretation is supported by a strange letter the adult Charles wrote to a cousin whose wife had just died: “Never in my life having lost one near relation,” he wrote, apparently repressing his memories of his own mother’s death, “I daresay I cannot imagine how severe grief such as yours must be.” Another indication of this psychological scarring was recalled by his granddaughter, who remembered how confused Charles had been when someone added the letter “M” to the beginning of the word OTHER in a game similar to Scrabble. Charles looked at the board for a long time before declaring, to everyone’s confusion, that no such word existed.
A hyper-Victorian aversion to (and obsession with) the erotic seems to have continued in Charles’s eldest surviving daughter, Henrietta. “Etty,” as she was known, edited her father’s books, taking her blue crayon to passages she considered inappropriate. In Charles’s biography of his free-thinking grandfather, for example, she deleted a reference to Erasmus’s “ardent love of women.” She also removed “offensive” pas- sages from The Descent of Man and Darwin’s autobiography.
Etty’s prim enthusiasm for stamping out anything sexual wasn’t limited to the written word. She waged a bizarre little war against the so-called stinkhorn mushroom (Phallus ravenelii) that still pops up in the woods around the Darwin estate. Apparently, the similarity of the mushroom to the human penis was a bit much for poor Etty. As her niece (Charles’s granddaughter) recalled years later, “Aunt Etty . . . armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves,” would set out in search of the mushrooms. At the end of the day, Aunt Etty “burn[ed them] in the deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire with the door locked—because of the morals of the maids.”
Loved it!
Very enjoyable quick read!