What Darwin Didn't Know About Sex (Part 2)
In celebration of Darwin’s birthday (February 12th, 1809), here is the second 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
Don’t get me wrong. Darwin knew plenty, and he deserves his place in the pantheon of revolutionary thinkers. If you’re a Darwin-basher looking for support, you’ll find little here. Charles Darwin was a genius and a gentleman for whom I have endless respect. But like many upper-class Victorian gentlemen, he was quite clueless when it came to the female side of human sexuality.
In questions of human sexual behavior, Darwin had little to go on. His own sexual experience appears to have been limited to his militantly prim and proper wife, Emma Wedgwood, who also happened to be his first cousin and sister-in-law. Before marriage, during his circumnavigation of the globe on the Beagle, the young naturalist appears never to have gone ashore to enjoy the sexual and sensual pleasures offered by uninhibited native women, unlike many seafaring men of that era. Darwin was apparently far too up tight to engage in what Herman Melville hinted at in his best-selling novels Typee and Omoo, or to sample the dusky South Pacific pleasures that had inspired the sexually frustrated crew of The Bounty to mutiny when ordered to leave Pitcairn island.
“As for an English lady, I have almost forgotten what she is. Something very angelic and good.”
— Charles Darwin, in a letter from the HMS Beagle
No, the young Darwin was far too buttoned-up for those sorts of shenanigans. His by-the-book approach to such matters is evident in his careful consideration of marriage in the abstract, before he even had anyone particular in mind. He sketched out the pros and cons in two columns in his notebook: Marry and Not Marry. On the Marry side he listed, “Children—(if it Please God)—Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, —object to be loved and played with. —Better than a dog anyhow . . . female chit-chat . . . but terrible loss of time.”
On the other side of the page, Darwin listed concerns such as “Freedom to go where one liked—choice of Society & little of it. . . . Not forced to visit relatives & to bend in every trifle . . . fatness & idleness—Anxiety & responsibility. . . . Perhaps my wife wont [sic] like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool.”
Though Darwin proved to be a very loving husband and father, his journal makes it clear that he almost got a dog instead.
“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.”
The understanding of human sexual evolution articulated by Darwin contains several clanging contradictions, but one of the most discordant involves female libido. Females, we’re told, are the choosy, reserved sex. Men spend their energies trying to impress women—flaunting symbols of wealth, displaying physical prowess and bravery, clawing their way to positions of fame, status, and power—all to convince coy females to part with their closely guarded sexual favors. For women, the narrative holds, sex is about the security a man can offer—emotional and material—not physical pleasure. The “coy” female who “requires to be courted” is deeply embedded in the theory of sexual selection.
If women were permitted—by nature or culture—to be as libidinous as men, we’re warned, society itself would collapse. Lord Acton was only repeating what everyone knew in 1875 when he declared, “The majority of women, happily for them and for society, are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”
And yet, despite repeated assurances that women aren’t particularly sexual creatures, in cultures around the world men have gone to extraordinary lengths to control female libido: female genital mutilation, head-to-toe chadors, medieval witch burnings, chastity belts, suffocating corsets, muttered insults about “insatiable” whores, pathologizing, paternalistic medical diagnoses of nymphomania or hysteria, the debilitating scorn heaped on any female who chooses to be generous with her sexuality . . . all parts of a worldwide campaign to keep the supposedly low-key female libido under control.
Why build an electrified high-security razor-wire fence to contain a kitty-cat?
Well, Darwin could not cover all of his bases. And remember that he had a chronic health condition.
Such irony; so much hypocrisy.
Keep 'em coming!