The March of the Monogamous
The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
G. K. CHESTERTON
The surprise box-office hit of 2005 was a film called March of the Penguins. The second-biggest money-making documentary to date, viewers were touched by its depiction of the extreme dedication penguin couples showed in nurturing their adorable penguin pups. Many viewers saw their own marriages reflected in the penguins’ sacrifice for their offspring and for each other. As one reviewer put it, “It’s impossible to watch the thousands of penguins huddled together against the icy Antarctic blasts … without feeling a tug of anthropomorphic kinship.” Churches across the United States reserved cinemas for private screenings for their congregations. Rich Lowry, editor of The NationalReview, told a conference of young Republicans, “Penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy. The dedication of these birds is amazing.” Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films, declared the penguins “model parents,” continuing, “What they go through to look after their children is phenomenal, and no parent who sees it will ever complain about the school run. There are parallels with human nature and it’s moving to see.”18
But unlike the birds themselves, penguin sexuality is not all black and white. That perfect penguin pair, that “ideal example of monogamy,” those “model parents” are monogamous only as long as it takes to get their little one out of the egg, off the ice, and into the frigid Antarctic water—a little less than a year. If you’ve seen the film, you know that with all the trekking back and forth across the windswept ice and huddling against raging Antarctic blizzards, there’s not much in the way of extramarital temptation anyway. Once Junior is swimming with the other eleven-month-olds—the penguin equivalent of kindergarten—fidelity is quickly forgotten, divorce is quick, automatic, and painless, and Mom and Dad are back on the penguin prowl. With a breeding adult typically living thirty years or more, these “model parents” have at least two dozen “families” in a lifetime. Did someone say “ideal example of monogamy”?
Whether you found the film to be cloyingly sweet or refreshingly so, a bold, if somewhat perverse, double feature would pair The March of the Penguins with Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Herzog’s documentary of the Antarctic is a masterpiece of photography and interviews with a range of surprising characters, including Dr. David Ainley, an almost comically reserved marine ecologist who has been studying penguins in Antarctica for two decades. Under Herzog’s wry questioning, Ainley reports having witnessed cases of penguin ménages-à-trois, in which two males take turns caring for a particular female’s egg, as well as “penguin prostitution,” where females receive prime nest-building pebbles in exchange for a bit of penguin poontang.
The prairie vole is another supposed paragon of “natural monogamy.”According to one newspaper article, “Prairie voles—squat rodents indigenous to plains and grasslands—are considered to be a near-perfect monogamous species. They form pair bonds that share a nest. Both male and female actively protect each other, their territory, and their young. The male is an active parent and, if one of the pair dies, the survivor does not take a new mate.”19
Considering the vitriol Darwin faced 150 years ago when he dared compare humans to apes, it’s striking to note the scraps of comfort contemporary scientists find in equating human sexual behavior with that of the ratlike prairie vole. We who once compared ourselves to angels now see ourselves reflected in this lowly rodent. But C. Sue Carter and Lowell L. Getz, who have studied the biology of monogamy in prairie voles and other species for thirty-five years, are unambiguous: “Sexual exclusivity,” they write “is not a feature of [the vole’s] monogamy.”20 Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (formerly director of Yerkes Primate Center) and an expert on the prairie vole, says that those in the know have a less exalted view of the prairie vole’s monogamy: “They’ll sleep with anyone but they’ll only sit by their partners.”21
Then there’s that line (invariably directed at women, for some reason) that goes, “If you’re looking for monogamy, marry a swan.”*
So what about swans, then? Many species of birds have long been believed to be monogamous because two parents are needed for the 24/7 labor of incubating eggs and feeding nestlings. As with humans, investment-minded theorists assumed males would help out only if they were certain the young were their own. But the recent advent of affordable DNA testing has blown embarrassing holes in this story, too. Although a pair of bluebirds may build a nest and rear the young together, an average of 15 to 20 percent of the chicks are not sired by the male in the partnership, according to Patricia Adair Gowaty, a behavioral ecologist. And bluebirds aren’t particularly slutty songbirds: DNA studies of the chicks of some 180 bird species previously thought to be monogamous have shown that about 90 percent of them aren’t. Swans, alas, are not among the virtuous 10 percent. So if you’re looking for monogamy, forget the swan, too!
Is monogamy natural? Yes…. Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time. Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal.
HELEN FISHER
Strange trademark for a species that enjoys so much extra-pair sexual activity. The glue holding the standard narrative together is the assumption that to marry and to mate have universally applicable meanings, like the verbs to eat, or to give birth. But whatever terminology we use for the socially approved special relationship that often exists between men and women around the world will never communicate the universe of variations our species comes up with.
“Marriage,” “mating,” and “love” are socially constructed phenomena that have little or no transferable meaning outside any given culture. The examples we’ve noted of rampant ritualized group sex, mate-swapping, unrestrained casual affairs, and socially sanctioned sequential sex were all reported in cultures that anthropologists insist are
monogamous simply because they’ve determined that something they call “marriage” takes place there. No wonder so many insist that marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family are human universals. With such all-encompassing interpretations of the concepts, even the prairie vole, who “sleeps with anyone,” would qualify.
* Most famously in Nora Ephron’s film Heartburn.