Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman

Author:Audrey Schulman [Schulman, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2018-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

How many sexual partners on average do you think an exclusively heterosexual man has in his lifetime?

How many sexual partners on average do you think an exclusively heterosexual woman has in her lifetime?

(When finished, please turn page over.)

On the backside of the paper was the final question.

If your two previous answers are different from one another, please explain the reason for that difference.

She watched the students as they read the two questions on the front. Their lips pursed, they hesitated only a second before they jotted down their answers. Then these young researchers—budding scientists at an Ivy-League university—flipped the paper over to read that final sentence. There was the longest pause. There came the rising sound of them flipping the paper back and forth from one side to the other. The rustling was the literal sound of their confusion, them shifting back and forth between their grasp of the mathematical incongruity and their deep societal belief in this essential difference between the genders. In the end, each student chose to write on one side of the paper or another. Only a few chose the first page, adjusting their original estimates so that the two numbers matched. Most spent their time on the second side of the sheet, justifying their answers with frantic theory-making.

This difficulty of smart people understanding such a simple concept reminded her of the way young men tended to stomp their feet on accelerators, unable to believe they might get hurt. Research showed that although an individual man could accurately assess the danger to other men in the same situation, he was unable do so for himself, always classifying his own skills as above average, his chances of getting hurt as nearly nil. This basic inability to comprehend was hardwired into his brain in the same way that every newly hatched turtle staring across the glittering sand to the ocean was certain it could reach the safety of the waves before the gulls got it.

So Frankie created a theory with three simple postulates:

1. Under the right circumstances, women substantially benefited evolutionarily by breaking the taboo against infidelity to conceive children with their lovers.

2. This benefit helped the species as a whole.

3. In response to the dangerous dilemma of needing regularly to break an important taboo, humanity had evolved a basic inability to assess the possibility that a wife might have a lover, or even to comprehend the blatantly obvious fact that heterosexual women had as much sex as heterosexual men.

The question now became how to test her theory.

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