Wild Connection by Jennifer L. Verdolin

Author:Jennifer L. Verdolin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2014-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

YOU’RE MINE . . . ALL MINE

Moving away from harassment and force, we still are in the land of less-than-desirable male mating strategies, at least from the perspective of females. What happened to all those gifts and free meat? Mate guarding arises because males do not want females to mate with other males. Females, on the other hand, often want to seek out additional males. This is a conflict to be sure. One effective way for males to ensure females don’t produce offspring with other males is to physically keep the females away from other males.

I have already talked about how risky it can be for males to fight other males. Given the size difference between males and females, it is easier and safer for males to control their own females once they have them. Certainly this is true in primates. Hamadryas baboon and chimpanzee males frequently bite, slap, kick, pound, and drag females.23

Remember the diving beetle? Well, after a male forces a female to copulate, you would think he would let her go. Absolutely not. It gets much worse. He continues to hold on to her, dunking her underwater, only allowing her to breath from time to time—for up to six hours. This sounds pretty bad, but the poor diving beetle is lucky she’s not a walking stick insect. In that species, after copulation, a male may stay attached to his mate for seventy-two days!

When we look at cultures around the globe we see a similar theme: repression and control of women and girls. As humans, we think that this behavior has its roots in religion, culture, or other social practices that many are continuously fighting against, but, once again, my animal studies force me to look at this human social phenomenon through a biological lens. We see that males everywhere attempt to control female movement, access to education, property, or money, to name just a few. In some cultures it is so pervasive that women are even covered up from head to toe. When it comes down to it, this is classic mate guarding.

Human males also engage in other behaviors that are just as extreme. Who do you think invented chastity belts, eunuch harem guards, and a variety of other objectionable practices? Not a woman, that’s for sure. If you are a woman on an island in Papua New Guinea your husband might restrict your movement as a means of mate guarding.24

In animals, mate guarding is linked very closely with a high probability of reproduction, which means that if the female is fertile, the male is more likely to keep her close. So why do human males do this? Well, for a man in some places, there may in fact be a significant chance that another male will father his partner’s child. In a village in Trinidad, 16 percent or more of offspring are raised by a male partner other than the biological father.25 Mate guarding by men might not have evolved if there was not a substantial risk of cuckoldry.

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