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.Notall such beliefs redound against women.Natalie Angier notes the prevalenceof the belief of partible paternity among foraging and horticultural soci-eties in lowland South America.Ache foragers of eastern Paraguay believethat a child can have more than one father and that the multiple ejaculatesof different men make for better and sturdier children than the discharge Selective Affinities / 195Figure 21.Earth Birth, fromThe Birth Project.© Judy Chicago1983, with quilting by JacquelynMoore.Quilting over air-brushedfabric, 5'3" × 11'4".Collectionof Through the Flower.Photo:Through the Flower Archives.of one fellow alone can. Pregnant Ache women thus enjoy adventuroussex lives and their children are supported not only by their mother s hus-band but by a cast of dutiful fathers.The Barí of Venezuela and Colombiabelieve and act in a like manner.Sociobiologists monotonously proclaim thatmale jealousy is natural and universal, but according to anthropologistStephen Beckerman, Barí men don t seem to mind their wives promis-cuity. They don t seem to object.They re not demonstrably jealous. Suchexamples militate not only against sociobiological fables about universal sextemperaments but also against sociobiological lore about what sorts of fam-ily patterns or sexual habits might be adaptive or convey some survivaladvantage.Barí children with just one father have a 64 percent chance of 196 / Varieties of Human Naturesurviving past the age of fifteen, whereas those with multiple fathers havean 80 percent survival rate.70coy egg and eager sperm?more facts of reproduction Look, a somewhat exasperated colleague recently insisted during an in-formal exchange with me around the topic of evolutionary psychology, itstands to reason that sex has different implications for men and women,since it is women who get pregnant, whereas men don t.And it s a basicfact, he continued, playing the part of the hard-headed realist, thatwomen are more likely to die during childbirth than men.And so, he con-cluded, as though my ethereal queer relativism had got on his last goodnerve, isn t what the evolutionary psychologists argue at least plausiblethe idea that natural selection has left men eager to have sex and women choosy about it? My interlocutor then invoked his care for his youngdaughter, and his abhorrence of the idea that she might someday experi-ence an unwed teen pregnancy, to urge me to reconsider my categorical dis-missal of bioreductive sexual lore.My interlocutor s argument not only turns the anthropological clock backa hundred years but also, I suspect, hails me as an uncomprehending crea-ture outside the charmed circle of heteronormative reproductivity.I m struckless by the vulgarity and melodrama of his claims than by the abstract anddisembodied approach to sex conveyed in his reasoning, with its appeal tothe self-evidence of basic facts, its elision of all the varied things people havethought about sex and reproduction.Far from providing the occasion forself-evident truths or stable understandings, the question of reproductionactually seems ripe for mythical thinking and magical investments.(In aplace no more exotic than my native North Carolina, for example, I havemet many people some of whom work in hospitals, are familiar with med-ical models of reproduction, and understand how ultrasound works whobelieve that a child s sex is not fixed until moments before birth, and whothus urge expecting mothers to eat certain foods and to avoid engaging incertain activities so as to influence the sex of the child.) But even if one takesit as a given that the prevailing biomedical understanding of reproductionis the correct one and even if one also buys the premise that basic biol-ogy, like the force of gravity, somehow draws the stuff of anthropologicalexotica down to a common ground my colleague s arguments still remain, Selective Affinities / 197ultimately, silly.Rather than saying that his arguments attribute too muchforce to biological corporeality, I should say instead that his line of reason-ing actually empties human bodies of any lived experiences in order to con-stitute them entirely from within an abstract heteronormative logic. Hasyour daughter no mouth, hands, or anus? I responded, perhaps a bit toobluntly.To put matters more delicately: I can imagine and cross-cultural sexresearch documents dozens of ways in which anyone s daughter mightenjoy a sexually adventurous life without incurring any risk whatsoever ofunwanted pregnancy.This hardly takes a lot of imagination.It s all a ques-tion of how one learns to use one s body, and how others use theirs.I haveno doubt that there are situations under which my colleague s line of rea-soning holds but that is to say, his associations follow from culturalregimes of sexuality, which instruct young girls in a very narrow range ofcarnal enjoyments, not from the evolutionary biology or psychology of sex.As even a cursory survey of the ways human beings have construed theirbodies shows, the facts about human sexuality and reproduction are nothard, cold, immutable objects, but artifacts of what we do and how we rep-resent: consequences of our actions and framings.In any claims about thebiology of sex, what one sees as plausible will thus depend on what onecounts as, and how one imagines the practices of, sex. Darwin s hypothesis about sexual selection, then, at least seems plausi-ble:The woman who plays coy and waits to have sex with a man might havesome reproductive advantage over the woman who plays fast and loose.Butthe plausibility of such reasoning rests on certain strategic denials andelisions (and on the institutional apparatus that supports them).It seemsequally plausible that the woman who engages in varied and nonreproduc-tive sex acts with many men in effect screening them for one or twolong-term partnerships might also enjoy the advantages of natural andsexual selection over her less adventurous rivals.By the same token, it seemsplausible that the eager, promiscuous man might enjoy certain biologicaladvantages over other men who fail to broadcast their seed widely.But italso seems equally plausible that the gentle, considerate man who nurturesa limited number of offspring with a single mate or two might enjoy a re-productive advantage over those men who abandon large numbers of ill-fed and poorly nurtured children to a string of hapless women.Just as there might be more than one strategy for enhancing one s re-productive fitness, a plausible Darwinism could logically support oppositeconclusions about human nature.But even enriched by multiple scenarios, 198 / Varieties of Human Naturea good Darwinism is worse than a bad social science at explaining humanacts, prodded as they are by cultural meanings in social and institutionalcontexts
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