A couple weeks ago, Don and I went out for breakfast on a Sunday morning. We were chatting amiably over our eggs and sausage, and we overheard a married couple having one of those painful heart-to-hearts. It turned out, he was getting his ass chewed for “looking at” our waitress. She was attractive, and Don and I had certainly checked her out—discreetly, of course. Anyway, the poor henpecked husband was making a feeble argument that men are biologically wired to be constantly on the lookout for attractive women, and that women who insist on monogamy need to understand that men make a heroic daily struggle to do the right thing, and we are relatively successful. Our minds and hearts are in the right place, but our other parts sometimes follow more primitive paths. You can imagine how that enraged the wife, but the poor guy was just trying to be honest.
As you know, this is a topic that comes up constantly around here. The basic theory is that a man—like virtually every other male of every other species—is genetically encoded to want to “spread his seed” far and wide. This is supposedly good for the survival of the species, in terms of evolution and natural selection. More babies is, well, more babies. But when you think about it that’s a kind of silly, simplistic idea of biological success. Everyone learns in health class that humans have one of the longest periods of maturation—taking more than a decade to reach physical maturity. (Heck, we can’t even get a rental car until we’re twenty-four!) What if those babies aren’t properly cared for after they are born? What if those children are abandoned by parents who are out looking for a good time? That certainly would not be good for the species. Conceiving is just the first of about a million steps to ensure the health and survival of the species, biologically speaking. So one could certainly make the argument that a stable, monogamous parental relationship is even better for the survival of the species.
Ironically, we happened to have a copy of that Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, which contained an interesting and inflammatory essay on the subject that has since become a hot topic among my buddies. In that article, science writer Walter Kirn mentioned that scientists had done genetic research on two species of voles, which are like mice. One species lives in grassy meadows and the males are promiscuous—they take as many sexual partners as they can. Their cousins that live in the forest, on the other hand, are naturally monogamous. So scientists were able to isolate the genetic component that accounted for the forest vole’s fidelity—in other words, the monogamy gene. Not only did they find it, they transplanted it into the libertine vole, and found—presto!—they had turned a philandering rodent into a faithful one. Well, this certainly got the writer excited. Would it be possible to do the same things in humans? Synthesize some kind of drug or supplement that guaranteed your spouse would never stray? Would we take it? (The women say: Where do we sign up for immediate clinical trials? The men say: Uh, hold on a second…)
Sexuality is an awfully messy facet of being human, isn’t it? It would be nice to have a drug that just eliminated the whole sordid business. I think there must be some biological reason that sex is so complicated for humans—some evolutionary reason that a straightforward, somewhat silly, physical act is powerfully connected to deeper feelings, to the heart, the soul, and the relentless libido.
If we could take a drug that insured fidelity, would that rob sexuality itself of something transcendental? I certainly wouldn’t argue that good monogamous sex is good because monogamy is so hard. But you could say that life itself is painful and hard—and that certainly would not justify a permanent renewable prescription for heavy pain killers. (Maybe a limitless tab at the local brewpub, though?) Somehow, I think a quick fix like a monogamy drug would only mask something that is essentially a part of the human condition. If sex were a simple, rational thing, we’d do it exactly as many times as it took to procreate, and no more… and we wouldn’t spend so much time and effort trying to get it, having it, daydreaming about it, moralizing about it, and talking about it. Trying to regularize sexual desire would be significantly more complicated than, say, correcting bad eyesight. I think the more women thought about it, the more they’d realize how undesirable that would really be. If my free choice to be a monogamous lover is no longer a free choice, but a drug-induced one—how sexy is that?
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