A common refrain from men is that they
have a biological imperative to spread their seed and keep their
mates on sexual lock-down as a result of our evolutionary history.
The logic goes that since sleeping around and ensuring his mate did
not do the same worked really well for a man's reproductive success
in our species' distant past, men have almost no choice but to repeat
that behavior in today's world.
Sorry, gentlemen, but you are wrong.
It is my belief that male sexual
jealousy and promiscuity are no longer useful evolutionary tools in
first world cultures and are doomed to go the way of the dinosaurs at
some point in the near future. While it was once of vital importance
for a man to prevent his mate from sleeping with other men because
her doing so meant she had a high likelihood of bearing some other
man's child, modern cultures now have highly effective birth control
and access to abortion. A man's jealousy in the face of such
technology serves little real purpose and should therefore slowly
begin to die out as a trait in human males. Similarly, sleeping
around does little for the average man to increase his reproductive
success – while I assume there will always be some men with enough
resources to provide for multiple women's children, that has never
been case for the majority of men and now that condoms prevent most
casual flings from resulting in offspring, male promiscuity will
start to become less useful. Most men reproduce with one, maybe two
partners in their lifetimes, a state of reproductive success that
puts them on par with most women. As male promiscuity and jealousy
die out, men will indeed start to more closely resemble women, and
their testosterone levels will drop since the hormone of
aggressiveness, sexual possessiveness and high sex drive will no
longer be necessary for men to produce offspring.
If you don't believe me, there is
evidence to suggest this is already happening in western nations.
According to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study published in 2007 in
the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism,
male testosterone levels have been steadily dropping over the last
two decades and the changes cannot be attributed to health and
lifestyle changes. While the authors of that study voiced concern
that this was bad for the male population's health, other men have a
different take on the matter. David Longhi, author of When
Women Cheat, suggests that
perhaps male testosterone levels are dropping to accommodate higher
levels of female infidelity. The cheating rates for men and women are
extremely similar these days, standing at 65% for men and nearly 50%
for women according to David J Ley, Ph.D., of Psychology
Today, so it is no surprise that
male biology would evolve to reflect new behaviors in their female
partners, especially since male jealousy in the face of birth control
serves no real purpose and could in fact drive a potential mother of
his child away from him, ruining his chances of reproductive success.
It is my belief that women's newfound freedom thanks to modern
technology will radically alter the way the genders approach each
other and cause both genders to behave more like the other, resulting
in a more equitable society where sexual relationships outside of
one's primary relationship won't be as socially unacceptable and the
imbalance between expectations for male and female sexual behavior
will slowly dissipate. Perhaps that would be more fun for all of us
if we could learn not to be so jealous.
For
men who claim men simply must
be hard-wired for jealousy and promiscuity and cannot help
themselves, I must ask: you call women the hormonal, illogical gender
when you're literally telling me you cannot help your behavior
because of your hormones? That's rich. While the numbers suggest that
men are still currently less forgiving of a partner's infidelity than
women are – according to a 2014 survey of 5,000 people on the
dating site Victoria Milan,
35% of men would forgive a cheating partner vs. 76% of women – it's
important to remember that in the span of humanity's existence,
reliable birth control is an incredibly recent invention and
therefore needs far more time than we've given it to have a lasting
impact on human behavioral and cultural norms. For most men, I can't
help thinking that refusing to forgive a partner's infidelity when it
has literally no impact on their chances of producing offspring with
that partner is no longer a particularly helpful move, and since the
odds of both genders cheating are so similar, the double standard
really just needs to die out already. Luckily current trends predict
it will.
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