Noli Irritare Leones

We sometimes frame discussions of nature, nurture, and sex differences as if it were simple to slice nature and nurture apart. Either our hormones are clamouring for us to be different – men wired by testosterone to be more aggressive and lustful, women ever so much more sensitive to the bonding effects of oxytocin (and we’ll set aside, for the moment, the effects of testosterone on women or oxytocin on men). Or else we’re responding directly to social messages – men should do this, women should do that. And, of course, both those things are important. But there are also a lot of ways nature and nurture interact, that can’t so easily be sliced apart. What does it mean to know that you can get pregnant, for maybe thirty years of your life? To know that you’re smaller and weaker – or know that you’re bigger and stronger – than most of your available sex partners? To know for sure that the baby’s yours, vs. knowing that the baby might not be yours? To know that you stand a non-trivial chance of being raped at some point in your life? All these things involve differences in our basic biology that can have a profound effect on our behavior, and certainly on our assessment of risks, but they’re also not disconnected from culture. Only look at how sexual behavior changes as birth control becomes more reliable and readily available – birth control is far more effective (for better or worse) at encouraging freer engagement in uncommitted sex than philosophies of free love, absent reliable birth control, ever could be. Similarly, the influence of rape on our behavior is hardly disconnected from cultural factors such as how likely rape is to be punished, how likely we are to be blamed for it, and what messages we get about the best ways to avoid it.

I said, in the monogamy/polyamory thread, that I think there are some natural constraints on what we can make of marriage, or at least what’s most likely to work on a large scale. Those constraints aren’t especially narrow. Some cultures have demanded monogamy, others allowed for polygyny, some (if a smaller number) for polyandry. Some have relatively easy divorce, and some divorce that’s nearly impossible. Some encourage families to live near the husband’s relatives, and others the wife’s. Some arrange marriages and some don’t. There have been (no, we’re not the first) some that allowed for varieties of same-sex marriage. The Egyptians allowed siblings to marry. The Nayar provide a standard anthropology class “does every culture really have marriage” example, with a system in which women, after a coming of age ritual with a man they may have little occasion to see again, have relationships with various men – to whom, if anyone, are they married? And our own culture, within the past century, has made radical legal changes to marriage – from divorce law, to laws about marital rape, to whether married women can get and use their own credit.

But, beyond that, marriage is a particular kind of institution. One that tries to accomodate a large number of people who want relatively lasting relationships that involve mutual support, sharing of property, and, for most married couples, bearing and raising children together. By no means does that mean that you’re less married if you can’t (or even just won’t) bear and raise children together, or if you choose to manage that mutual support and sharing of property in a different way from other couples, etc. If you publically make the commitment required of married couples, you’re married, and fit whatever requirements your state imposes, you’re married. But it does mean that if I say (and do believe) that there are limits to how far marriage is likely to evolve in an open to free casual sex on the side direction (given the realities of human jealousy, how people react to the risk of pregnancy involving someone outside the relationship, what most married people are likely to accept as comfortable and fair), I’m talking about how human nature interacts with a particular kind of institution (and what the bulk of people choosing that particular kind of institution are likely to shift their expectations to accept), not what anyone at all can ever enjoy doing. Something that only a few people will choose in the context of marriage may be something that quite a lot of people will choose, at least some of the time, in the context of dating. And something that only a few people choose in any context may feel just as “natural” to the people who choose it as the majority’s choice feels “natural” to them.

So, how far marriage will or won’t develop in a particular way has something to do with what people are like on a large scale (how we react to pregnancy and childrearing, what sexual arrangements are likely to be broadly popular and what ones may require more of an incentive to accept), something to do with cultural specifics (such as what the economic incentives may be, in particular cultures, of particular arrangments), and something to do with the nature of what kind of thing marriage is and what sorts of relationships end up there.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 7:09 am and is filed under Marriage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.