In the newly released film Someone Like You, based on the popular book Animal Husbandry, Ashley Judd plays Jane Goodall, a woman who formulates a stunning new theory of relationships shortly after a romantic disappointment. Although the character has no relation to the famous anthropologist, Goodall's theory owes something to her chimp observing namesake: it sees all men (read: males) as animals -- not apes or pigs, but bulls in constant pursuit of a new cow.
For Judd/Goodall, this notion conveniently explains why her boyfriend left, and why he wasn't worth her time after all. The new theory proves so popular that she is soon masquerading as a psychologist who writes an advice column on relationships. New-cow theory sweeps the country, and women everywhere see a lot of bull in their previous partners.
Judd's character cobbles together her cow theory from snippets of real science reports and bits of biology books. Its prime proposition takes shape when she reads that bulls refuse to copulate with a cow they have already mated with, even when researchers disguise the old cow with the scent of a new one. New-cow theory posits that all males will leave all females eventually because their biological imperative is to find the new cow. Voila, all relationships are eventually doomed, bull-based balm to dumped damsels.
We laugh not just at the movie's exaggerated analogy between men and beasts, but because it accurately illustrates the way Americans seize on the latest pop-psych invention to help them understand relationship failure. "We use animal theories to explain our own behavior because we want some reason to explain why I am doing what I am doing," proffers relationship therapist Janice Levine, Ph.D. "However, if we use this information to justify our behavior instead of as a tool for a different point of view, it becomes dangerous." In the movie, as in the real world, a simplistic theory is seductive to people who are confused by the complexity of human emotions and relationships.
The laziness of such logic has not stopped a spate of science articles purporting to teach us about ourselves via the slimmest slice of animal behavior. What is left out of the stories is the overwhelming variety in animal mating rituals: suicide (the drone bees), aggressive harem-keeping (silverback gorillas), sexually aggressive females (crickets and birds), and insecticide (insects and spiders). Finding the correlation between the mating habits of cows -- or spiders or silverbacks -- and our own may be an amusing parlor game, but it is hardly a complete picture.
"You have to meet strict scientific criteria to make a claim of similarity," says Ralph J. Greenspan, Ph.D., a geneticist at The Neurosciences Institute at San Diego, whose observations of fruit-fly mating rituals appear in the book to suggest how low men are on the evolutionary scale. "One of the ways species are most divergent is in their mating behaviors," he points out. "It is sloppy thinking to make extrapolations based on superficial similarities."
By the end of the film, Judd's character realizes the folly of a one-size-fits-all theory of relationships. "It is not helpful to graft scientific explanations onto human affairs when it doesn't help you in the end to make a decision, to make a choice," adds Greenspan. "Because we are willful beings we still have to make choices that can't be reduced by science."
Making choices is an integral part of being human. And while it's enticing to think there is a formula for making choices, we happen to be a little more complicated than cows.
PHOTO (COLOR): Judd in Someone Like You: Taking a wry look at human relationships.
Michael Seeber is the deputy editor of Psychology Today.
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