Wright's enthusiastic explanations of EP offered a seemingly cohesive, consistent overview of human nature that had answers for everything. In the best and the worst ways, Evolutionary Psychology just makes sense. Unfortunately, it often does so in the same way it makes sense that the earth is flat, the sun moves across the sky and the nose exists to hold eyeglasses. In other words, EP offers answers, but sometimes they're irrelevant and/or misleading, despite their common-sensical aura.

So there I was, armed with answers. Evolutionary Psychology seemed to explain nearly everything worth thinking about. Mine was almost a religious experience, being delivered from confusion and doubt to clarity and certainty. Like any good convert, I proselytized like a madman. I hungrily fortified my new understanding with all the classics of EP with titles like The Adapted Mind, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, Anatomy of Love, The Origins of Virtue, The Mating Mind....

At the time, I was the only man working for the San Francisco office of an organization called Women in Community Service, so I had plenty of smart, open-minded women around to bore and irritate with my rather male-centric ideas. Even from within the fog of my certainty, it was apparent that many of my co-workers weren't buying what I was selling. Of course, this could have had something to do with the fact that I was smugly informing them that they were basically evolved to be gold-diggers, one and all.

One of the core assumptions of EP - going back to Darwin - is that women are not very interested in sex per se. They barter sexual favors for protection, food, help with child-care and whatever other goods and services they can squeeze out of a desperately horny guy. The cliche is that "men trade love for sex while women trade sex for love."

But it wasn't long until my reading led me to a nagging question, which I came to call the Clinton Conundrum:

A) If, as Evolutionary Psychology holds, the main battleground in the never-ending War-Between-the-Sexes is over fidelity, with men straining toward the maximum possible quantity of sex partners while women struggle for mate quality and familial stability,

B) and, heterosexual men have controlled the levers of political, economic, and military power for a long time, if not forever,

C) then how the hell did the United States become a society where any man - up to and including the President – could be publicly humiliated, even impeached, for having a consensual sexual encounter with a woman not his wife — even if his wife had nothing to say publicly about the matter?

With all their power and influence, how on Earth had white, upper-class heterosexual American men painted themselves into this corner? If sexual monogamy runs against men's very nature, and men have always controlled the levers of power, how had male infidelity become such a big deal?

This was a very big question, and I didn't find any satisfying answers in my reading, so I came up with what I called The Theory of Assumed Hypocrisy. Until the mid-twentieth century, "monogamy" had referred not to sex, but to marriage. This state of affairs (pun intended) had continued unabated for millennia. In the Old Testament, adultery is defined as a married woman having sex with a man other than her husband. "Adultery" depends on the other woman being married and thus literally "belonging" to another man. There is no word specified in the Old Testament for a man having sexual relations with a woman other than his wife - unless she's married.

Even the coveting of thy neighbor's wife, read in context, clearly isn't about sex so much as keeping up with the Joneses. "Thy neighbor's wife" is just one in a list of things thou shalt not covet. In Exodus 20:17, we read that in addition to thy neighbor's wife, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house...nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass." Evidently, thy neighbor's unmarried daughters and sisters are perfectly covetable, just stay away from the wife and that ass!

My theory supposed that men had agreed to the primacy of the nuclear family and the appearance of fidelity precisely because actual sexual fidelity was not expected as long as certain standards of discretion were adhered to. [The same Robert Wright who got me into this mess in the first place has just published an essay strikingly similar to my Theory of Assumed Hypocrisy, which I'll have more to say about in this space soon.] Think of Francios Mitterand's long-time mistress and their daughter standing next to his wife and their children at his funeral. Or think of Tammy Wynette singing Stand By Your Man ("he'll do things you won't understand . . . after all, he's just a man.").

But in the mid twentieth-century, American women began to demand an end to Assumed Hypocrisy. Soldiers returning to domestic life in the U.S. after WWII found themselves in a different home game, or at least a game where new rules now applied. Women had been voting for a few decades, and had become integral to the economic system during the war, which was won largely due to industrial output that would have been impossible without Rosie the Riveter and her hard-working sisters. Through the fifties, sixties and seventies, laws were passed granting women ever more power in disputes over divorce, child custody, spousal abuse, sexual discrimination, and so on. Women had begun using this power to press an agenda promoting sexual fidelity – which they mistakenly equated with family stability. Although I certainly considered myself a feminist – not to mention a Woman in Community Service – it seemed clear that by including sexual transparency in their demands for equality, the women's rights movement had screwed men by forcing them to adopt a woman's perspective on "healthy," "emotionally mature" sexuality.

My theory made sense.

Except it didn't, really, because let's face it – women are no happier than men with this situation. (For example, take a look at Jen Kim's recent post about loving assholes.) More than half of American divorces are instigated by women and, whether one feels morally justified or not, divorce is excruciatingly painful for everyone involved. A recent survey of the roughly half of American couples who manage to stay married over the long haul found that of this select group of marital survivors, only 38% considered themselves happy. Add the married-but-unhappy to the divorced, and you start to see an epidemic of misery and disillusionment concerning love and sex in the U.S. Women are every bit as bereft of lasting love as the men they are divorcing or never marrying in the first place. So how to explain the abject failure of Love, American Style?

This is where I started to lose faith in the answers EP offered. Evolutionary Psychology's answers are founded on glaring contradictions. According to Darwin and pretty much everyone writing in EP, women are the choosy, reserved sex. Men spend their energies trying to impress women - wearing Rolex watches, driving shiny new sports-cars, clawing their way to positions of fame and status - all to convince the women to part with their closely-guarded sexual favors (as fellow PT blogger, Satoshi Kanazawa puts it, "Men do everything they do in order to get laid." We're told that for women, sex is all about the security of the relationship, not physical pleasure. This approach to sex is quite foreign to most men. As comedian Jerry Seinfeld put it, "If I were a woman, I'd be down at the docks waiting for the fleet to come in."