Unless you have been asleep for the last several days, you already know the news cycle was recently saturated with a particularly passionate Rush Limbaugh rant. In it he resorted to his requisite name calling. This time, of a woman who had earned his ire—she was labeled "slut," "prostitute," and, by insinuation, that old standby, "internet porn star." And then, inevitably, came the watered down apologies, with additional taunts attached like unwanted riders on a congressional bill. What on earth could make Rush Limbaugh angry enough to say something he would actually have to take back? What force could ever drive this particularly vicious and unrepetant bloviator to say something so offensive he would then issue an apology?
Only a vagina has this power.
Well, a vagina, and a vulva. And then all the reproductive machinery behind them—the fallopian tubes and the ovaries...you get the picture. Finally, let's not forget the clitoris, which serves no function other than to make sex feel good. Yes, female plumbing, female sexuality explicitly uncoupled from baby-making, and the specter of female sexual pleasure brought the blogosphere and the talking heads to a screeching halt last week. The facts are familiar by now: a conservatively-dressed law student named Sandra Fluke recently testified before a senate committee, expressing a wish that Georgetown University's student health plan might include coverage for contraception.
Rush Limbaugh (and Bill O'Reilly) got wind of her testimony and in short order, he and the like-minded had turned Sandra Fluke into a contemporary Hester Prynne, the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel, The Scarlett Letter, about a Puritan woman who gives birth out of wedlock, refuses to divulge the identity of the baby's father, and must wear a scarlet "A" for adulteress on her chest forever after, living as an social outcast and pariah. Rush would have Fluke wear an "S" for slut:
[She] goes before a Congressional committee and essentially says the she must be paid to have sex, and what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. The johns....We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch...Did you ever consider backing down how much sex you're having?
Rush's outburst has been, predictably, lambasted by the Left and more or less ignored by the Right. What has been lost in this sanctimonious back and forth about his antediluvian politics and appalling manners (and the refusal of prominent men on the Right to denounce them) is any substantive discussion or understanding of what exactly underpins male anger at figures (fictional and real) like Hester Prynne and Sandra Fluke. Why, precisely, do such women elicit the fantastically rageful responses they do from these men and others like them? How are we to understand the urge to punish, banish, and humiliate sexual women publicly? In short, and put most simply, what is it about being a woman who has sex that angers and threatens people—particularly, certain men—so much?
Two basic insights of evolutionary biology may provide unexpected answers to these questions. Human behavioral ecologists tell us that a couple of simple facts separate the men from the women when it comes to sexuality and reproduction, and that these differences have been driving high-ranking male primates, including homo sapiens, to extremes (like Rush's) for eons .
Women are the limiting sex.
While there are generally the same number of women as there are men in the world, with sex ratios skewing more or less evenly, equality is not the end of the story. Due to pregnancy, childbearing, and lactation there are generally fewer women on the sexual market at any one time than there are men. In other words, in most places, at most times, there are more men who want to have sex than there are women willing to have sex with them.
Put another way, while men and women presumably both want sex, women are, in a broad statistical sense, less available for it. It is not difficult to see how such an imbalance could lead to a number of behaviors—everything from courtship ("Choose me," the man who woos a woman with his accomplishments and attentions pleads) to flat-out resentment and even coersion. In this deeper, further-ranging perspective, Rush's outburst, with his (factually inaccurate in this instance) emphasis on the injustice of having to "pay" for women to behave like "sluts" speaks to a primitive truth. Male primates, even high-ranking ones, have for millennia had to pay a high price for access to sexually receptive females—investing in their young and often abjuring other opportunities for sex and reproduction with others, for example. In turn, sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy tells us, "they have been intent on controlling when, where and how females belonging to their groups reproduced...male fascination with the reproductive affairs of female group members predates our species." Yep, Rush is a caveman.
Internal fertilization works for women and works against men.
Internal fertilization, biological anthropologists tell us, is a phenomenon that has had a huge impact on the evolution of male and female strategies of reproduction, childrearing, and behavior in general. Mostly, it has served women well, and served to vex men. For, unlike the case with external fertilization (think a fish fertilizing the eggs a female has already laid), or even mammals and primates when it is clear when the female is fertile (estrus signals this clearly, creating swollen, red tissues that say, "Ready here!"), humans are more complex. Women can have sex any old time and the clues that we are ovulating are so subtle as to be essentially invisible—we are what biologists term "semi-continuously sexually receptive." Given this fact, how's a guy to know whether a kid is his? The availability of DNA tests at Duane Reade aside—and they are a relatively recent thing—there has, prehistorically and historically, just been no way for them to know. Hence many an episode of Peyton Place (and real life) in which a guy can't be sure and a lot of jokes about kids who look like the milk man.
In some places, as among the Ache of the lowland Amazon, the Mehinaku of Brazil and the Yanamamo of Venezuala, women "spread the certainty," having sex with a number of men the instant they know they are pregnant in order to create the feeling that anyone in the group could be the father. This strategy is the kind of thing that canny and successful mothers—Blaffer Hrdy deems them "flexible maternal strategists"—have been doing throughout our evolutionary history to ensure that their children have a better shot at being provisioned, cared for, and growing to adulthood and reproducing themselves. A cultural belief called "partible paternity"—the belief that it takes many men to create a single infant and that a child has many dads, including the one who provides the sperm for the baby's foot, the one who provides the sperm for the baby's hand, and so on—abets child survival and female reproductive success.
It follows that in a culture that does not subscribe to a belief in partible paternity, there is more anxiety and angst for men. And that men will have evolved strategies and behaviors that decrease the likelihood that they might misplace their own energy and resources into fathering a child not their own. From menstrual huts (which make it easier to figure out when a woman ovulates by making it public when she bleeds); to senate hearings on birth control; to legislation that would require women to submit to penetration by an ultrasound wand before having an abortion; to Rush spouting off, the determination to control female sexuality and reproduction takes many forms. Indeed, Rush's ostensibly bizarre rant about how Fluke is a slut and owes it to him and taxpayers to post her sexual experiences on youtube is not just a wish or a fantasy or a derogatory attempt to humiliate. It is also a primitive fantasy—the fantasy of the male homo sapien who can't have what he wants—absolute certainty about paternity. In this fantasy, sex is not so much something women have, either procreationally but recreationally, but something men watch. Such a fantasy only takes root in a mind that knows very well that it is far from all-knowing and all-seeing.
Instead, women are the gatekeepers of heterosexual experience (outside of rape) in our culture. And on a certain level, men who are fathers or who want to be must live with an eternal and ages-old uncertainty, as well as the specter of their own potential humiliation, every day of their lives. Evolutionary biology teaches us that, where there is the accusation that a woman is a slut, we should look for a man who is frustrated that it might be easier for others to have access to her than it will be for him, and anxious about whether the child he had with his partner is really his. For he is surely in there.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction (Harvard: 1977)
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (Ballantine: 1999)
