by Laura Zigman
—Richard Rhodes, a chapter on mad cow disease in Deadly Feasts: Cracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague
For the next week I lived a double life: Jane Goodall, distracted talk-show talent booker, by day (“Who died?” “A terrorist bomb went off where?”), and Dr. Marie Goodall, delusional fraudulent obsessive monkey scientist, by night.
Every day I’d rush home from the studio, make a little small talk with Eddie, and after he’d go out, I’d get to work, poring over the books and magazines I’d bought or brought home from the library, searching for something that would lay bare the secret workings of the human male heart and mind.
No small task.
I read Freud and Jung and Skinner.
I read Darwin and Margaret Mead and Richard Leakey and the real Jane Goodall.
I read about oral cravings and anal fixations and separation anxiety, about natural selection and sexual selection and courtship and mating rituals in birds, fish, mammals, primates, and humans.
I watched Nova, Nature, Wild Kingdom, and Love Connection.
I read Time and Newsweek, Natural History, Scientific American, Discover, Nature, the science section of The New York Times; Nature Genetics, GQ, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, The Farmer’s Almanac and, of course, Men’s Times.
And as I did, I thought and contemplated and theorized and analyzed.
And I wrote and wrote and wrote.
Not just about the particulars of primate copulation, for instance (though I did become quite fascinated by this subspecialty: brown-headed spider monkey: mating lasts for 5–10 minutes; chacma baboon: 3–11 minutes; dusky titi monkey: 10–30 seconds), but about anything and everything that struck me as interesting, potentially relevant, annoying, or just plain weird.
Like the fact that three months of back issues of the Science Times yielded thirty-one existing and emerging scientific subspecialists all very hard at work trying to figure out the complexities of human behavior, including evolutionary psychologists, medical anthropologists, psychobiologists, and fish scientists.
Or that an elephant’s vagina is called a vestibule.
Or the extremely irritating wire-service item about Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, which reported that he had married his nurse, one of fifteen such helpers who take care of him (read: feed him, bathe him, wipe him, change him). Item also reported that Hawking married said nurse after a twenty-six-year marriage to his first wife.
(Can I just say?
Hawking is a quadriplegic?
A twisted, contorted, immobile man?
If he were a woman, he would never have gotten married once, let alone again.)
Or a Newsweek article that described recent experiments conducted to map the brain differences in men and women. The study showed that when both sexes were presented with photographs of facial expressions and asked to determine what emotion was being expressed, women were able to correctly identify a sad face ninety percent of the time on men and women. Men, of course, had more trouble with this. While they could correctly identify sadness on men’s faces ninety percent of the time (big surprise), they had a seventy-percent success rate when it came to identifying sadness on women’s faces. In addition, PET scans revealed that men used significantly more of their brains during this exercise than women did, and they still got fewer answers right.
And, one of my favorites: an article from the Washington Post which reported that “most mammals actually have two ‘noses’ for sensing odors: the familiar, visible one, which responds to a broad spectrum of odors in the environment; and the ‘erotic’ nose, or vomeronasal organ, a specialized structure hidden near the base of the nasal cavity in reptiles and in most mammals, which responds only to pheromones.” This “erotic” nose is not related to areas of the brain that control higher functions but to the amygdala, a primitive part of the brain that mediates emotions.
Such provocative though somewhat unrelated findings as those just mentioned gave me a lot of ideas, and sometimes, in between tomes and scientific journals and factoids, I would jot down a follow-up reminder like this in my own personal notebook:
Sense memories of Ray remain persistent. Scent triggers include: soap, fresh laundry, and Obsession—Calvin Klein’s Obsession. Call American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons to find out whether vomeronasalectomy surgery is available.
THE MAKING OF ARTICLE I
While female chimps form only casual bonds, female bonobos establish lifelong relationships, spending much of their time socializing with one another and even engaging in recreational sexual activity together.
“For [male bonobos] with an aggressive bent, such a powerful sisterhood spells trouble. If a sexually mature bonobo male shows a female unwanted attention, she has merely to sound a distress call to bring an avenging group of females quickly to the scene. Males that misbehave in a nonsexual setting—say, at a feeding site, where they may try to hoard a cache of fruit and prevent other troop members from approaching—are similarly intimidated or chased off.
Time, October 14, 1996
By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I felt like my head was going to explode.
“I’m leaving,” I heard Eddie say from the living room.
I looked up. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, let alone showered. My hair was falling out of its bun, and I pushed my glasses back up my nose. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually seen Eddie—sometime after Freud but before Leakey, I guessed.
I opened the curtain just enough to expose my face. “Leaving?” I said. “For where?”
He was wearing old khakis, a white T-shirt, and canvas basketball sneakers. Weekend wear.
He stared at me. “East Hampton.”
“Good. Good. Who with?”
“My new wife.”
“Good. Good.”
His mouth dropped open. “Aren’t you going to ask me who she is?”
I adjusted my glasses and smiled absently. “Nope. Nope. I’m sure she’s lovely, whoever she is. Just have a good time.”
“Wait,” he said as I started to close the curtain. “What’s wrong with you? What have you been doing in there every night this week?”
“In where?”
“In your bat hole.”
“I’m just, you know, working.”
“Working? On what?”
“Something … for … Diane,” I mumbled. “A special project. A special thing she asked me to do. Big rush on it.”
He lit a cigarette and put his hands on his hips. “Tell me, Jane, or I’ll come in there and find out.” His voice was low, faux-threatening.
“Okay, okay,” I said, taking my glasses off. “But don’t tell Diane I told you.” I paused for effect and to think of a lie. “You know her thing about Kevin Costner?”
He nodded.
“Well, she wants me to write a special letter to him. Kind of like a proposal.” I had no idea what I was talking about, so I just kept going. “A package to send to him with videotapes and other material to try to convince him to come on the show. A pitch, if you will.”
“But that’s what you do—at work.”
Or what I should do at work.
I shook my head with an air of secrecy and condescension. “No. Not like this.”
He put his cigarette out and picked up his bag. “Well, okay. I guess I’m off—off to elope with my new wife about whom you know nothing,” he said as he walked down the hallway to the front door.
I closed the curtain. “Whatever.”
Before I showered and washed my hair, I called Joan and told her to come over. And an hour later she did, arriving exactly when she said she would—at ten-thirty—a first for her in the arena of punctuality.
She looked at me expectantly. “Speak,” she said.
So I told her about male bowerbirds, who build elaborate nests and decorate them to attract females.
About the underwater love songs of male dolphins.
About how monkeys and
dogs and even butterflies can smell out receptive females from miles away because of the allure of pheromones.
I told her how sexual behavior in humans goes through three distinct phases—pair formation, precopulatory activity, and copulation—but not necessarily in that order.
About how flies and birds lure females by giving them a nuptial offering of food to eat while they mate, and how oftentimes the male will take back the uneaten portion once their mating is complete so he can use it to attract more females.
And then I told her some of my half-gelled theories.
“You know how uncanny it is that there are so many similarities in the way men dump women? The things they say, the words they use, the order in which everything unfolds?”
Joan nodded. “Like Ray and Jason.”
“Not to mention Eddie.”
She nodded again.
“There’s an obscure term I came across which could explain it: allelomimetic behavior.”
Joan moved her lips and tried to pronounce it, but she couldn’t. I showed her the copy of the page from the scientific dictionary and then I read the definition out loud: “ ‘Of or characterized by imitativeness within a group: All the sheep in a flock, or all the fish in a school, or all the dogs in a pack, tend to do the same thing at the same time.’ ”
She looked at the piece of paper and then at me. “It’s like how all alien abductees draw the same picture of the alien that abducted them! As if it’s somehow part of the collective unconscious.”
“Right. Or like how all men seem to have gone to school and taken some secret break-up class,” I said, “because they all say and do the same thing when they end a relationship, as if they were—”
“Genetically programmed.”
I flipped through the file and showed her another piece of paper. “Did you know there’s actually a word for the love of new things? It’s called neophilia.”
I flipped again and found a cover story from Time called “The Chemistry of Love.” “And because falling in love produces amphetaminelike chemicals, some people, and I quote, ‘move frantically from affair to affair just as soon as the first rush of infatuation fades’ and become attraction junkies.”
Finally I told her about the different methods of escape animals use—freezing, fleeing, zigzagging, the dash-and-hide, the dash-and-retreat.
“So I’m focusing on the two topics you specified, and I’m going to add allelomimetic behavior and something I’ve been working on called the myth of male shyness, if you think that’ll work.”
Joan nodded. “That’ll work.”
Then I asked her to look at a very, very rough draft of the article I’d done, just to make sure Dr. Goodall was on the right track. Joan stared intently and silently at the batch of yellow legal paper I’d ripped from the pad, letting the pages drop onto the floor one by one as she read them.
“Yes,” she said. “I like this track. This is a good track. Keep going on this track.”
So I did.
I spent the rest of the weekend writing, and on Monday morning, when I got to the office, I faxed Joan the complete article. We went over it that night on the phone so she could take it with her in the morning to her editorial meeting.
She called me immediately afterward.
“All the women in the room went crazy,” she said excitedly. “And when the meeting was over, we all went into the bathroom and smoked and traded war stories. The world is one big fucking Used-Cow lot, it seems.”
“What did Ben think?”
Joan laughed. “He looked chagrined. As if he’d just read the first chapter of his unauthorized biography.”
I present the article herewith in its entirety:
ARTICLE I:
THE OLD-COW–NEW-COW THEORY ALLELOMIMETIC BEHAVIOR, AND THE MYTH OF MALE SHYNESS
A MEN’S TIMES EXCLUSIVE
When MEN’S TIMES photographer Zoe Raider went to shoot DR. MARIE GOODALL, she found a small, absentminded woman wearing a white lab coat and a high-intensity examination light bulb strapped to her forehead, sitting behind her large, messy desk, looking as if she were waiting for a PBS documentary film crew to arrive. The office, with its faded diplomas, Bunsen burners, beakers, taxidermied apes and monkeys, walls of textbooks, and, of course, obligatory analysis couch, looks like it could belong to a psychologist, professor, or monkey scientist—and indeed DR. GOODALL considers herself to be all three. Dwarfed by the stacks of files and papers in front of her—the hundreds, if not thousands, of documented “cases” of male behavior she has studied during the course of her thirty-five-year career—DR. GOODALL sits on the edge of her chair, excited at the opportunity of discussing her theories for the first time.
NOTE TO THE READER FROM DR. MARIE GOODALL:
When this male-oriented magazine contacted me to write about the human male, I was rather surprised—not only by the fact that the editors were aware of my existence as a recognized expert in the study and prevention of male behavior but also by the fact that they felt there was an apparent and somewhat urgent need for my findings and theories to appear in a general-audience publication, Whilst I have written a great many papers over the decades on this subject, I have, I must admit, written only for scientific journals. Allow me, then, to apologize in advance for the rather technical and clinical manner in which I address these topics.
And so, let us begin with the Old-Cow–New-Cow theory, Allelomimetic Behavior, and the Myth of Male Shyness.
THE OLD-COW–NEW-COW THEORY
The occurrence of a male tiring of his current female mate and leaving her for a new female mate is certainly not an aberrant occurrence in either the human kingdom or the animal kingdom, though it is far more accepted in the latter. While it is commonly known that most animal species are not monogamous (only three percent of mammals are categorized as such, in fact), and that their polygamy runs rampant at times, what is rarely known is just how rampant it is. Knowledge of this phenomenon as it appears in the animal kingdom should, I trust, help the human female comprehend the phenomenon when it manifests itself in her own backyard, as it were.
Perhaps the clearest example of this can be found in the Coolidge Effect. If I may digress for just a moment, I generally like first to share with my students the rather amusing anecdote that gave the phenomenon its name before describing the particulars of the phenomenon itself. According to one of my favorite texts available on this topic, The Great Sex Divide by Glenn Wilson, the phenomenon was named as such as a result of an incident involving President and Mrs. Coolidge:
The story goes that President and Mrs. Coolidge were visiting a government farm in Kentucky one day and after arrival were taken off on separate tours. When Mrs. Coolidge passed the chicken pens she paused to ask her guide how often the rooster could be expected to perform his duty. “Dozens of times a day,” was her guide’s reply. She was most impressed by this and said, “Please tell that to the President.” When the President was duly informed of the rooster’s performance he was initially dumbfounded. Then a thought occurred to him. “Was this with the same hen each time?” he inquired. “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time,” was the host’s reply. The President nodded slowly, smiled and said, “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge!”
The Coolidge Effect as it applies to the mating practices of sheep and common dairy cows is known by veterinary scientists and cattle breeders the world over, which is why farmers need have only one male to service all their sheep or cows: male resistance to repeating sexual contact with the same female.
The details of the phenomenon were recounted in a landmark study by the researchers Beamer, Bermant, and Clegg in 1969:
On Day I of the study researchers presented a bull with a cow. Mating ensued.
On Day II of the study researchers presented the bull with the same cow. Mating this day did not ensue.
On Day III of the study researchers presented the bull with the same cow that had been visually disguised (data is inexact on precisely what was us
ed to achieve this effect—most probably women’s clothing and undergarments in rather large sizes or a very big paper bag placed over the head). But again mating did not ensue.
On Day IV of the study researchers realized the bull was resistant to deceptive visual stimulus and proceeded to disguise the cow in a different manner: they smeared the vaginal odor of a fresh cow onto the vaginal area of the previously mated cow. While the bull’s interest was momentarily piqued, mating again did not ensue.
Undeniable hypothesis: The bull desired a New Cow and would not mate twice with what he perceived to be the Old Cow.
With human males and females the Coolidge Effect manifests itself in a subtler though still apparent way. Most commonly it occurs when a male, after engaging in a romantic and sexual relationship with a female for a period of time—a month, three months, six months, a year or more—grows increasingly bored with his previously New Cow. In the vernacular this is usually referred to as the “itch.” The male will then begin to sniff around, if you will, for variety and will pick from the somewhat wide selection of New Cows available to him one to his liking. Mating with this New Cow will ensue, which will promptly lead him to view the Cow he is primarily involved with as his Old Cow. In the majority of cases the male will leave the Old Cow to pursue a relationship with this New Cow, only to find, after a varying period of time, that this New Cow has gotten Old, and he will desire variety again and so repeat this process innumerable times. At present writing there is no set cure for this Old-Cow–New-Cow syndrome in either animals or humans, though my institute is working quite diligently in this pursuit.
