by Sara Pascoe
How to Cuckold
The ‘How To’ pages of Literotica are voluminous. Page after page of generous instructions: how to give oral pleasure, receive oral pleasure, female ejaculate, deep-throat, throw a swingers’ party, have better orgasms, maintain your erection, write erotic fiction—
You should read that one.
I should read them all! How to do phone sex, cross-dress, become a cuckold – tyre screech, stop the car. Become a cuckold?
I have to keep reminding myself: ‘Never underestimate the immense extent of human sexuality.’ Absolutely everything is sexy to someone. I must stop being surprised at what’s arousing to people and save my astonishment for when Dad remembers my birthday.
We touched on cuckoldry earlier. The word itself is borrowed from bird behaviour. Cuckoos are famous for laying their eggs in other birds’ nests.* The idiot non-cuckoos don’t realise and warm the marauder egg alongside their own. It all ends in tragedy when the cuckoo baby is born, greedy and demanding, and either starves its adopted siblings or nudges them floorward to their death. Every single cuckoo has caused the death of smaller birds, yet the politicians stay quiet. When you gonna comment about the shameful cuckoos, Crooked Hillary Clinton?
Imagine someone left a child in your home and you didn’t notice because your brain is so tiny, then while you’re out working at the worm factory the fake child murders your existing children. The Nest, an eight-episode BBC drama airing this spring.‡
In the human world a cuckold is a man whose wife has cheated on him, the inference being that the chump could be warming someone else’s eggs, raising large, feathered children that are not biologically his. In evolutionary terms, this male loses three times over. If you understand that all animals are mere meat machines churning out smaller versions of themselves as repackaged genes, you’ll realise how dire the cuckold’s situation is.
Loss 1 The fool might not have biological offspring of his own (evolutionary loser) OR if he does he’s effectively weakening them by delivering food and resources to the non-biological offspring. Parenting is a zero-sum game, there is a set amount of love resources. Any food or protection going to Jeremy is taken away from Sophie, and vice versa. This is where sibling rivalry comes from. Just by existing your brothers and sisters are potentially lowering your quality of life and survival chances. The bastards.
Loss 2 In evolutionary terms, unrelated humans are competitors. We compete for territory, for mates, for mangoes. A male providing sustenance for a non-biological son or daughter is helping his enemy. He unknowingly spends his time and energy strengthening the genes of an unrelated opponent, thus working against himself.
It might seem contradictory to remember that people adopt children. We’re not robots with evolutionary instructional manuals, we’re conscious creatures and our social group is vitally important. We form bonds with unrelated people in order to survive and our emotional capability means we can deeply and dearly love children we’re not related to. But the conscious aspect is important. If a parent finds out that a child is not ‘theirs’ – say a mix-up happened at the hospital and sixteen years later they’re told the kid they’ve brought up is someone else’s – that’s devastating.§ No one says, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’m attached to this one now.’ Our relatedness is important.
When I was growing up, my mum had boyfriends, and my sisters and I drove them all away. She would tell us, ‘It’s so hard to meet someone when you’ve got three kids,’ but she met them fine. It was when they came over and met US that the problems started. Again, I know that many men do become fathers to children they’re not related to, but as a culture we don’t necessarily expect it of them. We’re very impressed if they do it, especially if they do it well. But occasionally they’re viewed as schmucks, which brings us on to:
Loss 3 If people in the tribe or community know that a man has been cuckolded, he loses status. He himself may be blissfully unaware, raising a beloved family and living his best life, but his masculinity will be judged by those around him. For all male apes, a loss in status means an increase in danger.
Human males do not have paternity certainty. Let us spend some time examining this, because the ramifications are huge. I’ve mentioned paternity certainty a few times already in regard to the stigma around female promiscuity, so what does it really mean?
In most mammals, it doesn’t matter which male impregnated the female because there is no male parental investment. He has contributed his sperm and little else, he has nothing to protect and nothing to lose. If, as with humans, the male IS necessary for the child’s survival, if he has to potter about getting food, keeping the nest safe, going out in the freezing cold to de-ice the car while his family wait inside in the warm, well, this man has a lot to lose. ‘Who’s the daddy?’ is one of the most important questions in human nature.
So how does a male ensure that he is not cuckolded? Sperm goes in, time passes, baby comes out. He cannot see inside the lady, he cannot be sure that it is HIS sperm fertilising her, the only thing he can do is ensure that no other male gets near enough to become a threat. So he guards his mate. Not all sperm competition between males is fought in the female’s reproductive tract, some of it is behavioural. Mate guarding, sticking around your female and warding off any other plucky gents, sounds like an effective strategy when we’re thinking about ants or fruit flies. But when we think about humans it suddenly seems oppressive, abusive, an infraction of human rights.
One of the ugliest and sometimes most destructive human emotions is jealousy.
However we intellectualise it, sexual jealousy has deep roots in human psychology. This feeling evolved as an alarm system to protect our emotional investment, hyper-vigilant and often irrational. Love and jealousy co-exist, they support and strengthen each other. A pair bond without exclusivity doesn’t seem un-sensible to us modern people; we’ve all had ‘fuck buddies’, read articles on polyamory, have friends on 3nder.¶ We know that love and lust take many forms and monogamy doesn’t satisfy the needs of everyone. We’re aware that most of the sex our horny species undertakes is not procreational; pair-bonded couples are a by-product, not the point. But we must also acknowledge that for pre-agricultural people reproducing was not a choice, and survival depended on parents who cared for each other and you.
There’s a fascinating argument that jealousy is experienced differently by the sexes. In 1992 psychologist David Buss and colleagues proposed that men would be more jealous of a partner’s sexual infidelity, while women’s jealousy would be provoked by emotional infidelity. This was based on evolutionary principles: human females are fertilised internally, and males have no paternity certainty, thus males would resent and/or prevent their partner having sex with other men. A man who didn’t care, who wasn’t jealous – well, he’d be far more likely to be raising the children of other guys, spending his time and resources continuing the genes of some sneaky suitor, while his laid-back, ‘let Marjorie express her sexual needs’ genes were lost in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of non-reproduction. The very jealous men, those who mate-guarded, harangued and checked all Marjorie’s text messages – they ensured that offspring were genetically theirs, they bred successfully, and many of us have those unattractive and antisocial traits, making us unbearable to this very day.
To reverse the theory, the way women get pregnant means that they have complete maternity certainty and need never doubt their relation to the children they birth. Marjorie’s partner having sex with other women doesn’t affect this; her genes are in the children she is raising. She need not feel threatened by his sexual exploits, BUT affection for another woman might lead to him sharing his resources. Any food or protection going to this second woman is subtracted from Marjorie and her offspring. She’s correct to worry about this. Her children become more vulnerable if they are less well provided for. Even worse, emotional attachment might lead to my dad this man abandoning Marge and the kids for his new family. We have a reversed situation: any prehistoric f
emales who couldn’t give a flying goose about Roger’s close female friendships and obsession with his cousin Joan, those women were more likely to lose the resources and support necessary to raise their offspring to adulthood. We didn’t inherit as many of their genes. We’re descended from the watching-his-every-move, spreading-rumours-that-he’s-impotent, accusing-him-of-flirting-with-his-mum, jealous bitches.
The Buss study tested sex differences in jealousy in three ways. Experiment one was self-reporting. 202 undergraduate students were asked:
Imagine that you discover the person with whom you’ve been seriously involved became interested in someone else. What would distress or upset you more?
a) Imagining your partner forming a deep emotional attachment to that person
b) Imagining your partner enjoying passionate sexual intercourse with that person
It’s like a very short, traumatic version of those quizzes in women’s magazines that let you know whether your personality matches your blood type or what handbag you’d be if you were made of leather. I bet men’s magazines don’t have quizzes. Is that sexist? Is this a quiz?
a) No.
b) No.
c) No, quizzes give you a range of possible answers. This is a new thing I’ve just invented.
Participants chose whether emotional or sexual infidelity would hurt them more, and the results demonstrated a large gender difference. Almost 60 per cent of males were more upset about sex than emotion and over 80 per cent of women were more upset about emotion, than sex. The study isn’t claiming that these people don’t care about both kinds of infidelity, simply that for most of the men sex cheating was worse, and the opposite for women – but I’m a woman, and I would’ve answered B. Sexual infidelity makes me feel sick, I’m taunted by it, tortured with paranoid images. I’ve never had sweaty nightmares about my boyfriend writing someone with bigger boobs a poem.
How can anyone care more about feelings than fucking?
This is the difficulty when the results of some well-conducted experiment do not reflect one’s own opinion or experience. Maybe I should ask my aunt if she was more bothered by my uncle shagging her friend Michelle or the love letters he sent her? Is that insensitive? Either way, she hasn’t replied.
I want to know who these people who fear emotional infidelity are. Who are they? I bet they listen to ballads and cry at EastEnders. I bet they keep cards up all over the house even though their birthday was weeks ago.
A follow-up to the Buss experiment tested participants’ physiological responses. They got fifty-five students, covered them with beepy machines and measured electrical activity on their skin while asking them to visualise, you guessed it, emotional or sexual infidelity. They found that men had a more pronounced reaction to the sexual scenario, women to the emotional scenario. I imagine it wasn’t a pleasant morning for anyone, covered in electrodes, picturing their partner cheating.
These studies inspired a genre and since 1992 over a hundred experiments have investigated sex differences in jealousy. Meta-analysis has proved the ‘men more bothered by sexual infidelity’ hypothesis to be robust. But it’s important to remember that this doesn’t dictate anything about you and me, as individuals. Women and men do not fall into separate, distinct categories. Our sex alone does not dictate how and why we get jealous. We’re shaped by environment, culture and conditioning. When studies examining gender differences don’t reflect my experience I sigh to myself, ‘Must be a man then, what with my masculine reaction,’ rather than remembering that it’s only ever a small sample being extrapolated from. Four out of ten males in the first survey answered that they were more worried about emotional infidelity. But the spectrum of human reactions gets lost when the results come back as MORE MEN THIS and MORE WOMEN THAT.
I became intrigued by an experiment I saw quoted in many books and articles often with a headline like: ‘Male Brains Respond to Jealousy in Centre for Sexual Aggression’. This centre sounds like a youth club that needs closing or every single comments section. But I looked the study up, because if there are neurological differences in the way genders react to jealousy, that’s proof that those differences have been hardwired by evolution, isn’t it?
a) Yes.
b) Yes. Oh, it’s another one of these.
Maybe this paper will illuminate what’s going on. It cost $35.99 for nine pages but I still bought it, there’s nothing I won’t do in the name of research (if it’s tax-deductible). The title of the study is: ‘Men and Women Show Distinct Brain Activations During Imagery of Sexual and Emotional Infidelity’.
In 2006 the neuroscientist Hidehiko Takahashi and colleagues popped people into an fMRI scanner, which magnetically measures brain activity, and asked them to read statements that were either neutral (‘my girlfriend telephones her parents on the weekend’), sexual (‘my girlfriend was naked with her ex-boyfriend in his bed’) or emotional (‘my girlfriend gave a gorgeous birthday present to her ex-boyfriend’). I really like the sound of this girlfriend, she’s thoughtful and generous with her time, gifts and unclothed body. These were the ‘jealousy conditions’.
Analysis of the brain scans showed that men ‘demonstrated greater activation than women in the brain regions involved in sexual/aggressive behaviours such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. In contrast, women demonstrated greater activation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus.’
It’s very tricky to simply accept studies like this one, because despite all the quoting in books and science journals, they only studied eleven men and eleven women. No one can extrapolate anything about human behaviour from such a small sample; it’s dangerous to do so. Also no brain region has one pure function; there are not ‘bits’ that deal with one emotion or process. The brain is not a Sainsbury’s with clearly defined aisles that you can navigate and say for certain, ‘That’s the dairy section,’ ‘There’s the bakery.’ It’s all overlapping, at cross purposes, and we still know so little about it. The brain is a Lidl. Yes, it does sell milk and bread, but not where you’d expect, and you might not be able to see them in between the trumpets, microscopes and children’s trampolines. When people are studied in an fMRI machine it is not as simple as ‘bits’ lighting up, bingo, sexual aggression. The brain is always active, and it’s the scientists themselves deciding which parts have become more active, and this is not an exact science.
Studies like this want to find differences between the sexes because, in their demonstrated behaviour, men are more aggressive. DON’T HATE ME, I’m not saying you are, you’re a sweet angel reading a lady book written by a lady, but you know the stats. Men are far more likely to be violent and domineering towards their romantic partners – married women are nine times more likely to be killed by their partner than a stranger. In fact, until the 1970s the ‘Cuckold Defence’ was a valid excuse for murder. If a man came home and found his wife in bed with someone and strangled her, the law was like, *shrug* ‘What else can you do?’
Most women in shelters name jealousy as a prime reason for their partner’s abuse. Beatings, invasions of privacy, restricting access to a phone, money and other freedoms – these are mate-guarding behaviours and in evolutionary terms can be linked to males’ lack of paternity certainty. I made the mistake of reading a book about ‘wife-beating’ being an evolutionary tactic before going to speak to volunteers at Standing Together Against Domestic Violence. I excitedly told these women, who saw first-hand the effects of violence, what I’d been learning about mate guarding in apes: that from an evolutionary perspective, brutal or cruel abuse which dominates a partner is a way of ensuring paternity certainty and genetic survival. The book I’d read quoted studies on women who had escaped their abusers, saying that the very low self-confidence they had, plus the almost non-existent sex drive, proved that systematic abuse worked. These men didn’t want their partners to look at other men, and after months and years of domineering and violent behaviour they didn’t. It was the last thing on their minds; they only wanted to be safe.
I wish I’d just listened. They were staring. A woman politely but emotionally told me that people are not animals. Another explained that she had no interest in these kinds of theories while we live in a society that does little to support the vulnerable victims and their children.
When looking for evolutionary explanations it can seem like we’re seeking to excuse behaviour, to justify it. But I do not think there is any excuse or justification. Evolutionary pressures are not a defence. I am sorry I was insensitive.
The Takahashi study was prompted by the hope that perpetrators could be better supported, and their violence prevented, if we understood the neurological processes. But there are many factors that influence human emotions and behaviour. Experience and environment must be considered alongside evolutionary theory, as sexed division is too reductive. The either/or choices of these ‘emotional versus sexual jealousy’ studies ignore the complicating factor that most people experience a combination of both. To be oblivious or unbothered by a bonded partner sharing any type of intimacy with others would have lowered the reproductive success of any of our ancestors.
To bring this back to porn – I read many of the ‘How to Cuckold’ pages of Literotica, written by men who were sexually excited about sharing their wife or girlfriend with other men. But from everything we’ve learned, cuckolding is something that should be the opposite of sexy. It would be anti-selective for humans to become aroused by something that would cost them genetic survival. Intentional cuckolding is a terrible reproductive strategy for men AND YET it’s super hot to some of them. Isn’t this a crazy aspect of human sexuality? Some people fancy dead bodies, some people attach sexually to objects, some people would rather wank to porn than have sex with an actual person, wouldn’t they, Nicholas?
Human sexuality is much more than the conscious and unconscious desire to reproduce. It contains contradictory aberrations. If sex was all about reproduction, how could so many individuals be aroused by a practice that works against them? Why has our species evolved so many sexual practices that are unconnected with the continuation of the species? We’ve learned that we evolved to be private about our sex lives, yet some people remain exhibitionists who are most turned on by breaking that rule. We know humans evolved to be secretive about going to the toilet and be disgusted by excrement, yet some people will shit in a cup on the internet.
