Surprise

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In 2005, this question resonated with the interests of my new colleague Patricia Brennan. Brennan is Colombian but has lived in the United States for more than fifteen years. She is vivacious, enthusiastic, and scientifically unstoppable. She is not at all timid about working on, or talking about, avian sex. With two young children and a bit of gray hair, she still looks like the aerobics instructor she was during graduate school at Cornell. She is also a mean salsa dancer, which is to say still una Colombiana. Her Ph.D. was on the dinosaur-like, male nest care breeding system of the tinamous (Tinamidae). In the tropical rain forests of Costa Rica, Brennan came to know these extremely shy, chicken-like birds better than nearly anyone alive. Once, when observing tinamous mating, Patty was shocked to see a fleshy spiral dangling down from the male’s cloaca. The cloaca (a word that memorably derives from the Latin for “sewer”) is the anatomical chamber inside the avian anus, which is a kind of one-stop business rear end that receives the outflow of the digestive, urinary, and reproductive tracts. In birds without penises, insemination takes place with a “cloacal kiss”—a poetical term for a chaste juxtaposition of orifices in which the male and female anuses come into contact, the male releases his sperm, and the female takes it up. The male does not enter the female, because he doesn’t have anything that would allow him to. The tinamou penis had been described by Victorian anatomists who had performed dissections on natural history museum specimens, but these anatomical monographs were not inspiring enough to keep the topic alive scientifically, and the existence of the tinamou’s penis had been almost completely ignored for more than a century. So when Brennan spotted the extrusion from the cloaca of the postcoital male tinamou, she was stunned. Her sighting was probably the first-ever observation of the tinamou penis in action. When Patty first arrived in my lab in 2005, she was interested in continuing her studies of the tinamous, focusing on the anatomy and function of their penises. But tinamous are eminently edible, and they are heavily hunted throughout their range, which is why they are among the shiest of all the birds in the world, and therefore very hard to study in the wild. Whereas ducks also have penises and are comparatively easy to work with. So, Patty thought that ducks might provide an easier route to study the evolution of genital anatomy and function in birds.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  I returned to watch the first male Golden-winged Manakin in his territory, and what I observed over the next few minutes was profoundly surprising. Indeed, it was a scientific revelation. The male continued counter-singing, trading nurrt calls with the neighboring male, but he then flew off his habitual perch and into the dark forest. In a few moments, however, I heard the long, thin, high-pitched, continuous, descending seeeeeeeeeeeee note approaching through the air. I then saw the male Golden-winged Manakin drop rapidly in flight to land on a large, exposed buttress root of a tree right in front of me. As he landed, he immediately rebounded into the air, turning around in mid-flight, vividly flashing his brilliant golden wing patches, and landed back down on the root facing back in the direction of his first landing position. As he landed, he froze in an elongate tail-pointing posture with his beak held down against the surface of the root, his body plumage sleek, and his tail held up at a forty-five- to sixty-degree angle in the air. As rapidly as the brain converts an optical illusion from one image into an entirely new picture that was previously imperceptible, a rich and highly detailed set of scientific conclusions became immediately clear to me. The calls that were surprisingly similar to the White-throated Manakin’s were the log-approach display call of the Golden-winged Manakin. The host of remarkable similarities between the display behaviors of these two species were behavioral homologies—similar behaviors that they had both inherited from an ancient, shared ancestor, a common ancestor that no one had ever even conjectured might exist. Because the males of these two species look completely different from each other and are in two different genera, no one had ever before hypothesized that they were closely related to each other. However, after I saw their displays, it was immediately and vividly clear to me that the White-throated Manakin (Corapipo gutturalis) and the other Corapipo manakins were the closest relatives of the Golden-winged Manakin. [image "The log-approach display of the male Golden-winged Manakin." file=image_rsrc3MZ.jpg] The log-approach display of the male Golden-winged Manakin. It is hard to express how astounded I was by this discovery. It was a true epiphany, the culmination of weeks of futile searching, nine months of planning for the trip to the Andes, five months of previous fieldwork in Suriname, years of academic studies in ornithology and the sciences, and a parallel life of birding. All these influences had coalesced in an instant to reveal a heretofore entirely unsuspected connection. Never once during all my planning for this Andean expedition for the Golden-winged Manakin had I imagined such a possibility, that I could rewrite the phylogeny of the manakin family. Nor could I have, in my wildest dreams.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Like a selection of sex toys from a vending machine in a strange alien bar (think perhaps of an X-rated Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson), duck penises come in ribbed, ridged, and even toothy varieties. These surface features point backward toward the base of the penis, and as the penis unfolds, they are rapidly deployed into the walls of the female reproductive tract to secure whatever inward progress the unfurling penis has made, like the pitons a mountain climber uses to maintain progress up a forbidding cliff face. Oh, and did I mention the duck penis’s spiral twist? I did? Okay, well, there are so many odd things about a duck penis that it’s hard to keep them all straight. Although Brennan was well prepared by years of previous research on duck anatomy, even she was stunned by the duck penis in action. To be blunt, duck erections are “explosive,” the very word we used in the paper we eventually published about our findings in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: “Eversion of the 20 cm muscovy duck penis is explosive, taking an average of 0.36 s, and achieving a maximum velocity of 1.6 ms-1.” That’s nearly eight inches unfurled at three and a half miles an hour. In about a third of a second, the entire event is over, the male ejaculates, the penis begins to deflate, and the drake starts retracting it into his cloaca with a series of muscular contractions (color plate 16). Brennan’s data show that it takes an average of two minutes for a male to complete the process of gathering his penis back inside his cloaca, or 190 times longer than it takes to erect it in the first place. Brennan was able to make these observations about speed because during her first trip to the California duck farm, she had filmed the high-speed duck erections in the open air to document the process of an unimpeded duck penile erection. This gave us the first measures of the velocity of erection and the first observations of the efficacy of the sulcus—the sperm-carrying groove that runs along the length of the penis. After ejaculation and retraction, the farmers know that it will then be hours before the male will be able to perform sexually again—perhaps because that’s how long it takes for a sufficient quantity of lymph to build up in the male’s lymphatic bulbs to fuel another explosive erection. Whatever the reason, it takes a few hours for a drake to get his groove back. When our duck-farm research was published, what was everyday knowledge to the farm workers turned out to be both scientifically notable and culturally irresistible. The videos themselves attracted tens of thousands of YouTube viewers in just the first few days—a veritable explosion of interest, shall we say. —

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  The first time I saw a maypole bower was during the same trip to Australia. A week after our sighting of the Satin Bowerbird, Ann and I traveled to the rain forest in the Atherton Tablelands in northern Queensland, where we hoped to see the Golden Bowerbird (Prionodura newtoniana) and its famous double-maypole bower. The Golden Bowerbird is the smallest of the bowerbird species. The male has dull olive-green body plumage and bright yellow patches on his crown, upper back, throat, and belly. I was familiar with its bower from a classic, multi-panel black-and-white drawing illustrating the diversity of bowerbird architecture that has appeared in every ornithology textbook since, apparently, the dawn of time. The double-maypole bower of the Golden Bowerbird was depicted in a panel adjacent to the simple avenue bower of the Satin Bowerbird and appeared to be about the same size. It never occurred to me to consider whether or not the structures in the two panels were drawn to the same scale. So, as Ann and I headed down the rain forest trail scanning the forest floor for signs of the bower, I cautioned her in a whisper, “We have to be careful not to step on it!” In a few hundred meters, we rounded a bend in the trail and saw an enormous structure that was nearly waist high and more than a yard wide. It would have taken quite an effort to step over it, let alone step on it accidentally as I had feared. After recovering from my shock at its size, I was equally stunned by the complexity of the structure. The double maypole consisted of two huge piles of horizontal sticks piled around a pair of saplings but oriented in various directions. The two conical mounds merged together in the middle to create a saddle of sticks. The Golden Bowerbird decorates the bower structure itself but not the courtyard around it. This male had adorned one side of his bower with many dozens of small flowers of an exact shade of buttery forsythia yellow, and he had decorated the other side with myriad tiny threads of a vivid fluorescent-green lichen. The transplanted lichen threads were growing happily in their new home, and the flowers were as fresh looking as those in a florist’s bouquet. Even at this cooler altitude, these flowers would clearly not last for more than a few days, so the absence of any brown or wilted petals was testimony to the male’s constant and attentive curation of his display.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. The mind of man when satisfied reasonably brings forth praise, but when overcome, wonder. For whatever we are not able to praise worthily, we admire. Yet their admiration pertained rather to Christ’s glory than to their faith, for had they believed on Christ, they would not have wondered. For wonder is raised by whatever surpasses the appearance of the speaker or actor; and thence we do not wonder at what is done or said by God, because all things are less than God’s power. But it was the multitude that wondered, that is the common people, not the chief among the people, who are not wont to hear with the desire of learning; but the simple folk heard in simplicity; had others been present they would have broken up their silence by contradicting, for where the greater knowledge is, there is the stronger malice. For he that is in haste to be first, is not content to be second. AUGUSTINE. (De Cons. Ev. ii. 19.) From that which is here said, He seems to have left the crowd of disciples—those out of whom He chose twelve, whom He called Apostles—but Matthew omits to mention it. For to His disciples only, Jesus seems to have held this Sermon, which Matthew recounts, Luke omits. That after descending into a plain He held another like discourse, which Luke records, and Matthew omits. Still it may be supposed, that, as was said above, He delivered one and the same Sermon to the Apostles, and the rest of the multitude present, which has been recorded by Matthew and Luke, in different words, but with the same truth of substance; and this explains what is here said of the multitude wondering. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. xxv.) He adds the cause of their wonderment, saying, He taught them as one having authority, and not as the Scribes and Pharisees. But if the Scribes drove Him from them, seeing His power shewn in works, how would they not have been offended when words only manifested His power? But this was not so with the multitude; for being of benevolent temper, it is easily persuaded by the word of truth. Such however was the power wherewith He taught them, that it drew many of them to Him, and caused them to wonder; and for their delight in those things which were spoken they did not leave Him even when He had done speaking; but followed Him as He came down from the mount. They were mostly astonished at His power, in that He spoke not referring to any other as the Prophets and Moses had spoken, but every where shewing that He Himself had authority; for in delivering each law, He prefaced it with, But I say unto you.

• From Untrue (2018)

  For all these reasons—costly sperm, the difficulty of having and guarding multiple females, the difficulty of conception, the high likelihood that a gestation may fail, the fact that dependent offspring may do better with paternal care than without—inseminating and running was never such a great strategy. The idea of naturally polygamous males and naturally monogamous females (guys who favored multiple mating over care and gals who wanted the one “right” guy) was cast increasingly in doubt in the decades after Sarah Hrdy’s insights about strategically promiscuous female langurs. But perhaps the most fundamental blow to the belief that males benefited from multiple mating but females did not, making males “logically” more promiscuous than females, came from the laboratory of UCLA evolutionary biologist Patricia Adair Gowaty. After years of work on sexual selection, and in light of the growing body of evidence that females of many species did partake in and benefit from polyandrous or multiple mating, Gowaty put Bateman to the test in 2012, repeating his endlessly cited and vastly influential experiment, only modernized with DNA data. Gowaty discovered that Bateman’s findings could not be replicated, even in the very Drosophila he had studied. Could Bateman’s science, upon which he and a subsequent generation of thinkers had built their assumptions about female versus male nature, be wrong? At first, many experts were surprised. And surprised again—that until Gowaty, no one had ever thought to replicate Bateman’s foundational work in more than six decades. It was a classic case of confirmation bias. Scientists and social scientists had sought out behaviors that confirmed Bateman’s findings and simply didn’t see the evidence—supplied by Hrdy, Small, Smuts, Jolly, Altmann, and others—that contradicted it as anything other than exceptional. Gowaty’s lab work, combined with the burgeoning literature on populations where non-human female primates and women have sex and reproduce in ways that contradict the Bateman model, offered overwhelming proof that it was wrong to continue asserting universal difference in male and female reproductive strategies and sexual behavior based on the false dichotomy between “expensive eggs” and “cheap sperm” and between demure, monogamous females and naturally assertive, polygamous males. Males don’t have meaningfully faster reproductive rates than females. These notions were so many castles in the air. Now what? Omoka: The Meaning of a Himba WordBrooke Scelza had been influenced by both Gowaty and Hrdy, and inspired by each of their perspectives on females as anything but passive in the evolutionary and reproductive process. And while she had originally intended to study the relationship between Himba mothers and their adolescent daughters as the young women approached their childbearing years, she wound up stumbling on a word that set her on a different path, further contributing to the comprehensive upending of assumptions about female choice and coy, choosy, passive females.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Bonobos in ParadiseDarwin, with his tremendously influential assertion that the female is reluctant and reticent, sexually speaking, never saw some of the sexual behaviors that a number of female primatologists have brought into the spotlight over the last several decades. In many species of non-human primates, these scientists discovered, a female will initiate copulations much more frequently than a male does—often by presenting her posterior. But that is only the beginning of her assertiveness. Sitting next to a male she has chosen and giving him a “Let’s get this party started” grimace may be followed, if he is insufficiently ardent, by grooming him. A female macaque, Linda Wolfe and Meredith Small tell us, may then leap on this favored male, rubbing her genital area back and forth over his torso. And Darwin would have blushed at the antics of the lion-tailed macaque female, who will pester a male over and over if he is unresponsive, pulling his hair, screeching, and jumping up and down in front of him. When that doesn’t work, female lion tails have been observed vocalizing and literally writhing on the ground in sexual frustration and impatience, waiting for the male to get a clue and get busy with her already. Female ruffed lemurs, meanwhile, approach and slap males to get their sexual services, while female capuchins will chase males, emitting high-pitched whistling, whining vocalizations and smacking them, once they catch up, to prompt them to mount and copulate. A capuchin female may be so busy soliciting males that she does not eat during her days-long sexual peak. Mating replaces food as the greatest necessity and highest priority in her life. This is the “demure” and “reticent” sex.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  More recently, the evolutionary biologist John Endler and colleagues have discovered a fascinating new wrinkle in the aesthetics of bower decorations in at least some populations of the Great Bowerbird. In eastern Queensland, Endler has documented that successful Great Bowerbird males create displays in which the size of the objects gradually increases the farther away from the bower they are. They hypothesize that the male is creating an optical illusion known as forced perspective. In this case, with the objects getting bigger in proportion to their distance from the opening, the result is a flattening of the visual space so that when viewed from inside the bower, the objects tend to appear more uniform in size. Endler and colleagues make various speculations about why this particular trick of the eye should appeal to female bowerbirds. Interestingly, however, the optical illusion is not in the appropriate direction to make the male himself appear bigger to the female, so the illusion cannot function as a strategically dishonest signal about male size. Whatever the reason for it, there’s nothing accidental about the effect that the males are creating. By experimentally rearranging the stones in the opposite order, creating a negative gradient in object size, Endler and colleagues were able to observe that the males noticed the rearrangement, that they were not happy about it, and that they moved the objects back into place in appropriate order to restore the optical illusion. Laura Kelley and John Endler have subsequently shown that males with stronger illusions have higher mating success. That still doesn’t answer the question of why the preference for this visual illusion evolved. Endler has proposed that a male’s ability to create this illusion could provide honest information to females about the cognitive capacities of their prospective mates—that is, the better the illusion, the better the male’s brain, and the better the male’s genes. Regardless of what these exercises in perspective may or may not be communicating, the implications for this finding are amazing. Endler notes that techniques to create forced perspective in human arts did not arise in Western culture until the fifteenth-century Renaissance. Assuming that this behavior has been present in bowerbirds since before the fifteenth century, Endler asks, “Why did perspective evolve in bowerbirds before humans?” Of course, the human invention of perspective occurred first in art. I think it’s interesting that humans developed perspective in the service of art, long before we made any practical use of it. Why shouldn’t we expect the same of bowerbirds? As we have seen, aesthetic evolution can be an excellent source of evolutionary innovation. Endler himself seems to acknowledge this by comparing “bowerbird art” to human art. In a New York Times interview, he stated that the optical illusion “is evidence that bowerbirds are actually creating art” and that female mating preferences and male aesthetic construction preferences “can be regarded in an aesthetic sense because judgments are made.” —

• From Untrue (2018)

  In fact, two-fifths of Americans polled in 2010 said marriage was “becoming obsolete,” and that year found a mere 51 percent of US adults married, an all-time low for our nation. Marriage has been losing “market share” in the US for half a century, regardless of the state of the economy, and across all age groups, the same Pew Center research tells us. And yet today we are less tolerant of infidelity than we were in 1971, when only half of those polled in the GSS said infidelity was “always wrong”—81 percent of respondents agreed with that statement in 2008. Hugo Schwyzer notes with some surprise that we think cheating is worse than “suicide, human cloning, and polygamy,” and that while polls show we are more forbearing than ever of divorce, premarital sex, homosexuality, and gay marriage, infidelity remains, in a sense, “our last sexual taboo.” We may think marriages are ending or not being entered into and monogamy is under pressure and infidelity is upon us because of men and male behavior. Isn’t that what we were always taught? That men, who have “stronger sex drives” than women, step out on their wives and female partners because what choice do they have? That men need to conquer and spread their seed? That men are wired to seek new partners, while women are wired to seek the comforts of companionship and the security of the cozy couple, which we crave more than the thrills of orgasm? Right? We might be surprised to learn just how many of our assumptions about the whos and hows of infidelity are wrong. In fact, it turns out that when it comes to our sexual selves, women have been sold a bill of goods. In matters of sex, women are not the tamer, more demure, or reticent sex. We are not the sex that longs for or is more easily resigned to partnership, to sameness, to familiarity. Nor are we goody-goodies relative to men when it comes to fidelity, after all. Chapter Two Women Who Love Sex Too MuchImagine a total stranger asking you, among other things, whether you’d had sex with someone other than your spouse since getting married.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The trial court allowed almost all of these jurors to remain on the jury panel despite defense objections. Ultimately, a jury who brought many presumptions and biases to the trial of Marsha Colbey was selected to decide her fate. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on one count of capital murder. Prior to rendering a verdict, jurors expressed concerns about Mrs. Colbey being subject to the death penalty, so the State agreed not to pursue an execution if she was found guilty. This concession yielded an immediate conviction. The trial court sentenced Mrs. Colbey to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and a short while later she found herself shackled in a prison van heading to the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. Built in the 1940s, Tutwiler Prison is situated in Wetumpka, Alabama. Named after a woman who promoted the education of prisoners and championed humane conditions of confinement, Tutwiler has become an overcrowded, dangerous nightmare for the women trapped there. Courts have repeatedly found the prison unconstitutionally overcrowded, with almost twice the number of women incarcerated as it was designed to hold. In the United States, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, a rate of increase 1.5 times higher than the rate for men. With close to two hundred thousand women in jails and prisons in America and over a million women under the supervision or control of the criminal justice system, the incarceration of women has reached record levels. At Tutwiler, women are crammed into dormitories and improvised living spaces. Marsha was shocked by the overcrowding. As the only state prison for women, Tutwiler has no way to meaningfully classify and assign women to appropriate dorms. Women battling serious mental illness or severe emotional problems are thrown in with other women, making dorm life chaotic and stressful for everyone. Marsha could never quite get used to hearing women screaming and hollering inexplicably throughout the night in a crowded dorm.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In this interdisciplinary tour de force, Gilbert and Zevit took a fresh look at a very old story and arrived at a revolutionary new view of the Judeo-Christian creation myth. For some inexplicable reason, their paper has not yet received the firestorm of attention it deserves. It seems to me that everyone from the Vatican to feminist scholars should want to know about and debate this theory. Yet the paper has only been cited three times in fifteen years. Perhaps no one has time in our fragmented intellectual culture to ponder these questions? Shouldn’t more people care whether the Hebrew God created Eve from Adam’s penis bone? Inquiring minds should want to know. If Genesis tells the story of the loss of Adam’s baculum as an act of divine agency, how do evolutionary biologists explain it? Although there has been relatively little evolutionary theorizing about the human penis in general or its loss of the baculum in particular, one brave biologist does stand out in his eagerness to take on the task. Richard Dawkins hypothesized that the human penis evolved to be without a baculum in order that the penis could serve as—yes!—an honest indicator of health and genetic quality: A female who behaves like a good diagnostic doctor and chooses only the healthiest male for mate will tend to gain healthy genes for her children…It is not implausible that, with natural selection refining their diagnostic skills, females could glean all sorts of clues about a man’s health, and the robustness of his ability to cope with stress, from the tone and bearing of his penis. But a bone would get in the way! Anybody can grow a bone in the penis; you don’t have to be particularly healthy or tough. So selection pressure from females forced males to lose the os penis, because then only genuinely healthy or strong males could present a really stiff erection and the females could make an unobstructed diagnosis…If you follow through the logic of my penis hypothesis, males are handicapped by the loss of the bone and the handicap is not just incidental. The hydraulic mechanism gains in effectiveness precisely because erection sometimes fails. To be fair, Dawkins admits that this hypothesis “should not be taken too seriously” and that he only came up with it as a clever way to communicate Zahavi’s handicap (that is, Smucker’s) principle and its connection to good genes. However, when Dawkins admits that the idea is “less plausible than pleasing,” he is actually making an unexpectedly revealing comment on the entire field of adaptive mate choice.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Listening to Sarah and Annika, I kept thinking about a passage from Daniel Bergner’s book What Do Women Want? Bergner had spent time with the neuroendocrinologist and psychologist Kim Wallen at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, observing rhesus macaques. Historically female macaques were often kept in cages with the males, who seemed to initiate all the sex by unceremoniously mounting them, which the females seemed to endure indifferently. This informed not just the primate literature on macaques; it served as more proof from the animal world that female sexuality is essentially passive and “less-than” male sexuality. Didn’t it? Wallen wasn’t buying it. He wondered, What if the animals spend more time out of their cages? Would that change the choreography of rhesus macaque sex and, with it, some of our convictions about female sexuality? What happened next was a stunning performance of unconstrained female macaque sexuality. In larger enclosures, females did not simply endure sex; they initiated it. Assertively and insistently. They followed the males with stalker-ish intent, and smacked the ground in a kind of Morse code that meant “Serve me sexually right now!” They also got bored and listless after a few years of having sex with all the available males. Wallen wondered, what if we introduced new males? Sure enough, with fresh guys on offer, the females were again suddenly bananas for sex. Out of the cage, they were utterly different than they were within it. I also thought of the work the anthropologist Beverly Strassmann did in Mali, where women are compelled by tradition to repair to menstrual huts when it’s that time of the month. In this way, Strassmann determined, men are able to “count back the days” from their wives’ periods to the approximate date of ovulation. And figure out whether they are being true. It’s an effective form of constraint; the rate of extra-pair paternity in this region of Mali is one of the lowest in the world.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Classical Roman and Greek statuary depicts versions of female beauty so iconic that they were suitable for worship. Yet because of changing fashions, many of these faces and bodies would not be considered especially attractive in the contemporary Western world. Such changes in taste can appear not just over the course of thousands of years but in far shorter periods of time. In just a matter of decades, American culture has drastically changed its view of what men and women should look like. We have only to compare photographs of Marilyn Monroe or Rita Hayworth from the 1940s and 1950s with the comparatively emaciated, sometimes anorexic, female movie stars and fashion models of today to realize how rapidly cultural standards of beauty can change. Despite her legendary sexiness, the softly voluptuous Marilyn Monroe would not make it into the first round of the reality television show America’s Next Top Model. We have also changed our ideas about what we find attractive in male bodies. To stay at the top of the business, today’s male movie stars must maintain well-defined, muscular physiques that are a far cry from the softer bodies of the 1940s and 1950s stars like Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Gary Cooper. Some cultures, unlike our own, revere and sexualize female obesity. In Mauritania and other parts of Africa, feminine obesity is regarded as so attractive that girls of normal body weight are sent to “fat camps” where they are force-fed enormous amounts of food to gain weight. Young Mauritanian men express specific sexual excitement over the stretch marks that appear on the skin from the young women’s resulting rapid weight gain. In America, by contrast, we send young women to “fat camps” in order to lose enormous amounts of weight.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Female ChoicesAfter the better part of two and a half years writing, researching, and being a participant-observer on the topic of women who are “untrue” and all the untruths we have promulgated about them—in science, literature, and pop culture—I feel most of all a sense of amazement at how vast the terrain is. This book only scratches the surface of the history and evolutionary prehistory of female infidelity and female sexual autonomy, which are complex, surprising, and in many instances an upending of everything we have been taught about men and women. Meanwhile, the sex research data is copious, sometimes contradictory, and emerging at a quick pace from a number of committed female researchers whose findings will ultimately re-form many of our deeply held assumptions about who and how women are. Similarly, it seems that every time I mention that I am writing on female infidelity, someone shares another “must-include” node on the cultural landscape—from Big Little Lies to the brilliant and deceptively “simple” Florynce Kennedy quips that reframed our sexual consciousness in the 1970s to Rihanna lyrics. My research could have gone on many years more and I still wouldn’t be anywhere near qualified to write The Big Book of Female Infidelity with any comprehensiveness or authority. This stopping point and the scope of Untrue itself are, of necessity, arbitrary. May we continue to be inundated with ever-new challenges to received notions of female sexuality, in the form of groundbreaking research as well as songs, movies, Netflix series, social movements, hashtags, and more. Some readers may wonder about the choices I have made or where my research and this journey have led me. Writing about female infidelity and female sexual autonomy enriched my thinking and my marriage in ways I couldn’t have imagined. My husband and I discussed issues—how we felt about sexual exclusivity and “forever,” for starters—that we hadn’t before. Learning the legacy of female African American “hidden figures” of sex research like Gail E. Wyatt and June Dobbs Butts; delving into topics like hotwifing and polyamory; researching and observing female bonobo sexuality; going to sex parties; interviewing women who had affairs or consensually non-monogamous arrangements; immersing myself in the social science, science, and popular literature on female extra-dyadic behaviors; and interviewing experts in fields as various as primatology, doula care, and social activism were all adventures that not only reshaped my ideas about women, sex, and relationships but also shook up my comfortable assumptions about my own practices, beliefs, and life.

• From Untrue (2018)

  In his remarkably comprehensive and readable Insatiable Wives, clinical psychologist and sex therapist David Ley made similar discoveries—couples who were into the cuckold/hotwife lifestyle, he found, varied in how exactly they practiced it, but what the successful ones had in common was impressive levels of connection and intimacy, enviable communication skills, and high levels of desire for each other compared to couples in monogamous unions. When he first stumbled across this lifestyle while reading responses to an online sex survey he had sent out, Ley (who is also the author of Ethical Porn for Dicks, which demonstrates that he really has a way with titles) thought people were having him on. There was virtually no academic literature on the topic. But exploring further, he connected with some hotwifing and cuckold-life practitioners and interviewed them at length. What he discovered surprised him. “I initially thought, This can’t be healthy,” he told me when I interviewed him via Skype one morning. “And then I had to stop myself. Why did I assume that these couples, often in decades-long marriages, were necessarily unhealthy for engaging in sex behaviors outside the norm? I was allowing my social biases around monogamy, promiscuity, and female sexuality to intrude into my clinical judgment.” Instead, Ley decided to listen. He found more participants to interview and was further surprised to learn that, like Alexis McCall and her husband, many of these couples had quite extraordinary levels of commitment, showed deep mutual respect, and communicated skillfully. Not a few also reported very high levels of marital satisfaction and sexual satisfaction after decades of being together, a rather unusual state of affairs. According to Ley, there is variation within the lifestyle. For example, a couple he saw named Bobby and Richard don’t even really discuss Bobby’s extracurriculars, which she conducts on her own, with people they know, for safety’s sake. But Ley also interviewed couples in which the man participated in his wife’s sexual experiences with other men, and he told me that “quite a few men into this lifestyle have bisexual leanings.” They wouldn’t feel comfortable going to a gay club, but they might give a man oral sex in the context of cucking, if their wives directed them to as part of their play, Ley explained. One man Ley interviewed—married for twenty-two years and deeply in love with his wife—identified as bisexual and said he enjoyed “silky seconds” with her after she had had sex with another man because “his presence lingers in her.” In cases like this, men in the lifestyle can explore their sexual fluidity, though Ley told me they don’t always admit that to themselves. In this respect they are not unlike Alfred Kinsey, the father of American sex research and founder of the famed Kinsey Institute. Kinsey reportedly enjoyed sharing his wife, Clara, with other men, including his mentee Clyde Martin, with whom he may or may not have been involved sexually.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Logical, reasoned, and grounded in solid science as her ideas were, Hrdy set off shockwaves with her suggestion that infanticide might be an adaptive reproductive strategy for males and, stranger still, that it might be adaptive for females to engage in multiple matings so as to confuse paternity. “Those monkeys are deranged,” she recalls a prominent physical anthropologist saying dismissively of her work and her 1977 book on the topic, The Langurs of Abu. It was easier for that anthropologist, and anthropology in general, to pathologize an entire troop of langurs and dismiss Hrdy’s many months of meticulous fieldwork than it was to concede that males might operate selfishly rather than for the “good of the species.” Perhaps even more shockingly, Hrdy’s insights challenged the Darwin-Bateman paradigm, which was so foundational to the thinking not only of scientists but of Americans, who were deeply invested in the generations-old belief that sexually passive, “coy” females who once mated with the “best” available male would have no incentive to stray. In her 1981 book, The Woman That Never Evolved, Hrdy took aim even more directly at the passive, coy, monogamous female hypothesis, suggesting that observational data demonstrated it simply wasn’t the case in many primates, including humans, and that Darwin’s notion that retiring, disinterested, exclusivity-craving females drove sexual selection by seeking the one “best” male was more based in wishful thinking and social convention than in actual primate behavior. Moreover, she made the case that female primates, particularly mothers, were not exclusively tender, monogamous, and passive. Females might also be sexually assertive, selfish, shrewd, and, under some circumstances, not even necessarily nurturing. In her later book Mother Nature, she would show that among primates where mothers need a lot of help from others in order to rear their young (as is the case in humans), the same mother who lavished her infant with attention under favorable ecological circumstances might, when short on social support, refuse to nurse it or even abandon an infant at birth. Rather than being unnatural, such a mother was balancing her own well-being against that of her current offspring and also potential offspring she might bear in the future. Such a mother might be devoted and doting—or indifferent. She might nurse diligently, long past the time when her conspecifics had given it up, or tirelessly allow her infant to ride ventrally, clinging to the fur rather than locomote on its own. And then that same indulgent and fastidious mother might set her infant down, casting it momentarily, or more permanently, aside. As with female mating behaviors, maternal behaviors were far more variable, flexible, and strategic than previously assumed.

• From Untrue (2018)

  After her initial interviews, Diamond did follow-ups by phone every two years. When I spoke to her, she was in the middle of her twenty-year follow-up interviews with the women. “They keep saying, ‘Oh my god, we’re so old!’” Diamond told me with a laugh. She wasn’t initially looking for sexual fluidity all those years ago, she told me, “but it just bubbled up” in the conversations with her participants. Even though women who identified as exclusively lesbian pretty much stayed that way, there was undeniable variation in whom they were involved with and whom they were attracted to. Very few were “gold star lesbians”—women who only sleep with other women. One woman who had in fact only been with women for the entire twenty-year period told Diamond during their most recent interview that she and her wife had broken up. This woman, newly single and devastated, had then become involved with a man. She told Diamond, “I think I’ll end up with a woman again, but maybe I just needed a change.” Choice and change are not the same thing, Diamond explained to me. “These women tell me, ‘I wasn’t expecting to be attracted to a guy, but it just happened!’ They’re not choosing it. It’s surprising to them.” For a long time, Diamond says, what was called women’s “passing bisexuality” or “malleability”—she’s straight, she’s gay, she’s straight again!—was looked at as “noise in the data,” a problem that got in the way of answers. Diamond has flipped that understanding around. Such findings about changeable, changed-up female sexuality don’t cloud or pollute the data, she says—they are the data. Fluidity is the thing. Diamond initially thought that women were more fluid than men across the board. But a recent study of 179 men in the Salt Lake City area who identified as straight, bisexual, or gay changed her mind. “When I asked the straight men whether they [masturbated] to [porn] images and videos of other men, they said they did. Gay men told me that, yes, sometimes they did masturbate while thinking about women or watching videos of women. I wasn’t expecting that to happen, but when you think to ask the questions, you get the answers. Unfortunately it doesn’t always occur to us to ask the questions.”

• From Untrue (2018)

  The findings of Chivers, Meana, and Walker point to possibilities that are at once freeing and disquieting. What if it’s women, not men, who struggle especially with monogamy? What if women are the comparatively decadent sex, asphyxiating in sexually exclusive relationships, whereas men in the aggregate are more amenable to it? If the routinization of sex and institutionalization of roles within a long-term partnership dampen us in ways they don’t men; if women, too, crave variety and novelty of sexual experience and partners, perhaps even more than men do; if women’s sexual excitement is autonomous and disconnected from their partners in fundamental ways, rather than contingent on staring deeply into a soul mate’s eyes; if self-described happily married women are having affairs and doing so not for emotional but for sexual gratification, then nearly everything women have been taught about our sexual selves is patently untrue. It is as if Walker, Meana, and Chivers were the unbelievably skilled tricksters who pulled the tablecloth from under the polite and perfect place settings, and we stand marveling that our lives and silver service and plates remained miraculously undisturbed. I had heard from Mark Kaupp and other poly advocates and experts, including Open Love NY co-founder Mischa Lin, clinical psychologist and consensual non-monogamy expert David Ley, and polyamory practitioners I met at panels and social events for the poly community, that women, not men, were leading that movement. It tends to be women, I was repeatedly informed, who are telling their partners that they want open relationships and marriages, or that they want a sexual and romantic life unbeholden to the dyad. Women, not men, are the relationship radicals in this recent rearrangement of our intimacies. Now, however, I began to consider that women like the ones Meana works with might themselves be driving a social movement. But this movement has no slogans, and women drive it from the backseat, in the muted voice of discontent, by simply not having sex in long-term partnerships. In a profound sense, these women are on strike. They’re saying, “I’m not doing this.” Not because they don’t like sex, or because they don’t love or care for their partners, but because the same old sex with the same old person isn’t working for them. Rather than throwing “female Viagra” at these women, what if we told them the truth? That it’s normal for women to get bored? That it’s normal to want to have sex in lots of different ways, with many partners? And that women too, and perhaps especially, have cheating minds and hearts and bodies?

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. (ubi sup.) But He took not with Him His other disciples, so provoking them to a strange desire, because also they were not yet fully prepared, but He took Peter, and with him the sons of Zebedee, that the others also might imitate them. He took also the parents as witnesses, lest any should say the evidence of the resurrection was false. Luke adds to this also, that He shut out from the house those that were weeping, and shewed that they were unworthy of a sight of this kind. For it follows, And they all wept, and bewailed her. But if He then shut them out, much more now. For then it had not yet been revealed that death was turned into sleep. Let no one then hereafter despise himself, bringing an insult to the victory of Christ, whereby He has overcome death, and turned it into sleep. In proof of which it is added, But he said, Weep not; she is not dead, but sleepeth, &c. shewing that all things were at His command, and that He would bring her to life as if He were awakening her from sleep. They yet nevertheless laughed Him to scorn. For it follows, And they laughed him to scorn. He did not reprove them nor put an end to their laughter, that laughter also might be a sign of death. For since generally, after a miracle has been performed men continue unfaithful, He takes them by their own words. But that He might by sight dispose to the belief of the resurrection, He takes the hand of the maid. As it follows, But he took her by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise. And when He had taken her by the hand, He awoke her. As it follows, And her spirit returned, and she arose straightway. For He poured not into her another soul, but restored the same which she had breathed forth. Nor does he only awake the maid, but orders her to take food. For it follows, And he commanded to give her meat. That it might not seem like a vision what was done. Nor did He Himself give to her, but He commanded others to do it. As also He said in the case of Lazarus, Loose him. (John 11:44.) And afterwards He made him partake of meat with Him. GREEK EXPOSITOR. (Severus.) He next charges the parents, astonished at the miracle, and almost crying out, not to publish abroad what was done. As it follows, And her parents were astonished; but he charged them that they should tell no man what was done; shewing that He is the Giver of good things, but not covetous of glory, and that He gives the whole, receiving nothing. But he who seeks after the glory of his works has indeed shewn forth something, but receives something.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Big chunks of shrapnel had torn gaping holes through the corrugated tin roof and slashed through the tent like the thin stabs of a knife. We had been hit by almost 150 rounds in only a few minutes. Everyone was walking around in a daze. There were a bunch of men over at the motor pool kneeling around someone on the ground. I ran over there as fast as I could, my dog tags jangling around my neck. They were kneeling around a guy I knew pretty well. Mac. I looked down and saw that he was dead. His neck was almost off and his right arm had been severed. He had hundreds of silver holes in his face and chest, looking like little puncture points. MacCarthy was dead, bleeding in the sand, his dark blue Boston eyes open and staring up at the sky. I had just seen him the morning before on the chow line after we had come in from patrol. He had smiled at me and told me how everything was down at the motor pool. But now he was dead and I picked up my bag and walked back to the bunker, thinking how MacCarthy had just looked like a thing, a mannequin. The dead, he thought, looked kind of funny in a way, kind of very ridiculous. I felt almost like laughing and when I came up to the bunker there was the short kid from New Jersey who was taking pictures of the demolished tent. He was taking pictures with a little camera with the care and precision of a guy who should be shooting some pretty trees back home. I could see that a lot of the men were laughing and joking now, laughing and joking about the same thing. It was like the boy scouts, like the boy scouts getting all chopped up in their pajamas while having a nightmare. Another crowd had gathered around a trench. It was hard to tell what had happened there, how many bodies there were. Maybe three all mangled together in a heap, a bunch of arms and legs. There was a smell of gunpowder and blood mixed with burning flesh. One of the heads was completely severed, chopped off, with the exception of a strand of muscle—that was the only thing that continued to connect the head to the stinking corpse. There was nothing any of us could do but pick up the pieces. They seemed very cold and gray and someone in back of me was taking pictures. I fished around for identification in one corpse’s dead back pocket and found a wallet. It was Sergeant Bo, one of my friends. He was the supply sergeant and had a wife somewhere. He was sort of the Sergeant Bilko of the battalion. He never went on patrol and had the most comfortable quarters of anyone, with a rug and a desk and a picture of his pretty wife.