Mother Nature’s Dirty Trick : Our Body Design Bespeaks Promiscuous Urges

When the news broke that the Rev. Marvin Gorman had caught the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart with a prostitute, one word came to just about everybody’s mind: hypocrisy. The scourge of promiscuous preachers, the man who’d accused Gorman of adultery and helped bring down Jim Bakker on the same charge, had been caught with his own britches down. To make matters worse, it turned out that Swaggart has a history of extramarital dalliances.

But Swaggart’s apparent hypocrisy isn’t all that unusual. As a society--perhaps as a species--we succeed rather well in pretending to be something we aren’t. Although we drape ourselves in the white cloak of monogamy, we know--and try hard to deny--that homo sapiens is a promiscuous species.

We go to some trouble to say it isn’t so. We pass laws against adultery, pay preachers to denounce promiscuity and profess to be shocked when, time after time, upright citizens are found to be running around. Promiscuity is our secret vice and the source of our greatest hypocrisy.

We acknowledge that chimps and dogs are anything but monogamous. We know that gorillas and elephant seals are polygynous. We accept that they are the way they are because their behavior is biologically built-in. But most of us won’t accept that homo sapiens carry similar built-ins. We take them to school, to the office and yea, verily, even unto the pulpit on Sunday morning.

And all the time we’re carrying this evolutionary load in our genes, we swear that we’re not. We hate to admit that, like many other species, humans have a strong urge for variety in sexual partners. Our condition is summed up in the ancient Arab proverb, “The newcomer filleth the eye.”

I call this condition xenerotica, meaning sexual attraction to strangers. I believe that it’s built into human behavior.

The evidence?

Let’s start with the Revs. Swaggart, Gorman and Bakker, and for good measure throw in another famous evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson. All gained fame and fortune from their ability to denounce sin in entertaining ways. Topping their long list of sins were sins of the flesh. Yet each of these preachers risked shame and infamy--not to mention eternity in hell--for sexual variety. And all got caught.

But these are individual cases; where is the evidence that a need for sexual variety is inherent in the rest of us? Let’s start with a look at the way we’re built.

Humans are a moderately dimorphic species, meaning that the physical differences between the sexes are fairly pronounced. Male humans are 8% taller and 20% heavier than females. What’s more, among primates, the human male’s genitals are exceptionally large, and no other primate has mammaries as conspicuous as the human female’s.

Dimorphism tells a lot about sexual habits. Species with only slight differences in size and appearance between males and females tend to be strictly monogamous. The gibbon is a good example, and it seems to mate for life. By contrast, species that are highly dimorphic, such as gorillas and elephant seals, are highly polygynous. The 3-ton male southern elephant seal keeps a harem stocked with as many as 48 mates.

Our moderate dimorphism is nature’s joke on us. It means we are forever locked into conflict between monogamous and promiscuous urges. No matter how tightly we’re bonded to a mate, the newcomer will still filleth the eye.

More support for xenerotica comes from studies of human behavior. In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, researcher Alfred Kinsey outraged decent Americans by revealing that they engaged in a lot more sexual activity than they admitted. A 1970s update by Morton Hunt showed that Kinsey’s findings were no fluke. Indeed, Hunt found that sexual activity, in and out of marriage, had significantly increased since the Kinsey Report, particularly among women.

A 1983 survey of 100,000 Playboy readers refuted the notion that those who seek sexual variety do so because of sexual dissatisfaction at home: “Our figures suggest that by the age of 50, almost 70% of men and 65% of women have had an affair. Women who say they are sexually satisfied are less likely to cheat; for men, it doesn’t matter. No matter what they think of their sex lives, men fool around.”

Two studies reported this year--one by eight evangelical church denominations, the other by the Pentagon--showed that 43% of teen-agers attending conservative churches have had sexual intercourse by their 18th birthday. That’s almost the percentage of pregnant unmarried women in the Navy.

Further evidence of xenerotica comes from what we read. Playboy and Penthouse are the best-selling men’s magazines in the world. And, while the relatively sexless Sports Illustrated sells 130,000 copies from newsstands in the average week, its annual swimsuit issue sells 1 1/2 million, largely for what the swimsuits reveal. Dr. Dora Lee Dauma, past president of the Central New York chapter of the National Organization for Women, commented, “When it comes to swimsuits, I’m not sure there are any mature men.”

I rest my case. If we define maturity or goodness or righteousness or mental health by the standard of unflagging monogamous thoughts and behavior, we are swimming against the full tide of a powerful built-in force. If we denounce those who stray from absolute monogamy, we commit the same high hypocrisy as the fallen evangelists. They made fortunes by denouncing sex. But their own xenerotic biology brought them down in the end.