Wrestling with the Double Standard

by Clyde Frasier

We are in the midst of a very public assault on the double standard these days. The fact that women are condemned as "sluts" for the very same behavior which leads guys to be applauded as "studs" is widely condemned as one more example of the way that men oppress women. As if to compensate for this oppression, our popular culture increasingly celebrates sexual freedom for women. Television programs like Ally McBeal and Sex and the City depict women who are just as interested in sex as any man; in the film Disclosure a sexually aggressive woman harasses a male subordinate; Madonna flaunts her sexuality as explicitly as any male rock star.

Many real men and women, however, find it much harder to discard traditional attitudes than these pop icons. Our attitudes toward sex itself have changed much less than views on women's role in the family and on the job. Even some of the most ardent feminists have voiced support for the sexual double standard. Politically incorrect though it may be, the double standard has deep roots in both our biology and our culture.

Evolutionary biologists have traced the roots of the double standard to the most fundamental biological difference between the sexes, the fact that only females can get pregnant and give birth. This basic difference in reproductive physiology gives women a powerful reason to restrain their sexual activity, and it causes men to prefer women who are sexually restrained.

Since only women can give birth, there is a fundamental biological imbalance in the burdens of reproduction. All that's necessary for a man to reproduce is a single sexual act, but a woman must endure at least nine months of pregnancy. For most of history, women had to spend another year or two nursing if an infant was to have any chance of survival. Nursing not only added to the burdens of reproduction, it also made another pregnancy unlikely.

As a result of the differences in their reproductive biology, the evolutionary pressures affecting males and females were significantly different. Mating with a less-than-optimal partner isn't a man's best strategy for genetic survival, but it doesn't really prevent him from looking for better partners for very long. A man increases the chance of passing his genes on to the future by mating with as many women as possible. As a result, males evolved to be sexually undiscriminating.

Reproduction is much more burdensome for women, so it makes sense for them to be choosy about the men with whom they mate. Women who mate with less-than-desirable partners foreclose their reproductive opportunities for a couple of years. Over our evolutionary history, women who chose their mates carefully produced more offspring than those who did not, and females evolved to be sexually restrained.

The results of this evolutionary process are obvious to any observer of human behavior. Women think about sex less often than men do, and they both have and desire fewer sexual partners. In an experiment replicated on a number of college campuses, three quarters of the males propositioned by an attractive stranger of the opposite sex agreed to have sex. None of the females did. The sexual revolution has changed the behavior of females in recent years, but significant differences between the sexes remain. In one survey, eighty percent of sexually-active college women expected to marry their current partner, but only twelve percent of the males did. Women can now have sex outside of marriage without destroying their self-esteem, but unlike men, most women have little interest in sex outside of relationships.

If reproductive biology gives women a reason to be sexually restrained, it also gives men a reason to seek sexuallyrestrained partners. The fact that females give birth makes the identity of a baby's mother very clear, but until the recent development of genetic testing it was impossible to be sure about the father. The only way a man could be confident that he was the father of his partner's child was if she had been sexually faithful to him. Men have reason to be concerned about this because cuckoldry is an evolutionary deadend. Everyone alive is descended from men who successfully avoided cuckoldry at least once.

There's lots of evidence that men are far more concerned with a partner's sexual fidelity than women. In order to preserve their sexual purity, many cultures have forced women to wear veils, mutilated their genitals, and forbidden them to have any contact with men outside their families. No corresponding restrictions have been placed on men. Laws have punished wives' adultery since ancient Egypt, but the first law outlawing adultery by a husband wasn't passed until 1852. Surveys show that men are most threatened by a partner's sexual infidelity, but women are far more concerned when their partner forms a deep emotional attachment to another.

The double standard is widespread, but it's not universal. Women do enjoy sexual freedom in a few cultures, but those cultures exhibit a distinctive pattern. Women's sexual freedom leaves men uncertain about paternity. Since any care that the cuckold gives to his wife's children does nothing to promote his genetic survival, men in such societies provide little support for their wives' children. What support they do provide goes to their sisters' children instead. This makes evolutionary sense since they know that those children share at least some genes with them. This pattern is found among the Nyar of southern India where women have between three and twelve husbands, and there is a common saying, "No Nyar knows his father."

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger argues that something similar is happening in contemporary American society. He points to a seeming paradox: the rate of single motherhood more than doubled between 1960 and 1990, in spite of the fact that both abortion and birth control became widely available. The key to understanding this paradox, Tiger argues, is decreasing paternal certainty. Abortion and the pill made it possible for women to prevent or end unwanted pregnancies, but they also gave women increased sexual freedom. This undermined paternal certainty, so when unwanted pregnancies did occur, men were less willing to marry than in the past. Tiger fears that humans are in danger of returning to the basic mammalian pattern where the basic social unit is a mother and her young.

Not surprisingly, women are none too enthusiastic about this possibility. Gloria Steinem's famous quip, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," made a great bumper sticker, but it's a half-truth at best. A woman may not need a man, but mothers need help, and Steinem and other feminists have insisted that they are entitled to get it. Children need a father's care, too. In spite of vigorous attempts to dispute the importance of fathers, the most sophisticated contemporary research shows that children who grow up with their biological fathers are more likely to finish school and get jobs, and less likely to get pregnant as a teen or to get in trouble with the law. Both society as a whole and women in particular have an interest in promoting committed fatherhood, and that means that they have just as much of a stake in the double standard as men do.

In those societies which most narrowly restrict women's contact with the opposite sex, many women embrace the restrictions and they are also enforced primarily by women. One of the main obstacles encountered by the contemporary campaign against female genital mutilation has been the ardent desire of girls to have the operation. Even in advanced industrial societies, women are more likely than men to support the double standard. This was the finding of a 1993 meta-analysis that combined one-hundred-seventy-seven studies conducted in the United States and Canada with over 125,000 subjects. The results surprised the researchers, who had assumed that the double standard was imposed on women by men. Even the readers of Cosmopolitan, who might be expected to be the most enthusiastic supporters of sexual freedom for women, have had second thoughts. A 1991 survey of more that 100,000 readers found that the majority felt disappointed, bitter, disillusioned, and betrayed by the sexual revolution.

One of the clearest indications of women's support for the double standard is the way that sexual permissiveness has divided feminists. For a brief period in the early seventies, sexual freedom was a key feminist demand, but even then ambivalence wasn't hard to find. The very first issue of MS in 1972 contained an article entitled "The Sexual Revolution Isn't Our War." More recently, feminists have made alliances with traditional religious conservatives to fight porn and they have even had second thoughts about abortion. Catharine McKinnon has criticized the Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion on the grounds that it "frees male sexual aggression" by removing "the one remaining legitimated reason that women have had for refusing sex besides the headache."

It turns out that the double standard is a lot more persistent than it appears on television. No matter how often popular culture titillates teenage boys with images of sexually liberated women, they are unlikely to want to raise children with a woman whose behavior raises serious doubts about whether they have fathered those children. No matter how appealing images of sexual adventure are to young women, most can't help feeling used by a guy who picks them up for sex and never calls again. They also have to worry, in the words of feminist social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, that "If sex is 'free,' then so potentially are men; and [they will be] left to fend for themselves.If abortion is a woman's choice, then there will be no way to convince men that children are, in part, their responsibility too."

Despite what our popular culture would have us believe, the double standard isn't just a hang up. It's a very basic aspect of the kinds of creatures we are and also a rational response to fundamentally different reproductive dilemmas faced by males and females. But the double standard is even more than this. It's also an essential part of the way in which cultures convince adults to nurture the next generation. Nothing is more important to human survival and before we abandon a practice which has been almost universal throughout history and across cultures, we should at least consider the ramifications of doing so. The double standard isn't inescapable, but casually renouncing it is reckless in the extreme.

© 2001 Clyde Frazier. Clyde Frazier teaches Politics at Meredith College in Raleigh. He is currently working on a book entitled Is Masculinity Obsolete? Readers with questions or comments are invited to contact the author at frazierc@meredith.edu.