Cuckolding In the News

Mistress and slave have had a rather low key weekend so far here in River City. Friday involved dinner at home and an evening at a local jazz club, where my lovely Mistress caught more than a few eyes. In an odd coincidence she ran into a woman who was an underclassman at her small liberal arts college. I wasn’t flattering when I whispered that Mistress looked much younger than her supposedly younger friend.

Saturday I spent the morning with a cute grandson, and returned around 1 pm for an afternoon in bed….both of us needed the R&R. And we were thrilled to dodge a dreaded bullet. The couple who insisted we join them for dinner and a night at the symphony cancelled!!

(Happy dance from Mick, who is not much of a classical music buff!)

That left our evening open for a movie and a stop at Mistress’s favorite ice cream parlor, just a short walk up the street. Much more relaxing!

But today’s blog is not about Mick avoiding Segovia and dinner at a dreary country club. It’s about one of our little fascinations here at UCTMW – the science behind cuckolding!  And an article in yesterday’s NY Times shed some historical light on the phenomenon under the headline: “(Fathered by the Mailman?#55FFFE)  Fathered By the Mailman? Mostly an Urban Legend.”

It turns out some crackerjack scientists have done some intensive DNA and genealogical studies and discovered that the likelihood that someone else fathered a guy’s child are actually pretty low:

“In a commentary in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues argue that it’s long past time to toss out frequent cuckoldry as a myth. Studies relying on different methods in different cultures all point to cuckoldry rates of less than 1%.”

Apparently that’s not only true in the more “civilized” world, but also in less “developed” societies. (the difference is apparently based on the frequency in  neighborhoods with fast food restaurants and obese people). The tell is us pathetic human males have rather lazy sperm --

Beverly I. Strassmann, a University of Michigan anthropologist who gathered the data on paternity rates in Mali, agreed that widespread cuckoldry “was an urban legend. It seemed to have a life of its own.”

The evidence of low rates of cuckoldry comes not just from gene studies, she noted. In species where females mate with many males, the males tend to evolve sperm that are good at competing for fertilization. The males may produce large amounts of sperm, for example, and a high percentage swim well.

Humans, however, don’t rate in the sperm department.

“It’s of amazingly low quality,” Dr. Strassmann said. “Half the sperm can be duds; they can have two heads; they can be defective in all sorts of ways.”

The only way for men to have evolved comparatively ineffectual sperm, she added, was for them to have experienced high rates of paternity over time.

I’m having trouble getting my head around what my lazy, ineffectual, two headed sperm have to do with the likelihood that someone else is having fun with my wife.  Maybe one of our commenters can explain that to me. 

But I digress.  The more interesting factoid is that some human communities are more inclined to  cuckolding than others:

It’s not that widespread cuckoldry doesn’t exist in some cultures, Dr. Larmuseau said. Some South American tribes with high rates share a belief that more than one man can contribute to the formation of a fetus.

But Dr. Larmuseau suspects that these populations are the exception, not the rule. Humans have evolved to avoid cuckoldry, he said, because of our peculiar biology.

Human infants are born quite helpless, compared with the newborns of other animals, and they need a lot of food over a long period to fuel the growth of their calorie-hungry brains. Mothers needed fathers to help find the food.

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“Babies really need good investment from the fathers,” Dr. Larmuseau said, “and the paternity has to be very sure in order for them to make those investments.”ckoldry rates of about 1 percent.

Of course, all of this is based on history, not the evolution of community values in the 21^st Century. And it relates to reproduction, not recreational sex!  While the rate of cuckoldry may have been historically low for women in their child bearing years, it says little about women of a certain age who, like Mistress, have the occasional  itch for a little sexual variety that just needs to be scratched. Or husbands who get a strange thrill when their wives grab for a little extra gusto via a sidedish.

We may need some more social science research to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.