Does Monogamy Really Drive Us to Drink?

A recent article by Mara Squicciarini and Jo Swinnen in the journal of the American Association of Wine Economists (and no, I'm not making that up) suggested the answer to that question might be "yes." Wrote the authors: "Historically, we find a correlation between the shift from polygyny to monogamy and the growth of alcohol consumption. Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the pre-industrial world."

Naturally, lots of bloggers picked up the story, delighted (as bloggers almost always are) to be told what they already believed to be true: monogamy is so frustrating it drives us to drink. Implicitly they were suggesting a beer in the hand is not worth two in the bush.

I was curious to know whether this article might actually support the idea that monogamy drives us to drink, so I asked my colleague Raymond Hames, Chair of Anthropology at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, to give it a look-see. Ray seemed the perfect person to ask, since his work is cited in this article, he's studied some of the populations considered, and he's engaged (with a former student) in a major study of polyandry.

Womb Gay

Reading an excerpt from the new book Sex and War has got me thinking about the Mormons and California’s Prop 8. Sex and War features a meditation on how biology might help to explain why and how humans kill each other. The battle between the Mormons and the LBGT civil rights movement, now being waged over the Mormon’s support of California’s anti-gay Proposition 8, has not (yet) turned bloody. But I can’t help but think about the interesting biological background to all this.

Discussions and debates over the origins of homosexuality have tended to focus on two possibilities: you’re either gay because you’ve got a “gay gene,” or you’re gay because of some aspect of your upbringing. (The latter option is usually imagined to involve something nasty, like a pedophilic priest.)

These two options—gene-gay and turned-gay—fit neatly in the (yawn) nature-nurture debate, and that probably explains why almost everyone seems to keep ignoring a third option, one for which there is astoundingly robust data: womb-gay.

The Federal Marriage Amendment and the New 'One Drop of Blood' Rule

Intersex messes with the opponents of gay marriage.

As anti-miscegenation laws took hold in an effort to stop blacks and whites from marrying, by necessity courts had to start deciding who counted as white or black. The standard that ultimately emerged – namely the “one drop of blood” rule of blackness – dictated that any trace of black heritage, no matter how remote or invisible, made you black.

Although a legal necessity, the rule amounted to a biological and social absurdity, one that thrust upon many people an identity that made no sense in terms of their bodily appearances and their lives. For example, Susie Phipps grew up, lived, and married twice as a white woman, but was informed in 1983 by the Louisiana courts (in response to a passport application dispute) that she was really “colored” because she had had one black ancestor six generations back.

As conservatives continue to push the Federal Marriage Amendment and similar state-level same-sex marriage prohibitions, there are signs that a new one drop of blood rule is about to emerge – but this time it will be about sex instead of race. Soon, the way this sort of legislation is going, against their will some men will legally become women, and vice versa. It’s already happening in Texas.

Let me back up a bit.