Adapted from Mail Online
It was a moment that smashed assumptions with the force of a wrecking ball. She approached the sexy older male who seemed to arrive from out of nowhere, his black-and-white coat gleaming in the light. She put herself directly in his path, shook her head provocatively, then turned and bent over to “present” herself to him. She eagerly pressed her backside against his groin and the two gyrated against each other. Spectators watched as the two built toward a climax, and then they went their separate ways. The sexual display took the scientific community completely by surprise.
When primatologist Sarah Hrdy described this behavior among female hanuman langurs—or Semnopithecus entellus, a monkey species from western India—in the late 1970s, it erupted into the kind of controversy usually reserved for lewd performances at the MTV Video Music Awards. Ever since Darwin there had been an assumption among evolutionary biologists that females were coy and choosy in their sexual behavior while males were the ardent, promiscuous sex. Even though important advances in gender equality have been achieved since then, “most Darwinian models of human origins incorporate females only as passive objects of male competition,” wrote biological anthropologists Craig Stanford and John Allen as the 20th century came to a close. And yet these female langurs were observed actively pursuing males from neighboring troops while, according to the prevailing theory, they should have been chaste rather than chasing. What was even more surprising was that they would exhibit these sexual advances at any stage in their estrous cycle, sometimes even when they were already pregnant.
“Under some circumstances,” Hrdy wrote in her classic 1977 book The Langurs of Abu, “females are continuously sexually receptive, a pattern previously thought to occur only among human females.” Primatologists refer to langur societies as polygynous, in that they are composed of multifemale, single-male groups. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection held that these females should choose the most impressive male in their troop to ensure the hereditary success of their offspring. But here was clear evidence that females would actively engage in “adulterous solicitations” with males from other societies. As Hrdy revealed to a scandalized scientific community, the genetic benefits that came from seeking extra-pair matings—while maintaining the support of an existing partner—meant that evolution could favor females who choose to cheat.
More than 30 years of subsequent research has confirmed Hrdy’s findings and expanded on them to reveal that females in many primate species, humans included, engage in a diversity of sexual strategies to enhance their overall reproductive success. For example, in saddle-backed tamarins, females will solicit sex from multiple males who will each help to care for her offspring.* Female mouse lemurs will mate with up to seven males during a single night. Capuchin monkeys will seek out mating opportunities in the early stages of their pregnancy, presumably to confuse males about paternity. And bonobo females will have sex with everybody at pretty much any time they feel like it.
In the latest addition, Brooke Scelza, a human behavioral ecologist at the University of California–Los Angeles, contends in Evolutionary Anthropology that not only do human females seek out multiple sexual partners as an evolutionary strategy, they opportunistically shift that strategy depending on the environmental context (more on that below). In other words, female sexuality is not so much blindly promiscuous as it is pragmatic.
Read more of the story Mail Online
