We humans sometimes think of our morals as reflecting a higher order of being, something that sets us apart from the other animals of the earth. But our most consecrated moral convictions are often the ones most leavened with primal instinct. Accordingly, sexual behavior, among the most ancient instinctual endeavors, is often a cardinal focus of what we regard as morally right or wrong. And it's fair to say that across cultures, religions, and political systems, women's sexuality commands a greater share of our moral scrutiny. But why women's sexuality, and men's only to a lesser degree? Females hold a crucial resource—their precious half of the genetic coupling required for reproduction. The scarcity of women's reproductive output triggers male mate competition, and men in power have made managing that scarcity a focal point of our politics, broadly manifesting as sexual control. A deeper look into the politics of sexual control uncovers specific primate male reproductive imperatives—avoiding cuckoldry, and competing with rival male groups for greater representation in the gene pool. This chapter will explain why these efforts are concentrated in political conservatism and how they can create societal instability and violence.

THE DEFENSIVE GAME OF MALE MATE COMPETITION

There is a group of birds from the family Cuculidae that engage in a notorious evolutionary reproductive strategy called brood parasitism. Three New World and fifty-six Old World species of bird engage in this strategy, which involves laying their eggs in other birds’ nests—often birds from different species. By doing so, the cuckoo birds, as they are commonly known, offset all the energy expenditure and risk associated with rearing offspring onto another animal. Worse yet, the cuckoo nestling kills its forced adoptees’ offspring by ejecting their eggs. Unaware of the switch, the host species instinctively feeds the cuckoo chick into adulthood. Sometimes the costs incurred by the cuckolded birds, which are often much smaller species, are painfully clear, with an outsized cuckoo chick greedily demanding food from tiny stepparents who practically kill themselves trying to keep up with the voracious imposter's caloric needs. Critically, this herculean feeding effort is done to support a chick with foreign DNA, which makes it not only evolutionarily profitless but also dangerous; in an uncertain natural world filled with hazards, spending an entire breeding season on an imposter chick could mean complete failure to reproduce, an evolutionary dead end.

The risks of cuckoldry are not limited to birds, however, and in fact turn out to form the basis for an enormous share of male human reproductive psychology. Despite the fact that men tend to seek casual sex, they also take risks and invest time and resources in caring for their offspring. Because provisioning human offspring can take decades, the concern over being cuckolded is an important adaptation that prevented our male ancestors from being duped into nurturing foreign DNA. Even today, a large body of evidence shows that, when compared with women, men worldwide are more jealous of sexual infidelity, which places them at risk of cuckoldry.1 Women, on the other hand, tend to be more jealous of emotional intimacy, which might lead to resources being diverted to another woman's children.² This is not to say that women don't get sexually jealous (or that they shouldn't). But a woman always knows whether a child is hers, which makes sexual jealousy (relatively) less critical for her reproductive success.

Cuckoldry, moreover, is a concern shared with other nonhuman male primates, including chimpanzees, baboons, and gorillas, all of whom use a variety of strategies to prevent it. They may attack potential rivals or straying females. Male monkeys and apes have been seen chasing, biting, and dragging females as punishment for flirting with or grooming other males, or simply being within a rival male's vicinity. They may also engage in mate guarding, constantly monitoring the female during her fertility phase to ensure sexual primacy.3

Men too engage in these ancient behaviors. Unlike ovulation in most other primates that show obvious sexual swellings, ovulation in women is hidden. Yet research has found that men have the unconscious ability to smell fertility. In one study, researchers had women wear cotton underarm pads at different phases of their menstrual cycle. When the researchers asked men to rate the smell of those pads on “pleasantness” and “sexiness,” men consistently rated pads worn during the follicular phase (when the egg is ready for fertilization) higher on sexiness.⁴ Compelled by this primitive sense, men are inclined to mate guard. One study found that men engaged in more mate guarding during their mate's follicular phase—calling their partners unexpectedly, monopolizing their time, or displaying anger when they talk to other men.⁵ As among nonhuman male primates, mate guarding can become aggressive, and men may attack their mates in an effort to dissuade partner defection. Research finds that sexual jealousy is a primary motivation for spousal violence, including spousal homicide, both of which are almost always perpetrated by men.⁶

Once again, because men usually run human societies, male reproductive strategies have a way of working themselves into the political arena, where they are often concretized into law. In Texas, for example, it was legal to murder your wife if you caught her cheating as late as 1974.⁷ In Italy, men committing this kind of murder were given special light prison terms (three to seven years) until 1981.⁸ In Uruguay, a conservative penal code allowed judges to completely pardon men who committed murder as a result of “passion provoked by adultery” until 2017.⁹ There are other examples, but the key message here is that conservative laws enforcing female sexual control are greatly driven by male cuckoldry concerns.

For a deeper understanding of how the ancient, animalistic fear of cuckoldry forms a major pillar of present-day statecraft, we turn our attention to the nations where political conservatism tends to be most concentrated. If our hypothesis about conservative politics as a male reproductive strategy is correct, female sexual control should also be at its peak in those nations.

CASE STUDIES OF CONSERVATISM AS MALE SEXUAL CONTROL

The Islamic World

Political conservatism is measurably most concentrated among Islamic nations. In the most comprehensive study into this phenomenon, American political scientist Ronald Inglehart used an enormous World Values Survey dataset (with a 114,800 average sample size per question) to examine the cultures of citizens from eighty-two countries.10 Inglehart organized responses into two continuous orientations. He termed the first the traditional—secular/rational continuum. Here the traditional orientation reflects an emphasis on “religion, family and child-bearing, national pride and respect for authority, and rejection of abortion and divorce,” and the secular/rational orientation largely the opposite values. He termed the second continuum survival—self-expression, and writes, “Self-expression values gives high priority to environmental protection, tolerance of diversity, and rising demands for participation in decision making in economic and political life,” with survival being largely the opposite. What emerged from Inglehart's study is that countries from Islamic traditions—for example, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, among others (along with a smattering of Christian-majority nations like Zimbabwe and Uganda)—were far overrepresented among nations scoring highest on the traditional and survival continua, signaling national pride, respect for authority, emphasis on religion, low tolerance of diversity, few environmental protections, rejection of abortion and divorce, and other hallmarks of politically conservative ideologies.

With such values at the prow, authoritarian regimes flourish in Muslim-majority countries. Political scientist Steven Fish studied data from 157 countries worldwide to identify factors that predict democracy or authoritarianism.11 Among those nations, the most robust predictor of authoritarianism was having a predominantly Muslim population. This trend was seen across languages, ethnicities, and geographic regions, in the forty-seven countries worldwide that predominantly follow Islam; only a few could be classified as democracies. Among the Arabic-speaking countries, which make up one-third of all Islamic-tradition nations, none were democracies. Authoritarianism was even pervasive among OPEC members, oil-rich countries, and this suggests that the lack of democracies among Islamic nations is not dependent on wealth, as is sometimes argued. Fish surmises that the wealth produced by oil “may enable the state to sustain a large and powerful internal security apparatus capable of repressing challengers.” Fish's speculation is consistent with the winner-take-all mentality of male mate competition.

How do we understand this connection? Before anything else, by avoiding logical fallacies. There are those on the Left who may erroneously frame any inquiry into Islamic culture as racism. However, suffice it to say that Islam is not a race. Islam is a religion practiced across every race around the globe. Indeed, Islam's most useful framing here is as a political system, which is true of all religions, particularly those in nations where church and state are not vigilantly kept separate. On the other end of the political spectrum, some on the Right may be tempted to presume moral difference or moral inferiority of Muslims. This too is an error in thinking.

Avoiding either of these fallacies, we can see that authoritarianism is a product of our male-gendered psychology, forged through the pressures of male mate competition. Returning to our initial question, we may ask, “Do societies with the greatest conservatism also show the greatest cuckoldry concerns?” To answer, we may start by considering gender equality. Here we must acknowledge that there is no nation on the planet in which gender inequality means men having less power than women. Seen through the lens of evolutionary science, gender inequality is about controlling female sexuality and thereby protecting male reproductive interests.

The World Economic Forum annually publishes a massive, 144-country survey called the Global Gender Gap Report. The report ranks nations on measures of gender equality across four main domains: economic income and opportunity, educational attainment, health factors such as life expectancy, and political empowerment. In 2016, twelve of the fifteen worst-ranked nations on this list were from the Middle East, and all were Islamic-majority countries, with the sole exception of Ivory Coast, where Christians narrowly outnumber Muslims for the majority religion (by 44 percent to 38 percent respectively).12 The fifteen worst in ascending order were Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Iran, Mali, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Bahrain, and Turkey. In each of these countries, gender inequality is accompanied by government-endorsed control of female sexuality, enforced by a variety of strategies that serve a clear mate-guarding function, ensuring females are always under the watchful eye of a dominant male, and that their interactions with outside males are highly constricted.

Yemen, worst on the global list for gender inequality, provides some examples. Yemeni women who escape their home to marry the man of their choice may be charged with adultery or “shameful acts,” punishable by one hundred lashes. Article 40 in Yemen's constitution mandates that a wife may not leave her residence without her husband's permission (the article also stipulates that she must fulfill his sexual desires). Yemen also has laws designed to dissuade women from straying to the rival tribe. Yemeni women who marry foreign citizens are not allowed to pass on their citizenship to their children, whereas no such restriction exists for men.¹³

The strategies legislated in Yemen are prevalent throughout the Middle East. In Saudi Arabia, for example, it was illegal for women to drive until 2017, and a woman still requires permission from her male guardian to travel, study, or work. Saudis have also managed to harness modern technology to assist that primal endeavor to mate guard; when a woman attempts to travel outside the country, her male guardian is sent a text message.14 Moreover, voicing dissent from these evolutionary arrangements is often summarily punished. When men have made public calls for an end to male guardianship in Saudi Arabia, they have been arrested and given prison sentences.¹⁵

Another classic strategy for mate guarding has involved concealing women's sexuality from other men. Historically, in some places, the women of high-status men were hidden behind the fortressed walls of harems. Today women in many Muslim nations remain hidden behind clothing, which can range from the headscarf hijab to the most extreme form of covering, the burka, which conceals every inch of skin and hair, and some even cloaking the eyes. While often framed as a means to protect women, concealing women from competitor males—primed as they are to detect visual signs of sexual fertility—functions as a highly efficient form of mate guarding. And in many Muslim-majority societies, women risk beatings, prosecution, or even being attacked with acid if they are caught without appropriate covering.¹⁶ It would seem that such violent enforcement does little to provide “protection,” and that the more basic function of concealment is to deter cuckoldry.

At its most literal, sexual control in many Middle Eastern countries includes men having legal rights over their wives’ reproductive organs. Yemeni law, for example, stipulates that women must obtain permission from their husbands for any kind of medical procedure involving the uterus (including a hysterectomy, or a C-section) or for access to contraceptives; this level of control is endemic across the Middle East.¹⁷

Lastly, in some Islamic nations, conservative interpretations of Sharia law prescribe punishing straying females and form the basis for so-called honor killings, which almost always concern female sexual control. Honor killings most often occur as a result of extramarital affairs, premarital loss of virginity, refusing an arranged marriage, speaking to a male nonrelative, or even getting raped.18

Notably, in most of the nations in which gender equality is lowest, Islam provides the principal religious, cultural, and political framework. Islamic doctrine and tradition have frequently been used as a rationale for female sexual control. As one example among many, the Koran plainly states,

Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme.¹⁹

These findings raise important questions regarding the relationship between culture, religion, and human reproductive strategy. The stakes become very clear when we observe that male-centric and conservative Islamic-majority societies have unusually high male populations. According to the United Nations, in 2015 twelve of the top twenty largest male-to-female sex ratios occur in Islamic nations, and eight of the top ten are Islamic.²⁰ In descending order those countries are Qatar (3.066:1), United Arab Emirates (2.722:1), Oman (1.844:1), Bahrain (1.613:1), Kuwait (1.35:1), Saudi Arabia (1.309:1), Maldives (1.302:1), Equatorial Guinea (1.23:1), Bhutan (1.13:1), and Western Sahara (1.105:1). According to the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit specializing in world health and environmental data, male-biased sex ratios reflect “various forms of lifelong discrimination against girls and women—particularly inferior nutrition and health care early in life and during childbearing years,” as well as “sex-selective abortions or infanticide.”²¹

One thing that zoology teaches us is that skewed sex ratios intensify mate competition. Research on a large variety of nonhuman animals finds that when sex ratios are biased, mate guarding increases to contend with the surplus of rivals.22 In other words, cross-species observations predict exactly the correlation we see emerging between male-biased sex ratios and mate guarding, variously expressed by low standards for gender equality and specific practices from veiling to male guardianship to honor killings.

Now, here it is important to acknowledge that Muslim countries are not the only nations with religions or laws that codify male dominance, and that the ultimate cause of male mate competition is not religion or culture or politics—it is the evolved minds of men who express their evolutionary imperatives in the religions, cultures, and political doctrines that they craft. That being said, religions and cultures can codify male privilege to a greater or lesser extent, and there is little question that the doctrines of Islam—coupled with poor separation between church and state in Muslim nations—work in concert with the evolved psychology of men to create the nadirs of sexual control we are exploring here.²³

Moreover, when we understand male mate competition, the reasons for political stances in Islamic nations become clearer. Research across Middle Eastern nations, for example, finds that most Middle Easterners agree that democracy is valuable but disagree with Western approaches to women's rights and women's education. For instance, a World Values Survey study by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris found that Westerners and Middle Easterners consistently agree on statements assessing how well democracies perform as forms of government, and on the value of democratic ideals, e.g., “Democracy may have problems, but it's better than any other form of government.”²⁴ However, the two groups diverged markedly on a scale assessing the value of gender equality, e.g., “A woman has to have children in order to be fulfilled,” and “A university education is more important for a boy than a girl.” The findings led the researchers to conclude that “the values separating the two cultures have much more to do with eros than demos.”

To summarize, nations that are the most politically conservative and authoritarian score lowest on gender quality and are most likely to legislate male mate competition strategies, such as mate-guarding, to include physical punishment or execution for straying females. This is accomplished by intermeshing secular and religious laws that reflect the dictates of dominant male figures, variously represented in the patriarchal family, in a political hierarchy, and in religious structures, including an authoritarian male god.

America

While the more ardent American tribalists see themselves as the religious or moral antithesis of their counterparts in the Middle East, and despite the fact that to many the United States is considered the pinnacle of the free world, the great nation is not first on the 144-country Global Gender Gap Report list. Nor is it the twentieth or the thirtieth. Compared to other countries on measures of things like wage equality, literacy rate, women's labor force participation, or the ratio of women in ministerial positions, the United States scores lower than forty-four other nations.25 With men in charge, it is perhaps not surprising that we find female sexual control to be a focal concern of conservative politics in America as well. Nor is it surprising that such control is tied to fears of cuckoldry.

There are many ways men work female sexual control into law, such as by allowing the murder of unfaithful wives, as we saw above. Another is the historic fight against birth control, which has been spearheaded by conservative men. Tellingly, male worry over birth control has often been framed as a path to women's sexual freedom and the potential for cuckoldry. While it is true that by mitigating the risk of unintended pregnancy, birth control removes a potential disincentive to intercourse, ironically contraception would prevent actual cuckoldry in the biological sense, where an extramarital affair results in a man raising another man's child. However, primate males’ evolved concern over cuckoldry long predates any form of contraception. Thus male brains remain exquisitely primed for sexual jealousy,²⁶ which makes even non-procreative adultery emotionally threatening.

During the Victorian age, sexual repression in America hit its historical climax. Anthony Comstock, a US postal inspector on a personal crusade against what he regarded as sexual indecency, was a key figure in setting the cultural and legal standard of sexual control during that period. In 1873, Comstock managed to persuade the US Congress to pass a federal statute (the Comstock Law) that criminalized the distribution or even possession of sexually oriented paraphernalia, everything from sex toys to sexually explicit fiction. These laws extended to medical literature on abortion or contraception, which were regarded as sexually obscene. During this era, those caught selling or even possessing contraceptives were fined, given prison terms, or assigned hard labor. Many states followed with “little Comstock laws” that outlawed giving away contraception or even verbally passing on information about birth control. Connecticut even made using contraceptives illegal. While men too were targets of these laws of repression, restricting women's sexuality was a central concern, just as we see in Sharia law. American constitutional law scholar Geoffrey Stone explains:

[The prevailing question was] “If women and men need no longer fear pregnancy as an outcome of sexual intercourse, what would keep wives faithful and daughters chaste?” As women gained control over their own reproductive destinies, the seemingly pernicious thought began to creep into the public consciousness that even for women, sex could be separated from reproduction and that freedom from pregnancy could unleash women's biblical lasciviousness.27

During this era, men often voiced the fear that contraceptives would lead to adultery—sex outside the marital contract that gave men ownership of their wives’ reproductive capacity, and a potential route to cuckoldry. Comstock argued that contraceptives could reduce venereal disease or unwanted pregnancy, thus removing potential negative consequences preventing premarital or extramarital sex.²⁸ In 1917, women's reproductive right activist Ethel Byrne (sister of Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood) was arrested for distributing birth control to women at her and her sister's Brooklyn clinic. At Byrne's trial her lawyer argued that prohibiting women access to contraception deprived them the pleasures of sex without the fear of pregnancy, and was therefore unconstitutional, violating the clause guaranteeing “free exercise of conscience and the pursuit of happiness.” The judge ridiculed the argument, insisting that the fear of pregnancy is an important obstacle to fornication, and gave Byrne thirty days in Blackwell Island Prison.29

Comstock laws endured well into the 1960s. Astonishingly, it was not until 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government to prevent married couples from using birth control, and 1972 when the Court extended this protection to non-married couples. Even then there were fears about turning reproductive control over to women. Of the birth control pill, a 1966 headline of a U.S. News & World Report cover story asked, “Is the Pill regarded as a license for promiscuity? Can its availability to all women of childbearing age lead to sexual anarchy?”³⁰

While attitudes about women's sexual freedom, including access to birth control, have progressed since the Victorian age in recent decades, cuckoldry was an important selective force shaping male jealousy across our ancestral history. That legacy continues to be expressed as resistance to birth control. Given the connection between conservatism and mate competition, it follows that we find anti-contraception attitudes most strongly expressed by modern-day conservatives. In the United States, this resistance takes several forms: insisting on abstinence-only sex education in schools; blocking access to certain contraceptives, such as the “morning-after pill”; fighting the mandate that insurance companies cover birth control; and fighting to shut down reproductive health clinics across the nation. There are other reasons for this resistance, as I discuss below, but sexual control of women is a prominent one.

Republican (male) legislators have taken the trouble to explain this connection. Former Pennsylvania Republican senator Rick Santorum, for example, has lectured on the “dangers of contraception,” saying, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that's okay, contraception is okay. It's not okay. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”31 Others have blatantly described the availability of contraception as a threat to male dominance. Former Florida Republican congressman Allen West argued that reproductive health clinics castrate men and make them subservient to women: “These Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women, and all of these women that have been neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness—[we need] to let them know that we are not going to have our men become subservient.”³² Birth control has in some instances become a symbol of the terrible perils of modern society, as when former Republican House majority leader Tom DeLay linked birth control (and evolutionary science) to the Columbine High School massacre: “Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are…the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.”³³

It should be obvious that the pill doesn't cause mass shootings, but that such a link would be proffered betrays (certain) men's reproductive urgency to scare women away from sexual independence. Moreover, conservatives have shown their willingness to legislate punishment for sexual freedom. Reminiscent of the sentiments of Anthony Comstock over a century earlier, in 2009 Colorado Republican state senator Dave Schultheis insisted that he would block a bill requiring HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease “stems from sexual promiscuity” and that the legislature shouldn't “remove the negative consequences of poor behavior, unacceptable behavior.”³⁴

The divide on contraception is seen between liberals and conservatives in expected ways. For example, a 2012 Pew Research Center surveyed Americans about whether insurance companies should be given a religious exemption to a mandate requiring that they provide birth control. Among those surveyed, 73 percent of Republicans said that insurance companies should be given an exemption, compared to 29 percent of Democrats.35

In the religious justifications given for this opposition, we can see the ancient male primate concern over sexual control. For instance, R. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and also a highly influential Evangelical theologian, wrote,

[The birth control pill] became almost an assured form of contraception, something humans had never encountered before in history. Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation.³⁶

As with Islam, in considering religiously motivated opposition to birth control in America, we cannot ignore how loudly man's sexual control of women is prescribed in scripture: “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”³⁷ This privilege is handed down to men, who are God's male proxies on Earth, e.g., “He [man] is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man…. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”³⁸ Or, more to the point, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.”³⁹ The emphasis on female sexual control is more subtly, but perhaps most profoundly expressed through the foundational story of the Abrahamic religions, which holds the woman, Eve, responsible for the expulsion from paradise and for bringing suffering and death to all people thereafter. How did Eve sin? By eating the forbidden fruit—an allegory for sexual freedom that hasn't escaped much of anyone.

ABORTION

Research finds that the availability of contraception stems the use of abortion as a means of birth control.40 Yet political conservatives, far more often than political liberals, tend to oppose both birth control and abortion. The issue of abortion is complicated. One factor making abortion a complex and emotionally charged topic is evolutionary—the profound human empathy for children. Protecting children is central to our survival, especially in the face of human offspring's epic stretch in dependency. Debates as to how many cells constitute a full human aside, when embryos are framed as human offspring—which they often are for political, rather than scientific, reasons—the topic of abortion taps into powerful emotions designed to help us protect our young.

In truth, it is difficult to engage in a scientific debate on the right or wrong of abortion. As Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden succinctly put it in their book Sex and War, “Religious assertions about when life begins are philosophically parallel to religious beliefs about life after death. They are both strongly held by different groups, but they go beyond the realm of science to prove or disprove.”⁴¹ Therefore a foray into the morality of abortion would need to be lengthy but is beyond the scope of this book.

Nevertheless, there is a widely expressed argument on the political Right that access to abortion leads to sexual freedom, the old enemy of males programmed to avoid cuckoldry, which bears some consideration. An excerpt from Conservapedia.com, an “encyclopedic” conservative website (which to date has had over six hundred million views) expresses this connection in plainest terms:

Abortion and promiscuity refers to the liberal trait of using abortion as a way to deal with unwanted pregnancies caused by promiscuous sexual behavior. Due to immoral public school sex “education” many liberal youths view contraception and abortion as a license to engage in unhealthy premarital sexual relationships.⁴²

While religious convictions are often cited for antiabortion stances, the Bible does not comment on when a fetus achieves personhood, nor decree restrictions on abortion. In fact, it may be shocking to learn that in the Old Testament the god of Abraham was described as anything but pro-life. In Numbers (5:11–5:31), for example, God instructs Moses to give women he suspects of having cheated on their husbands poisoned water to make them miscarry—thus eliminating competitor genes. Further, in Hosea, God punishes the Ephraimites for worshipping other gods, which is framed throughout as sexual infidelity: “O Ephraim, thou committest whoredom”43; “They are all adulterers.”⁴⁴ Here God causes the Ephraimite women to miscarry: “Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit: yea, though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb.”⁴⁵

Similar disregard for the unborn is seen throughout the Bible, particularly in the context of infidelity. Later in Hosea, Samaria, an ancient city that was considered to be one of God's wives, was also punished for adultery: “Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.”⁴⁶

There are several points to be taken from these darkly gory narratives. First, again, is that the god of the Abrahamic religions, who conservatives so often cite for their moral guidance on sexuality, was a jealous male god who did not suffer infidelity. Second is that God is purported to actually cause abortions himself, or command his male representatives to cause them. Third, the preponderance of feticide (and infanticide) in the Bible makes the stated biblical reasons for conservative opposition to abortion greatly suspect.

In fact, before Nixon, Democrats and Republicans were relatively more evenly divided on the topic of abortion. Nixon himself initially took a proabortion stance—for instance, in 1970, he authorized all military hospitals to perform abortions—but quickly changed his position at the influence of political strategists in order to secure the Catholic vote during the 1972 presidential election, framing abortion as an issue of religious morality.47 A year later, Nixon revealed his true feelings about abortion on tape. Not only did Nixon reiterate the timeworn male stance that abortions lead to sexual promiscuity, or “permissiveness” as he put it, but he also claimed abortion should be allowed to eliminate the genes of outside races—“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white.”⁴⁸ In Nixon's candid words, the importance of controlling women's sexuality in competition with outside races is evident. Whereas the Bible does not explicitly disallow abortions, it certainly emphasizes reproductive competition with the out-group, a sublimated (thus less commonly understood) evolutionary motivation for the Right's pro-life stance.

GROWING A BIGGER CLAN

In all the discussion of contemporary policy on birth control, it is necessary to remember that natalism (encouraging reproduction) has been a core tenet of religions throughout the ages and of Christianity in particular. Indeed, across the globe religiosity is associated with higher birthrates,⁴⁹ and natalist dicta is often embedded in religious canon. For instance, in the Bible, God kills Onan for spilling his seed—that is, for withdrawing during sex with his brother's widow, Tamar, instead of impregnating her per Levirite law.⁵⁰ There are many religious explanations for Onan's execution. But ancient Israel was marred by nearly continuous warfare, and a basic fact of coalitionary violence is that larger coalitions are more powerful.

This rule was painfully evident in the biblical era, during which larger, stronger groups regularly slaughtered smaller, weaker groups with impunity. More specifically, invaders typically slaughtered men, whereas, once again, women were often spared and taken as sexual spoils. In violent times, men have a rather obvious incentive to enlarge the warrior class. It is from this incentive that men have created religious dictates that promote an ever-expanding tribe and why political orientations based on male competition favor these dicta. Recall that the Christian god's very first decree to humans is to reproduce, and in it we can see the importance of dominance, not only in competitions between God's “chosen tribe” and other races, as we commonly see, but with all other competitors as well: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”51

The Christian formula appears to be winning fitness competitions worldwide. At 2.3 billion as of 2015, Christians make up the largest population of believers on Earth, and fully 31 percent of the world's people.⁵² Some of these numbers are a result of evangelizing, but they also greatly reflect high birth rates.⁵³

Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose writings have had a great influence on modern-day conservative Christian sexual morals, saw lust as an abomination, the sin that brought about humankind's fall from God's grace. Despite his convictions, Augustine well understood the need for Christians to reproduce themselves. “The will of God,” he insisted, was “not to serve lust” but “to see to the preservation of the race.”⁵⁴ According to early religious laws, sex could be for procreation only (between husband and wife), and only in the missionary position, which was believed to increase the chance of conception.⁵⁵ Following Augustine's enduring authority, the Catholic Church continues to vehemently oppose contraception, and today Catholics make up fully 50 percent of the world's Christians.⁵⁶

And so religion's sustained anti-contraception policy has had the measurable impact of enhancing Christian evolutionary fitness around the globe. Moreover, the value of large groups remains tied to their utility in coalitionary violence. Religious warfare has seared its way across the historical landscape for as far back as we have records. During the conquest of the Americas, for example, fleets of Spanish men set sail across the Atlantic under crosses and banners, thirsting for gold and glory. Stripped down, the conquest was primate males bent on acquiring territory, sequestering resources, killing off the male competition, and breeding with the resident females, all at the explicit command of church and crown, and their natalist agenda. In terms of fitness, these efforts were immensely successful, creating two continents of mestizo believers claiming loyalty, surrendering resources to the church and crown, and abiding the command to expand the Catholic population. Today, 40 percent of all Catholics reside in Latin America,57 and the Catholic Church owns more real estate than any multinational corporation, and, further implicating male competition in all of this, genomic studies find a disproportionate contribution of European male genes across Latin American genome.⁵⁸ These feats of male mate competition would have been impossible with a doctrine espousing, say, the regular use of contraception.

The doctrine of Manifest Destiny offers another example of how religious and government powers have used fecundity to swarm the opposition. Manifest Destiny itself highly influenced the US government's expansionist policy during the conquest of America's western territories, which was a violent and protracted competition for territory with the natives already living there. In an 1845 article in the Democratic Review, where the term Manifest Destiny was first used, westward expansion was equated with “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (here Providence, of course, referring to God's alliance). The “multiplying millions,” however, referred specifically to reproduction for European immigrants. To put this bias into perspective, consider that when the US government's extermination of Native Americans ended, it took up the business of sterilizing Native American women by force throughout the reservation system.⁵⁹

A contemporary example of conservative, conflict-based natalism comes from the Quiverfull movement, a small but rapidly multiplying anti-contraception conservative Christian group based primarily in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom, which claims its inspiration from an unequivocal Bible passage from Psalms:

Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord, fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one's youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.60

Of one of the movement's leaders, Nancy Campbell, offers, “We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication” and that “the womb is such a powerful weapon; it's a weapon against the enemy.”⁶¹ Perhaps not surprisingly, most (if not all) Americans associated with this movement identify with the Republican Party.

Tying all of this back to political psychology, it follows that those with minds calibrated for male-centrism, higher xenophobia, and focusing on competition with the outside tribe for their place in the gene pool would be most opposed to contraception—an effective barrier to winning fitness competitions.

Indeed, this reason for anti-contraception politics was noticed by Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), a community nurse who became the first president of Planned Parenthood. Notes Sanger,

In every nation of militaristic tendencies, we find the reactionaries demanding a higher and still higher birthrate. Their plea is, first, that great armies are need to defend the country; second, that a huge population is required to assure the country its proper place among the powers of the world…. As soon as the country becomes overpopulated, these reactionaries proclaim loudly that it is their moral right to expand…and to take by force such room as it needs.⁶²

Sanger's observations are borne out by history. Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Nicolae Ceausescu, and Idi Amin, all of whom killed rival groups en masse, also took specific measures to restrict or outlaw access to contraception and abortion, which sent birthrates skyrocketing.⁶³ Baby booms provide the human fodder that fuels authoritarian ambitions. We can see the purpose of creating population surges (of one's in-group) in the words of ethnocentrists in the modern day. For example, Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, said in a CNN interview, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies. You've got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values. In doing so, you can grow your population, you can strengthen your culture, and you can strengthen your way of life.”64

In short, conservative opposition to birth control is rooted in male mate competition. Not only does birth control stir fears of cuckoldry, but it also keeps populations smaller relative to the rival tribe, which has always been a grave concern of men, who are disproportionately targeted for killing by the invading hordes. However, while growing the tribe may temporarily provide security for one's own kind, there is a large body of research showing that it comes with costs—social instability and male violence.

ON THE BROADER DANGERS OF SEXUAL CONTROL

One of the most common manifestations of sexual control—limiting access to birth control—is increasingly recognized for the manner in which it fuels instability and violence by creating population surges. One major reason population booms are dangerous is that they increase the ratio of young men to women and older men. Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden offer an extensive review of how this ratio has been a robust predictor of greater violence, more frequent raiding, greater political instability, more incidence of genocide, and more warfare across history, cultures, and geography—from the conflict among the Mojave tribes in America to the lead-up to World War II in Germany to the enduring conflicts in the Middle East.⁶⁵

This observation has also been put to the test empirically. Researchers Christian Mesquida and Neil Wiener of York University in Toronto quantified the magnitude of conflicts across the globe by tallying the number of fatalities they caused. In their study, the ratio of men aged fifteen to twenty-nine predicted one-third of all the variance in the number of total dead.66 Other research has found similar trends in the United States, where homicide rates increase and decrease along with the relative proportion of men aged fifteen to twenty-nine.⁶⁷ Essentially, flooding a population with young men creates a societal powder keg, for reasons ultimately rooted in male mate competition.

Young men often enter the fields of mate competition with fewer resources to offer women, what behavioral ecologists call “embodied capital.”⁶⁸ They must compete with older, more established higher-ranking men who control more resources, which women generally prefer in light of the costs of child-rearing. In fact, research finds that when male sex ratios are high, women expect men to spend more money on them in their mating efforts.⁶⁹ With young men facing these demands and the peril of being shut out of the mating game, violent risk-taking among young males has been an evolutionarily sensible strategy.⁷⁰ Not desirable, but effective, helping young men in acquiring scarce or monopolized resources, challenging the existing male dominance hierarchy, or raiding the rival clan. Young men in our past who couldn't take risks were more likely to become evolutionary dead ends. Today risk-taking and antisocial behaviors are strongly associated with being young and male across societies worldwide,⁷¹ and men at their reproductive peak tend also to be most inclined to violence, a phenomenon known as young male syndrome.⁷² In short, more balanced age ratios equal more balanced societies.

Most importantly, outlawing or restricting access to abortions or contraception creates population booms, which cause havoc when male baby boomers grow up to become violent sexual competitors. Conversely, across nations when abortions became legalized, crime rates dropped, including in the United States.⁷³ Despite the clear links between population swells and social instability, there are many on the right wing who resist the very notion of population control.

On Conservapedia.com, population control is dubiously pitted against one of the most ancient, fundamental survival imperatives—competition with other species: “Population control means reducing the human population of the earth, in favor of other species or to promote political or ideological goals (see eugenics). Population control is based on pseudoscience and ill-founded economic assumptions.”⁷⁴

Nonetheless, the danger of population surges is well understood by key sectors on the Right, notably among those with the highest pedigrees in national security. General Michael V. Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, identified rapid population growth as among the biggest threats to global security.⁷⁵ Similarly, as US ambassador to the United Nations, George H. W. Bush wrote of family planning: “Success in the population field, under United Nations leadership, may, in turn, determine whether we can resolve the great questions of peace, prosperity, and individual rights that face the world.”⁷⁶ As a Republican congressman (before he too became director of the CIA), George H. W. Bush was nicknamed “Rubbers” for his advocacy of family planning but was forced to disavow these ties when he ran on Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign ticket as the vice presidential nominee.

In 1985, a string of Islamic terrorist hijackings, bombings, kidnappings, and deadly attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports brought back Rubbers's voice. The next year, as head of a task force on combating terrorism, Bush broke ranks and gave the following warning: “Fully 60 percent of the Third World population is under 20 years of age, half are 15 years or less. These population pressures create a volatile mixture of youthful aspirations that when coupled with economic and political frustrations help form a large pool of potential terrorists.”⁷⁷

It is also worth mentioning that Bush's father, Prescott Bush, was once the treasurer of Planned Parenthood (in 1947), an organization frequently in the crosshairs of US conservatives. This tie is believed to have cost him his first US Senate race in 1950, particularly in the heavily Catholic Connecticut where he ran.⁷⁸ Family planning is generally considered a signature concern of the Left, and the Left is often portrayed as being naïve about human nature and even soft on security. But Prescott was a Republican, a field artillery captain during World War I, and once wrote a piece in Readers Digest that suggested he well understood the power of primate threat displays: “To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are.”79

George H. W. Bush and Hayden's observations about the dangers of population surges have been strongly corroborated by other US military men; Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Al Haig, Colin Powell, and William Draper all voiced the importance of family planning to national security.⁸⁰ In addition, after 9/11 a commission was set up under George W. Bush to help us grasp the causes of the World Trade Center attacks. The 9/11 Commission Report was unequivocal on the issue of population control: “By the 1990s, high birthrates and declining rates of infant mortality had produced a common problem throughout the Muslim world: a large, steadily increasing population of young men without any reasonable expectation of suitable or steady employment—a sure prescription for social turbulence.”⁸¹

The stabilizing power of contraceptives is further evinced by the fact that the most violent societies are those in which women are kept out of the political process to serve as reproductive machines. Excluding women not only allows male reproductive imperatives to maintain a monopoly on the political process but also tends to reinforce male-centric reproduction policies that are more likely to flood the population with volatile young males. The next chapter will explore female reproductive psychology and will examine what happens when women are allowed into the political arena.