But the Devil Made Me Do It!

Cupid Rhymes with Stupid

-       Or, Taking Responsibility for Your Own Love Life

By Cherri Randall, PhD

In vampire lore, Dracula has to be invited inside your house before he can bite you.  Similarly, the devil does not twist your arm.  He entices you to give in to your own desires, to listen to your treacherous heart, to make emotional decisions based on the easy way out.  He stands outside in the cold wind urging you to open the door - but the bottom line is, it is up to you whether or not to open the door. 

                Everybody wants to choose for themselves, but the homework to make an informed decision is so painstaking.  The problem with relationship advice is almost everyone makes one basic assumption that is not true.  Before that can be discussed, some background is in order.

                Consider the idea that there are basically two ways of looking at the world.  One is that a creator put us on earth to go therefore and multiply.  It does not matter if you believe that creator is God Almighty, Yahweh, Allah, Karma, Jehovah, Krishna, et. al.  What matters is that you believe a pair of humans were made, and their divinely appointed plan was making more humans. 

                Or, you can believe that we evolved from primordial ooze, and that our prime directive is to procreate our species and survival of the fittest will insure that he who parents best parents last. 

This is not to engage a theological debate but to point out that these two disparate world views reconcile on this all-encompassing agenda.  Whichever belief you have, we're here to make babies.  To make babies, we need eggs and we need sperm.  So we put those two things together and procreate

                As humans, we invest in quality of offspring more so than any other species.  Two parents can offer more to a child than one parent can offer.

                There are of course exceptions to this idea.  If a man is abusive, a child might be better off being raised only with his mother.  If a woman neglects her children, those children likely will be better off in foster care or being raised by their father.  If we speak of positive attention, however, it is always in the best interests of a human child to have two parents investing in the future in a positive manner.

                This is where the idea of marriage originated.  What God has yoked together, let no man break apart.  If you don't believe some version of that, then the alternative is recognizing that pair-bonding evolved to insure the success of parenting.  Teenagers today chafe at the idea of abstinence until marriage as if the injunctions against premarital sex were effected just to keep them from enjoying their bodies. 

The simple truth is the necessity of waiting until the pair-bond was formalized meant that any children conceived by the couple practicing sexual relations would benefit from having two parents investing in their future. 

                A formalized relationship benefits any children that are born into that relationship.  In our society, marriage is not just a cultural institution, but also a legal institution. 

                Abortion also has both a medical definition and a legal status which terminates all future interests in an embryo or fetus.  It curtails all investments in the life of the developing child.  An abortion legally means:  I will take no further responsibility for this pregnancy and the life that would have resulted from it.

                Males do not have this legal right.  Proponents of male abortion rights state that a male who has fertilized an egg in a female body should have the right to say, sometime during the first trimester and/or within the same legal restrictions that females have, I will take no future responsibility for this pregnancy and the life that would have resulted from it.  I will make no emotional commitment.  I will make no financial investment.  I will not rock a colicky baby or go to school plays or help with algebra homework. 

This in no way gives the male the right to curtail the female's investment in the future, but it does give him an equal right to curtail his investment if he so chooses.  The female is legally notified in this scenario that she can expect no investment from the male involved. 

                If this ever becomes law, there are a lot of TV talk shows that are going to have to find new subjects.  But the issue is problematic if a woman does not know paternity in the case of rape or multiple partners.  Male abortion rights presume that the father in question can be notified within the time restrictions allowed by law. 

But on some level, this law would make a certain sort of sense.  There are men who have been forced to undergo abortions - men who wanted to take responsibility for their children in cases where the woman decided to terminate the pregnancy regardless of their wishes.  Even without this law, our society is filled with deadbeat dads across the spectrum. 

                The problem with deciding issues about gender, whether about marriage or abortion or rape or anything else, is that we speak of a relationship between two equal parties.  Legally we can do this.  Legally we can term an abortion termination of parental interests, and apply it to either parent, but medically, biologically, abortion can never involve two equal parties, for until a sci-fi futuristic laboratory with artificial uteruses becomes the norm, there will never be an equal investment by the male and female when it comes to procreating the species. 

                As a society, we have learned to manipulate biology to the point that we can prevent conception by fooling the female body into thinking it has already conceived and thus there is no need to release another egg each month. 

We can prevent conception by several barrier methods, all of which prevent the meeting of sperm and egg.  We can plot ovulation on a calendar and deny sperm when the egg is ripe.  We can prevent implantation after conception by interrupting the process by which the fertilized egg attaches to the uterine lining. 

We can also use agents that neutralize the ability of sperm to penetrate the egg or that stop the motility of sperm in reaching that point.  If conception occurs, we can inject saline or we can vacuum the embryo out of the uterus so that no further development occurs.  Most of these methods are recent developments in human history and the impact on behavior is ongoing.

                But for millennia, humans have not had these options.  Females have had their bigger eggs that are biologically more expensive.  In most mammalian females, only one or two eggs are produced each estrus cycle.  Should conception occur, the female will have to incubate the egg for a period of time from days to weeks to months, depending upon the species. 

Males have had their sperm cells, of which they produce millions each day.  These biological costs mean that when conception occurs, the female always has more invested in the mating than does the male.  Whatever you believe about the origins of life is moot in the process of mating.  Whether we are designed by a creator to operate this way or we evolved as a species this way, this is the biological reality we face and it impacts behavior.

                Women say they are unlucky in love and cupid is not smiling on them, and it is not their fault that they cannot find romantic bliss. 

It is popular in academic circles these days to say that gender is a cultural product.  Certainly, what it means to be a man or a woman is determined in many ways by one's social environment.  Too many girls idolize celebrities in our culture. 

Humans learn what it means to be male or female from their cultural context.  This has chilling implications when the most popular girls are flashing their genitalia at the paparazzi with the resultant photographs posted on the internet and the boys are on the sideline of Girls Gone Wild shouting for more nakedness. 

In the here and now, there are over 200 books on Amazon.com about relationships and how to find the love you are looking for. 

There are columns in every magazine and shows on every network and gurus at every radio station.  If we had that many experts trying that unsuccessfully to balance the federal budget, someone would have been fired by now. 

Marriage is like a budget with several components.  In a budget you have to spend but you expect to get some return on your investments if you choose wisely.  You expect to build some equity, to have ownership, to find satisfaction. 

Marriage includes legal status and, in relationships that result in offspring, parenting.  But the human animal is a much different species from the hens and roosters with their very different sex cells.  Hens do not cluck around the barnyard that the rooster is getting it on with 47 other hens while she is laying yet another egg. 

Bambi's mom is not distraught in spring over birthing her fawn alone.  If the bucks were there, it would mean more mouths to feed on a limited grazing area, so there could be no advantage and in fact a disadvantage in having him around.  Hens and does are not lonely for their men after conception occurs. 

Humans are concerned with the body, but also with the mind and the spirit.  The problem with posting naked celebrities on the internet is that no one is concerned with anything beyond the body.  Yet the headlines clamor for our attention at every magazine rack in every grocery store in America:  Stars in Rehab!  Stars in Court!  Stars in Jail!  Stars in every imaginable pain no matter how hot they look or how rich they are!

                The body, the mind, and the spirit.  A balanced budget requires an integrated approach.  Anytime all the attention is given to only one category in the budget, some other category is coming up short.  We learn our gender from our culture without ever realizing that all the mind over matter in the world is not going to change our biology, and biology does impact behavior in some profound ways, beginning with the sex cells.  Women invest more in reproduction, and the ability to manipulate reproduction, to prevent conception or to halt the process once it begins, does not change the behaviors programmed into the mind and body by a creator or millennia of imprinting.  Men invest less.  They have millions of new sperm cells every day and the body wants to spend them. 

                Some argue that this is nature's stamp of approval on male promiscuity, the biological thumb's up, the green light to nail anything that moves.  This is the biological hand of cards that men have been dealt, and it is in the male's best reproductive interests to spend those sperm cells as often and as widely as possible. 

This is the male equivalent of angels and cupid.  Women say they are unlucky in love and cupid is not smiling on them, and it is not their fault that they cannot find romantic bliss.  It is just their destiny to be unloved. 

Men say they have all these sperm cells every day and the desire to spend them at every opportunity.  Sometimes they will cheat on a woman with whom they are committed, bonded, married, and the rationale will be "the devil made me do it."  It didn't mean anything emotionally baby; I just had a weak moment.  I just couldn't help myself. 

                Women do not have a monopoly on failing to take responsibility, on copping out.  They just have different methods.  There's a biological vampire wrangling an opportunity to just have a taste, a devil advertising instant gratification to men that they have all those sperm cells anyway. 

So some of them give in and justify it by saying it is in their nature.  The most perfectly representational example of this is found in the 1988 movie "Earth Girls Are Easy."  Valerie (played by Geena Davis) arrives decked out in newly blonde hair and scrumptious undergarments to the place she shares with fiancé Ted (whom she fears is losing interest as their wedding date approaches) only to discover he is philandering with a nurse. 

After the confrontation, as Ted begs for forgiveness, he tells Valerie:  “You can’t expect me to be higher evolved than I am.”  He could just as easily have said the devil made him do it.  Either way, he was abdicating all responsibility for his actions.  He opened the door of opportunity.  No matter what he rationalizes or believes about that door, he did have a choice on whether or not he opened it.

                Here is the next thing to consider on that list of what you do not want for your life.  You are taking control of your romantic and sexual destiny.  You are ready to say cupid is not in charge; the responsibility belongs to me.  There are likewise two kinds of men:  those who say temptation controls me, or those who take responsibility for their own romantic and sexual destiny.  Put the kind you do not want on your “do not want” list.

Cherri Randall has a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Arkansas and is Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.