Male Sexual Proprietariness andViolence Against WivesMargo I. Wilson and Martin Daly

There is a cross-culturally ubiq-uitous connection between men'ssexual possessiveness and men'sviolence.' We have studied ac-counts of uxoricides (wife killings)from a broad range of societies,and find that male sexual propri-etariness—broadly construed toencompass resentment both of in-fidelity and of women's efforts toleave marriages—is everywhereimplicated as the dominant precip-itating factor in a large majorityof cases.^ The discovery of wifelyinfidelity is viewed as an excep-tional provocation, likely to elicita violent rage, both in societieswhere such a reaction is consid-ered a reprehensible loss of controland in those where it is considereda praiseworthy redemption ofhonor. Indeed, such a rage iswidely presumed to be so compel-ling as to mitigate the responsibil-ity of even homicidal cuckolds.

Battered women nominate"jealousy" as the most frequentmotive for their husbands' as-saults, and their assailants com-monly make the same attribu-tion.̂ '"̂ Moreover, assaulted wivesoften maintain that their husbandsare not only violently jealousabout their interactions with othermen, but are so controlling as tocurtail contacts with female friends

Margo I. Wilson and MartinDaly conduct research on in-terpersonal conflict and vio-lence. Address correspondenceto Margo Wilson, Departmentof Psychology, McMaster Uni-versity, Hamilton, Ontario, Can-ada L8S 4K1; e-mail: wilson(a'mcmaster.ca. .:: : .

and family. In a 1993 national sur-vey. Statistics Canada interviewedmore than 8,000 women currentlyresiding with male partners. Inaddition to answering questionsabout their experiences of vio-lence, the women indicatedwhether five statements about au-tonomy-limiting aspects of somemen's behavior applied to theirhusbands. Autonomy-limiting be-havior was especially likely to beattributed to those husbands whowere also reported to have be-haved violently, and women whohad experienced relatively seriousor frequent assaults were muchmore likely to affirm each of thefive statements than were womenwho had experienced only lesserviolence (Table 1).'* These andother data suggest that unusuallycontrolling husbands are also un-usually violent husbands. Ratherthan being one of a set of alterna-tive controlling tactics used by pro-prietary men, wife assault appearsto go hand in hand with other tac-tics of control.

y EVOLUTIONARYK PSYCHOLOGY,;: INTRASEXUALCOMPETITION, ANDMARITAL ALLIANCE

Why should sexually propri-etary feelings be linked with vio-lence in this way? Although it isoften supposed that wives are as-saulted mainly because they areaccessible, legitimate targets whenmen are frustrated or angry, mereopportunity cannot account for thedifferential risk of violent victim-

ization within households. Wivesare far more likely than other rela-tives to be murdered by an adult intheir household (Fig. 1).^ Wife as-sault has distinct motives. We pro-pose that a satisfactory account ofthe psychological links betweenmale sexual proprietariness and vi-olence will depend on an under-standing of the adaptive problemsthat men have faced in the courseof human evolutionary history andthe ways in which the psyche isorganized to solve them. Thoseadaptive problems include boththe risk of losing the wife, a valuedreproductive resource, to a rivaland the risk of directing paternalinvestments to another n:ian'schild.'

Adaptations are organismic at-tributes that are well "designed,"as a result of a history of naturalselection, to achieve functions thatpromoted reproductive success inancestral environments.^ Becauseorganisms can usefully be ana-lyzed into numerous distinct partswith complementary functions, in-vestigation in the life sciences is al-most invariably conducted in theshadow of (often inexplicit) adap-tationist ideas, Sound hypothesesabout what the heart or lungs orliver are "for" were essential firststeps for investigating their physi-ology, for example. Psychologicalresearch is similarly (and equallyappropriately) infused with adap-tationist premises.

The goal of psychological sci-ence is and always has been thediscovery and elucidation of psy-chological adaptations. Evolution-ary thinking can help. By payingexplicit attention to adaptive sig-nificance and selective forces, evo-lutionists are better able to gen-erate hypotheses about whichdevelopn:\ental experiences andproximate causal cues are likely toaffect which aspects of behavior,and what sorts of contingencies,priorities, and combinatorial infor-

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CURREhT DIRECTJONS m FSYCifOLQGiCAL SQENCE

Table 1. Association between violence against wives and husbands' autonomy-limiting behaviors, according to a nationalprobability sample of Canadian wives'*

History of violence against wife

StatementSerious violence

N - 286Relatively minor only

N - 1,039None

N = 6,990

'He is jealous and doesn't want you to talk to other men"'He tries to limit your contact with family or friends"'He insists on knowing who you are with and where you

are at all times"'He calls you names to put you down or make you feel

bad"'He prevents you from knowing about or having access to

the family income, even if you ask"

393540

48

15

131124

22

Note. Table entries are the percentages of respondents affirming that each item applied to their husbands. Violence was categorizedas "serious" or "relatively minor" on the basis of the alleged assaultive acts; the validity of this distinction is supported by sampleinterviews indicating that an injury requiring medical attention occurred in 72% of the incidents that met the "serious" criterionversus 18% of the "relativeiy minor" violent incidents.

mation-processing algorithms arelikely to be instantiated in the ar-chitecture of the mind.^'^ Psycho-logical constructs from self-esteemto color vision to sexual jealousyare formulated at a level of abstrac-tion intended to be of panhuman(cross-cultural) generality. If thesethings exist and are complexlystructured and organized, they al-most certainly evolved to play

some fitness-promoting role in ourancestors' lives. But although psy-chologists usually recognize thatthe phenomena they study haveutility, jealousy in particular hasoften been dismissed as a func-tionless epiphenomenon or pa-thology. In light of what is knownabout evolution by selection, thisis scarcely plausible.

In a sexual population, all the

Fig. 1. Homicide victimization rates characteristic of different categories of co-residing relatives (corisidering only adults as potential perpetrators) in the city ofDetroit, 1972.̂

males are engaged in a zero-sumgame in which the paternal share ofthe ancestry of all future genera-tions is divided among them,while the females are engaged in aparallel contest over the maternalshare of that ancestry. In a funda-mental sense, then, one's principalcompetitors are same-sex mem-bers of one's own species. But al-though it is true for both femalesand males that selection entails azero-sum conipetitive contest forgenetic posterity, the evolutionaryconsequences are not necessarilysimilar in the two sexes. In partic-ular, sexual selection (the compo-nent of selection that is attribut-able to differential access to mates)is generally of differential inten-sity, leading to a variety of sexu-ally differentiated adaptations forintrasexual competition.®

In most mammals, the variancein male fitness is greater than thevariance in female fitness, with theresult that male mammals are gen-erally subject to more intense sex-ual selection than females, andthat the psychological and mor-phological attributes that haveevolved for use in intrasexual com-petition are usually costlier andmore dangerous in males than in

Copyright © 1996 American Psychological Society

.VOLUME 5, NUMBER 1, FEBRUARY 1996.

females. The human animal is noexception to these generalizations,and rivalry among men is a ubi-quitous and sometimes deadlysource of conflict. Where homiciderates are high, most victims aremen, and their killers are mainlyunrelated male acquaintances; thepredominant motive is not rob-bery, but some sort of interper-sonal conflict, especially a status or"face" dispute, with an overt ele-ment of sexual rivalry apparent ina substantial minority of thecases.•^ Of course, killing oftenoversteps the bounds of utility,but the circumstances underwhich dangerous violence is usedin these cases bespeak its moretypical functionality in its muchmore numerous nonlethal mani-festations. And although the prin-cipal victims of men's lethal as-saults are other men, violence is acoercive social tool that can beused on women, too, includingwives.

From a selectionist perspective,the marital relationship has specialproperties. The fitnesses of geneticrelatives overlap in proportion togenealogical proximity, a situationthat engenders selection for altru-istic and cooperative inclinationstoward kin. Mates share geneticinterests, too, but their solidarity ismore fragile. By reproducing to-gether, a monogamous couplemay attain a state in which al! ex-igencies affect their fitnesses iden-tically, a situation conducive toconsensus and harmony. How-ever, the correlation between theirexpected fitnesses can be abol-ished or even rendered negative ifone or both betray the relationship.^

Is it reasonable to propose theexistence of an evolved social psy-chology specific to the marital re-lationship? Certainly, marital alli-ance is neither a sporadicallydistributed cultural option nor amodern discovery or invention,like agriculture or writing. Womenand men everywhere enter into so-

cially recognized unions, with aset of complementary sex-specificentitlements and obligations pred-icated on the complementarity offemale and male sexual and repro-ductive roles, and they have doneso for many millennia. We there-fore expect that there are certainfundamental, universal sources ofmarital conflict, reflecting situa-tions in which one marriage part-ner could have gained fitness inancestral human environments atthe other partner's expense. Thesesituations would include conflictsover equity of contributions to thecouple's joint endeavors (worksharing), over each partner's nep-otistic interest in the welfare of hisor her distinct kindred {in-Iaw dis-putes), over asymmetrical tempta-tions to abandon the union, andover sexual infidelity. In a pair-forming, biparental species, mostof these conflicts can apply bothways, but the potential effects ofinfidelity are an exception: Males,unlike females, can be cuckoldedand unwittingly invest their pa-rental efforts in the service of ri-vals' fitness.

There is abundant contem-porary, historical, and ethno-graphic evidence that even closelyguarded women expend effort andincur risk to evade mates, espe-cially when in marriages not oftheir own choosing.^ But the prop-osition that the risk of misattrib-uted paternity has been a distinctselective force on male psyches,over and above the effects ofalienation of wives, implies thatinfidelity within undissolved mar-riages has been a threat to malefitness. Male sexual anatomy andphysiology lend some support tothis proposition. In cross-speciescomparisons, testis size closelytracks the degree to which femalesmate polyandrously in the shortterm, presumably because suchmatings engender sperm competi-tion among rival ejaculates withinthe female reproductive tract, se-

lecting for males who have highsperm counts and ejaculate vol-umes and who therefore get moreof their own sperm into the con-test.^'^^ Human male testis sizesuggests an ancestral level of poly-androus mating between the"promiscuity" of female chimpan-zees and the monogamy of femalegorillas. Moreover, if sperm com-petition has been a selective force,one might expect that men will ex-hibit contingently variable re-sponses to cues that n:iight indicatesome risk of female infidelity. Re-sults of one recent study supportthis expectation: The number ofspermatozoa transferred in a givencopulation in steady couples wasbetter predicted by the proportionof time since the last copulationthat the pair were out of contactthan by the mere passage of timesince the last ejaculation, an effectinterpreted as a sophisticated psy-chophysiological adaptation tolapses in mate monitoring.^" Somegenuine risk of misattributed pa-ternity would also appear to ex-plain systematic biases of attentionand attribution favoring allega-tions of paternal rather than ma-ternal resemblances in babies.^

Undetected cuckoldry poses amajor threat to a man's fitness, butfor women the threat is slightlydifferent: that a husband's effortsand resources will be diverted tothe benefit of other women andtheir children. It follows that thearousal of men's and women'sproprietary feelings toward theirmates is likely to have evolved tobe differentially attuned to distinctcues indicative of the sex-specificthreats to fitness in past environ-ments. Diverse evidence on feel-ings, reactions, and cultural prac-tices supports the hypothesis thatmen are more intensely concernedwith sexual infidelity per se andwomen more intensely concernedwith the allocation of their mates'resources, affection, and atten-

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CONTINGENT CUING OF: MALE SEXUAL ;PROPRIETARINESS ANDTHE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF

'JUH^ VIOLENCE aiKilh]y| ;AGAINST WIV

If sexual proprietariness isaroused by cues of threats to sex-ual monopoly, and if use of vio-lence is contingent on cues of itsutility (including tolerable costs),then variations within and be-tween societies in the frequencyand severity of violence againstwives may be largely attributableto variations in such cues.^ Thoserelevant to the arousal of sexualproprietariness are likely to in-clude cues of pressure from poten-tial rivals and cues of one's part-ner's fertility and attractiveness tothose rivals. Regarding the formerissue, we would expect a husbandto be sensitive to indicators of thelocal intensity of male competitionand sexual poaching, and to indi-cators of the status, attractiveness,and resources of potential rivalsrelative to himself. Being part of a

relatively large age cohort mayalso be expected to intensify male-male competition, especially ifsame-age women are unavailable;thus, cohort-size effects on intra-sexual rivalry and hence on the co-ercive constraint of women maybe especially evident where agedisparities at marriage are large.Parameters like relative cohort size,local marital instability, and localprevalence of adultery clearly can-not be cued simply by stimuli im-mediately present, but must be in-duced from experience accumulatedover large portions of the life span.

If men's violence and threatsfunction to limit female autonomy,husbands may be motivated to actin these ways in response to prob-abilistic cues that their wives maydesert them. Women who actuallyleave their husbands are often pur-sued, threatened, and assaulted;separated wives are even killed bytheir husbands at substantiallyhigher rates than wives who livewith their husbands (Fig. 2).^ Theelevation of uxoricide risk at sepa-ration is even more severe than thecontrasts in Figure 2 suggest be-

70 T

a| 6 0 -

0,50 -

S: 40 -

lior

| 3 0 -

-a

| 2 0

| i o

0

1 1 Coresident

^ 1 Separated

1— 1̂ 1— 1̂J _ ^ J— ^ — -

NSW Canada

•1••••••̂̂B—

Chicago

Fig. 2. Rates of uxoricides perpetrated by registered-marriage husbands, for co-residing versus estranged couples in New South Wales (NSW), Australia (1968-1986); Canada (1974-1990); and Chicago (1965-1989).̂ ^

cause the rate denominators in-clude all separated wives regard-less of the duration of separation,whereas when separated wives arekilled, it is usually soon after sep-aration. Of course, the temporalassociation between separationand violence does not necessarilymean that the former caused thelatter; however, many husbandswho have killed their wives hadexplicitly threatened to do soshould their wives ever leave, andexplain their behavior as a re-sponse to the intolerable stimulusof their wives' departure.

Why are men ever motivated topursue and kill women who haveleft them? Such behavior is spitefulin that it is likely to impose a netcost on its perpetrator as well as itsvictim, and therefore challengesthe evolutionary psychological hy-pothesis that motives and emo-tions are organized in such a wayas to promote the actors' interests.Moreover, if the adaptive functionof the motivational processes un-derlying violence against wives re-sides in retaining and controllingone's mate, as we have suggested,killing is all the more paradoxical.The problem is akin to that of un-derstanding vengeance.^ A threatis an effective social tool, and usu-ally an inexpensive one, but itloses its effectiveness if the threat-ening party is seen to be bluffing,that is, to be unwilling to paythe occasional cost of followingthrough when the threat is ig-nored or defied. Such vengeful fol-low-through may appear counter-productive—a risky or expensiveact too late to be useful—but effec-tive threats cannot "leak" signs ofbluff and may therefore have to besincere. Although killing an es-tranged wife appears futile, threat-ening one who might otherwiseleave can be self-interested, and socan pursuing her with furtherthreats, as can advertisements ofanger and ostensible obliviousnessto costs.

Copyright © 1996 American Psychological Society

Evolutionary psychologistshave predicted and confirmed thatmen are maximally attracted toyoung women as sexual and mar-ital partners.-^^ This fact suggeststhat sexual proprietariness will be

relatively intensely aroused inmen married to younger women,and young wives indeed incur thehighest rates of both lethal^^ (Fig.3) and nonlethal* violence by hus-bands. (It might be suggested that

Uxoricides per Million Wives per Annum

England & Wales

40 T

• Canada

ri20 - I

Chicago

15-19 20-24 25-29 3(>34 35-39 4CM4 45-49 50-54 55-59 >=60

Wife's (victim's) Age

Fig. 3. Uxoricide rates as a function of the victim's age, in England and Wales(1977-1990), Canada (1974-1990), and Chicago (1965-1989).̂ ^

male sexual jealousy cannot be anevolved adaptation because menremain sexually jealous of post-menopausal or otherwise infertilewomen, but adaptations can haveevolved only to track ancestrallyinformative cues of fertility andnot fertility itself. In a modernsociety with contraception, im-proved health, and diverse cos-metic manipulations, postmeno-pausal women are likely to exhibitfewer cues of age-related decliningreproductive value than still-fertilewomen in ancestral societies. ̂ )̂

There are several reasons tosuppose that husbands may be rel-atively insecure in their propri-etary claims in de facto marriages,which have higher rates of disso-lution and a weaker or more am-biguous legal status than regis-tered unions. And, indeed, wivesin de facto marital unions in Canadaincur an eight times greater risk ofuxoricide and a four times greaterrisk of nonlethal assault by hus-bands.^ However, registered andde facto unions differ in manyways, and the higher risk of uxor-icide and assault in the latter maybe due to a complex combinationof factors, including youth, pov-erty, parity, and the presence ofstepchildren;^'^'^ whether adulteryand desertion are greater sourcesof conflict in de facto unions than inregistered unions is unknown. De-mographic risk markers such astype of marital union and age areundoubtedly correlated with sev-eral variables that may be more di-rectly causal to the risk of violence;elucidation of their relative rolesawaits further research. However,it was the logic of evolution by se-lection which suggested to us thatthese demographic variables arelikely correlates of breaches of sex-ual exclusivity and hence of vio-lence.

Evolution by selection offers aframework for the development ofhypotheses about the functionaldesign of motivational-emotional-

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cognitive subsystems of the mindsuch as male sexual proprietari-ness, providing hints about proxi-mate causal cues, modulated ex-pression, attentional priorities,and perceptual and informationalprocessing. We have argued thatthe development and modulationof male sexual proprietariness iscontingent on ecologically validcues of threats to a sexually exclu-sive relationship. The link be-tween male sexual proprietarinessand violent inclinations has pre-sumably been selected for becauseviolence and threat work to detersexual rivals and limit female au-tonomy. (This is not to say that vi-olent capacities and inclinationswere not also subject to selectionpressures in other contexts, in-cluding intergroup warfare andhunting.) The expression of malesexual proprietariness, includingviolent manifestations, will de-pend not only on the presence andincidence of ecologically validcues, but also on community, fam-ily, and person-specific factors that

are likely to affect the thresholdsand other parameter settings ofthe psychological mechanisms in-volved.

Acknowledgments—Our research onviolence against wives has been sup-ported by grants from the Social Sci-ences and Humanities Research Coun-cil of Canada, the Harry FrankGuggenheim Foundation, the NaturalSciences and Engineering ResearchCouncil of Canada, the North AtlanticTreaty Organization, and the McMasterUniversity Arts Research Board. Wethank j . Bannon, C.R. Block, R. Block,O. Fedorowycz, H. Johnson, C. Nuttall,A. Wallace, and M. Wilt for access todata.

Notes

1. M.I, Wilson and M, Daly, The man whomistook his wife for a chattel, in The AdaptedMind, J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J, Tooby,Eds. (Oxford University Press, New York, 1992);M.i. Wilson and M. Daly, An evolutionary psy-chological perspective on male sexual proprietar-iness and violence against wives. Violence & Vic-tims. 8. 271-294 (1993).

2. M. Daly and M.I. Wilson. Homicide {Aldinede Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY, 1988).

3. M.I. Wilson, M. Daly, and J. Scheib, Femi-cide: An evolutionary psychological perspective.

in Evolutionary Biology and Feminism, P.A. Go-waty, Ed. (Chapman and Hall, New York, inpress),

4. M.I. Wilson, H. Johnson, and M. Daly, Le-thal and nonlethal violence against wives, Cana-dian journal of Criminology. 37, 331-361 (1995),

5. G.C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selec-tion (Princeton University Press. Princeton, NJ,1966).

6. J. Tooby and L. Cosmides, The psycholog-ical foundations of culture, in The Adapted Mind,J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds.(Oxford University Press, New York. 1992); D.M.Buss. Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigmfor psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6,1-30(1995).

7. M. Daly and M.I. Wilson, Discriminativeparental solicitude and the relevance of evolu-tionary models to the analysis of motivationalsystems, in The Cognitive Neurosciences, M. Gazza-niga. Ed. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995); M,Daly and M.I. Wilson, Evolutionary psychologyand marital conflict: The relevance of stepchil-dren, in Sex, Power, Conflict: feminist and Evolu-tionary Perspectives, D.M. Buss and N. Malamuth,Eds. (Oxford University Press, New York, inpress).

8. M. Andersson, Sexual Selection (PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994).

9. T.R. Birkhead and A.P. Mailer, Sperm Com-petition in Birds (Academic Press, London, 1992).

10. R.R. Baker and M.A. Bellis, Human SpermCompetition (Chapman and Hall, London, 1995).

11. D.M. Buss, RJ. Larsen, D. Westen. and J.Semmelroth, Sex differences in jealousy: Evolu-tion, physiology, and psychology. PsychologicalScience, 3, 251-255(1992).

12. D.S. Symons, Beauty is in the adaptationsof the beholder: The evolutionary psychology ofhuman female sexual attractiveness, in Sexual Na-lurelSexua! Culture. P.R. Abramson and S.D.Pinkerton, Eds. (University of Chicago Press,Chicago, 1995).

Psychopathology and Cognitive andFamily Functioning in SuicidalAfrican-American AdolescentsMary B. Summerville, Nadine J. Kaslow, andKarla J. Doepke

Suicide is the third leadingcause of death among adolescents.Research suggests the ratio of at-tempts to completed suicides maybe as high as 200 to 1.' Recentepidemiological increases in sui-cide attempts in African Ameri-cans are quite dramatic. For exam-ple, between 1960 and 1987, therate of suicide attempts in African-

American males ages 15 to 24 tri-pled.^ Key risk factors for suicideattempts in adolescents includeprior suicide attempts, being fe-male, and residing in an economi-cally deprived environment.^

Historically, there has been apaucity of research on African-American adolescent suicide, andonly recently have researchers

Mary B. Summerville is in pri-vate practice and an Adjunct Pro-fessor in the Department of Psy-chiatry and Behavioral Sciencesat Emory University School ofMedicine and the Georgia Schoolof Professional Psychology. Na-dine J. Kaslow is an AssociateProfessor in the Departments ofPsychiatry and Behavioral Sci-ences and Pediatrics at EmoryUniversity School of Medicineand is Chief Psychologist atGrady Health System. Karla J.Doepke is an Assistant Professorat Auburn University. Addresscorrespondence to Mary B. Sum-merville, Atlanta Genter for Psy-chotherapy, 300 West WieucaRd., Building 1, Suite 200, At-lanta, GA 30342.

Copyright © 1996 American Psychological Society