When love songs proclaim the singer’s desire to “make you mine”, possessiveness starts to look like an ordinary, rather than a pathological, aspect of romantic love. Indeed it is, and we really shouldn’t be surprised. Falling in love entails forsaking alternatives, and when you’ve burnt bridges, you want to be sure that your beloved is equally committed. Hence love’s evil twin: jealousy.
Claims that romantic love is a recent cultural invention and that sexual jealousy is unknown in exotic societies are Eurocentric fantasies that have been debunked by anthropologists. Love and jealousy are universal across cultures – and across social strata. Sexual jealousy manifests itself as continued absorption with the beloved, specifically when commitment shows signs of waning. A lover’s jealousy thus has a curious status: while it can be threatening, its absence may be interpreted as a different sort of threat, namely that your lover has no interest in your fidelity because he has no deep, abiding interest in you.
“Love and jealousy are universal across cultures and social strata”
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Men’s minds readily construe love and marriage in proprietary terms, as cross-cultural studies of marriage ceremonies, premarital negotiations, adultery laws and love songs confirm. Violating men’s proprietary entitlements towards “their” women has a special power to motivate violence. For example, the great majority of uxoricides (wife killings) everywhere are attributable either to suspicions of infidelity or to the wife wanting out: a woman’s risk of being killed is actually higher in the immediate aftermath of leaving a violent partner than while living with him. “If I can’t have her, no one will,” declare uxoricides.
The roles are rarely reversed, and when women kill their mates it is usually in response to the man’s controlling violence. It is male sexual possessiveness that is the dangerous variety, arguably because men are in intense competition with one another for reproductive opportunities and are uniquely vulnerable to being deceived about paternity.
Men don’t assault their female partners at high rates everywhere, however. The reason why they don’t is a crucial question – and a controversial one, fraught with methodological problems. Believing that distinguishing “severe” from “minor” violence trivialises and condones unacceptable behaviour, some researchers insist that threats and humiliations must be counted with beatings as “violence against wives”, and even where definitions are more circumspect, it is doubtful whether estimates are truly comparable.
And yet there are surely large cross-cultural differences. In Papua New Guinea, for example, an ethnographer working with one ethnic group (the Lusi-Kaliai) reports that nearly all women can expect to be beaten by their husbands at some time, whereas in another tribe (the Wape), such behaviour is purportedly non-existent. There are big differences between developed nations too: according to figures from the World 91ɫƬ Organization the number of wives who have been assaulted by their husbands ranges from 10 per cent to more than 50 per cent.
Every year, more than 100 British men kill female partners or ex-partners. Who are these men, and why do they do it? Rebecca and Russell Dobash of the University of Manchester have scrutinised case files and interviewed jailed murderers looking for answers. They were particularly interested in whether wife-killers are “ordinary guys” rather than typical criminals. Their results suggest that men in the UK who murder their wives are indeed less likely than other murderers to be unemployed, to have long criminal records, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to have had abusive childhoods, but that they are still not quite “ordinary” in these areas, and they are especially likely to have a history of assaulting women.
In the US, about 1000 women are killed by partners or ex-partners annually. This is twice the per capita British rate, but it is still a striking drop from the more than 1400 deaths per year of the early 1980s. This is surprising since female participation in the workforce and female-initiated divorce (both phenomena that sexually proprietary men resent) have increased. One reason for the falling uxoricide rate is apparently the increased availability of resources for abused women.
There has also been a much larger drop in the number of men in the US killed by their wives. Research backs the hypothesis that money spent on women’s shelters actually saves the lives of more men than women. It appears that when women have realistic options for escaping abusive, controlling husbands, they are less likely to kill.
Of course, male sexual jealousy is usually not lethal, and it is often effective in stopping wives straying. Does this mean that violence against romantic partners is ineradicable? Certainly not. Large cross-cultural differences in wife-beating and uxoricide prove that although possessive sentiments may be ubiquitous aspects of the male-female relationship, violence need not be.
