In spite of chatrooms, gay rights, women’s rights and the Pill, the human world has remained largely monogamous. A recent survey of sexual behaviour in 59 countries — published in The Lancet, and therefore not to be dismissed as frivolous — seems to dispel the myth that social and technological progress breaks down traditional forms of being sexually together. “Most people are married,” the study sums up (sounding like Alice heckling the Caterpillar), “and married people have the most sex.” Apart from this general preference for monogamy (married or otherwise), none of the data indicates a universal tendency towards sex at a younger age. But significantly, there is a dramatic increase in the number of sexually transmitted infections, possibly owing to a small minority of promiscuous people. This leads to some curious, and hilarious, local trends. Britain, for instance, is still a largely monogamous society, but thrice as many of these faithful Britons are plagued by chlamydia now than they were about ten years ago.

So, what is it about modern life that still makes monogamy the most convenient arrangement? Nobody has ever believed that human beings are naturally monogamous — and every kind of science and anthropology has endorsed this unbelief. In fact, 80 to 85 per cent of societies culturally and/or legally support polygyny (one man, several wives), but 80 per cent of the marriages in such societies are nevertheless monogamous. And the United Nations World Fertility Report, 2003, says that 89 per cent of all women and men get married by age 49. Disconcertingly for some, all over the civilized world, even gay men and women have been fighting for, and winning, their rights to form partnerships, which are defined in terms of monogamous commitment that exactly mirror those in heterosexual marriage.

Perhaps there is a new kind of point now to Erica Jong saying that human beings are driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion. The wealth and possibilities afforded by liberalized and globalized modern economies are easier to realize and manage if one is not sleeping around too much. So domestic arrangements remain nuclear, stable and uncomplicated. And Engels had shown long ago how monogamy secures the handing down of wealth to “biologically related offspring”. So unabashedly consumerist societies are essentially risk-averse and hence, conservative. (Young, urban professionals in India are thus beginning to see the point of arranged marriages.) Besides, women in the most ‘permissive’ of societies are still brought up to believe that they are naturally more monogamous than men, which they continue to accept as more-or-less true. Feminists and the UN insist on fighting polygamy, in countries like Africa, not by giving women the right to have more than one husband like men, but by holding up monogamous marriage as ideally suited to sexual equality.

If women began to think, and live, against the grain of this supposed faithfulness, The Lancet would perhaps have to reckon with another set of conclusions about monogamy.