Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous

Amanda Rees’s “Higamous, hogamous, woman monogamous” takes its title from a comic rhyme that reduces sexual difference to a memorable rule: men are naturally promiscuous and women naturally monogamous. The article examines the authority granted to evolutionary explanations of mating and gender. Its feminist importance lies not in rejecting evolution as a field of inquiry, but in asking how a scientific account moves from evidence about variation and reproduction to a confident story about what contemporary women and men supposedly are.

A sociology-of-science approach makes the construction of that story visible. Researchers choose comparison groups, define behaviors, infer functions, and decide which observations count as representative. Popular accounts can then turn a hypothesis about ancestral selection into a timeless explanation for heterosexual jealousy, fidelity, aggression, or family form. Once social arrangements are described as adaptations, inequality can appear inevitable rather than historical and contestable. Rees’s provocation is that the simplicity of the conclusion may owe as much to narrative convention and present-day gender expectations as to the evidence.

The essay is best used as a guide to critical reading, not as proof that biology is irrelevant. A serious feminist science critique asks about sample, method, competing explanations, variation within sex categories, and the distance between a finding and the social claim built from it. The title itself demonstrates why this matters: a catchy binary travels farther than methodological qualifications. Read beside feminist work in primatology, history of science, and contemporary critiques of neurosexism, Rees helps distinguish evolutionary research from biological determinism marketed as common sense.