The more they like sex, the more women like women

Hmmmmmmm, I've advanced this theory myself on occasion and generally been looked at as if I had horns growing out of my head

*using some sort of erect-o-meter

While looking at the gay porn the straight men were all furiously biting their tongues and trying to summon up mental images of Carrot Top.

there's more than a bit skepticism about that study. apparently the man behind it is a pretty shady character.

should read: "by STRAIGHT porn"

--- oops (don'temailmenicelad...) (webmail), August 24th, 2004 3:16 PM. (Oops) (link)

Of course someone proceeded to vehemently argue against my opinion, go figure.

Meaning I don't think gaps like these need to be explained biologically -- they fit pretty neatly with the culture as a whole.

If anything, women are more open to the concept of exploration/bisexuality because of our social conditioning I would think. We're around women's bodies everywhere we go (magazines, tv, etc). We're easily able to show affection and touch other women and hug them and etc without being weird.

I suppose some butch lesbians might have more testosterone and thus = more sexed up though.

Nabisco's point sets up nature and culture as a neat and watertight binary. But what if things are socially constructed for reasons traceable to biology? And what if saying something is socially constructed is not the same as saying it's not real, and not pretty much inevitable? In other words, cease and desist with this tidy division between nature and culture, we need to talk about nature-in-culture and culture-in-nature!

I don't think it does anything like that. Give examples, plz.

But what if things are socially constructed for reasons traceable to biology?

This sentence is so self-referential, so self-justifying, and so poorly worded that it offends me.

The more I understand what Momus is saying, the more I understand that Momus only lives in Momus world. Fuck a Momus.

i.e, is our culture influencing our sexuality or are our inherenent biological urges the reason why we have such a culture?

someone who understands science answer me a poorly-phrased question:

can't environmental factors affect a person's biological make-up? so environment could stimulate different hormone growths? I have never understood how this works, really, but it makes sense to me that rather than sexuality being sort of written into your genes at birth as a set orientation, your sexual responses to things could change according to what you were exposed to in your life.

As for cause and effect, I guess that distinction's not super-important to me -- but whatever, sure. Culture leads to behavior; and yeah, sure, biology can lead to culture, too. Though I wouldn't overestimate that part: not every culture in the history of the world has been organized like ours, so human biology couldn't be absolutely running that show.

Genetics can predispose you to certain traits, which are also influenced by the environment you were raised in.

Obviously there comes a point where brain patterns are so uniform, among all different sorts of people, that you figure they're totally ingrained. And some are just super-obvious mechanical, like visual centers lighting up when you, umm, look at stuff. But with things like this I think it's still a pretty open question. Most people seem to accept that the details of people's sexuality are shaped by untraceable little experiences and ideas -- details like going for blondes, having a foot fetish, being into S&M, whatever. Loads of them are really, really obviously cultural. So I dunno that I see too much need to look into biological explanations for homosexuality, especially when it's not hard to imagine how it could develop along those same lines. (And especially when what we consider "homosexuality" -- as distinct from, say, prison sex -- revolves around a whole lot of already-cultural stuff about romance and relationships.)

I think it's a common problem that people think of culture as a "construct", which is fine, but then make the jump to saying that it's somehow not real, which is not. Money and language are constructs, but utterly real, for example.

And biology is real.

As long as the "constructedness" part doesn't do that by denying the realness part, ne?

As for morality, there can't really be a notion of what's good without a notion of what's necessary, in other words an idea of limitations, some of which will be biological. Like, it would be pretty unfair to solve a problem by saying "But you're going to live forever!" (This is one of the best objections to Christianity, it seems to me.)

well... how you *get* food, etc, affects your biological structure.

according to my mum if you jump a lot when you're young you become taller, so i guess a more jumpy culture will have taller people

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But what if things are socially constructed for reasons traceable to biology?

That's just sneaking essentialism through the back door. Yes of course very broad parameters are "traceable to biology". I'm a speaking animal because my human anatomy allows it. But that doesn't explain why I speak English and not Swahili. The explanation of that will never be "traceable to biology". I am also a sexual being. But I'm by no means certain that the specific ways I express my sexuality will be "traceable to biology".

what about people who are compulsive thieves? i mean, if there's something physical/neurological that is wrong with you, would that be classified as a disability and is "helped" in some way? Or are you just condemned for being INHERENTLY EVIL? and killed at birth?

Paraplegia (paraplegism? what's the noun?) is fixed. I certainly don't think sexuality or criminality are.

jz, please don't mistake my position for biological determinism. I'm just saying biology must be taken into account, because biology and culture are totally interpenetrated. As Cathy said, they both act on each other, and the action of culture on biology is a biological way to offset biological determinism. We therefore don't need to be ostriches about biology, or claim that any biologically-oriented arguments are inherently right wing, essentialist or deterministic.

Well, that's reducing it to a tiny part of what it is. 90% of sexuality doesn't seem to have an awful lot to do with reproductive urges.

But yes, I think why I'm so keen to believe that culture and circumstances can affect biological make-up, is that I shrink from determinism. It's unreasonable, as you say Momus, to refuse to admit that anything could be biological. But I prefer to think of biology as fluid and changeable. Of course, I know nothing about genetics. I just try to make science fit with my own experience.

I can promise you that if we didn't reproduce sexually, nobody would have invented sex as a kind of weird hobby just for the hell of it. Well, somebody might have, but it wouldn't have caught on. There'd be no orgasms, for a start.

u so crazy!

Sure. But that still leaves us a lot of leeway. It's a valid project for scientists to look for the specific genetic causal factors in various congenital diseases. It would be silly to look for a genetic reason as to why I speak English and not Swahili. We know that's environmental; there are no "English language" genes. I'm guessing "gay gene" projects will lead us nowhere as well. The sheer diversity of ways sexuality is expressed within societies and between societies seems to militate against genetic causes for specific behaviours. Yes, sexuality is a reproductive mechanism. But it's also a mechanism of social organisation. It's been coopted into the cultural enterprise.

yeah... but that doesn't mean people wouldn't frot away were reproduction nonsexual.

why are female orgasms not tied to eggs though?

They would probably be preoccupied with whatever did lead to reproduction. If it were immaculate conception directly from God (like the virgin Mary), they'd pray a lot. If parthenogenesis (like the goddess Athena), they'd spend all their time imagining stuff.

wait, that just ties homosexuality with sexuality. you just tagged the word reproduction in there and the bold bits!

I mean, there would be no metrosexuality in a world where the metro newspaper was not sexual innit.

In what sense are they not tied to eggs?

Er, Ken, in what sense is homosexuality not tied with sexuality?

I'm not sure the 'in a parallel world in which sex is not used for reproduction and also is not particularly pleasurable sex would not be a common act because it is not particularly pleasurable' argument really works, Momus. You're making the assumption, I take it, that sex evolved as something pleasurable so that humans would do it often enough to keep reproducing? Rather like flowers are bright and sweet-smelling so that bees will sense them easily and thus spread their pollen? That strikes me as very one-sided. If culture and nature are totally interpenetrated, couldn't it be that the natural necessity of reproductive sex led to the development of a whole series of cultural attitudes around sex, which are (by now) also 'natural' but don't actually link back to the 'original' natural need? Why do you want to privilege the most simplistic, most basic reading that has so very little impact on how people actually experience sexuality nowadays? Fetishes, sexualities, non-reproductive acts are more a part of what sex is these days than the need to reproduce; it doesn't really matter that the need to reproduce was what led to the, uh, invention of sex. I doubt, in fact, that sex has only been for reproduction ever - it's always had something to do with power relations, eg.

well, you know...

this is making me blush now.

Also, while obviously "You only get pleasure playing with your penis or your clitoris because of sexual reproduction!" doesn't necessarily mean 'in the course of sex which will result in reproduction there WILL be pleasure from penis and clitoris', it's kind of implying that a little too much, desho?

lol but that's not what i was saying. i was saying sexuality isn't necessarily tied to reproduction!

There was a fantastic article in the Times last year about how science hasn't been able to come up with a "function" for the clitoris. The researchers determined that the clitoris exists solely for pleasure. (Afterall, women can and do get preggo without having an orgasm.)

God is a woman. The end.

That being said I don't really agree with the argument had, I mean it's not even half as simple as all that, but he's basically right about WHY these things were originally designed the way they are.

HEADLINE: A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm

BYLINE: By DINITIA SMITH

BODY:

Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.

But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant -- doing their part for the perpetuation of the species -- without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

Over the last four decades, scientists have come up with a variety of theories, arguing, for example, that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce or that it leads women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring's chances of survival.

But in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, ''The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution,'' has no evolutionary function at all.

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts -- a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

In that early period, the nerve and tissue pathways are laid down for various reflexes, including the orgasm, Dr. Lloyd said. As development progresses, male hormones saturate the embryo, and sexuality is defined.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while ''females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan.''

Nipples in men are similarly vestigial, Dr. Lloyd pointed out.

While nipples in woman serve a purpose, male nipples appear to be simply left over from the initial stage of embryonic development.

The female orgasm, she said, ''is for fun.''

Dr. Lloyd said scientists had insisted on finding an evolutionary function for female orgasm in humans either because they were invested in believing that women's sexuality must exactly parallel that of men or because they were convinced that all traits had to be ''adaptations,'' that is, serve an evolutionary function.

Theories of female orgasm are significant, she added, because ''men's expectations about women's normal sexuality, about how women should perform, are built around these notions.''

''And men are the ones who reflect back immediately to the woman whether or not she is adequate sexually,'' Dr. Lloyd continued.

Central to her thesis is the fact that women do not routinely have orgasms during sexual intercourse.

She analyzed 32 studies, conducted over 74 years, of the frequency of female orgasm during intercourse.

When intercourse was ''unassisted,'' that is not accompanied by stimulation of the clitoris, just a quarter of the women studied experienced orgasms often or very often during intercourse, she found.

Five to 10 percent never had orgasms. Yet many of the women became pregnant.

Dr. Lloyd's figures are lower than those of Dr. Alfred A. Kinsey, who in his 1953 book ''Sexual Behavior in the Human Female'' found that 39 to 47 percent of women reported that they always, or almost always, had orgasm during intercourse.

But Kinsey, Dr. Lloyd said, included orgasms assisted by clitoral stimulation.

Dr. Lloyd said there was no doubt in her mind that the clitoris was an evolutionary adaptation, selected to create excitement, leading to sexual intercourse and then reproduction.

But, ''without a link to fertility or reproduction,'' Dr. Lloyd said, ''orgasm cannot be an adaptation.''

Not everyone agrees. For example, Dr. John Alcock, a professor of biology at Arizona State University, criticized an earlier version of Dr. Lloyd's thesis, discussed in in a 1987 article by Stephen Jay Gould in the magazine Natural History.

In a phone interview, Dr. Alcock said that he had not read her new book, but that he still maintained the hypothesis that the fact that ''orgasm doesn't occur every time a woman has intercourse is not evidence that it's not adaptive.''

''I'm flabbergasted by the notion that orgasm has to happen every time to be adaptive,'' he added.

Dr. Alcock theorized that a woman might use orgasm ''as an unconscious way to evaluate the quality of the male,'' his genetic fitness and, thus, how suitable he would be as a father for her offspring.

''Under those circumstances, you wouldn't expect her to have it every time,'' Dr. Alcock said.

Among the theories that Dr. Lloyd addresses in her book is one proposed in 1993, by Dr. R. Robin Baker and Dr. Mark A. Bellis, at Manchester University in England. In two papers published in the journal Animal Behaviour, they argued that female orgasm was a way of manipulating the retention of sperm by creating suction in the uterus. When a woman has an orgasm from one minute before the man ejaculates to 45 minutes after, she retains more sperm, they said.

Furthermore, they asserted, when a woman has intercourse with a man other than her regular sexual partner, she is more likely to have an orgasm in that prime time span and thus retain more sperm, presumably making conception more likely. They postulated that women seek other partners in an effort to obtain better genes for their offspring.

Dr. Lloyd said the Baker-Bellis argument was ''fatally flawed because their sample size is too small.''

''In one table,'' she said, ''73 percent of the data is based on the experience of one person.''

In an e-mail message recently, Dr. Baker wrote that his and Dr. Bellis's manuscript had ''received intense peer review appraisal'' before publication. Statisticians were among the reviewers, he said, and they noted that some sample sizes were small, ''but considered that none of these were fatal to our paper.''

Dr. Lloyd said that studies called into question the logic of such theories. Research by Dr. Ludwig Wildt and his colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany in 1998, for example, found that in a healthy woman the uterus undergoes peristaltic contractions throughout the day in the absence of sexual intercourse or orgasm. This casts doubt, Dr. Lloyd argues, on the idea that the contractions of orgasm somehow affect sperm retention.

Another hypothesis, proposed in 1995 by Dr. Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and two colleagues, held that women were more likely to have orgasms during intercourse with men with symmetrical physical features. On the basis of earlier studies of physical attraction, Dr. Thornhill argued that symmetry might be an indicator of genetic fitness.

Dr. Lloyd, however, said those conclusions were not viable because ''they only cover a minority of women, 45 percent, who say they sometimes do, and sometimes don't, have orgasm during intercourse.''

''It excludes women on either end of the spectrum,'' she said. ''The 25 percent who say they almost always have orgasm in intercourse and the 30 percent who say they rarely or never do. And that last 30 percent includes the 10 percent who say they never have orgasm under any circumstances.''

In a phone interview, Dr. Thornhill said that he had not read Dr. Lloyd's book but the fact that not all women have orgasms during intercourse supports his theory.

''There will be patterns in orgasm with preferred and not preferred men,'' he said.

Dr. Lloyd also criticized work by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, who studies primate behavior and female reproductive strategies.

Scientists have documented that orgasm occurs in some female primates; for other mammals, whether orgasm occurs remains an open question.

In the 1981 book ''The Woman That Never Evolved'' and in her other work, Dr. Hrdy argues that orgasm evolved in nonhuman primates as a way for the female to protect her offspring from the depredation of males.

She points out that langur monkeys have a high infant mortality rate, with 30 percent of deaths a result of babies' being killed by males who are not the fathers. Male langurs, she says, will not kill the babies of females they have mated with.

In macaques and chimpanzees, she said, females are conditioned by the pleasurable sensations of clitoral stimulation to keep copulating with multiple partners until they have an orgasm. Thus, males do not know which infants are theirs and which are not and do not attack them.

Dr. Hrdy also argues against the idea that female orgasm is an artifact of the early parallel development of male and female embryos.

''I'm convinced,'' she said, ''that the selection of the clitoris is quite separate from that of the penis in males.''

In critiquing Dr. Hrdy's view, Dr. Lloyd disputes the idea that longer periods of sexual intercourse lead to a higher incidence of orgasm, something that if it is true, may provide an evolutionary rationale for female orgasm.

But Dr. Hrdy said her work did not speak one way or another to the issue of female orgasm in humans. ''My hypothesis is silent,'' she said.

One possibility, Dr. Hrdy said, is that orgasm in women may have been an adaptive trait in our prehuman ancestors.

''But we separated from our common primate ancestors about seven million years ago,'' she said.

''Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it's phasing out,'' Dr. Hrdy said. ''Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about.''

Western culture is suffused with images of women's sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.

''Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function,'' Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is ''natural'' to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

''Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women,'' Dr. Lloyd said. ''And indirectly for men, as well.''

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This was why I brought up fetishes, most of which seem to stem from complicated "experience" stuff. Not that they're plain and simple to trace, but ... some set of early experiences might sensitize you to feet. You might focus in on feet as a "private" body part, or get really into the feminization of feet in terms of heels, or painted nails. And once that's really settled into your brain, it'll change the way your brain reacts to things: clutching a stiletto heel now creates a whole different response than it might for someone else. Cf Momus's stuff upthread about immigration and new settings rerouting some of people's perceptions and reactions. It's a whole other semantic problem how much we want to call that stuff "biology" in this discussion

NB Momus I was, yes, obviously expressing a preference toward experiential explanations for this stuff, yes. They seem fairly reliable. And they seem too complex, and too early-acting, to ever fully differentiate from alleged genetic inclinations. Really simple experiential stuff can exert such a strong influence over so much of our behavior -- often in ways that are simple to trace -- that I can't help but believe the really deep experiential stuff is playing just as big a role, if not bigger. Human beings seem really mutable, really adaptable, really programmable; this may be more of a gut argument than a logical-proof one, but I'll always suspect experiential stuff before theories about genetics, at least until the latter are pretty well backed up. Plus I think a lot of people in the genetics camp are just pulling against our ideas of individualism, which is well and good but slants the argument -- they'll be very interested in, say, the level of behavioral sameness through a hereditary line, but without comparing it against the incredible amount of behavioral difference that can emerge, even among people raised in the same environment.

Hopefully that doesn't put me too far on the side of Skinner, or anything. Your point is definitely taken about the limits of that stuff, or the ways that genetics are pretty demonstrably peeking out (separated-twin studies are always cataloging this stuff). I'm not arguing against that, or pretending that it doesn't exist. And I'll totally admit that leaning toward experience is probably related to all those other moral concerns -- treating that explanation as a bit of a necessary fiction that we should default to when in doubt, maybe. But that's in part because, throughout history, people have at lots of points tried to explain behavior as biological, genetic, in-bred, and acted accordingly, and as time goes on it seems to become clearer and clearer how often they were wrong. It's odd: we've managed to learn more and more about the genetic side, to understand its power more, and yet at the same time we've learned more and more about how important the experiential part is, too!

in my experience, this evaluation is hardly unconscious