So I’ve been participating in the Half-nekkid Thursday self-photography internet meme for a number of years. And while this blog is now way more about sexuality than actual, you know, sex, I still quietly participate, posting in an area of this website that no longer shows up in RSS feeds or internet searches.

So anyway, speaking of trying to lighten up and learn to be a little more fun, this week I thought I’d try my hand at a little burlesque.

Turns out fan dancing is a lot harder than you’d think!

If and only if you're interested in such things you can see mildly non-work-safe photos of my attempted fan dancing here.

Sadie of Jezebel says

n the last 20 years, household roles have shifted: whereas the supermarket used to be the woman’s domain, today “almost one-third of men are now the principal shoppers in the household.”

Read Sadie’s quote in context here.

This isn’t exactly breaking news to the principal shoppers in households. This is good news though.

The sooner we can get to really, serious equal divisions of labor the sooner we’ll get away from that egregious “there’s nothing sexier than a man doing [some item of housework].” And towards, oh, say, “there’s nothing sexier than having lots of spare time for each other because all domestic tasks done in half the time because we split the work.”

If you’re an adult you can click here to see a not-very-work-safe housekeeping image.

Via economics blogger Tyler Cowen and sex-blogger Violet Blue we’ve got not one but two works of epic fiction, one sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that, together, explain perfectly why so many women can have orgasms the regular way (with fingers, toys, tongues) but no so much from intercourse.

Exhibit #1 would be sociobiologist David Barash (in his first book, incidentally, he claimed the behavior of microscopic, parasitic acanthocephalan worms somehow explains or justifies homosexual rape in humans) who’s new book, How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas co-written with long-time collaborator Judith Eve Lipton, M.D., spends an entire chapter on the “Enigmatic Orgasm” (Note: sociobiologists think only women’s orgasms are enigmatic while men’s are thoroughly self-evident… and therefore absolutely unnecessary to explore)

Anthropologist-primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that female orgasm evolved as a spur to having sex with many different males. “Based on both clinical observations and interviews with women,” writes Hrdy, “there is a disconcerting mismatch between a female capable of multiple sequential orgasms and a male partner typically capable of one climax per copulatory bout.” A potential consequence of this “mismatch” is that females would be inclined to seek multiple partners in order to achieve their orgasmic potential. As for why this potential exists at all, Hrdy suggests that it is ultimately driven by the fitness benefit of taking out an anti-infanticide insurance policy, as proposed earlier for the evolution of concealed ovulation. Thus, female orgasm and its requirement of sustained stimulation may have provided the proximate mechanism underpinning the ultimate payoff deriving from having sex with multiple partners. Here are Hrdy’s own words: “It is possible that as in baboons and chimps the pleasurable sensations of sexual climax once functioned to condition females to seek sustained clitoral stimulation by mating with successive partners, one right after the other, and that orgasms have since become secondarily enlisted by humans to serve other ends (such as enhancing pair-bonds).”

Read the quote in context here.

So. Got that? Them gang-bangin’ hoor women somehow evolved multiple orgasms… or maybe evolved… um… difficulty having orgasms with just one partner… in order to encourage them to have lots of group sex. Got that?

But wait, there’s more!

This month’s Scientific American Jesse Bering summarizes the latest word on Ev Psych thinking about the evolution of penis shape in “Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?“

It too takes the line that women are just a bunch of train-pulling cum dumpsters, and therefore, mens penises have evolved our evidently atypical bulbous glans and flared coronas in order to…

...effectively displace the semen of competitors from their partner’s vagina, a well-synchronized effect facilitated by the “upsuck” of thrusting during intercourse. Specifically, the coronal ridge offers a special removal service by expunging foreign sperm. According to this analysis, the effect of thrusting would be to draw other men’s sperm away from the cervix and back around the glans, thus “scooping out” the semen deposited by a sexual rival.

See page #2, here.

So. Got that? Men evolved the kind of penises we have becausea them gang-bangin’ hoor womin pulllin alla them trains. Got that?

So we’ve got a little concordance here between “creationist” sociobiology and it’s more sophisticated “intelligent design” ev-psych descendant: them gangbangin’ hoor women forced men to evolve plunger-shaped penises out of reproductive self-defense. We didn’t want to, women made us!

Now this is where things start to get tricky. See, the researchers Bering mentions tested their semen-extraction hypothesis with sex toys. Specifically with “anatomical” vs. smooth-sided dildos inserted into masturbation sleeves. And sure enough, dildos with coronas extract more artificial semen (they boiled precisely measured quantities of flour and water for precisely measured quantities of time so it has to be science) than did dildos without coronas.

All well and good. Except, of course, unlike dime store “pocket pussies,” actual vaginas, rather like actual live human beings with vaginas, are complex, dynamic, muscular, and responsive. Worse, from the ev-psych/sociobiology point of view real women’s vaginas do that darned tenting thing as they get close to orgasm, meaning this carefully selected-for “semen extraction” business isn’t going to do much good at all if the woman’s even slightly aroused. From, say, the cooperative intercourse with preceding partners during these allegedly evolved serial couplings.

Which is where the ev-psych/sociobiology unified field theory rides to the rescue! If penises don’t efficiently displace (other men’s) semen in pre-orgasmically aroused women then men must not be accidentally incompetent about helping their partners have orgasms during PIV intercourse compared to other methods, our incompetence is evolved!

At last! Not just a biological basis but an evolutionarily determined basis for the proscriptions and prescriptions of the no-sex class paradigm! :-)

—-

Now truth be told there are more than a few teeth missing from the ev-psych/sociobiology combs here. Which is fine, of course. There are a few muffins short of a baker’s dozen in my arguments as well. The difference being, however, that I don’t pretend to be a scientist.

Gap #1: Other closely-related species are also promiscuous (hello chimps? bonobos? Orangutans? Though not gorillas) but Bering says they’re not semen pumper-shaped.

Gap #2: Which means we would have had to evolve ours in the ~6,000,000 years, or call it 2-300,000 generations since separate speciation from common ancestors. Which, sorry, isn’t a lot of time for multiple-partner competitive semen-extraction to be a significant selective factor at the margin.

Gap #3: Just because it’s not selected for doesn’t mean that human penis shape doesn’t facilitate semen extraction. The authors Bering cites aren’t the first to notice the effect. Bering cleverly proposes that the male post-orgasmic refractory is evolved to prevent men from pumping their own semen back out of their partners by resuming intercourse too soon after ejaculation. The down side of this, though, would be that if Barash’s interpretation of Hrdy is correct and women “evolved” to favor lots of group sex (um…) then a refractory period would tend to be maladaptive for all men who weren’t a women’s final partner.

Gap #4: So based on #3 the refractory period suggests men and women both evolved having more single-partner sex than Barash, Hrdy, and Bering suggest, or else there’s some other reason for the refractory period. I can see having one, or the other, but both doesn’t make much sense. (And, at least as Barash is willing to admit in his title, these are all “just so” stories so there could be plenty of other reasons instead of the ones proposed.)

Gap #5: All of the above leaves out… um… y’know… women, even “primitive” proto-human women, making decisions in the matter. A counter experiment I might propose would be instead of using phthalate-laden plastic sleeves to ask real, actual women to try not two types of dildos but three: the original smooth-sided and “anatomical” ones, sure, but also one of the new glass dildos which tend to have lots of extra bulbs and ridges. Oh wait! We don’t have to conduct that experiment, women who can afford them speak highly of glass dildos. (For instance.)

Gap #6: See gap #5.

Gap #7: See gap #6.

Gap #8: For something called “Evolutionary Psychology” these guys (and it’s still mostly guys) don’t spend much time on the psychology part. In fact they’re highly resistant to it. The problem being that humans almost certainly started being able to do mind hacks around the time we learned to make tools — which would have been at least 1.36 million years ago. And the problem with mind-hacks is that they by definition derail predestination.

That doesn’t mean humans haven’t evolved. Or even that human penises haven’t evolved. Or even that human behavior isn’t adaptive or selected for (see human facial expressions, for instance.) It just means you can’t base every flipping hypothesis for human sexual selection on the behavior displayed in reruns of The Flintstones and Mad Max.

%$$!@$!^&*!!!

NSFW Caveat: If and only if you’re an adult you can click here for an extravagantly not-work-safe image possibly related to penis evolution… in a primitive habitat no less. :-)

In a post titled “Once a Stripper, Always a Stripper” Lux Alptraum of BOINKOLOGY says of a promo for a new HBO series.

“It’s being written by smart stripper Diablo Cody, and produced by a man named Steven Spielberg. Great, just what we needed—another reason to watch TV.”

Get it? Diablo Cody took her clothes off! That’s all you need to know about her. Isn’t it funny? She was a sex worker, and now she’s a screenwriter! That’s so cute!

It’s a laugh a minute, all right.

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah, I always wonder if my more political posts would get linked back to more often if a) I was ever right or b) if I’d never posted photos of my booty or c) both.

Shoulda thought of that years ago though.

Oh well, since I did and since Lynn Gazis-Sax and Sungold are still celebrating female desire week I’ve included three of the photos most often marked “favorite” from my Flickr photo stream after the “continue reading” jump.

(Oh yeah, and while the first image isn’t as not-work-safe as it appears, you probably still wouldn’t want to try explaining it to someone else from work.)