Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has more news that’s bound to be a disappointment to those who found their ideologies on the presumption that males in general, and human men in particular, are psycho-bio-accountants when it comes to providing paternal care only to offspring they know beyond all doubt is “theirs.”

The value of long-term field studies: Christophe Boesch and colleagues report on adoption in the Taï Forest chimpanzee study population — where more than 30 years of observations have produced 18 well-defined cases of adoption of orphaned individuals. They considered “adoption” to be the provision of maternal care (e.g., carrying, feeding, food sharing, defense) for more than two months. It’s possibly unfortunate terminology, as it leads to headlines like mine. Yet it is really interesting behavior.

It would be nice to say that these cases represent 18 happy endings, but these adoptions did not increase the probability of survival compared to orphaned individuals who did not receive ongoing care. There were a couple of cases where females breastfed orphaned infants “for many years,” but there seem to be several sad stories too.

Sometimes, the care for the orphaned juveniles was given by males:

Remarkably, all adult males of the East Group that adopted young orphans went a step further by investing in unweaned small infants and carrying them dorsally during travel for many months (see Figures 3 and 4 of Porthos with Gia) (Table 3). Since, Taï chimpanzees walk about 8 km per day on average, this represents a notable investment. Porthos’ adoption of Gia lasted for 17 months, until his death due to Anthrax, and he was seen to carry her even in extremely risky situations, such as during encounters with neighboring communities [26]. Furthermore, some males were seen to share their night nest with their adopted infant (Table 3). Fredy, the 3rd ranking male of the East Group, adopted Victor, the son of Vanessa, who died from Anthrax in late December 2008, and shared his nest with him every night, carried him on his back for all long travels, and shared the Coula nuts he opened from December 2008 to July 2009. For example, on February 17th, Fredy cracked 196 Coula nuts for 2h05mn and shared pieces of 79% of them. This gives a measure of the altruistic investment made in an unrelated infant.

That sounds pretty amazing. I think it’s very relevant to human evolution, as orphaning must have been very common with the high mortality rates of the past.

He said it here.

Hawks doesn’t mention it but according to the original author’s abstract, half the orphans were adopted by male chimps.

The proposed driver for this and other prosocial behavior, at least among chimpanzees, would be responses to heavy predation by leopards. That could be relevant for evolution of social behavior in humans as well since leopards have been big predators of primates for many millions of years.

Both Hawks and the original authors are very careful to point out that you really can’t draw simple, straight-line correlations between different species, but to the extent (cough*sociobiology*cough*evolutionary-psychology*cough) you do it’s something else you’re probably going to take into account while spinning yarns about, oh, all sorts of just-so stories. Like about maternal investments in offspring, paternal investments in offspring, the tendencies for animals with complex cognitive behavior being highly influenced by specific genes.

Especially if you’re going to go throwing those genes around by way of justifying explaining antisocial and/or animal-like behavior in humans in general, and men, women, and children in particular.

In a perfectly lovely, long post on complications of our casual understanding of the term “casual sex” Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones shines a bright spotlight on what’s got to be the biggest source of wariness about it (italic emphasis mine, bold emphasis hers.)

But before I get to sex, I need to talk about not-sex, because that has a lot to do with my visceral reactions to what people call, variously, “casual sex,” “one-night stands,” “hookups,” “flings,” “no strings attached,” etc. In particular, I’m thinking of a particular kind of not-sex: the stream of not particularly welcome overtures, from people not particularly willing to care about my response, that started with the obscene phone call from an apparently adult man when I was just a kid, including the guy who tried to grab me on the street when I was still not quite legal, the shouts in the street from groups of men, the drunk at the swimming pool whose wife kept apologizing for him, etc. Because the thing about these unwelcome, uninvited, boundary pushing approaches is that, though the men making them were very much a minority among the men I met in general, they were a much larger set of the men who were approaching me for no strings sex.

You’d probably enjoy reading the whole thing, here.

Mild-reflex reservations aside (reflex says it sounds like she’s stereotyping, reflection says not) I think this is the $64,000 problem. There really are at least two types of people interested in “casual sex” and one of those two types is very different from the other one.

Fairly or unfairly, it’s very, very easy to see how involvement, even glancing involvement, with individuals from one group could make you wary about the whole approach.

Lynn really crystalized the difference.

The flip and/or “sex positive” solution is to say stuff like “well, it’s unfair to judge my intentions by the actions of of others.” This is perfectly true — thus my mention of reflex reservations, above.

It’s also, unfortunately, 100% victim-blaming.

So it occurs to me that if you enjoy the idea of casual sex then it’s your responsibility to challenge, aggressively and consistently, the actions and intentions not of the victims but of the perpetrators.

You see a guy cat-calling someone from a window? Hear a guy in a dorm, frat, office, or party talking about spiking the punch with odorless/tasteless PGA, let alone roofies? You hear someone saying “cash, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free?” You see someone with a “shut up and suck” t-shirt? You see someone not taking no for an answer whether out of cluelessness, drunkenness, eagerness, privilege, arrogance, impatience, or barely-suppressed rage at the entire class of people they’re sexually oriented towards? You hear someone running someone else down for their weight, or for their body parts, or their (real or hypothesized) sexual behaviors or proclivities, someone referencing another strictly in terms of their sexual utility instead of their humanity? You see or hear any of that you’re not just seeing the oppression of their intended victim. You’re seeing your own oppression.

By convention you don’t have to do or say anything when you see that kind of oppression. But don’t imagine it has nothing to do with you.

Intern Katy in a blog-roundup post at Jezebel says

Katynels posted an article titled “Why is there no female Tiger Woods?“ in which Richard Cohen writes: “women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother – to have a child and then raise that child.” Yup, he really breaks down the whole Tiger Woods-sex-scandal thing to Darwinian urges. Reductionist, but topical!

She spotted the logic flaw here.

Riiiggghht. See, there’s this one guy, this Tiger Woods guy, who’s biological imperative makes him do this stuff that…

...he’s embarrassed and ashamed of enough to hide… even though it’s some kind of genetic imperative, as pre-determined as growing fingers on the end of your hands during fetal development, right?

And (at last count anyway) there’s, like, eight or nine women who’ve come forward to admit they “coupled” with this toolbagishly dressed stranger.

So… One guy who sleeps around, eight women who sleep around, and this guy stands there with is bare face hanging out talking about evolutionary urges.

And yeah, yeah, the “evolutionary argument” is that, well, those women don’t count since they’re just opportunity maximizing [insert random gendered derogatory term here] instead of being proper women.

But…

But…

Look, point being this guy Cohen can’t just go around claiming men are going around doing stuff with individuals he’s claiming have no, zero, none “natural” interest in anything but “a stronger need to mother – to have a child and then raise that child” when… pretty clearly… for every man who’s promiscuous with multiple hetero partners there sort of by-definition have to be a corresponding umber of women to be hetero partners with!

At some point it stops being about morality, or “science” and starts being about arithmetic.

(Also, gee, maybe Tiger Woods is all ashamed and upset because despite his promiscuity he loves his wife and children and doesn’t want to be separated from them. Which ought to be its own post.)

Finally, I’ll stop ranting about Evolutionary Psychology as soon as they stop making the kind of errors in logic and rhetoric that would get, say, a anthropologist, chemist, or dental hygiene student flunked out their freshman year. Because stuff like this matters. It slurs actual men and snubs real women and creates expectations that serve no one.

#!#^)

I hinted at this in a previous post a week ago but it’s worth calling out again. Jill Filipovic of Feministe said

I get that the point of the article is that feminism shouldn’t focus on purity — you can still be a feminist and do things that seem counterintuitive to feminism. I agree! But emphasizing all the stereotypically feminine things that women can do while still calling themselves feminists only seems to lend credence to the idea that the stereoptical feminist — who is “masculine” and queer and mouthy and not conventionally attractive — is not the kind of woman we want to be. And that’s a problem.

She said it here.

You probably don’t need to follow the link to figure out the context. It’s a great reply to the general problem of “I’m not a feminist but…”

Lately I’ve been trying to more directly engage with MRA- and other anti-feminist attitudes in other on the web and in the world and I gotta say that wall to wall it’s like the “No True Scotsman” fallacy out there.

What’s weird is a lot (though definitely not all) of those guys are willing to agree with a lot of in-all-but-name feminist principles, from anti-sexism, to anti-rape, to equal pay, to respect for decisions, to acknowledgment of the right to choice. And yet… they’ll end up, over and over, saying “but Teh Real Feminists are men-hating menaces.”

So it’s not making the job of engagement any easier when effectively the same sentiment shows up on our side too.