Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Paleoanthropologist and population geneticist John Hawks takes one look at a… questionable trend piece in the New York Times about “paleolithic diets” (notable quote from one practitioner “‘I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,’ Mr. Durant said.”) and finds the notion wanting. (Emphatic emphasis his.)

I’m the last person to promote gatekeeping in science. But a piece of free advice: Don’t get your information about human evolution from non-anthropologists who charge you money for subscriptions and seminars!

He said it here.

I think that’s actually pretty good advice by the way. And by profession Hawks pretty interested in ancestral diet and dietary practices. (See for instance You are what your ancestors ate, part 1 or Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines, although if you’re into that sort of things most of his posts on diet are fun to read.) And yet you don’t see him selling, or even offering, dietary advice.

Another one of his posts on food gets why that might be harder than it sounds. It also gets to the heart of the general problem with “ancient ancestors adapted for…” lines of reasoning.

[T]he idea that we are adapted to the Pleistocene can’t literally be true. [NYT science writer Marlene Zuk hits on the reasons very well: (a) the Pleistocene encompassed huge temporal and ecological variability, so that no human population was ever optimally adapted to any given time or place; (b) various historical and structural constraints make such optimization impossible; and© we’ve been evolving rapidly for the last few thousand years.

He said she said it here.

Proponents of evolutionary psychology bristle at accusations that their methods are “reductionist.” Which would be a bigger problem if a) they were all reductionist and b) there was anything wrong with a little reductionism in science. Instead, like proponents of “cave man” diets, the problem is more about radical oversimplification.

Photo by Flickr user digital-anger. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Summary: Naomi Mc rocks and so does her blog; genital odor as gender Rorschach.

I just stumbled across Naomi Mc’s provocatively-named blog about the sociology, politics, and science of (would it be redundant to say gendered?) reproductive health, Vagina Dentata. It’s hard describing how I feel reading her posts — it’s some kind of combination of familiarity, amusement, envy, awe, delight, and recognition you might feel upon meeting a long-lost cousin. To put it as weirdly as possibly my blog wants to go to a family reunion with hers. Anyway, she’s pointed, thoughtful, irascible, creative as hell, has an amazingly dry wit, and I highly recommend her blog.

Anyway, while discussing the stupid vaginal breath-mints business that cropped up in advertisements last week Vagina Dentatashe thoughtfully (and earthily) addresses the usual reservations and then drops a nifty gender bombshell.

There is nothing peculiarly smelly about women’s bits. Any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy – male as well as female.

She said it here.

It’s a killer point. It’s not that vulvas smell, it’s that genitals smell. As do armpits. And feet. So does hair. So does breath. So does behind a lot of people’s ears. In particular vulvas smell, yes, but so do men’s (ok, no vulva-like word for the combination so…) penises, testicles, and perineums. And yes, the 12% of the worldwide population represented by 96% of all research (credit to Mc) are inclined to lament body smells in general…

But in the narrow spectrum of “intimate” aromas it seems neither accurate nor fair to single out one gender’s bits over the other. Predictable, yes, for half a dozen reasons. Fair or accurate, though, no.

Despite occasional, mostly lockerroom references to “smells like balls in here” and maybe “dick breath” there’s just not as much acknowledgment of just how much men can smell. For the same “any enclosed area that gets sweaty gets wiffy” reasons women do.

A couple of reasons come to mind (and you’re welcome to add your own in comments)

• Until very recently men have overwhelmingly written, lectured, published, and otherwise controlled public discourse about sex in general and body smells in particular.
• If 90-96% of the male population is heterosexual then most of any discourse about partner’s smells are going to be about vulvas.
• If 10-15% of the population has at least one lifetime close encounter with same-sex genitals, until extremely recently they’ve been under considerable pressure to keep quiet about it.
• As several bloggers have mentioned this week, going back at least as far as Leviticus (call it 4,000 years) women have been considered unclean because they menstruate, with sometimes fantastic steps being taken to avoid contact. Since this makes about as much sense as the (Biblically) even more “unclean” practice of blended fiber in woven cloth (no poly-cotton for you “sayeth the LORD”) it seems likely that folks would make up all manner of reasons why that might be. And hey, maybe smell would be one of them. (Wow, do I sound like an Evolutionary Psychologist here or what? Where’s my invitation to blog for Psychology Today?)
• As Twisty Faster, James Dobson, your average MRA, and all perpetuators of the no-sex class’s Rule #2 all “know,” women never get their noses anywhere near male genitals (or at least shouldn’t) so they wouldn’t know.
• And as Twisty Faster, James Dobson, and your average MRA will tell you, if a woman does get their noses anywhere near male genitals they better not like it.
• And whether women like it or not they’d darn-tootin’ better not brag about it.
• And finally, and most likely, men are aware that they smell, but don’t care because we have a WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, credit Mc again) cultural heritage of considering ourselves baseline neutral, the standard against which all other is measured… and women as the “other” in question.

• Treatments for endemic-to-men “jock itch” are sold in the sports aisle in pharmacies instead of next to yeast-infection medication on the feminine “hygiene” aisle, so unlike yeast infections jock itch is all vigorous and healthy and not at all smelly.

Couple of other points:

First, you can’t even argue that “yeah, well women get them stinky yeast infections” without studiously avoiding the point visible in any corner pharmacy that for every over-the-counter creme or concoction for treating yeast infections there’s a corresponding nostrum for treating equally stinky “jock itch” fungal infections.

Second, as Mc puts it

This impacts on women’s health because if they always think that the pink clink stinks then they are less likely to notice changes which may signify infection or seek help and advice (similarly vibrator use actually increases sexual health). Plus being self-conscious of your wookie effects your enjoyment of oral sex which instead should be savoured.

The same can be said of men in reverse: there’s lots of residual messaging out there, including myriad anguished and often clichéd laments from men, that women don’t like giving blowjobs. Lacking self-consciousness, or indeed consciousness at all, that their balls can smell of yeast, fungus, stale urine, and perspiration this seeming mystery to men might be easily resolved with more diligent use of soap and water. Or perhaps the same (or maybe “manly” rebranded) wipes that are heavily marketed to self-conscious women.

Bottom line: pretty much any way you look at it the special emphasis on “smelly vaginas” is gendered out the (non-gender-specific) wazoo.

Summary: A brief history of teen pregnancy policy and how, long before I found this domain name, it motivated me to start blogging.

Actually I can answer part of my previous question, about whether the boyfriend is likely to disappear if his girlfriend becomes pregnant. In fact it was the second issue that made me decide to try to start a political blog, back when a domain name cost $1000 a year and a “blogging platform” meant Notepad.exe and copy of HTML for Dummies.

Again I can’t remember the source nor can I find my original notes (we’re talking mid-1990s here so they might by on a floppy disk somewhere) but…

At the time teen pregnancy rather than illegal immigration was the giant bugaboo of the right, and so of necessity of the left as well.

One data point that stood out for me was that when teenage girls become pregnant, or at least became pregnant back then, the father was overwhelmingly likely to be 10 years older than she was.

In other words the “boyfriend” wasn’t likely to be an actual boy at all!

Again, I don’t have my notes but I’m pretty sure that at least when it comes to teen pregnancy the disappearance of said “boy” friends is likely to be even more complicated.

Some years later, after domain prices and other barriers to creating websites had fallen, and, sad to say, after my original attempt at a straight-up political blog had perished in obscurity, while digging through a list of recently-expired domain names I stumbled across “realadultsex.com.” And snapped it up figuring I’d figure something to do with it. It wasn’t till a year or two after that that I finally decided to, well, start doing this!

Before all that, though, when I was just an obscure straight-up wannabe political blogger, I’d already decided that it wasn’t just a good idea to discourage sex between minors and adults, it would be good policy as well. My domain name has several meanings to me. That’s a big one.

At any rate, while I didn’t yet have much of the progressive and/or “sex-positive” and/or “3rd-wave feminist” vocabulary it seemed pretty clear to me that even if teenagers couldn’t be held accountable for teen pregnancy (a bit of a myth since, in fact, they’re often amazingly solemn in actual peer-to-peer relationships) then it might be a good idea to craft policies to reach impregnating adults instead of “slut-shaming” their juvenile partners.

As far as I know it’s still never been tried.

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks picks up an unconsciously but hugely man-hating comment on Slashdot.

Slashdot picks up the Svante Pääbo “Humans had sex with Neandertals“ story.

Hilarity ensues.

You do not need any DNA analysis to figure that out. What do you think the troll did to the captured the [sic] princess, once he took her back to his mountain cave? And they did not call it the Stockholm syndrome if she ever was freed; it was called bergtatt (literally: taken into the mountain) or bewitched.

Mod skepticism +5…
He said it here.

We have no, zero, none idea whether the sexual behavior in Neanderthals, or Cro Magnons, or any other species in our genus would be that much like ours. We have very little reason to believe that other species would be more attracted to members of our species — presumably Neanderthals would prefer to meander down the the Neander with a man or woman with a nice bell-shaped rib-cage and undershot jaw instead of the weirdly hourglass-shaped, pointy-chinned “princess” the slashdot commentator imagines would be more “hawt.”