Sungold uses reactions to the Rep. Weiner cybersex scandal to emphasize a far more "scandalous" but actually utterly mundane fact about "sexting." (emphasis mine)

I wouldn’t be able to give [reporters asking for a gender-studies take] a pat explanation, because I think that masculine sexual entitlement isn’t the whole story. We all have an unruly id. Men aren’t the only folks playing at sex on the Internet. Every hetero man playing around in the vast cyber sex emporium is interacting with female partners (or at least, so he thinks).

Source: Kittywampus

Yes.  Yup.  Yeah, exactly!  Whatever one might think of Weiner himself (I'm generally forgiving but not at all about to forget) the behavior he actually engaged in was by all (or possibly all but one) accounts step-wise consensual and/or reciprocally escalated.

But how, sez all the knee-squeezing twits who reflexively think "hurr hurr they said 'weiner,'" could that possibly happen if people with lady parts were involved?  Sungold has a suggestion that will shock them even further.

Mainstream practitioners of ev psych systematically avoid theorizing about pleasure. It’s all about “reproductive success.” And yet, the quest for pleasure is by far the more parsimonious explanation for Weiner’s actions. What’s more, it even explains his partners’ actions! Weiner and his partners were looking to get off. They wanted the thrill of being wanted. They enjoyed the thrill enough to risk (or repress) the potential for embarrassment, should they be caught out. Of course it’s true that Weiner, as a congressman, had more to lose, but the women have also been dragged through the mud in ways that were foreseeable. They, too, took a risk.

Shocking I know.  But there you go.  Lady parts don't get wet when you drop a quarter in them (the "women need a reason, men just need a place" theory), or when they think they're going to get a baby (the hysterical womb theory) or even just for their husbands (the monogamous "what evolution does to keep the offspring's father around the house" theory.)

Instead I have it on very good authority (on average more than 103.4 million authorities in the United States alone) that lady parts get wet when women get horny.  And on average when they get horny it feels really, really good when someone rubs their lady parts just right or (gasp!) when they do it to themselves!  And on average stuff like consensual, reciprocally escalated online flirting, sexting, and phone cyber sex makes women horny, which makes them wet, which makes it feel even better when they rub their lady parts.

Hmm... wouldn't it be funny if you had to lay out a similar case to explain why men like online flirting, sexting, and phone- and cybersex?

Now to respond fairly to the field Sungold is interrogating, yes, the fact that rubbing your own lady- or gentleman is really pleasurable is probably a byproduct of evolution.  But only in the same way the hair on our heads grows in such a way that we can enjoy looking at it when we part it in the middle is a byproduct of evolution: as a byproduct of some other probably-more-critical function.

But trying to explain why our drives to reproduce is directly rather than very-indirectly responsible for our appreciation of parting our hair in the middle or rubbing our own parts, without using a general (no-doubt evolved) ability to hack our gene expressions for pure personal enjoyment is going to be a fool's chase.

Hmm... to digress even further, an even better example of the general phenomenon of hacking might be that many people like Jagermeister despite the fact that eons ago our animal ancestors evolved a kind of taste bud that identifies poisonous alkaloids as bitter.  We evolved the taste buds to avoid eating poisonous plants and minerals, but since we're flexible enough to hack taste-bud expression we're able to take pleasure from the flavor of Jagermeister.

To get back on track, anyway, Sungold's right that the general, non-sex-specific drive to create pleasurable sensations from direct stimulation of nerve endings, regardless of their original "purpose" goes way farther to explain why men and women sext and cybersex each other than any amount of speculation about seed spreading or husband retention.

Note: Satoshi Kanazawa used the generic catchphrase "black" in the post I'm about to discuss.  Since it's not clear from his context whether his racism was directed at people of African, or African-American origin, or even just anyone with skin he determines to be darkly pigmented, in this particular I'm just going to use his terminology and say "black."

Usually when anybody types the words "Satoshi Kanazawa" my eyes start to glaze over. For obvious reasons. When I see him he's cited approvingly my blood also boils, but that's been happening less and less, so mostly when I see him referenced I just move on.

But last he became so extreme that even Psychology Today (the Cosmopolitan Magazine of science journalism) woke up enough to yank one of his posts. (After altering the title from Kanazawa's original "Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" to "Why Black Women Are Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women" because that made it better.)

And now it sounds like (finally!) his employers at the London School of Economics might have been moved to action -- if not for his overt racism, sexism, and homophobia then at least for his really capricious methodology.

So anyway, there having been such an awesome uproar this time I had to take a look. And... yeah, he's pretty special that guy.

You sort of have to admire his serenely confident but argumentatively gratuitous shot that while “black women are on average much heavier than non-black women” that’s not why black women are uglier. Oh no, he's scientifically controlled for that so they're still just ugly even when you take into account that they're fat.

Next he blithly asserts that blacks on average are stupider (have lower intelligence) than all non-blacks… but that’s not why, quoth he, black women are uglier. Oh no, because, see, even though black men are just as stupid as black women they’re still significantly more attractive than non-black men. (Or, one supposes from his amended version, black men are rated more attractive. Which I guess is supposed to be less racist.)

But wait! Maybe they’re not gratuitous structural arguments: he may have brought them up by way of eliminating the factors most favored by his superficial racist stereotypes to get to his more fundamental ones: “well, you’d think black women were uglier because blacks are fatter and stupider but no, even filtering out their fatness and stupidity black women are still ugly.

Oh, and then there's this lovely bit!

[B]ecause they have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, Africans have more mutations in their genomes than other races. And the mutation loads significantly decrease physical attractiveness (because physical attractiveness is a measure of genetic and developmental health). But since both black women and black men have higher mutation loads, it cannot explain why only black women are less physically attractive, while black men are, if anything, more attractive.

He says that black male attractiveness eliminates as a reason the “fact” that since blacks “have existed much longer in human evolutionary history, blacks have more mutations in their genomes than other races.” And, you see, purer races prefer lower “mutation loads.” But once again, despite those preferences (and, don’t forget, men’s seed-spreading willingness to screw anything that moves… er… to make lower genetic “investments”) and all those icky mutations make black men “if anything, more attractive.”

(Speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that were Kanazawa of black heritage he'd instead have have concluded not that rather than having more “mutations” blacks have robust genetic diversity, which instead would be superior to those icky “inbred” races with their “evolved” aversion to replenishing their degenerate gene pools. He could even use same "objective" statistics to back back up that claim! But I digress.)

(Also speaking of “objectivity,” one can imagine that black people have more “mutations” because, as you say Rob, “black” is only a race in the sense that “black” people have darker skin, with the result that while “black” people descended from populations recently indigenous to north Africa, south Africa, central, east, and west Frica, south Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, parts of India, and so on are, yeah, a $@^%@ of a lot “older” and racially “mutated” since some of them are likely more genetically similar to what ever relatively genetic monoculture Mr. Kanazawa calls homeland than they are to each other. But I digress again...)

But nope, nope. Instead he says he's factored that out too: “mutations” don’t make black women uglier either. In fact, says he,

The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently.

Yup, that’s probably the only other thing that could possibly explain the difference. (If he'd said they had less oxytocin we could all go home.)

It’s also the point at which he stops being a racist asshole using raw statistics and becomes a… free-wheeling racist homophobe "evolutionary psychologist" of the sort that gives evolutionary psychology a really bad name.*

See testosterone, Kanazawa believes, makes everybody look more manly. And black women have more testosterone. Which makes them look more manly. And it's looking manly that makes them ugly.

And so by inference that makes anyone who’s attracted to black women Teh Gay Takei. And, as we all know, Teh Takei is an evolutionary dead end. So all right-minded, offspring-maximizing men recognize that black women are ugly: QED.

And does he present any graphs or charts to back up these assertions? No. Does he bring up any counterarguments? Not at all. Does he cite any prior research? Nope. Does he cite anyone else's research? Not that either.  And does he bring up any other possible reasons why black women might be singled out as less attractive?  Not a bit.  Did he even stop check his arithmetic to make sure that, you know, the data he was using says what he wanted it to?  Evidently not(!)

Nope, nearly all the preceding crap is just Kanazawa being an unencumbered racist doing what racists are really good at doing -- selectively using the tools of a still-emerging field of science to advance his foregone conclusions. He happens to use evolutionary psychology much the way early 20th-Century racists and classists used Darwin to advance "social Darwinism," the way Dick Army, Paul Ryan, and Brian Caplan use economics to advance their defense of the status quo, the same way Dinesh D'Souza and Charles Murray use statistics to defend segregation, and just the same way Donna M. Hughes uses feminism as sheeps clothing for her neoconservatism.

With any luck, though, this time next year Kanazawa will be publishing from The Spearhead or National Vanguard and working lecturing at Bob Jones University or Liberty University. Which, his nominal Darwinism notwithstanding, should welcome him with open arms.

* I.e. he starts pulling shit out of his ass and saying "it must be evolved because it gives me such a woodie" and leaving it at that. Evolutionary psychology itself isn't objectionable in principle -- it would be hard to argue that nothing about human behavior has been influenced by natural selection. And most practitioners are actually fairly moderate people and many of them are outright Unitarian, Birkenstock-wearing, old-school liberals. And as far as I know none of them actually like, let alone admire Satoshi Kanazawa. But! Up till now he's been the closest thing to a Carl Sagan EP has had. And... yeah... how's that been working?

So Ta-Nehisi Coates started a fairly short post calling bullshit on the notion that women aren't funny.

I haven't finished this Tina Fey piece on Fresh Air yet, but as I've said, my readings of Jane Austen, and now Edith Wharton, have really taken me back to this old claim (most famously aired here and answered here) that women aren't funny. As an adult, probably the first author I found to be truly humorous was Zora Neale Hurston. Better people then me can probably cite a range of other women authors who used humor in their writing, but even in my own small forays it's clear to me that they are there. Leaving aside the desire to say something provocative, if thin, I'm thinking that a large portion of this claim originates in shrinking the range of "funny."

Source: The Atlantic Blog

In comments the conversation eventually turned to Vanity Fair's humorless article "Women Aren't Funny" by Christopher Hitchens. A bit further in DoctorJay said

I just clicked through to Hitchen's piece. I'd never read it.

In his first paragraph he mentions that you don't often hear a man describe his partner/mate as funny. I think this might be a socially accurate observation, within his circle. Or maybe even beyond it.

Reading on, I discovered, to my surprise, that Figleaf's rule number 2 applies. (Many thanks to the commenter here, I think it was K__Bee, who linked that a week or so ago.

If you aren't familiar, rule number 2 is, paraphrased,

Men are not allowed to be the object of desire. [close enough --fl]

In Hitchen's case, he claims that men (at least, straight men) must be funny in order to get laid. If we weren't funny, nobody would fuck us.

Therefore, men have a powerful motivation to be funny.

Of course, to disprove this, all one needs is to think of examples of men who aren't funny, but still got laid. Richard Nixon comes to mind.

At which point the thread becomes more of a discussion of Hitchens and/or of the power of the whole "evolved to be funny to spread our seed" thing.

Sigh!

The whole stupid "pass on your seed" business is so overblown. You know another indisputably evolved behavior that's absolutely critical to "passing on your seed?" Taking a deep breath right after birth. Screw that up and you'll never "get laid" either. Considering some of the other convolutions some people go to to wring sexual selection out of a behavior it's amazing no young cupid has never come forth to explain how men learn to breath after birth because chix think men who breathe are hawt.

So you can buy the whole pitiful-male/gatekeeper-female model, where every action men takes is designed to get her to lower her "barriers" just misses a heck of a lot of, you know, other regular old every day selection you've got to get through to survive long enough to meet, greet, subvert or defeat those gatekeeper-y feeemales.* And Mr. Hitchens joins on the order of millions of otherwise sensible men who fall for it. But doing so means they miss out on a very large group of other possible reasons a trait might develop.

For instance, with all due respect to Hitchens on many other topics I'm... pretty sure men have to be funny, and might even somehow genetically have to be funny,... for the same reason they have to not become objects of desire: to keep from getting beaten up by older and/or bigger boys and men. Or perhaps even more accurately, in order to enter alliances with groups of older, larger boys and men who will either not beat them up or will stand by then when members of other alliances try to beat them up.

Laughing men rarely beat up juveniles and newcomers. Jealous ones do. For that matter men rarely beat up juvenile or newcomer men they perceive as having any non-jealousy-provoking merit or potential. (BTW, say hello to the true, patriarchal source of the whole male worthiness trap.)

Given that in all but the most chaotic, atomized or (possibly) well-ordered societies boys must at some point in their development depend on the tolerance and/or support of older/larger males if they hope to achieve sexual maturity, trying to explain all gendered behavior in terms of male/female sexual selection necessarily overlooks huge swaths of selective pressure (social or biological) on human behavior.

(This latter point, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons Ayn Rand's science-fiction-y novels fall apart. Neither John Galt nor, especially, Howard Roark, can have had human childhoods. Indeed, in The Fountainhead Roark is born full-formed, naked, and to tie it all together, laughing, thigh deep in a stream miles from anyone. As he had to have been. Because otherwise, no matter what a hardass he became, somewhere between the ages of, say, two and sixteen, he'd have had no choice but to compromise, to flex, to joke, to ingratiate, or otherwise fit in -- if not with other boys and men then with parents or their proxies.  But I digress.)

At any rate, whereas at least in patriarchy men tend to be far bigger obstacles to male reproductive success than women, and therefore men might feel like they're under more pressure to be funny, I don't see why it's not obvious that a) women are just as likely to benefit from being funny to men, b) that men benefit from being funny around groups of women, c) that women benefit from being funny around women, etc.

* Quick point: throughout history and literature, virtually all gatekeepers are flunkies, lackies, or at best trusted servants of the lord or master who owns the gate itself. Women are designated "gatekeepers" to their sexualities alright, but by convention, tradition, and often law the gate they're charged to defend with their lives and honors actually belongs to a custodial male. Thus people who label women "gate keepers" are 100% up to their scuppers in patriarchy.

Sooo....

If I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I might spend all my time pondering how it's just seed-spreadingly natural for men to want to be polygamous.

Oh, silly, me.  Actually if I was a pop evolutionary psychologist or sociobiologist I wouldn't ponder any such thing.  I'd take it as axiomatic -- requiring no proof beyond "makes sense to me" -- and cheerfully use that axiom to prove anything else that popped into my little brain. When pressed by people with a modicum of gender-studies in their background I'd blithly breeze by way of explanation that hogamous-higamous, men are polygamous.

The other axiom I'd posit would be that women just don't like sex in the first place, and that therefore they're grudgingly going to aim to have it as infrequently as possible, preferably with as few men as possible.  And explain that with higamous-hogamous, women are monogamous.  Oh, and bitches too.  Oh, or if they didn't match my axiom, whores.

In evolutionary biology, on the other hand, it's more common to actually ponder whether there might be a reproductive benefit or cost underlying any inclination towards something like monogamy.

Something like this tidbit, via from Holly of Self-Portrait as, who says --

...low fertility rates among Mormon polygamists. My favorite bit:

the more women partnered with a man, the fewer children each of those women had. Exactly why is not clear. Like the Soay rams, men may simply not have had the stamina.... The failure of the Utah polygamy experiment should therefore not be seen as that surprising.

Source: Self-Portrait as

Reading the article it sounds like, in fact, on average, women in polygamous marriages tend to have approximately one fewer child for every fellow "sister wife."  And no, that's not a stretch.  Stories of sultans or Mormon patriarchs notwithstanding, most polygamists have somewhere closer to two to four wives, meaning a one-child per fellow wife isn't going to put anyone in negative numbers.

Anyway, EPs and sociobiologists tend to go on, and on, and on, about how men can fertilize bazillions of women in a lifetime while women's "investment" of pregnancy, lactation, and staying home in the cave-kitchen limits their reproductive potential to a relative handful.  And they brass on about how that means men are "naturally" likely to collect wives and partners willy-nilly whereas women are going to just as "naturally" be all gate-keeper-y and discriminating.

Which never made much sense to me -- in the real, non-Flintstones version of "the state of nature" related groups of women with satellite groups of men seems pretty common, and those groups of related women are usually able to collectively gather and trap enough to feed themselves and most of the men.  So while women might tend to care about fathers, and be interested in having men in their lives, and definitely interested in the meat and other foodstuffs men tend to hunt and forage for.  So in pure reproductive survival terms that's never seemed like a good enough reason to "evolve" a preference for monogamy.

If I were to going to assume that women are "naturally" monogamous, though, and if I were further inclined to go looking for facile sociobiological explanations for why that might be, then the likelihood that getting rooked into polygamy creates a material reduction in women's reproductive potential ought to be just about all I'd need to start making that case.

---

Getting back to the original article, the reference to Soay rams is about a variety of sheep that do the whole alpha male head-butting fights over harems thing... but basically run out of sperm.  In comments someone pointed out the tendency for women to ovulate in sync.  That would tend to put a pretty heavy limit on men's ability to productively "spread his seed" in his own "harem."

Which in turn leads me back to the suspicion that "collecting" wives is probably a relatively recent function of property accumulation rather than some sort of "on the savannah" biological adaptation.

---

Note that whereas women (and females of other species) are evidently reproductively harmed by polygamy, there wouldn't necessarily be the same issues with polyamory, either overt or covert.  So whereas men might be concerned about "cuckoldry," women (in polygamous marriages anyway) would positively benefit from it.  But in monogamy?  Not so much -- which at the very least ought to be a monogamy selectivity-stabilizer for men. (Don't hold your breath waiting for a pop sociobiologist to bring that one up.)