Oh yeah, and speaking of rhesus monkeys and how the “no-sex” class paradigm — like any paradigm good or bad — makes certain questions very easy to answer and others almost impossible to even ask, here’s another interesting point from Mary Roach’s new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

One question you might not ordinarily associate with the no-sex class paradigm or any other, for that matter, would be “why did 62 married American women smear synthesized rhesus monkey “sex pheromones” onto their chests before getting into bed with their husbands every night for three months back in 1977.”

In fact if not for Mary Roach only a few hundred people might have ever asked, or been asked, that question at all.

The answer? Well…

The short answer is that the researchers paid them. ... The long answer is that monkey-observing scientists used to believe that the reason rhesus monkeys have more sex around the time the females ovulate is not that the female is under the sway of hormones that push her to make a move, but rather than the female has pheromones — chemical triggers of behavior — that prompt the males to make a move.

Source: Bonk, pg 289

Emphasis mine. In other words, yes, scientists were willing to consider that females might have some sort of hormones that triggered sexual interest when they ovulated. But they were so wrapped up in anthropomorphism (which might be even more accurately termed androcentrism) that those female hormones wouldn’t affect the actual female but would instead cue males to (as romance novels so quaintly put it) “take” them.

Roach adds that the turns-out-to-be-unsupported, passive-pheromone-releasing female theory…

...set our understanding of female hormones and female sexual behavior way off down the wrong boulevard. It implied that when it came to sex, the female primate was a passive receptacle with no drive or interest of her own.

And so…

y’see…

...it’s like

Pardon my textual sputtering but look. Y’know what I kept wondering when I read about the old behaviorist B.F. Skinner who claimed people are just big bags of reaction-formation-izing reflexes? I just kept wondering what the hell he thought was going on when he was lying in bed late at night, listening to the breathing of his partner, staring through darkness and contemplating the ecstasy and/or agony of existence.

And so I also wonder what stories we — men and women, or more accurately men and at men’s unconscious-but-enforced insistence women — have been able to tell ourselves for all these generations that could have so blinded us to something so amazingly obvious. And I’m not talking about female monkeys and I’m not talking about anything as B.F. Skinner-y as “behavior.”

Anyway, just to be clear, the idea of the “no-sex” class ideology is pretty clear: men grow up with the idea that women are intrinsically, biologically disinterested in sex and, therefore, that leverage must be used to “get” women to have sex***. Ignoring what’s evidently fairly blatant-once-you-see-it initiating/courtship behaviors of female monkeys in favor of assaying their sweat for aromatic proteins that might get males off the dime is not the biggest consequence either.

[** None of which, Roach points out, ever amounted to anything. Except, I’d point out, yet another bogus product for spammers to hawk along side penis enlargers and herbal viagra. —fl]

[*** Leverage can mean anything from “proper” offers of marriages to trickery or violence… with the only difference being whether one or another form of leverage is polite or rude, fair or unfair, legal or illegal. The only thing that’s never questioned inside the ideology is that one way or another women have no sexual agency and therefore must be prompted or activated by men. —fl]