Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

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Now if you only the abstract below you might conclude the only possible explanation for women "evolving" same-sex desire was (what a surprise, *cough*Rule of Desire #1*cough*) for "the kids!"  Since women having sex for any reason other than getting pregnant or getting help raising their kids would be intolerable! Inconceivable!

Born Both Ways: The Alloparenting Hypothesis for Sexual Fluidity in Women

Barry X. Kuhle, Department of Psychology, University of Scranton; Sarah Radtke, Department of Psychology, Ryerson University

Abstract

Given the primacy of reproduction, same-sex sexual behavior poses an evolutionary puzzle. Why would selection fashion motivational mechanisms to engage in sexual behaviors with members of the same sex? We propose the alloparenting hypothesis, which posits that sexual fluidity in women is a contingent adaptation that increased ancestral women’s ability to form pair bonds with female alloparents who helped them rear children to reproductive age. Ancestral women recurrently faced the adaptive problems of securing resources and care for their offspring, but were frequently confronted with either a dearth of paternal resources due to their mates’ death, an absence of paternal investment due to rape, or a divestment of paternal resources due to their mates’ extra-pair mating efforts. A fluid sexuality would have helped ancestral women secure resources and care for their offspring by promoting the acquisition of allomothering investment from unrelated women. Under this view, most heterosexual women are born with the capacity to form romantic bonds with both sexes. Sexual fluidity is a conditional reproductive strategy with pursuit of men as the default strategy and same-sex sexual responsiveness triggered when inadequate paternal investment occurs or when women with alloparenting capabilities are encountered. Discussion focuses on (a) evidence for alloparenting and sexual fluidity in humans and other primates; (b) alternative explanations for sexual fluidity in women; and(c) fourteen circumstances predicted to promote same-sex sexual behavior in women.

Sign!

And reading just the abstract you might conclude that they conclude there could be no other possible mechanism whereby women would form sexual attachments with other women there's therefore absolute certainty that heterosexual women have "sexual fluidity." It's all about the conditional reproductive strategies, see.

But if you read the actual paper (PDF here) you'd realize that, no, they qualify their assertions to such a bizarre degree that... you kind of wonder why they bothered in the first place.

The sentence to watch while reading the thing seems to be this "Under this view, most heterosexual women are born with the capacity to form romantic bonds with both sexes." Really, rather than trying to justify their assertion that nominally hetero women form same-sex sexual relationships to facilitate childrearing (a.k.a. alloparenting) they mostly seem to be speculating about why, let alone how, women "evolved" to have hawt girl-on-girl action.

Did I say "sigh" already? I guess I already did.

Did you know that, based on research lesbians report enjoying sex with men less? Did you know, further, that women who've been abused and/or been victims of sexual violence seem to have more difficulty forming same-sex relationships with men? Did you know that heterosexual women in isolation from opposite-sex partners are more likely to form same-sex relationships when confined (as in a harem or... I dunno... jail) with only other women? Yes, yes, and yes! Because, for the kids, see? It's gotta be! Because...

More interestingly, did you know that out of the 14 "testable hypotheses" they propose only the first four seem to have been studied? Or that out of some of those you really, really have to scratch deep to find something that sort of resembles confirmation? Son of a gun! What a whacky way to practice science!

Oh well, at least baseless, experiment-free "research" papers beats getting college coeds to give you unprotected blowjobs to "confirm" whether your semen is an antidepressant.

What's so $%!#% frustrating for me is that I actually believe humans evolve certain psychological tendencies and behaviors! I even believe it's likely that some of our behaviors are sexually selected for! But empty owl whiz like this stuff just makes anything else anyone tries do do less credible. And therefore discourages people who might someday turn out to be competent scientists from giving it a whirl.

Note: in the end notes the article was apparently rejected and then resubmitted. It may first have been rejected by Penthouse Letters. :-P

One of the things I've been realizing over the last year, something that's shaken me up quite a bit, has been the way my nominally normal if somewhat libidinous upbringing was overlaid with wide, thick layer of third-hand, second-hand, and sometimes, in retrospect, first-hand abusive culture.*

Because I grew up in the extremely disrupted culture of the 1970s with it's hippie and sexual revolution rejection of unquestionably socially repressive, conservative barriers it's taken me a very long time to realize that thrown into that mix was indoctrinated... and in retrospect sometimes actively groomed rejection of boundaries.

I suspect that of my generation I am not alone.

For this reason I've really got a soft spot for recovering fundamentalist-cult survivor Elisabeth Esther, who today shared a wonderful list. Check it out. If you find it recognizable share it with your friends and loved ones. (I've numbered the list so I can refer to specific items in the rest of my post.)

I had a total epiphany moment when I read “Signs of Unhealthy Boundaries” on page 171 of Take Back Your Life. Here is an abbreviated list:

1. Telling all
2. Being sexual for others, not yourself
3. Being nonsexual for others, not yourself
4. Going against personal values or rights in order to please others
5. Not noticing or disregarding when someone else displays inappropriate boundaries
6. Not noticing or disregarding when someone invades your boundaries
7. Giving as much as you can for the sake of giving
8. Taking as much as you can for the sake of getting
9. Letting others define you
10. Letting others describe your reality
11. Believing others can anticipate your needs
12. Believing you must anticipate others’ needs
13. Practicing self-abuse (cutting yourself)
14. Being deprived of food or sleep
15. Being unable to separate your needs from those of others

It was pretty eye-opening for me to realize I could check off almost all of these signs.

Source: Elisabeth Esther

I've been there for a lot of that too. Sometimes even when I thought I wasn't! Fairly often I'd even impose some of those things on myself. (This being classic sign of what the 12-step people call co-dependence: imposing on yourself conditions you only believe to be required to be with someone else, for instance.)

For instance tolerating anger or even violence from an early partner on the assumption that a) she needed to express herself, b) I could "take it," and c) love requires "give and take" (itself of course a perfectly true thing) that I turned into "if I couldn't 'take it' I wasn't cut out to be in a relationship in the first place." Call that fallout from items #7, 9, 10, 12, and 15.

For instance the older youth "leader" who in "rap sessions" would make the perfectly valid point that most people are at least a little bisexual... while regularly "demonstrating" his point with egregiously inappropriate touching of young men in the group and often leading to "private sessions" with them to help them "work out their inhibitions." And to the extent the rest of us wondered if it was ok we were all desperately afraid of appearing too "uncool" or "sexually hung up" to mention it. See items #4, 5, and 6, above, topping that chart with a bullet. And see, worse, that coming away of those sessions we tended to question only the degree of the leader's behavior, believing "it's ok to do that, you just shouldn't go so far." Maybe with a little bit of #2 and/or #3 depending on whether you felt you could or couldn't be "cool" and participate in what pop culture was referring to at the time as "bisexual chic."

Others were imposed or assumed by others.

Throw in turmoil and shame if a woman wanted to fellate her partner (let alone if he asked her to), or if in those pre-g-spot days she preferred penetration to clitoral stimulation, or if a man wasn't "respectful" during sex, a.k.a. was anything but slow and basically worshipful, or if a woman (perhaps impatient with the neo-victorian pace) wanted to be active, or... or... or... etc. #6 and/or 7, numbers 12 and 11, numbers 2 and 6 and 15, and pretty much all the rest except maybe #13 and 14 (with maybe a mashup of choosing to "altering your reality" on your own by depriving yourself of sleep while staying up sometimes for days to travel or "rap" with each other.

And, for instance, the overwhelming sense that since sex should be "natural" you really shouldn't check in with each other during it, not to see if this felt good ("but the Joy of Sex said it should work!"), not to see if that was what was actually wanted since we were all supposed to be able to read each other's "vibe." Not really having any boundaries about drug or alcohol intoxication. And when it came to young men and boys, while there was (mostly homophobia-driven) understanding that they could say no to men nobody could even comprehend that it was even possible that a boy wouldn't be "ready" if a woman came on to him. (In a most unfortunate, deeply misunderstood, but widely repeated phrases from the era I think it was Susan Brownmiller who said men were so incapable of self-control sexually they would "even" have sex with women who were dead!)

And eh, more numbers in there somewhere.

Sigh. Yes, it was the 1970s. And almost everything about the era that wasn't bitterly tense was almost heedlessly nihilistic. And they really were trying to break down the giant zit of Western Civilization that had come to a (eww) head in the Mad Men era of the 1950s and 1960s. And mostly people were making it up as they went along. And everyone had to make their mistakes while they learned from them.

But here's the thing, and how it relates to Esther's post:

Unlike Elizabeth who escaped from her 1950s-holdover cult, a lot of my peers were more like 2nd-generation cult survivor. My parents were both raised very strictly but I was exposed to their parent's church cultures only through early elementary school.

But I've got to say that being the children of escapees had its own perils. In my own generation, which coincided with the hippies and the nominal sexual revolution, there's a not-even-unnatural possibility of mistaking rejection of oppressive barriers with maintenance of healthy boundaries. And wow am i learning -- sometimes after way too many decades -- what a huge difference there is between the two!

I'm going to order her cult-survivors book, Take Back Your Life. Using her Amazon link instead of mine. The 1970s, from its Viet Nam-era lyrics like "If you can't be with the one you love (honey) love the one your with" to the catastrophically sexually unsafe anonymity of New York and Bay Area bath house culture, to the hellishly triggered first wave of 2nd Wave feminists to their naked-woman-in-a-meat-grinder Hustler-cover antagonists in porn, amounted to a cult of its own. Even if it was only a rebound one after the preceding cult of the 1950s. But I get the impression we could learn a lot from that too.

* Footnote: I don't want to leave the impression I'm now dour or sour on what's become of sexuality after the 1970s. Or at least since the 1980s. Nor do I feel a need to recant much of anything I've said on this blog, although I think some my earlier posts show strong overtones of those unrecognized unhealthy boundaries. It definitely what I've learned or advocated is itself wrong.

Instead I think the way most of my writing stands up well indicates the problem I'm trying to illustrate here. The sexual ideals people were working on were just really different from the often toxically dysfunctional social context I and a lot of other suburban and exurban children of the Silent Majority generation were exposed to. To consider a (only slightly) less volatile example from current events, it's more like the case where you might hear mild advice like "well, it's a good idea for people in remote areas to be able to protect themselves." Only where for most people that just means have a dog, a baseball bat, or (as Joe Biden suggests) a shotgun, for the people you grew up around it meant machine guns, bunkers, explosives, bullet proof clothes and cars, the occasional confederate and nazi flags or white hoods, etc. The basic ideas can make sense even if the implementation and local influences are unhealthy in the extreme. Or look at Elizabeth Esther's example: it can be a good thing to be of religious faith even though it turns out you grew up in an almost insanely violent, repressive, terrified-and-terrifying cult.

Well, same sort of deal with the world of gender, relationships, tolerance, boundaries, and sex in the 1970s. All things considered now I think it might be nice to try on being a survivor. Because wowzie!

Image by figleaf published with a Creative Commons license.

So some evolutionary biologists, Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti, recently published a paper about a relatively recent (only 35,000 years old) gene mutations in humans that appears almost exclusively in East Asians. The mutated gene, EADR, appears to be responsible for thick hair, distinctively-shaped teeth, small breasts, and extra sweat glands. It's not carried by populations of European or African descent. With me so far? Great! So far we're just talking about regular, everyday genetics research.

The problem arises, as it usually does, in the interpretation of regular, everyday genetics research. Because sooner or later -- usually sooner -- some asshat "evolutionary psychologist" or sociobiologist is going to come along and insist it couldn't be about anything but sex.

Katy Waldman has the scoop.

Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, [says] it all comes down to pretty ladyparts.

According to Akey, “thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.” In fact, he claims, “the sexually visible effects of EDAR are likely to have been stronger drivers of natural selection than sweat glands.”

Basically, the genetic mutation flourished because men wanted to do the no-no-cha-cha with women who carried it. Oops, I’d forgotten that science, the world, etc., revolves around what males find attractive. Never mind that this assumes an alarming passivity on the part of the females. Did they have no say in their mating partner? (That’s a rhetorical question: Studies throughout the animal kingdom show that it’s usually the females who decide who gets action and who doesn’t.) And even supposing that the women had no agency, were prehistoric East Asian men really so very picky? Did they typically refuse intercourse with large-breasted or fine-haired women? I am trying to imagine a caveman turning down a willing sexual partner on account of a triviality like insufficiently luxuriant tresses, and not just one caveman but the entire sperm-producing Pleistocene population.  

Source: Slate.com

So let's review. Here we've got a gene mutation that codes for four characteristics.. If one of those characteristics increases the survival prospects of one's descendants the whole mutation will likely be conserved and might even eventually outcompete all other variations on the gene. So it could be better ability to sweat -- but how useful would that have been in the extremely hot, muggy climate of east Asia 35,000 years ago? It could have been the teeth. It could have been the hair. It could even have been the breasts. And even if it was the breasts, it could have been that the particular configuration of smaller breasts were more efficient for nursing, less subject to infection, less likely to interfere with running or other physical activities. And sure, they could even have been more attractive to men, although given how many generations it takes for a characteristic to evolve and how fickle fashionable preferences tend to be in humans, it would have had to have been hella more attractive than all other breast types to have consistently been preferred by mating decision makers (men or, often as not, matchmaking parents) over tens of thousands of years.

But one way or another, if all characteristics are encoded by a single gene and just one of them confers a reproductive advantage then all the rest are just carried along for the ride.

Which, without considerable further research, makes it essentially a value judgement and/or an expression of conscious or unconscious bias to proclaim that one and only one of those characteristics "must" be the important one.

Now. Did the original researchers, Kamberov or Sabeti, make any such claim? No. Did their co-author Daniel Lieberman, another genetics researcher make the claim? Quite the contrary. Instead when Waldman asked him outright he said " “The problem with all selection, but especially sexual selection, is that it’s impossible to test on humans. We were careful not to make assumptions about the selective benefits of the gene.” And did Jerry Coyne, another evolutionary geneticist Waldman spoke to make any such claim? Nope! Once again an actual evolutionary geneticist said the idea was "extremely dubious" and, besides, sexually selected traits tend not to work that way anyway. (They usually arises in one sex only and generally impose that would otherwise be filtered out by increased mortality if the other sex didn't preferentially select it.)

Nope. The only scientist to jump on the titties and hair bandwagon was someone from the David Barash school (literally! Barash and Akey are both at the University of Washington) of just-so storytellers, a.k.a. making shit up to fit your expectations.

And what a story it is! A mutation crops up that affects teeth and chest shape, number of sweat glands, and hair thickness in both men and women. Some of these characteristics -- thick, shiny hair in particular -- are considered attractive in both men and women. And yet, somehow, the only possible advantage a nominally professional geneticist can imagine the mutation might convey is to make women more sexually desirable to men. But not the other way around? Really? No woman might be more attracted to a man with thicker, more luxurious hair? And therefore preferentially want to "mate" with him (a.k.a. jump his bones?)

Oh right. Based on all the evidence the primary purpose of reflex "evolutionary psychology" speculation is to buttress the dominant paradigm: it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire; it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Therefore it's doubly inconceivable to Mr. Akey and his kind that nicer hair would make any difference to a woman's partner preference. End of story.

Fortunately there are other kinds of scientists.

Photo by Flickr user vistavision. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Another way de Botton's claim...

Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices of interest. In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife, in which it is often hard to tell whether people really like us or whether they are being kind to us merely out of a sense of duty, the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.

Source: Psychology Today

...isn't, um, "particularly true and honest," let alone an "unambiguous agent of sincerity" would be that based on 3rd, 2nd, and lately 1st-hand evidence, it can be the case that no erection doesn’t mean not aroused. For some men some of the time, and almost all men as we age, the darn things aren’t up when you really, reallly, really want them to be.

Also, not to put too fine a point on it but not that long ago something like 27% of all email spam was for variations on erectile "dysfunction" remedies!  How can he still make such a ridiculous assertion!?!?!?  How can he not have made that connection?!?!?

Also, as another commenter, Crista, at Emily Nagoski's blog pointed out, vaginal lubrication can persist well after arousal has gone. And, of course, like erectile inconstancy, for some women some of the time, and most women as they age, vaginal lubrication can also "fail" to arrive either before or after orgasms, let alone arousal.

All of which just goes to show it would be an insult to sheep to call this guy de Button a mutton head.

I mean, look.  I'm sure that for a privileged, cis, straight, white, high-income, younger than middle age, educated, non-medication-using, possibly non-sex-abused-or-abusing man from a developed country de Botton was just trying to make a philosophical point about how nice it is that there can be some confidence of certainty when your partner's shows genuine (if also highly typically indicated) arousal for you, as opposed to some other forms of communication that can be confused with, say, rote observances -- for instance anniversary "remembered" in your Outlook calendar, flowers orderd by her secretary, vaseline on the teeth to keep you smiling for in-laws, Lake Woebegone assurances of "no, it's fine, fine, really it's fine."