Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Another finished draft I inexplicably neglected to post earlier this year provides a timely opportunity to link to Emily Nagoski. —fl

Going back to that goofy idea proposed most recently by g-spot denier Tim Spector that women have “evolved” orgasmic (difficulty during intercourse only, natch) in order to “test” the reproductive worthiness of their male partners.

That notion’s first screeching collision with reality, as Holly Pervocracy and I’m sure others pointed out, would be where waiting for orgasms during intercourse would seem to be a bit late in proto-women’s mate-selection process.

The second obvious collision with reality would be the part about where roughly a third of all women report they never have orgasms from intercourse.

A third obvious collision would be that there’s no evidence whatsoever that women who have fewer orgasms from intercourse reproductively “penalize” their partners by having fewer children than women who do. (A corollary would be that there’s no evidence that childless women are any less, or more, orgasmic than their childbearing counterparts.)

There’s a completely non-obvious collision.

It’s non-obvious because it’s not particularly related to orgasms.

Which makes it almost completely non-obvious because if you’re reading this in English you’ve almost certainly been indoctrinated with the idea that sex is all about orgasms. Or, in the slightly more sophisticated version sex is all about orgasms for men, and all about the promise that they might “give” women orgasms on the way to having their own. Or in the slightly less sophisticated version sex is all about orgasms for men and economic security for women and “their” babies.

The non-obvious part is that even men and women who never have orgasms at all, let alone orgasms with partners, let alone orgasms during intercourse still desire sex.

Intensely.

Sometimes achingly.

If you wanted to claim humans were evolved to desire sex, meaning sex just about any way you care to define it, I’d have to agree. No problem. If you wanted to claim humans evolved to have orgasms I’m probably quibble that they’re more of a side effect than directly selected for. If you were going to claim, though, that one sex evolved not to have orgasms in order to “test” the fitness of the other sex? I’d have to pat you on the head as if you were a simpleton and write long posts about it.

In fact, protestations of armchair evolutionary psychologists notwithstanding there’s no evidence that women or men really need to have orgasms to reproduce. That doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy them thoroughly, just that there’s no evidence that they’re needed to encourage other organisms to reproduce, nor is there evidence that we need them either.

Emily Nagoski of sex nerd, celebrating her 100th post, says

So here we are. Almost none of the sex we have is reproductive, yet we’ve managed to populate the planet beyond its capacity to sustain us. We use sex to every end – as a commodity, as a weapon, as a status marker, as plain old recreation. In everything that makes us most human – our economy, our wars, our art, our language, our complex relationships and social systems – sex plays a role.

Read the quote in context here.

And then adds

“Emily, if you could be any animal, what animal would you be?” I’d be a human, any day of the week.

Why, then, with all this genius, all this creativity and innovation, can we not stop using sex as a weapon of war, when we have so many other weapons? Why can’t we let women’s sexuality belong to the women in whose bodies it resides, rather than treating it as a commodity in the public domain? Why can’t we even just let two people who love each other get fucking married, without worrying about how their genitals might fit together?

What, in short, the fuck is wrong with us?

I still think she’s over-reliant on the whole evolution-as-destiny thing — after nearly all the sex we have really isn’t reproductive. Nor, for that matter, is most of the sex we have political or weaponized. But it is heavily socialized, and (mainly in our culture but not all) heavily overloaded with status and self-esteem. And, again more in our culture than many others, we have a tendency to make it highly transactional.

I’d just add, too, that what humans really seem to be evolved for (in the sense that you see us doing it in all manner of circumstances by all manner of methods among all manners of age, gender, class, orientation, etc.) is competing for status. And among humans status really does seem to confer reproductive benefit in the sense that more of one’s offspring are more likely to survive to reproduce in turn. You’ll also see there are plenty of instances where we compete for status even when, whether by disinterest or glut, sex isn’t significant to status.

I think there’s a tendency (particularly strong among, say, those inclined to speak English as a first language) to see sexual conflict as its own thing instead of a single, particularly pervasive instance of conflict for status. And sex in this instance, going back to Nagoski’s first sentence, being almost completely separate from sexual reproduction in the directly evolutionary sense.

That’s actually a good thing, though. Because one consequence of feminism is that women are resisting the layers and layers and layers of social and status significance that’s been put on, almost literally, their asses independent of their own autonomy or desire. The end result will never be the “free love” free for all imagined in, say, the 1960s Playboy mansion — which was itself a vision of bypassing rather than eliminating use of women’s sexuality to measure one’s own status. Instead it would more likely offload much of the social overloading we currently put on sex in favor of… well… almost any other form of interchange or competition between adults.

Just to be clear what I mean when I say that getting over Nagoski’s question “what the fuck is wrong with us” isn’t that we’d, well, fuck less. It’s that we’d de-galvanize sex to the point where we might instead ask ourselves “what the food-consumption is wrong with us” or “what the stamp-collecting is wrong with us” or “what the fashion-sense is wrong with us” or, getting closer to the bottom line, “what the pecking order is wrong with us?”

Note: I also agree completely that if I could be any animal I’d pick human every time.

Via Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who has paid access to academic papers, the concluding paragraph of a new paper by economics researchers Dalton Conley, Emily Rauscher claims that not only does having more daughters tend to make politicians more conservative (despite prior research saying the contrary) there’s an sociobiology/evolutionary-biology angle that explains the whole thing! (Emphasis mine.)

Using nationally-representative data from the General Social Survey, we find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince.

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The conservative emphasis on family, traditional values and gender roles, and prolife anti-abortion sentiments all stress investment in children – for both men and women. Conservative policies mirror the genetic interests of women, writ large. They attempt to promote paternal investment in offspring. Further, they stress investment in conceived offspring – “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” In short, Conservative policies support the genetic fitness of women by capitalizing on each pregnancy, reducing male promiscuity, and increasing paternal investment in children. Such policies may impinge on the freedom of parents’ immediate offspring, but they increase the expected number of grandchildren via daughters.

You’ll have to pay to confirm it but they allegedly say it if you begin reading here.

Got that girls? Keeping you at home, in the kitchen, with the children, while government policy rains Hell on the kind of hussies that “ask for it” from men, and scowling and sternly tapping it’s foot at the men who give it to them, is all in your own best genetic interest.

Maybe not your individual, personal, mental and psychological or even corporeal interest, sure. But your genes? Oh yeah, you mousey little baby-maker, your genes know better than you. They know you want it.

It’s an even more cellular-level version of the same old worth-of-a-woman-is-her-offspring argument.

Otherwise, whereas it’s entirely possible that the researcher’s data supports their contention that politicians who have (proportionately) more daughters tend to be more conservative, I’m extremely skeptical of their implications that

a) politicians with daughters become more conservative in order to maximize their own 2nd- and 3rd-generation offspring
b) that conservatism even maximizes the reproductive potential of those women under their dominion
and, especially,
c) that very many conservative politicians are going to be that thrilled that they’re either the products or the beneficiaries, let alone the vehicles for Darwinian evolution.

Via Tyler Cowen an academic analysis of 1.4 million chess-tournament game records (pdf) by Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark shows that not only do men players tend to be less risk-averse than women but (emphasis mine)

A novel finding is that males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.

They said it here. (pdf) If you don’t like PDFs you can read the abstract at Marginal Revolution

There are surely dozens of conclusions to be drawn from that single sentence, and drawn with far more nuance and conviction upon reading the entire paper (which is blissfully available and free of charge.) But the most important conclusion I’d like to point out is that whatever origin you care to pick for it (patriarchy, sociobiology, misogyny, history, stereotypical chess-nerd unfamiliarity with the opposite sex or conversely more experience playing female opponents, some other reasons, and/or all of the above) gendered male aggression towards women diminishes male performance!

Specifically….

Interestingly, the estimate in column (5) shows that in cases where men are on objective grounds weaker players than their female opponents, their propensity to opt for an aggressive opening strategy seems to become even greater.18

This as opposed to men who are weaker players’ tendency to choose more risk-averse strategies when facing stronger players who are men. And lest this gender bias all seem 100% one-sided it’s important to note that weaker women players are also more likely to select aggressive strategies against women vs. men who are stronger players than they are.

Our results point at significant differences in risk taking across gender. Most notably, both men and women seem to change strategy when they face a female opponent.

The bottom line for me though is that no, really, “males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.”

Why do male chess players choose to refrain from playing a solid game and opt for more aggressive strategies when they play against female opponents? Could it be rational to pursue a more aggressive strategy? In an attempt to find an answer, we investigate whether men have a greater winning probability when they use such a strategy in games where they face a female opponent. For a strategy to be seen as rational, we simply require that it should result in a higher probability of winning a game. For analytical clarity, it is desirable to use an unambiguous outcome measure, so here we only consider wins and losses, not draws. The results of estimations are shown in Table 7 where the outcome of the game (a win is coded as 1, a loss as 0) has been regressed on choosing a solid strategy, holding constant for other aspects, similar to the earlier regressions. We find that when a man plays against a woman, a solid strategy has a 1.5 percentage point higher probability of winning compared to not using such strategy. Our interpretation of these results is that, on average, it does appear irrational for males to opt for less solid strategies when they face a female opponent.

Recall that for economists “irrational” is equivalent to the slacker insult “loser.”

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Quick question: what do you think these economists propose for a possible mechanism. Would it be a “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology” hypothesis about some kind of zany male instinct to send pawn- or horsie-shaped white sperm proxies squirting across the board towards their female adversaries?

Well… no. In a footnote the authors specifically note that competitive behavior has more of a power component than a biological/sexual one.

On the importance of the position of women in society for competitive behavior see Gneezy et al (2009). In a field study of the Khasi tribe in India and the Maasai tribe in Tanzania, they found that in a society organized along matrilineal lines, like the Khasi tribe, women chose competitive schemes more often than the men in their tribe.

Demonstrating that indeed they are behavioral economists rather than sociobiologists they suggest if there’s any biological basis it’s the universal, non-gendered, and almost certainly evolved tendency for our human brains to save “bandwidth” by resorting to stereotyping, perhaps especially under pressure.

We are not in a position to provide a conclusive explanation for the latter result; however, some theories on stereotyping within the social psychological literature fit in nicely with our results. According to these studies “judgment can become more stereotypic under cognitive load,” (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000, p. 105). Under the assumption that the “cognitive load” becomes greater when playing against a stronger player, gender stereotyping could be used as a “cognitive shortcut,” i.e. used as a means of processing information in a heuristic mode. As Hilton and von Hippel (1996) report, stereotyping can manifest itself through the selective judgment of evidence, for example regarding another person’s intelligence. Thus, stereotyping seems to be a plausible explanation for our findings, especially as we find the elevated aggressiveness against women not to be rewarding, i.e. irrational in economic terms.

The very good news? Biology we can’t do much about, at least in less than evolutionary time-scales. Stereotypes though? Yeah, well they’re tough too. We’ll never be rid of them (I mean, seriously, would you want to spend time consciously deciding whether each individual piece of red flat octagonal metal near a road meant “stop” this time too?) But we can change them. Not overnight, maybe, but unlike genetics we can change them in decades or even years, not generations.

All the better news if you’re a man too, right? Because the study suggests that right now if you’re a man your stereotypes and assumptions about women don’t just make you behave more aggressively (and thus less, um, endearingly) but also less competitively successful!

In other words you know all that anti-feminist claptrap about how “men are losing out to women?” Well yeah, turns out that’s true. The trick, though, is that if you’re losing it’s because you’ve fallen for other anti-feminist claptrap. How’s that been working for you?