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omorkaJust finished a pair of books that contrast interestingly with each other.
The first is Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. Now, let me start off by presenting the book's deepest and most consistent flaw: it's rather poorly written. If this were fanfic, I would be jumping up and down yelling "get a beta!" for most of the book. Her sentence structure combines the worst aspects of Hemingway and Faulkner: they're long and ramble, yet give very little detail about anything. Moreover, she has a personal grudge against, well, someone - it's not very clear who, although "anyone who ever publicly attacked Steven Jay Gould" seems like a starting point (Gould was her mentor). Thus, her tendency to repeat herself (in some cases over and over) collides with her wanting to make it very clear to the reader that certain viewpoints are wrong, wrong, wrong! The net effect is didactic and hard to read.
Which is a shame, because underneath is a really interesting argument: that everyone in evolutionary psychology assumes that female orgasm is adaptive, but no one ever actually presents any evidence that it is. In point of fact, the reliable (i.e., not based on deliberately selected or very small samples) evidence that we do have suggests that non-orgasmic and orgasmic women have exactly the same levels of reproductive success. This, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that (a) female sexual excitability has no evolutionary significance - she agrees that it does - or that (b) it didn't have any effect on reproductive success in the environment we evolved in. She glosses over this last part, assuming that we're been more or less pair-bonding since the beginning, and in fact oddly brushing off the suggestion that we're (or at least used to be) a sperm-competitive species, as near as I can tell on the grounds that male humans don't have testicles of the same proportions as chimps and bonobos. (We'll come back to that in the next book.)
She does a fairly good job of demolishing the various arguments presented for female orgasm being a direct adaptation, and presents an argument derived from Donald Symons (who, it must be noted here, is not exactly a pro-feminist thinker) that it's essentially a spandrel. Symons points out that male ejaculation is necessary for successful reproduction, orgasm is the reflex that mammals use to prompt it, and that the embryological tissue responsible for the reflex exists in both males and females; there's no reason for it to go away in females simple because ejaculation is unnecessary for their reproductive success. Moreover, Lloyd notes that female orgasm in the wild - for the most part, in bonobos and stump-tailed macaques (who are apparently the bonobos of the monkey world) - tend to happen much more often in female-female interactions than in reproductive copulation. She does not take what I would have assumed to be the next step - that is, noting that orgasm is therefore a mammalian response, not a male or a female one at all. Sauce for the gander, etc. Women are orgasmic because humans are orgasmic, full stop, no further evolutionary explanation necessary. And yet she never quite says this. Further, she neglects the suggestion that female-female orgasm might now have been acted on by evolution, by promoting social bonds between female primates (whether bonobo, macaque, or human), which would have been the next place I'd gone.
Anyway, I gave it three stars for battling male-centric thinking in evolutionary psychology and the frequent assumption that copulation = orgasm for both sexes, but her personal grudges and the lack of clarity in the writing are serious detriments, and as noted in the sperm-competition example, she occasionally dismisses things out of hand without really explaining why. David Barash, an avid adaptationist she dismisses once in the text who apparently took it rather personally, has a more biting negative review here (warning, that's a .pdf).
The second book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, gives Lloyd a brief, mostly negative mention - and similarly brief but far more positive ones of both Michael Pollan and Easton & Liszt, which made me feel as if they'd been reading my Amazon purchase list. Their basic thesis is that, as near as we can tell from studying our nearest evolutionary cousins (the chimps and the bonobos, again) and those true hunter-gatherer cultures that have survived long enough to come in contact with industrialized societies, monogamous or polygynous pair-bonding is not the 'natural' relationship form for human beings. This flies in the face of the standard EvPsych narrative, which is that women offer constant and exclusive sexual access to a single male in return for his provisioning them and their offspring - a bargain that only works for the male if he is assured paternity. In both cases, there are incentives to cheat - for males, if there is a low-risk opportunity to mate with a woman who will not demand resources from him later; for women, if there is an opportunity to make it with a male with superior genetics. Ryan and Jetha argue that this simply isn't how hunter-gatherers behave; for the most part, sexual resources in small nomadic troupes are shared, as is food - no one man brings back meat for only one woman; everyone who's hungry gets a piece, or, at worst, the higher-status individuals get more. Similarly, everyone gets laid who needs to, and both men and women regularly have multiple ongoing sexual partners, whether they also have a specific pair-bonded relationship or not.
The writing style is breezy, flavorful, and (for me, at least) irritatingly casual; there are places where the endnotes are more relevant than the text. They also flip back and forth between arguing that multi-mate relationships are just as inherent for woman as for men, and focusing on how unhappy men are with monogamous relationships. (I suspect that we're seeing a difference in focus between the two authors, there.) They argue quite strongly that we - especially male humans - are physically equipped for sperm-competitive relationships, albeit not quite as strongly as the chimps and bonobos are, and their evidence is compelling, if perhaps slightly compromised by occasional dependence on some of the bad-sample studies Lloyd critiqued. (By the same token, I don't understand why she didn't address some of the better studies they cite.) Personally, I'm more than willing to accept their thesis on the basis of personal evidence alone, but their last chapter - on the breakdown of marriage in post-industrial societies - is interesting reading just by itself.
They blame agriculture for the rise of monogamy (and, not incidentally, patriarchy), and they're probably right - although I would argue that it's not the domestication of the plants that's the problem, or even the necessity of storing a harvest; it's the idea of property that goes along with it, including the propertization of women and enslaved males, and the violence required to enforce that. (What, me, blame capitalism? ;-) )There's a reason that Mars was a god of farming as well as war, and that Inanna of the storehouse became Ishtar of love and war. Still, Demeter has no such associations, and the idea that there could be another way survives into some of the studied horticultural and even small-scale farming cultures that kept sexual autonomy and multi-pair mating patterns, even to the near-present or present.
I gave it four stars; I'd've given it five if the scholarship were better and it didn't veer into near-apology for bad male behavior in places.
The first is Elisabeth Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution. Now, let me start off by presenting the book's deepest and most consistent flaw: it's rather poorly written. If this were fanfic, I would be jumping up and down yelling "get a beta!" for most of the book. Her sentence structure combines the worst aspects of Hemingway and Faulkner: they're long and ramble, yet give very little detail about anything. Moreover, she has a personal grudge against, well, someone - it's not very clear who, although "anyone who ever publicly attacked Steven Jay Gould" seems like a starting point (Gould was her mentor). Thus, her tendency to repeat herself (in some cases over and over) collides with her wanting to make it very clear to the reader that certain viewpoints are wrong, wrong, wrong! The net effect is didactic and hard to read.
Which is a shame, because underneath is a really interesting argument: that everyone in evolutionary psychology assumes that female orgasm is adaptive, but no one ever actually presents any evidence that it is. In point of fact, the reliable (i.e., not based on deliberately selected or very small samples) evidence that we do have suggests that non-orgasmic and orgasmic women have exactly the same levels of reproductive success. This, of course, doesn't necessarily mean that (a) female sexual excitability has no evolutionary significance - she agrees that it does - or that (b) it didn't have any effect on reproductive success in the environment we evolved in. She glosses over this last part, assuming that we're been more or less pair-bonding since the beginning, and in fact oddly brushing off the suggestion that we're (or at least used to be) a sperm-competitive species, as near as I can tell on the grounds that male humans don't have testicles of the same proportions as chimps and bonobos. (We'll come back to that in the next book.)
She does a fairly good job of demolishing the various arguments presented for female orgasm being a direct adaptation, and presents an argument derived from Donald Symons (who, it must be noted here, is not exactly a pro-feminist thinker) that it's essentially a spandrel. Symons points out that male ejaculation is necessary for successful reproduction, orgasm is the reflex that mammals use to prompt it, and that the embryological tissue responsible for the reflex exists in both males and females; there's no reason for it to go away in females simple because ejaculation is unnecessary for their reproductive success. Moreover, Lloyd notes that female orgasm in the wild - for the most part, in bonobos and stump-tailed macaques (who are apparently the bonobos of the monkey world) - tend to happen much more often in female-female interactions than in reproductive copulation. She does not take what I would have assumed to be the next step - that is, noting that orgasm is therefore a mammalian response, not a male or a female one at all. Sauce for the gander, etc. Women are orgasmic because humans are orgasmic, full stop, no further evolutionary explanation necessary. And yet she never quite says this. Further, she neglects the suggestion that female-female orgasm might now have been acted on by evolution, by promoting social bonds between female primates (whether bonobo, macaque, or human), which would have been the next place I'd gone.
Anyway, I gave it three stars for battling male-centric thinking in evolutionary psychology and the frequent assumption that copulation = orgasm for both sexes, but her personal grudges and the lack of clarity in the writing are serious detriments, and as noted in the sperm-competition example, she occasionally dismisses things out of hand without really explaining why. David Barash, an avid adaptationist she dismisses once in the text who apparently took it rather personally, has a more biting negative review here (warning, that's a .pdf).
The second book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, gives Lloyd a brief, mostly negative mention - and similarly brief but far more positive ones of both Michael Pollan and Easton & Liszt, which made me feel as if they'd been reading my Amazon purchase list. Their basic thesis is that, as near as we can tell from studying our nearest evolutionary cousins (the chimps and the bonobos, again) and those true hunter-gatherer cultures that have survived long enough to come in contact with industrialized societies, monogamous or polygynous pair-bonding is not the 'natural' relationship form for human beings. This flies in the face of the standard EvPsych narrative, which is that women offer constant and exclusive sexual access to a single male in return for his provisioning them and their offspring - a bargain that only works for the male if he is assured paternity. In both cases, there are incentives to cheat - for males, if there is a low-risk opportunity to mate with a woman who will not demand resources from him later; for women, if there is an opportunity to make it with a male with superior genetics. Ryan and Jetha argue that this simply isn't how hunter-gatherers behave; for the most part, sexual resources in small nomadic troupes are shared, as is food - no one man brings back meat for only one woman; everyone who's hungry gets a piece, or, at worst, the higher-status individuals get more. Similarly, everyone gets laid who needs to, and both men and women regularly have multiple ongoing sexual partners, whether they also have a specific pair-bonded relationship or not.
The writing style is breezy, flavorful, and (for me, at least) irritatingly casual; there are places where the endnotes are more relevant than the text. They also flip back and forth between arguing that multi-mate relationships are just as inherent for woman as for men, and focusing on how unhappy men are with monogamous relationships. (I suspect that we're seeing a difference in focus between the two authors, there.) They argue quite strongly that we - especially male humans - are physically equipped for sperm-competitive relationships, albeit not quite as strongly as the chimps and bonobos are, and their evidence is compelling, if perhaps slightly compromised by occasional dependence on some of the bad-sample studies Lloyd critiqued. (By the same token, I don't understand why she didn't address some of the better studies they cite.) Personally, I'm more than willing to accept their thesis on the basis of personal evidence alone, but their last chapter - on the breakdown of marriage in post-industrial societies - is interesting reading just by itself.
They blame agriculture for the rise of monogamy (and, not incidentally, patriarchy), and they're probably right - although I would argue that it's not the domestication of the plants that's the problem, or even the necessity of storing a harvest; it's the idea of property that goes along with it, including the propertization of women and enslaved males, and the violence required to enforce that. (What, me, blame capitalism? ;-) )There's a reason that Mars was a god of farming as well as war, and that Inanna of the storehouse became Ishtar of love and war. Still, Demeter has no such associations, and the idea that there could be another way survives into some of the studied horticultural and even small-scale farming cultures that kept sexual autonomy and multi-pair mating patterns, even to the near-present or present.
I gave it four stars; I'd've given it five if the scholarship were better and it didn't veer into near-apology for bad male behavior in places.
