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Centering the Penis: The Bad Boys
and Bad Studies of Evolutionary Psychology
When it comes to human sexuality, scientific studies can be heavily skewed toward questions men want addressed, answered in ways that men want them answered. In a field called evolutionary psychology, that has often meant that answers to questions about sexuality favor what the overrepresented sex (men) in this field want. One of the many problems is that people use this androcentric nonsense to justify being brutal, angry, aggressive, or degrading to others in the name of some vague "authenticity" that evolution baked into them. As you'll see in this chapter, studies of human sexuality as it relates to evolution versus culture follow this pattern in the field of evolutionary psychology. As the chapters that follow illustrate, the tendency is pervasive across all fields that purport to evaluate sex-based features. Even when it comes to nonhuman animals, the male-centered bias-and its centering of the penis-always seems to overshadow everything else.
"Survival of the fittest." With apologies to Inigo Montoya, people keep using that phrase, even though it does not mean what they think it means. This refrain seems to imply that only the strong survive nature's death traps. But "fitness" has nothing to do with strength or even evading death. "Fitness" is tied to successful reproduction, helped to the goal line by specific features that sustain life and facilitate the transmission of DNA. You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction. The phrase might communicate the idea better if it were "survival of the best adapted" or "survival of the best fitting."
These adaptive attributes can vary enormously from population to population, from place to place, and, depending on how unstable an environment is, from moment to moment. These advantageous characteristics can be behavioral (lobsters and their shoulders, maybe), chemical (lobsters and their pee?), sensory (ditto), or physical (being a big lobster), and collectively, their advantages and disadvantages will sum to "success" or "no success."
As long as the adaptive feature generally gives a survival and reproductive boost to the animals that have it, more members of the population with that feature will pass along the DNA underlying it. If the associated DNA becomes more common in a population, that population has evolved. The frequency of that gene variant has changed over time in that population, which happens to be the pedantic, semantic, not-at-all romantic definition of evolution itself.
Why am I talking about survival of the fittest and how badly people misunderstand it? Because this idea that "fittest" means "having most power" or "having most strength" has taken weedy root in some byways of evolution research that emphasize "winning" a lot more than "fitting." A field of study called evolutionary psychology mixes the manifestations of the unique and widely variable human brain with the tenets of evolution to serve up an often toxic brew that we, as a society, pay for dearly.
As the New Yorker contributor and academic Louis Menand put it in 2002, the result of this focus on "winning" as an interpretation of evolutionary fitness means that evolutionary psychology itself becomes a "philosophy for winners: it can be used to justify every outcome." And somehow, every outcome justifies what those "winners" want or believe.
The "what" that these winners want to believe can be everything from "racial" supremacy to the intellectual dominance of one sex over the other. Evolutionary psychology, when taken with a false doctrine that evolution is about "winning," offers a perfect cover for these aspirants and a perfect tool to perpetuate themselves as the "winners." When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?
Where Did My Ovulation Go?
Many primate females signal that they're able to conceive through visual and olfactory cues. These cues can include genital swelling and color changes, and they signal, in the dry words of one primatologist, a "heightened female sexual motivation." The length of this period is as short as a couple of days in gorillas to a couple of weeks in chimpanzees. Copulatory sex is off-limits unless the swellings say otherwise. In this way, the signals of ovulation say that penis use is a "go."
Humans, on the other hand, do not have these unmistakable visual signals. Obviously, then, Science says, the one who ovulates is hiding something. Because this process typically involves females, ovulation is being hidden for nefarious reasons. Even though dozens of other primate species and who knows how many nonprimate species do it-I mean, we are talking about internal fertilization here-in humans, the act of popping an egg into a fallopian tube is "cryptic" or hidden because it's a "lady" thing.
This secrecy keeps potential mates guessing, confused and confusticated and desperate to be the one to fuse a sperm with that egg when the ovary frees it. So, the idea continues, these potential mates stick around on their own behalf throughout a reproductive cycle. With this bevy of beaus lined up at the door or cave opening or whatever, the ovulator gets to have a slew of "extra-pair" partners waiting, like a conveyor belt of cuckolds. The inevitable conclusion is that ovulation is a sexual trap, the egg always being released but not being released, like Schršdinger's gamete, keeping potential partners guessing and engaged.
Yet "concealment" isn't a defensible premise for suspecting ovulators of cuckolding their partners or a rationale for others to expect sex anytime, anywhere. In fact, research suggests about a 1 percent overall rate of children being born from "extra-pair" liaisons, but social factors-not genetics-are tied to this rate. Living in an urban area or having a low socioeconomic status is linked to higher rates of "extra-pair" paternity, emphasizing the power of sociocultural influences on behaviors taken to be "evolutionary," including an assumption that monogamy is a human norm.
The "Stripper Study"
That real-world finding did not stop one research group, of whom more anon, from taking on the "hidden ovulation" question and publishing what has come to be known as the "stripper study." For this study, they recruited a group of women working at a strip club-because what better way to evaluate ovulation than in a place where conception is the last thing on anyone's mind?-and tried to track how the women's ovulatory status affected the tips they earned.
These authors concluded that the money women make when performing lap dances varies with their cycles. The work involved only eighteen anonymous women self-reporting online about their earnings, hours, mood, and other factors. The researchers argued that their results mean that everyone needs to know when women are near ovulation for economic reasons. Why? Because when women are ovulating, see, they can make more money if they are also giving lap dances. There's no word on how women accrue economic benefit by "ovulating while serving as a trial judge" or "ovulating while cooking dinner."
The rationale for the study was based on a passing and potentially interesting observation: the women in a strip club were getting tampons from the guy who also tallied up their tips, and the fellow (an author on the study with two other men) noticed that the women getting tampons averaged lower tips (so, you see, humans can detect these rhythms from indirect cues even if they themselves are not ovulating).
The research team did not ask what would seem like obvious questions about the women's experiences, such as what sort of cramps or bloating they were feeling during those times, or if they were worried that their tampon strings would be visible. Instead, the group just wanted to see if those women got more tips during an inferred period of fertility (ovulation) compared to the rest of their cycles. And they did not want to know this for the sake of women who give lap dances.
Their results indicated that the eleven women not using hormonal birth control had their lowest tip levels during their bleeding days, peaks during the time leading up to the estrogen spike that triggers ovulation, and then edging up again in the days after ovulation, when there's nothing a sperm could possibly do to change the situation. We have no way of knowing if the women actually had any of those hormonal peaks and valleys because all the research was done through an online survey. No one actually tracked the respondents' hormone levels.
The seven (seven!) women on hormonal birth control had those peaks of earnings as well, except at lower levels. They also had the low point during what the authors erroneously call the "menstrual period." Hormonal birth control works by flattening hormone peaks and preventing oocyte maturation and ovulation (cycling). If earnings were associated with hormonal fluctuations and their physiological or behavioral effects, then flattening these rhythms should yield no peaks and valleys in earnings.
None of it makes sense if you think only in terms of hormone cycling, even if this weren't a self-reported study with only eighteen respondents, seven of them on what was likely a mix of different hormonal birth control formulations.
The authors did not conclude, of course, that tip fluctuations had anything to do with the women's internal state affecting their work performance. Although the researchers cited two studies claiming that women don't change their dance performance based on the cycle stage they are in, they do not seem to have asked the women in their study this question. Instead, these scientists decided that the men doing the tipping were somehow detecting subtle signs of "estrus" or receptive condition, possibly in the softening of the women's contours (the researchers never saw the women themselves) or other putative signals of "I am able to conceive." Detecting those subtle signals motivated the men unconsciously to tip more.
The cognitive dissonance hurts. Somehow, those men had superpowers of detection despite likely being impaired by alcohol and in a darkened room full of cigarette smoke, the reek of booze, and the sights, sounds, and smells of a strip club. And despite the fact that women are allegedly so effective at keeping these cues hidden, the authors describe the women as "leaking" sexy-pants cues to the men, which is strange considering that women are also allegedly trying to hide their secret ovulatory doings.
Despite this leakage, it all comes down to women hiding things so that they can fuck around, the authors concluded: "Women's estrous signals may have evolved an extra degree of plausible deniability and tactical flexibility to maximize women's ability to attract high-quality extra-pair partners just before ovulation, while minimizing the primary partner's mate guarding and sexual jealousy." In less obfuscatory language, they are saying that women "leak" these cues subtly while their usual mate isn't looking to signal their availability to other men. But ladies are so coy about it that if their steady fellow busts them, they'll have plausible deniability. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to have my reproductive processes and gender talked about as though they were a crooked politician double-timing a Mafia boss.
The researchers' purported aim appears to have been to frame humans as having a form of estrus (which I have no issues with), but folks can't have it both ways: top secret concealed ovulation but an estrus so discernible that it could be detected in the sensory cacophony of a strip club, where not even a female chimpanzee's swollen genitals would be that easy to see.
That reference to "extra-pair partners" is a common refrain among researchers who want to argue that the human penis has unique traits to handle "extra-pair partners," including structures for plunging out a rival's semen. They argue that the human penis has a plunger shape for this purpose. With all the leaking and plunging happening, we're coming dangerously close to reducing women to toilets.
I am not alone in critique of studies like this one.
Alan Dixson, who is widely acknowledged for his deep and broad expertise in all things related to primate sex and reproduction, points out that our ancestors probably didn't have visible ovulation either, and the skin swellings that show up on bonobos and chimps may well have arisen after we and they split from Grandma Apelike Ancestor millions of years ago. So, like so many other animals that ovulate, we may well never have had the visual cues that our primate cousins use to tell potential partners that it is okay to approach. But again, we're not chimpanzees, either, and if we want to know if someone would like to have sex, we can just use our words, develop an appropriate social connection, and, if the moment seems right, ask.
Erect Men, Undulating Women
The heading of this section is taken from a book of the same title. The author, Melanie Wiber, has noted that in so many evolutionary images or images showing people living in "hunter-gatherer" societies, the men are always depicted as very erect and fearsome and usually bearing an erect weapon of some kind, whereas the woman are gathered around him, huddling nearer the ground, doing womanly things with plants or children. These images reflect many features of modern Western human perception and bias. Men hold the technology and the power, while women maintain things on the ground. That imagery isn't an accident. It derives straight from a frame of thought that men, with their weapons and hunting and "natural ingenuity," are responsible for all the advances humanity enjoys, while women are supporting players, maintaining home and hearth when they aren't busy undulating, leaking the occasional ovulatory cue, and maintaining plausible deniability.
It's only natural that the perspective of conventional men dominates the interpretation of evolution. History is told by the ones who hold power, and there's no questioning the greater average physical dominance of the stereotypically "masculine" human physique. Wiber wrote specifically about Sherwood Washburn, who thought that humans had incrementally come to dominate the natural world thanks to the specific (nonphysical) strengths of the human male. It's interesting that the conventional voices in the sciences have long positioned this dominance as progress-except when they appeal to nonhuman animals as evolutionary models to rationalize immoral behavior.
Washburn did both. He pointed to nonhuman primates as examples of the necessary power of males and the dependence of females in social and economic exchanges. Like so many of his kind, he used military language to characterize the males, even if they were baboons, and cast the females as passive. Like Peterson with his lobsters, Washburn argued that this (inaccurate) interpretation of baboon interpersonal and intersexual dynamics clearly indicated that among primates, the males drive progress and the females just drag along behind, periodically undulating in a prehistoric version of the lap dance. Humans must therefore have followed a similar pattern. It's the most insidious of Lobster Traps.
