Tag Archives: sex

Wickedly Wired

Posted on by annabones
7

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Modernista!’s ad campaing for Hearts on Fire jewlers

“In 1977, she was a translator at the US embassy in Bonn, West Germany. She met a man called Frank Dietzel, whom she described as looking like Robert Redford. She fell in love instantly. [...] She never suspected him; she said she loved him too much to think he would do anything bad.”

- Victim of an East Germany “Romeo” spy during the Cold War

On a rainy February day, following Peter Sozou’s lecture on ‘Courtship as a costly signaling‘ at UCL, a handful of us took Peter to the nearest bar on campus. A few bottles of wine were ordered, and with our minds still very much on the courtship issue, we turned to the next most obvious topic. Birds.

… Well, their brains anyway.

For gravity-defying organisms, birds sport bigger brains than would appear advisable. “It seems”, said a fellow bird-lover, after explaining in some detail the fine intricacies of birds’ courtship displays, “that brain size in birds correlates with the mating system; the more monogamous the species, the bigger the brain”.

In an instantaneous (and ephemeral) light-bulb moment, a stream of images of my boyfriend adjusting his red bike helmet around his bulbous head condensed into one immensely reassuring thought: with a head that size, I have nothing to worry about.

Or do I? *light-bulb out*.

Despite my high hopes for a blissful existence of monogamous fidelity, I quickly realized that there must be something wondrously more complex and Machiavellian lurking behind these bulges of ours than a world of exclusivity and devotion; and it doesn’t take looking much beyond my own nose to understand that these brains of ours are not made for lovin’.

It is almost heart-warming to think of our big brains as evolved for long-term matrimonial love, but it takes just one ejaculation to tip that idea off its knees. Men release 280 million sperm during each single ejaculation. Why, then, would they waste all that sperm on one single being? Why put all their metaphorical eggs in one literal basket when they could be spreading the wealth? Why be monogamous when you can pretend to be monogamous?

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Baboon sexual swelling during ovulation period

… But when it comes to brains, there is no room for sexism; it’s one size fits all.

In what seems to be the most exemplary case of bad PR, women put themselves through the physically (and emotionally) demanding task of ovulating every month without ever making the effort of marketing their fertility periods. This rather passive-aggressive “I’m not telling” strategy seems not so conducive to matrimonial trust either, and this withholding of information makes it impossible for males to assert their  paternity (at least before chastity belts and DNA testing) – in fact, degrees of non-paternity can range from 0.4% to over 50% in societies worldwide.

Whether we vow our bodies and souls, for better or worse, to our better halves, there is no escaping our neocortical baggage. We are inescapably involved in a pull-and-tug war between bonding and cheating. Our souls and hearts may be rooting for coupling, but our bodies and minds scream deception all over.

According to the Journal of Couple & Relationships Therapy, 20 to 50% of married men and women cheat. But given our built-in trumpery widget, the surprise is not that pair-bonded couples should choose to sexually deceive their partners, but that we expect that they should not and that we equate monogamy to normalcy. In light of our prolific baby-making power, “till death due us part” seems, on the contrary, like a most extravagant demand. After all, even the most seemingly monogamous of animal species shy away from such a life of eternal one-on-one love – black swans, wolves and elephants may keep house together for many years but are sexually promiscuous; even penguins only remain monogamous and faithful to one partner for one breeding season.

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Tree Swallow feeding its progeny

Birds have long been upheld as poster-children for monogamy and until recently it was believed that 93% of  avian species bred monogamously (Lack, 1986). Griffith et al (2002), however, burst that last bubble of hope when their results showed that 86% of the 130 so-called ‘monogamous’ species were in fact very much adulterous; over 2/3 of female Tree Swallows produce at least one extramarital offspring and baby Starlings from the same nest often come from different fathers.

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Female gorilla caught in the act by the silverback

Although more common in primates (15% of species) than in mammals (less that 5% of species), monogamy is a very rare behaviour, as our closest living cousins can attest. While chimpanzees have long been known for their promiscuity, female gorillas, who have an alpha of a reason not to cheat, also seem to find ways to benefit from illicit affairs on the silver-side of things by sneaking away into the jungle for random quick flings. They’ve even learned the finer subtleties of betrayal in order to avoid getting caught, and while they are vocally appreciative of the alpha-male’s love-making efforts, they keep the sound to a minimum with their young furry toy-boys.

Our Westernized views of how many people should be involved in one amorous union compel us to feel disappointment if not shock at such social laxities. But the fact is that a menage-a-deux is not the only way to go for humans either. 80-85% of societies allow polygamous marriages even if the majority of them involve one husband and one wife (most of the men in societies that allow polygamy do not obtain sufficient wealth or status to have multiple wives). And in the few societies that shun these types of arrangements, like the US, about 12-26% of married women and 15-43% of married men engage in extramarital sex.

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Bill and his three wives in HBO’s ‘Big Love’ TV series

But while a polygamous arrangement may seem lax, it is certainly not relaxed. Bill’s constant Viagra pill-popping, neighbour-dodging and money-pouring, clearly requires a high degree of social intuition and very refined manipulative and diplomatic abilities – the same abilities needed for successful extramarital hanky panky… And international espionage. Take “Romeo” Spy Frank Dietzel’s good looks, for example, which paired with an enhanced knack for deception, duped Gabriele Kliem into unsuspectingly betray her country of West Germany during six years.

Increased social complexity and the ability to manipulate others is a unique primate condition. Superbly mastered by sociopaths and politicians alike, in humans, this quasi pathological ability to manoeuvre in complex and dense social environments is the genius we’ve been increasingly amassing in our globular think tanks. This evolutionarily favoured “Machiavellian Intelligence“ neatly folded behind our faces – the neocortex – makes up to 76% of the human brain’s volume. To the detriment of our love-obsessed souls, encapsulated within these cranial vaults, rest 1,400 grams of jellied evil. Ganged up with an exuberantly lustful appetite, we seem unavoidably wired for inducing heartaches.

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Neocortex in blue

Eager to ignore my own 76% duplicitous nature, my suspicions turn to my long-distance big-headed partner: I knew it… lurking behind that red bike helmet lies a large mischievous fatty lump.

… Or does it? *light-bulb flickers*

While our self-imposed ‘for-all-eternity’ style monogamy may be borderline self-harming (from a genetic and reproductive point of view), the notion of pair-bondedness in nature takes a very different shape: it’s behavioural, not sexual – a necessary condition for spicing up the genetic pool. Behaviourally monogamous birds, for example, have been shown to seek males that are genetically more different than their better-halves, thereby (surreptitiously) increasing genetic diversity in the species.

Because survival is not just about production but also about reproduction (making sure the progeny procreates in turn), knowing how to juggle the quest for genetic flavour and successful rearing is why many behaviourally monogamous species pack more gray.

Lifelong monogamy is a risky commitment, but in species where substantial post-natal parental investment is needed, it may well be a necessity. It takes between 10 to 17 years for a human to be sexually mature (sometimes many more years to be emotionally or financially independent), and for over 1/3 of that period infants are physically dependant on their parents. Reproductively speaking, successful twosomes are those who will coordinate and synchronize their activities so that each half gets time for grubbing and napping. Perhaps as a precursor to this biological drive to procreate, successful human coupledom must also involve anticipation, harmonization and synchronization of behaviours and needs.

… And judging by the boy’s perfect Skype synchronicity, perhaps that fatty lump is also a good dose of sugar too.

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Eros and Psyche

What can be painful for the heart is essential for survival, and our thirst for clandestine caresses outside of the nest is what propels us to propagate and diversify. Sculpted over the course of our winding evolutionary road, our wrinkly bundles of gray matter have been shaped to a size fitted for our success.

While we cannot escape our wickedly wired brains, much room lies in its winding valleys and folds for the free human spirit to arise. A spirit as tortuous and shaded as our cortical matter betrays: one of good and evil particles indistinguishably blending together in a mesh of gray dough.

For better or for worse, our brains push us to move us forward all the while keeping us fickle. Like Eros to Psyche we constantly put our souls at Venus’ whim, despite clinging to the hopes of that intangible goal we’ve set for ourselves of exclusive and blissful duality. And in this permanent conflict between our vagabond bodies and brains, and our monogamous souls, we are able to find overwhelming pleasure in the form of great pain, and a way to forge true bonds in the midst of much deceit…

The Wandless Penis

Posted on by annabones
5

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British Museum, London

The floor where I now stood, puzzled, and waving about what seemed to me like a wand-like bone, had once been covered in milk. This was the site of an old dairy farm, now the home of UofT ‘s zooarchaeology collection.

I found myself shuffling through cardboard boxes marked Vulpes lagopus, Ovibos moschatus, and Erignathus barbatus, in a hopeless attempt to identify my bone. That’s when Prof Friesen pointed out to me (and to the class): “Anna, you are holding a baculum” – blank stare – “That’s a penis bone”.

By then I knew they came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes (across the animal kingdom I mean), but it had never occured to me that the penis could also come in the calcified version. And I thought, what a waste to have given it up to evolution…

While most other primate fellows are endowed with a baculum, it seems Adam may have lost it for humanity when he sacrificed his ‘rib’ for Eve; indeed, a few misunderstandings over the years may have made his os penis into a rib. While the baculum is a very simple and elegant way of solving the ‘boner’ issue, man has chosen a more boastful approach to the intercourse affair: hydraulics.

Sex is life, and while the female womb is its cradle, the penis is its vessel. As such, only a few elementary tasks are but asked of it: rigidity and deliverance… in a flash.

Humans seem to have made an absolutely complicated mess of the very basic business of ‘seed-planting’, but most mammals, being more pragmatical about these issues, keep sexual encounters at a bare minimum. They ‘get in’ and ‘get out’ as quickly as they can (the baculum-endowed Chimpanzee for instance, lasts on average a mere 6 seconds – an expedience which must lie in the other 2% of the genome we did not, thankfully, inherit), in which case assuring stiffness at the crucial moment is key. A bone, for instance, does the trick.

But behind every handicap, there is a blessings in disguise… and mammals without a baculum strut bigger erections and provide longer lasting carnal hook-ups. If the lion is able to provide 250, 30 second bouts of sexual ecstasy in 4 days, the human penis is able to bring multiple five-second bursts of joy (with a capital ‘G’) to its female counterpart in an average 7.3 minutes of union, due to its great size (the greatest of all primates in fact).

And while we don’t ride with the lions on their copulation marathon, (whose erection depends on a willingly moved muscle that pushes the baculum sitting inside his abdomen into his penis), the wandless human erection is nothing short of magic.

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Indeed, the gravity-defying performance the male penis must rise for, relies solely on the concentration of blood inside two tubular structures that cover its length – a mostly involuntary occurrence.

Not short of a physiological feat, females may have seen in these shaftless tumescences a sign of good health, and may have acquired, over the years, a preference for the soft version of the erection over the all too easy baculum-style one. Perhaps as a serendipitous outcome of this preference, these boneless erections were left free to grow long enough to reach the female G-spot. And according to studies, it may well turn out to be that ‘a happy female is a pregnant female’ – in which case females would tend to be drawn to the orgasm-inducing engorgements…

After much excavating through the cardboard boxes in the zooarchaeology collection at UofT, I finally found my glorious Eureka moment when I matched my baculum to that of a raccoon’s. Despite being sometimes worn as a luck or fertility charm, this raccoon baculum brought me neither the best mark in the class nor pregnancy (phew), but it gave me a new perspective on the human male genitalia.

… and although I am much the bone lover myself, those are several inches of flesh that seem to do just fine without one. Clearly, one can get all the magic needed without a ‘wand’.

Breaking Eve

Posted on by annabones
16

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January 21st 1982. My mother’s pelvic bones are too small for my head and she will need a cesarian. It’s 8:08pm, we’re in the middle of a snowstorm that almost prevents my father from making it on time. When I finally arrive, at almost 5kg, I’m declared the heaviest female baby the Montreal Royal Victoria Hospital has seen up to that date.

Human birthing is difficult and there is a reason for that. If there was ever an original sin, it wasn’t reaching for the apple; it was reaching for it on two feet.

Rightfully named so, the vertebra upon which the skull directly rests, is called the atlas, and below it, lies a whole frame designed to support this globe. Like Atlas, our whole bodies are burdened with the weight of the world – our brains – and the demands of leading a life on two feet whilst having to balance a head whose volume is three times greater than in our greatest furry counterpart – almost 10% of our total body mass - have forced our hominoid bodies to completely restructure themselves from a biomechanical standpoint.

… and these heads must come out of our ever-narrowing Homo female pelvises.

As a result of these architectural shuffles, ‘taking a bite of the forbidden fruit’ can have physically painful consequences, and assuring our species’ continuity while sporting big brains and standing tall must come at a price. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 529,000 maternal deaths per year worldwide – only 1% of these occuring in the developed world. Obstructed labour, which relates to disproportions in the head to pelvis ratio (thereby making it physically impossible for the baby to pass between the mother’s pelvis) accounts for 8% of deaths, or 42,000 women, worldwide (!).

It seems that our most powerful resource is the hardest one to deliver – so much so that our pelvises must unhinge themselves during this event. In order for the bony head and shoulders to pass through Eve’s Ivory Gates, our large heads and shoulders must perform a specific sequence of maneuvers, as does the female pelvis – while a gap between the pubic bones of 4-5 mm is normal, in pregnancy a total width of up to 9 mm can be seen between the two bones (that’s almost one entire centimeter!).

Occasionally, however, delivering a new life can involve more than a mere unbuttoning of the pelvis at its seam, but a more violent rupture of it. Indeed, in some extreme cases, the pelvis can actually separate entirely, a condition – “postpartum symphyseal diastasis” – that causes much pain, but that about 45% of all pregnant women and 25% of all women postpartum suffer from. Other times, however, it is the offspring who must pay the price for their ‘mega-encephalized’ heads, and archaeological evidence shows that fetuses have sometimes had their limbs severed in order to extract them from the womb for being too large for their mothers’ cradle…

Not so surprisingly perhaps, this epicentre of life is the one female body part that gets plundered the most – not only from the inside out but also from the outside in.

For numerous evolutionary and biological reasons, wombs are prized possessions which must be kept, protected, controlled, and forced into submission. In the most extreme of cases, or situations of war, where dominance is key, rape, mutilation, and torture of women often serves as a powerful weapon for terrorizing, shaming and demoralizing a people. In 2005, Doctors Without Borders admitted 1,292 women who were victims of sexual violence in the DRC and as many again in the first six months of 2006 ; more than 3,500 women and girls have been raped in the first six months of 2008, the most affected age group being between the ages of 19 and 45 (53.6 percent of the population).

Biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Craig Palmer, state that they “[...] fervently believe that, just as the leopard’s spots and the giraffe’s elongated neck are the results of aeons of past Darwinian selection, so is rape [...]. There is no doubt that rape has evolutionary — and hence genetic – origins”. In support of their arguments, and since procreation is the ultimate goal driving rape, is the fact that the majority of rape victims are young women at the peak of their fertility.

But really? Then what to make of systematic gang-rapes, mutilations, fistulas, forced incest, rape of pre-pubescent women, etc, which go against any evolutionary reasonings I can think of? – especially of the “procreation” reasoning…

Whatever this all means, it seems that 200,000 thousand years ago, our own bipedal Eve bred her own continuity along with her own demise, as she released 6 billion trojan horses into the world – genetically speaking – some even evolving to turn against her. It looks like our ‘gateways’ to earth, are also gateways to hell, as each one of us brings a new bundle of mutations into the world, and with it, a new possible evolutionary road. Each new life is a potential population founder, and each new woman a potential Eve.

As humanity’s genesis occurs between our legs, both good and bad sprout from between them in both equally as painful deliverances. But no matter how good we are, what sex we are, or if we are newborns or grown-ups, as a result of our blown-up, machiavellic brains balanced atop an erect frame, we are, in one way or another, forever breaking Eve…

 

Baby-faced for babies?

Posted on by annabones
5

Manga” She came hardly up to my chest hair and had the kind of dimpled round little face French girls so often have, and I liked her long lashes and tight-fitting tailored dress sheathing in pearl-gray her young body which still retained – and that was the nymphetic echo, the chill of delight, the leap in my loins – a childish something [...] “

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita


Above my desk in my hall of residence’s room, hung a picture of me taken by my father when I was a child. On one lazy Sunday morning, I woke up with my boyfriend telling me that, at that moment, incredibly, my face looked exactly like it did on that picture… which made me think about sex, porn and my genes.

Of course, this was all just a side-effect of the Sunday morning haziness, and of his blooming affections for me – I look nothing like I did when I was little, and thank goodness for that – but it had not been the first time I was told I had a baby-face (perhaps at certain angles, under a certain light?), and I wondered why this would be a compliment.

It’s common knowledge that men tend to ‘appreciate’ younger female specimens of our species. This is especially notable in today’s world, where tools like makeup, plastic surgery and photoshop feed into this youth culture – especially when it comes to female youth. But is there a genetic reason for all this? Or is this purely an irrational fad?

When it comes to faces, neoteny (or the retention of child-like features) can be quite pronounced in females, and contrary to all expectations, it has been shown to be more often utilized than the body in judging “attractiveness”. Biologically, testosterone stimulates the growth of the jaw, cheekbones, brow ridges, center of the face, and facial hair in males, whereas in females, growth of these traits is inhibited by estrogen. Therefore, human feminine features are often associated with a smaller chin and higher cheekbones, smaller lower face area, fuller lips, and larger eyes (picture a manga cartoon character). It seems that these features, combined with physical signs of sexual maturity, are found to be the most attractive by men… and there seems to be a reason for this: studies have shown that baby-faced women are perceived as having fewer health or fertility problems, and are more often selected for by males for self-sacrificial actions, sexual relations and child rearing (Furham and Reeves, 2006; Gyobe et al, 2004; Jones et al, 1995).

… Is my boyfriend attracted to me because my face betrays good baby-making qualities?  Are women really baby-faced for babies?

This obsession with youthfulness so prevalent in our society seems to be so exaggerated that you’d almost be skeptical if it didn’t serve some sort of purpose – evolutionary-wise. Studies show that indeed, it may. In a 1995 paper, Jones et al collected photos of 10 female models on covers of Cosmopolitan and Glamour, and took a series of facial measurements. The researchers found that models were exaggeratedly neotenous, having large relative eye width, small relative nose height, and large relative lip height. In fact, the predicted ages based on facial proportions were calculated to be between 6.8 – 7.4 years – ouch! The authors explain that this doesn’t mean that the facial proportions of models match those of real 7 year olds, but that the results strongly suggest that female model faces represent a “supernormal stimulus”.

However, in order for facial neoteny to actually enhance female fitness, it has to be an honest signal – i.e. it must advertise actual reproductive qualities, such as a good a immune system or healthy ovaries. Studies indicate this may be so. In order to have a baby-face, one needs a lot of estrogen; this hormone is essential in giving the female face its soft and feminine appearance, but high levels of it are implied in certain types of cancers and can be quite toxic for the organism. It appears, therefore, that a beautiful female face would imply an ability to deal with the devastating effects of the high estrogen required to make the estrogen-related beauty during development, as well as possessing adequate estrogen for ovulation and reproduction.

Because female’s fertility drops to nearly 0 as we get closer to 50 – although we live on average almost twice as long! – it’s no surprise that we would want to do everything possible to give out cues of youthfulness for as long as we can, as this maximizes our chances of finding a mate and making babies… And we can spend a lot of money doing so, even if vocally we express no desire of getting married or impregnated – I should know, I just (ir)rationally spent 12 pounds on lipgloss!

It seems that I am both unwillingly and purposefully advertising good ovaries. I’m not quite the Lolita but it looks like I may be baby-faced for a reason… so thank you for the compliment!