Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human

by Jesse Bering

  If we take Adams’s findings that homophobic men get erections from watching gay porn as reasonable evidence of their sexual arousal, then these findings are enormously important. For example, they may help us to understand some of the psychological causes of gay bashing. Some of the most startling data I’ve come across involve a 1998 survey of five hundred straight men in the San Francisco area. Half of these men said they had acted aggressive in some way against homosexuals (and these were just the ones who admitted to such acts). And a third of those who hadn’t struck out in this manner against gay people said that they would assault or harass a “homosexual who made a pass at them.” If you missed the irony, this was in San Francisco—presumably one of the most “gay-friendly” places in the world.

  In fact, a later study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology by Adams and his colleagues found that on a competitive task, homophobic men acted more aggressive toward gay male competitors than they did toward straight male competitors. In this study, fifty-two self-reported heterosexual men with a mean age of nineteen years were again classified as “homophobic” or “nonhomophobic” based on their responses to various items on a homophobia questionnaire. Participants were then told that they would be exposed to random types of erotic stimuli to determine pornography’s effect on response time. In reality, all participants were shown only gay male porn.

  Before and after watching this two-minute video of a male couple engaging in sexual foreplay, fellatio, and anal penetration, the participants completed several measures of their current emotional state (for example, whether they felt angry, anxious, sad, and so on). Then they proceeded to the competitive response-time task, where on twenty separate trials they were told to push a button as soon as a red “hit” light flashed on the console. Participants believed they were competing on this task against another player in an adjacent room. In fact, there was no other player, and the game was rigged so that on a randomly distributed half of the trials, the participant would lose. For every “winning” round, the participant was told he could deliver an electric shock varying in both degree and intensity to the other (nonexistent) player; alternatively, he had the option of administering no shock at all to this other person.

  All players “lost” the first round and experienced a mild electric shock themselves, presumably administered by the other player. The critical manipulation in this study was that half of the participants thought they were competing against a gay male, whereas the other half thought they were competing against a straight male. Prior to the task, and after watching the gay porn, participants had been shown a brief video introducing them to this other “player.” In one condition, this fictitious competitor was portrayed as a homosexual with stereotypical affectations who told the interviewer that he was in a “committed gay relationship with his partner, Steve, for two years.” In the other condition, this same actor played it straight and said he was “involved in a committed dating relationship with his girlfriend for two years.”

  Although there was no significant difference between the homophobic and the nonhomophobic groups in the intensity and duration of shock administered to the straight competitor on winning trials, the homophobic group delivered more intense shocks and for longer durations when they thought the person in the other room was gay. On the subjective ratings of mood, the major difference between the two groups was on the dimension of anger-hostility: nonhomophobics showed a small positive blip in the radar on this dimension, while the homophobics showed a dramatic increase in anger-hostility between the pre-video measure of mood and the post-video rating. These data suggest that homoerotic stimuli—such as seeing two men holding hands—could send an already angry homophobic man over the top.

  Although it is certainly true that the world today is more “approving” of homosexuality than it was just a decade ago—often begrudgingly so, in my opinion—there are still dangerous and malignant social elements beneath the surface preventing real acceptance. The day I can be in a public place in Anytown, U.S.A., and simply hold hands with the person I’m in love with (something most couples don’t give a second thought to) without placing my partner and me in physical danger is the day I’ll be convinced we’ve moved beyond rhetoric about “equal rights” and have actually changed hearts and minds.

  Meanwhile, the next time you come across someone being especially hostile or reproachful toward gay people, stare him in the eye, scratch your chin, and repeat after me: “Hmm … very interesting…”

  Baby-Mama Drama-less Sex: How Gay Heartbreak Rains on the Polyamory Parade

  There’s a strange whiff in the air, a sort of polyamory chic in which liberally minded journalists, an aggregate mass of antireligious pundits, and even scientists themselves have begun encouraging people to use evolutionary theory to revisit and revise their sexual attitudes and, more important, their behaviors in ways that fit their animal libidos more happily.

  These recent attempts, including many bestselling books, explore how our modern, God-ridden, puritanical society conflicts with our species’ evolutionary design, a tension making us pathologically ashamed of sex. There are of course many important caveats, but the basic logic is that because human beings are not naturally monogamous, but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out “extra-pair copulatory partners”—having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes—suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

  Intellectually, I can get on board with this. If you believe, as I do, that we live in a natural rather than a supernatural world, then there is no inherent, divinely inspired reason to be sexually exclusive to one’s partner. If you and your partner want to screw your neighbors on Wednesday nights after tacos, participate in beachside orgies lit by bonfires, or slip on your eyeless, kidskin discipline helmet and be led along by bridle and bit down the road to your local bondage society’s weekly sex fest, then by all means do so (and take pictures). But the amoral beauty of Darwinian thinking is that it does not—or at least should not and cannot—prescribe any social behavior, sexual or otherwise, as being the “right” thing to do. Right is irrelevant. There is only what works and what doesn’t work, within context, in biologically adaptive terms. And so even though any good and proper citizen is an evolutionarily informed sexual libertarian, Charles Darwin provides no more insight into a moral reality than, say, Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

  On a related note, it’s rather strange that we look for moral guidance about human sexuality from the rest of the animal kingdom, a logical fallacy in which what is “natural”—such as homosexual behavior in other species—is regarded as “acceptable.” It’s as if the fact that bonobos, desert toads, and emus have occasional same-sex liaisons has a moral bearing on gay rights in human beings. Even if we were the lone queer species in this godless galaxy, even if it were entirely a “choice” between two consenting adults, why would that make it more reasonable to discriminate against people in homosexual relationships?

  Beyond these philosophical problems with seeking out social prescriptions from a nature that is completely mute as to what we should do with our penises and vaginas, however, there’s an even bigger hurdle to taking polyamory chic beyond the tabloids, talk shows, and Internet forums and into standard bedroom practice. And that is simply the fact that we’ve evolved to empathize with other people’s suffering, including the suffering of the people we’d betray by putting our affable genitals to their evolved promiscuous use.

  Heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists’ otherwise practical polyamory. It’s indeed natural for people—especially men, given, unlike women, their essentially unlimited reproductive potential—to seek sexual variety. My partner once likened this to having the same old meal o
ver and over again, for years on end; eventually, you’re going to get some serious cravings for a different dish. But I reminded him that people aren’t the equivalent of a plate of spaghetti. Inconveniently enough, we have feelings.

  Unless you have the unfortunate luck of being coupled with a psychopath, or have the good fortune of being one yourself, broken hearts are not easily experienced at either end, nor are they easily mended by reason or waved away by all the evolutionary logic in the world. And because we’re designed by nature not only to be moderately promiscuous but also to become selfish when that natural promiscuity rears its head—again, naturally—in our partners, “reasonable people” are far from immune to getting hurt by their partner’s open and agreed-upon sex with other parties. Monogamy may not be natural, but neither is indifference to our partners’ sex lives or tolerance for polyamory. In fact, for many people, especially those naively taking guidance from scientists and pundits without thinking deeply enough about these issues, polyamory can lead to devastating effects.

  One of the better accounts of the human heartbreak experience is a summary by the anthropologist and author Helen Fisher. Drawing largely from work by psychiatrists, Fisher surmises that there are two main stages associated with a dead and dying romantic relationship, which is so often tied to one partner’s infidelities. During the “protest” stage that occurs in the immediate aftermath of rejection, “abandoned lovers are generally dedicated to winning their sweetheart back. They obsessively dissect the relationship, trying to establish what went wrong; and they doggedly strategize about how to rekindle the romance. Disappointed lovers often make dramatic, humiliating, or even dangerous entrances into a beloved’s home or place of work, then storm out, only to return and plead anew. They visit mutual haunts and shared friends. And they phone, e-mail, and write letters, pleading, accusing and/or trying to seduce their abandoner.”

  At the neurobiological level, the protest stage is characterized by unusually heightened, even frantic activity of dopamine and norepinephrine receptors in the brain, which has the effect of pronounced alertness similar to what is found in young animals abandoned by their mothers. This impassioned protest stage—if it proves unsuccessful in reestablishing the romantic relationship—slowly disintegrates into the second stage of heartbreak, what Fisher refers to as “resignation/despair,” in which the rejected party gives up all hope of ever getting back together. “Drugged by sorrow,” writes Fisher, “most cry, lie in bed, stare into space, drink too much, or hole up and watch TV.” At the level of the brain, overtaxed dopamine-making cells begin sputtering out, causing lethargy and depression. And in the saddest cases, this depression is linked to heart attacks or strokes, so people can, quite literally, die of a broken heart. So we may not be “naturally monogamous” as a species, but neither are we entirely naturally polygamous.

  It’s depressing to even read about, I realize, but for most people those all-important chemicals eventually begin pulsating again when a new love affair begins. Let me note, however, that one of the more fascinating things about the resignation/despair stage is the possibility that it actually serves an adaptive function that may help to salvage the doomed relationship, especially for an empathetic species such as our own. As I mentioned earlier, heartbreak is not easily experienced at either end, and when your actions have produced such a sad and lamentable reaction in another person, when you watch someone you care about (but no longer feel any real long-term or sexual desire to be with) suffer in such ways, it can be difficult to fully extricate yourself from a withered romance. If I had to guess—in the absence of any studies that I’m aware of to support this claim—I’d say that a considerable amount of genes have replicated in our species solely because, with our damnable social cognitive abilities, we just don’t have the heart to break other people’s hearts.

  Again, we may not be a sexually exclusive species, but we do form deep romantic attachments, and the emotional scaffolding on which these attachments are built is extraordinarily sensitive to our partners’ sexual indiscretions. I also say this as a gay man who, according to mainstream evolutionary thinking, shouldn’t be terribly concerned about his partner having sex with strangers. After all, it isn’t as though he’s going to get pregnant and cuckold me into raising another man’s offspring. But if you’d explained that to me as I was screaming invectives at one of my partners following my discovery that he was cheating on me, curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my kitchen and rocking myself into self-pitying oblivion, or as I was vomiting my guts out over the toilet for much of the next two weeks, I would have nodded in rational Darwinian assent while still trembling like a wounded animal.

  In fact, sexual jealousy in homosexual relationships, especially gay male relationships, is a place where polyamory chic meets with some significant theoretical problems. One of the most frequently cited findings in evolutionary psychology is the fact that men tend to become most jealous when their female partners have sex with other men, whereas women tend to get most jealous when their male partners show signs of “emotional infidelity” (behaviors that indicate that the man may be interested in “more than sex” with another woman and has developed meaningful feelings for her, possibly signaling long-term plans). These aren’t mutually exclusive types of jealousy, mind you, but instead they represent points along a continuum or spectrum of jealousy—emotional jealousy at one end and sexual jealousy at the other. Males and females simply tend to fall, on average, at different places along the way in terms of what triggers their highest levels of jealousy. This general sex difference makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Prior to the era of DNA testing, which is of course when human brains evolved, men were extremely vulnerable to investing, unwittingly, in some other guy’s genes (conveniently packaged in the form of children). By contrast, women, encumbered by the many physical demands of bearing and tending to young children, would have evolved to rely primarily on their male long-term partner to help them raise their offspring to reproductive age. Therefore, they’d have been at risk of having his attention and resources diverted to another woman and her offspring.

  So when it comes to homosexual affairs, writes the psychologist Brad Sagarin and his colleagues in Evolution and Human Behavior, “a same-sex infidelity does not entail the asymmetrical threats of mistaken paternity and of resources being diverted to another woman’s children, suggesting both that the sexes may be similar in their jealous responses and that such responses may be less intense than in the case of opposite-sex infidelities.” In fact, in studies designed to test this basic hypothesis, the researchers indeed found that jealousy was less intense when straight participants were asked how they would feel, hypothetically, if their partners had a homosexual fling than if they were to become involved with someone from the opposite sex. Personally, I think the participants would have other things to worry about besides jealousy if their partners were on the down low, but these data clearly show that reproduction-related concerns indeed moderate feelings of jealousy in human romantic relationships.

  But the foregoing study actually highlights bisexual affairs, since the hypothetical cheating spouse is in a primary sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex. By contrast, from the perspective of a same-sex partner in a long-term relationship, homosexual infidelity may elicit a different pattern of jealousy altogether. After all, as any gay person with a past knows, homosexual relationships certainly aren’t without their fair share of this type of drama. Gay men may, in fact, be less distressed by sexual infidelity than are straight men. But there are meaningful individual differences in this regard. Still, I’m willing to speculate and say this: most of us certainly aren’t completely okay with the idea of our partners having sex with whomever they please. Nor, I’d imagine, are most lesbians comfortable with their partners seeing other lesbians and developing close relationships with them (that is, emotional infidelity). Now, perhaps I’m in a minority in caring so much about my partner’s same-sex behaviors—at least
the ones not including me. When asked in a 2010 interview by a reporter for New York magazine how he’d feel if his husband, Terry, cheated on him, the well-known sex columnist Dan Savage, for example, said that he “[wouldn’t] give a shit” and that gay men are “not psycho like straight people are” about sexual infidelity in their partners. I’m not so sure about that. Often we’re just as psycho. In my case, I informed the sexual interloper that I would gladly emasculate him with a crisp pair of scissors if ever he made contact again with my partner. This was classically aggressive “mate-guarding” behavior as seen in straight men threatening their sexual rivals. Scaring off other men like this, most evolutionary theorists believe, is a preemptive tactic designed to thwart cuckoldry.

  Gay men, of course, are unusually vulnerable to HIV, and that’s reason enough to become absolutely furious about a partner’s cheating behind one’s back. Yet although they’re often commingled, jealousy is distinct from anger. Also, the deadly scourge that is AIDS wasn’t present in the ancestral past, so the threat of this disease could not have produced any special adaptive psychological defenses in gay men’s brains. So how else could one explain sexual jealousy among gay men? It may actually be understood by some sort of pseudo-heterosexuality mind-set, in which gay men’s brains are just the same as straight men’s brains in this regard—hypervigilant against being deceived into raising some other man’s child. All this is to say that I reacted the way I did at my partner’s cheating on me because, at an unconscious level, I didn’t want my testiculared honey getting impregnated by another man. I didn’t consciously think of him as a woman, mind you; in fact, if I had, I assure you I wouldn’t have been with him. But tell that to my gonads and my amygdala. I do wonder, also, whether these differences may be related to whether one is more a “top” or a “bottom,” a subject we’ll examine in the next essay.