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

by Jesse Bering

  It is fashionable these days, particularly in the West, to say that one is “born gay.” I appreciate the antidiscriminatory motives and believe strongly that this attitude reflects an increasingly humanitarian ethos toward sexual minorities. But if we think about it more critically, it’s exceedingly odd, and nonsensical, to refer to a newborn infant still dripping with amniotic fluid as being a member of the LGBT community. Yes, it requires a prodigious degree of stupidity to talk about what makes one’s genitalia become tumescent as being a conscious choice, but it’s far from obvious that every person shoots equally out of their mother’s birth canal with an already discriminating taste for penises over vaginas, or vice versa.

  Then we arrive at the most important question of all. Why do parents worry so much about whether their child may or may not be gay? You might not be one of these fretful parents; in fact, you might like to see yourself as being indifferent to your child’s sexuality as long as he or she is happy. Then again, all else being equal, I suspect we’d be hard-pressed to find parents who would actually prefer their offspring to be homosexual rather than heterosexual. Evolutionarily, needless to say, parental homophobia is a no-brainer: gay sons and lesbian daughters aren’t likely to reproduce (unless they get creative). And I would imagine, on a viable hunch, that even in today’s most liberally minded communities, coming out of the closet to parents is a much easier thing to do for gay individuals who have the luxury of demonstrably straight siblings who can carry their own reproductive weight. As for me, with a breeding older brother and sister—not with each other, mind you—and their little respective litters of my fantastic nieces and nephews, my father at least doesn’t have to worry about his genes going extinct. In any event, I think it’s far better for parents to recognize the source of their concerns about having a gay child as being motivated by unconscious genetic interests than it is to have them fibbing to themselves about being entirely indifferent to their son or daughter “turning out” gay.

  And, bear this in mind, parents, it’s also important to stress that since genetic success is weighed in evolutionary biological terms as the relative percentage of one’s genes that carry over into subsequent generations—rather than simply number of offspring per se—there are other, though typically less profitable, ways for your child to contribute to your overall genetic success than humdrum sexual reproduction. For example, I don’t know how much money or residual fame is trickling down to, say, k. d. lang, Elton John, and Rachel Maddow’s close relatives, but I can only imagine that these straight kin are far better off in terms of their own reproductive opportunities than they would be without a homosexual dangling so magnificently on their family trees. The very thought of making love to a blood relative of Michelangelo or Hart Crane, irrespective of anything else about that person save his heritage, makes me strangely and instantly aroused, and I’d imagine such a person would be eminently desirable to heterosexually fecund women as well. So here’s my message: cultivate your little pre-homosexual’s native talents, and your ultimate genetic payoff could, strangely enough, be even larger with one very special gay child than it would be if ten mediocre straight offspring leaped from your loins.

  There’s one final thing to note, and that’s in reference to the future of this research and its real-world applications. If researchers eventually perfect the forecasting of adult sexual orientation in children, what are the implications? Should broad-minded mothers be insouciantly describing their OshKosh B’Gosh–wearing toddlers as “bi” or fathers relaying how their “straight” daughters started eating solid food or took their first steps at the grocery store today? Would parents want to know? Parents often say to their gay children, in retrospect, “I knew it all along.” But hindsight is twenty-twenty, and here we’re talking about the possibility of really, definitively, no-doubt-about-it, knowing your child is going to be gay from a very, very early age.

  I can say as a once-pre-homosexual pip-squeak that some preparation on the part of others would have made it easier on me, rather than my constantly fearing rejection or worrying about some careless slipup leading to my “exposure.” It would have at least avoided all of those awkward, incessant questions during my teenage years about why I wasn’t dating a nice pretty girl (or questions from the nice pretty girl about why I was dating her and rejecting her advances).

  And another thing: it must be pretty hard to look into your pre-homosexual toddler’s limpid eyes, brush away the cookie crumbs from her cheek, and toss her out on the streets for being gay.

  PART VII

  For the Bible Tells Me So

  Good Christians (but Only on Sundays)

  This is a difficult confession to make, because, on the surface, I’m sure it sounds wildly hypocritical. Still, here goes: I trust religious people more than I trust atheists. The hypocritical part is that I happen to be an atheist with unshakably strong godless convictions. In my book The Belief Instinct, I’ve tried to explain at considerable length, in fact, why I feel this particular way. But for our purposes here the only important thing to know is that I’ve not a sliver of agnostic hesitation in my belief that there is no intentional God—at least not a very intelligent one. I also suffer some trepidation before religious people in general whenever discussing anything of moral substance, since it’s long been my opinion that God is the Great Obfuscator, unnecessarily complicating many otherwise straightforward humanistic matters.

  So now that I’ve come out of the atheistic closet, entirely undressed, how can I possibly say that I trust those who believe in God more than those whom I’d otherwise consider to be sympathetic and like-minded thinkers? Well, trustworthiness is a different thing altogether from intellect, and I suppose I’m ever the social pragmatist in my dealings with other people.

  Take, for example, a situation I found myself in outside a rail station in an Irish seaside town years ago. My luggage in hand, the cold gray sky windy and threatening to rain, I was confronted with two taxis at the curb waiting for passengers. One of the cars had a crucifix dangling from the rearview mirror and a dog-eared copy of the Bible on prominent display on the console. The other taxi showed no trace of any religious icons. Now, all else being equal, which of these two taxis would you choose, considering also that you’re trying to avoid being overcharged, a practice for which this part of the country is notorious—and that being an American during the “W.” administration, I might add, elevates you one step above our forty-third president in respectability? Both drivers are in all probability devout Catholics—this is Ireland, after all. Still, there’s no way to know for certain.

  Unless you’re trying to make a point about how “atheists are good people too,” or you happen to despise the Catholic Church, it’s really a no-brainer: go with God. Why is this so obvious? As the political scientist Dominic Johnson has argued, “If supernatural punishment is held as a belief, then this threat becomes a deterrent in reality, so the mechanism can work regardless of whether the threat is genuine or not.” In other words, from a psychological perspective, the ontological question of God’s actual existence is completely irrelevant; all that really matters in the above case is that the taxi driver is fully convinced that God doesn’t like it when he cheats his passengers.

  This theoretical supposition that believers behave better because they feel that God is watching them, and presumably communicates His displeasure about their sinful deeds in the shape of various misfortunes, is one of the most compelling scientific arguments for the sheer stickiness of religion in society today. God just won’t go away, and much of the reason He won’t, goes this purely mechanistic evolutionary logic, is that the cognitive illusion of a punitive God functions to stem the selfish behaviors of individuals and helps to sustain social harmony.

  A number of studies have offered empirical support for this supernatural monitoring hypothesis. This is a term coined by Ara Norenzayan, who in multiple studies has found that when participants are implicitly primed with God-related words (“spirit,” “
divine,” “sacred,” and so on), they become both more “prosocial” and less antisocial. By contrast with nonreligious or neutral words, people who see such religious words, for example, donate more money to a charity after completing a word-scramble task in which they cobble the words together into some coherent sentence. Although he and his collaborator Azim Shariff favored the interpretation that participants behaved more altruistically in the religious condition because the religious words reminded them that God was watching and therefore judging them, Norenzayan had always been cautious not to conclude prematurely that this was caused simply by concerns about heavenly spying. It’s also possible, of course, that these religious words simply activated related social concepts such as “benevolence” and “good deeds,” priming altruistic decision making independent of worrying about God’s fretful glares.

  More recent work, however, has allowed Norenzayan to put those concerns to rest. Getting people to think about God—even unconsciously and even, interestingly enough, among nonbelievers—indeed triggers very specific reasoning about their being the targets of someone’s visual attention. Norenzayan and Will Gervais found that this basic effect of religious words making people feel visually exposed panned out across a variety of experimental conditions. In one study, for instance, the investigators used the same implicit God-priming method as before, assigning either a religious or a nonreligious word-scrambling task to believers and atheists. The participants then completed something called the Situational Self-Awareness Scale, and, remarkably, regardless of their explicit belief or disbelief in God, all those who’d been exposed unconsciously to the religious words—but not to the neutral words—showed a spike in their public self-awareness. That is to say, they became significantly more cognizant and concerned about the transparency of their social behaviors from an audience’s point of view.

  Furthermore, “when people feel that their behavior is being monitored,” reason Norenzayan and Gervais in a follow-up experiment, “they tend to cast themselves in a positive light.” This led them to hypothesize that reminders about God would not simply increase self-awareness but also encourage socially desirable responses. Participants’ responses to statements such as “I am sometimes irritated by people who ask favors of me” and “No matter who I’m talking to, I’m always a good listener” should reflect their beliefs about what God wants to hear, not the truth about these unrealistically positive social attributes. In this study, however, the only people who produced socially desirable responses to the implicit God primes were those who actually believed in God. This means that while nonbelievers might feel “exposed” in the wake of receiving implicit God primes, just like believers, this feeling doesn’t influence how atheists attempt to portray themselves socially.

  For believers, in fact, additional evidence shows that God-related cues not only influence their desire to have others see them in a positive way but actually motivate them to do good deeds. Some of the best support for this is the so-called Sunday Effect, first identified by Deepak Malhotra of the Harvard Business School. Malhotra’s research has also revealed how it’s the context of the situation—particularly the presence or absence of ostensibly holy cues—that flushes out any actual differences in altruism between believers and nonbelievers. “This approach helps to shift away from seeking a simple answer to the question of whether religious people are nicer,” reasons Malhotra in Judgment and Decision Making, “and towards assessing when, if ever, religious people may be nicer.” Malhotra hypothesized that religious individuals would be more responsive to appeals from charities than would nonreligious people, but only on days when they had earlier attended church.

  To test this prediction, the author collaborated with an online auction house that agreed to systematically alternate its scripted language for encouraging continued bidding. For online participants who’d been randomly assigned to the “charity-focused” message, the prompt read as follows:

  We hope that you will continue to support this charity by keeping the bidding alive. Every extra dollar you bid in the auction helps us to accomplish our very important mission.

  By contrast, people who’d been picked to receive the “competitive” message saw this:

  The competition is heating up! If you hope to win, you will have to bid again.

  Are you up for the challenge?

  Importantly, Malhotra also had an independent measure of the bidders’ religiosity, including their church attendance habits, which he obtained six weeks after they’d made their bidding decisions in response to one of these two primes. “The effect size is compelling,” he explained. “On Sundays, appeals to charity were 300% more effective on religious individuals compared to non-religious individuals.” By contrast, there was absolutely no difference between the religious and the nonreligious bidders in the effectiveness of the charity appeals on any other day of the week. There’s another interesting Sunday Effect finding too, this one uncovered by chance by the economist Benjamin Edelman, also of the Harvard Business School. In crunching the salacious online numbers, Edelman discovered that the U.S. population is significantly less likely to purchase online subscriptions to pornographic websites on Sundays than they are on any other day of the week.

  Although much of this may make for common sense, the fact that salient religious cues prompt neighborly decisions and curb social transgressions because they focus the believers’ attention on God’s hawkeyed view of their behaviors is tremendously important for understanding the adaptive function of religion. And such effects play out all around us. In many courtrooms across the Western world, for instance, defendants and witnesses must place their hand on the Bible and volunteer to respond to the religious oath “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” And in the ancient Hebrew world, there was the similar “oath by the thigh”—where “thigh” was the polite term for one’s dangling bits—since touching the sex organs before giving testimony was said to invoke one’s family spirits (who had a vested interest in the seeds sprung from these particular loins) and ensured that the witness wouldn’t perjure himself. I rather like this older ritual, in fact, as it’s more in keeping with evolutionary biology. But in general, swearing to God, in whatever way it’s done, is usually effective in persuading others that you’re telling the truth. We know from controlled studies with mock juries that if a person swears on—or, better yet, kisses—the Bible before testifying, the jury’s perception of that person’s believability is significantly enhanced.

  After all, who in their right mind would lie before God? Well, as these findings suggest, atheists are more likely to do so. And that’s the reason—the only reason—that I’d choose a Catholic taxi driver in Ireland over one who, like me, thinks that little book on the other driver’s console is filled with nonsense of papal proportions.

  God’s Little Rabbits: Believers Outreproduce Nonbelievers by a Landslide

  What’s that famous quotation by Edna St. Vincent Millay? Oh, yes. I remember now: “I love Humanity; but I hate people.” It’s a sentiment that captures my normal misanthropically tinged type of humanitarianism well, but it becomes roaringly apropos on some particular occasions. For example, while I was making conversation at the pizza shop in a small village in Northern Ireland, the topic turned to what I did for a living. Now, this simple query was usually a hard question for me to answer; when I said I’m a professor, inevitably I was asked what I taught. When I said psychology, people giggled uncomfortably about their problems or replied—as if it were the most original line—that I’m in the right town for that. When I corrected them and said I’m not a clinical psychologist but a researcher, I had to explain what exactly I research.

  “Evolutionary psychology” tended to conjure up some bizarre ideas in many people’s minds. And so it did on this occasion, as I struggled to articulate the nature of my profession in a cramped pizza parlor with about half a dozen locals eavesdropping as I did so. Somehow or another, as conversatio
ns with me so often do, homosexuality came up as an example of a complex human behavior that evolutionary psychologists are still trying to understand.

  I wish I’d had a notebook in hand to scribble down the young employee’s comments word for word, so as to provide you with a proper ethnographic account. But here, in a nutshell, is what he very confidently said to me, flavored with the peculiar vernacular flourish found in this part of the world: “Aye. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothin’ against gay people. But what I don’t get is why they’d choose to be selfish and not ’ave a family and kids—like which is what we’re here for, how’s you’s go against evolution by not continuin’ the line ’cause you’s can’t help the species without having kids. Just seems selfish-like to me.” I replied that as a gay man myself, it’s not quite as simple as “choosing” not to reproduce; since women are about as arousing to me as that half-eaten pepperoni pizza sitting on that table over there, I said, I couldn’t get an erection to inseminate a woman for the life of me. I do, however, I continued, get a mighty erection by seeing other men’s erections, so therein—I pointed my finger to the heavens for emphasis—lies the true Darwinian mystery! I then took my pizza and left. In haste. And now I’m writing this from Ohio.