by Sara Pascoe
So apparently lower-status human males might have an inbuilt, easily triggered system to get this vulnerable sex time over quickly. A speedy ejaculation can still impregnate someone, but there’s less chance of a high-status male interrupting and fighting for the female. While a prehistoric male would have to be alert to predators and other dangers, a stronger man would’ve been the scariest threat. We mustn’t assume that all sperm competition evolved via female-initiated consensual sex. Even though it’s grim to contemplate, male competition would often have taken place in the bodies of raped women. Men get aroused by seeing sex, which we will be analysing shortly. The reason we evolved to hide our sex was to avoid the provocation of other males and their unwanted interference.
Interference is a polite way of putting it.
Regarding intercourse duration, I’ve been wondering if status ramifications are why there’s kudos for men who can last ages. Maybe it subconsciously signals ‘I’m alpha,’ ‘I’m not scared of big animals or other tribesmen,’ ‘I can go as long as the Bayeux Tapestry.’ Maybe that’s why fast ejaculation is embarrassing, feels diminishing … a reflection of masculinity? And that’s what seems odd about this machismo: all this thrusting for hours and lakes of semen – where is the female pleasure? Is this the Conundrum of Heterosexuality™? The reason there’s so often a disconnect between sex that would be enjoyable for the female (clitoral stimulation) versus what is enjoyed by the male (mindless thrusting)? The men of our species have been in competition for millions of years and the battlefields were often women’s bodies. Does this mean male sexuality will always have an awareness of other men inextricably within it? Are males jostling for social position even in the privacy of the bedroom, and is that why porn looks the way it does? When I ask lots of questions do you hear them in Carrie from Sex and the City’s voiceover?
We’re shortly going to be investigating pornography and its relation to sperm competition. But in order to comprehend why porn has such a powerful effect on our arousal system there are some other aspects of the human body that need your attention first.
Constant Sexual Signalling
I briefly mentioned concealed ovulation a few pages ago, but now I want to delve into the reasons we may have evolved to be so secretive about our fertile period, and the consequences for human sexuality.
Some primates, such as baboons and bonobos, have visual signals of fertility; their bottoms swell up and become infused with colour, yelling to local males, ‘Woohoo, over here, ripe ova.’ Other animals are less attention-seeking, relying on pheromones emitted from their skin or in urine. In addition to this, the majority of female animals are ONLY receptive to mating when in their fertile period, or oestrus. Any non-fertile sex is a waste of their time and any male trying his luck during this period will be refused. Sometimes politely, sometimes with a kick or headbutt.
How intriguing then that human beings have evolved to do the opposite. Technically, human females can be receptive to sex twenty-four hours a day, 365 days of the year. It doesn’t always work like that, we get in bad moods and need to sleep sometimes, but technically we are constantly sexually available, regardless of what our ovaries are up to. Now I’d initially believed that our concealed ovulation meant that we didn’t exhibit any fertility signals, closed and dormant like old volcanoes. ‘How clever, human females,’ I thought, ‘keeping all our insides secret so that we can choose our partners and express our personal sexuality,’ and I WAS WRONG.
Yes, there is no physical indication that a human is in oestrus. That is because, from adolescence onwards, the female body maintains a CONSTANT STATE of fertility signalling. Our breasts and bums don’t swell up to say ‘Hey, I’m fertile, come on over’ on a cyclical basis. Instead they stay swollen up, saying that All. The. Time.
See, the great thing about signalling ovulation like a female baboon is that when she isn’t fertile, the male baboons leave her alone. Sure, they’ll hang out as friends, but she is not going to get continually pestered. The human female is not so lucky. Walking down a path, sitting in a Costa, waiting for the bus – a woman’s life can be an assault course of avoiding male attention.
I’ve encountered this as much as any city-dwelling woman, but as for the reason it happens – I’d never really got past ‘men are pigs’.
NOT ALL MEN.
Sure, but it only takes a very small fraction of you to do all the work for the rest. I know there are gradients, some men think they are being friendly or ‘complimentary’. Not all the approaches are predatory, some are a mere nuisance. But I’ve never taken the time to wonder what causes the men to do it.
Here is my ground-breaking, personal-first attempt to see it from their point of view. If you’re a straight man and the shape of women’s bodies makes you feel stuff – you didn’t choose that either. It happens automatically, instinctively. I’m not excusing any of the creepy stalkers, bus rubbers or unsolicited dick pic-ers; that is a choice, I still blame them. But I used to resent men for their thoughts. I wanted to exist in the world as a person, sexless in both meanings of the word. I wanted sex to be something I could switch on, like a light, for a few relevant people, something that only I was in control of. When some man online or in real life attempts to flirt, I feel enraged. HOW ARE YOU SEEING SEX WHEN I AM HIDING IT? It feels important to acknowledge that we cannot control what people see.
We have another Conundrum of Heterosexuality™: ‘can’t say anything these days’, ‘#MeToo has gone too far’, ‘can’t even have a cuddle at work’. Many old men people are worried about the growing respect for bodily autonomy. ‘How will anyone get together if you’re not allowed to go up to someone and pinch their arse?’ It’s the vital question of our age. All of our grandparents met when Grandad shouted ‘nice tits’ out of a passing vehicle. What will we do now? How will any of us find love without the groping hands of a stranger letting us know it’s real?
My initial reaction to the people who say this stuff is hard to navigate is to roll my eyes, it’s too easy. But that isn’t fair of me. It isn’t easy if you don’t understand the basis of what you’re doing wrong, and it’s exacerbated by the media, who are very good at picking up on stories which suggest #MeToo is out of control and oversensitive. Much attention is given to hysterical, OTT situations undermining the rest. Here’s an example from a couple of years ago. A lawyer got upset with a man over a message on LinkedIn. The man posted under her photo ‘stunning picture!!!’ which is too many exclamation marks, but has he committed any other crime?
The man prefaced his comment by saying he knew it was probably un-PC, and he followed it by saying it would win a ‘best photo on LinkedIn’ competition and that he was always interested in connecting with people in his field of work. It wasn’t predatory, or at least I am not reading it that way. It wasn’t particularly flirty even. It was a compliment. The woman, Charlotte Proudman, replied saying his message was misogynistic and offensive.
Does that perplex you? It seems like an overreaction, eh? Misogyny is HATRED of women. This dude doesn’t hate them, he thinks there should be a LinkedIn photo competition, like Miss World with headhunting and fax numbers.
I sympathised a little bit. There is no invisibility for women. Proudman wanted her photo to say ‘lawyer’ and resented the response ‘attractive woman’. Our species does not have a set of triggered physical signals to create sexual interest, and that has resulted in constant sexual interest. Or at least awareness. And this means there is no downtime – no time off for us to just exist.
Until menopause.
*throws self off cliff*
Considering this from a straight male perspective I realise that it’s true for men too. We live in massive societies, not small tribes, and even without the internet and billboards, even just with the human beings surrounding your average man there is a deluge of sexiness. It might be mainly or entirely inadvertent, but nature has sculpted men to be attracted by it like moths to light—
#METOO WANTS TO BURN OUR
WINGS OFF
If you say so. The most important lesson of adulthood might be that just because you feel something, that doesn’t mean someone intended you to feel it. That applies to both the women in LinkedIn photos and the men making comments.
We know that other female primates indicate fertility with tumescence, swellings and pinkness around their rump, but did you know that humans might once have had red bums too? We evolved out of it. The anthropologist Bogusław Pawłowski suggested that bipedalism may have extinguished our fiery loins because significant areas would have been hidden from sight unless we bent over. It’s a curious theory and I like the guy’s name, he sounds like an evil dog. I’d also like to reverse the theory and argue that women learned to walk upright cos they were fed up of guys looking at their fanny.
And men stood up to chase them?
Science is so easy. An interesting aside from this: studies have found men judge women as more attractive when they’re dressed in red or against a red background. Is this an archaic response hardwired by our ancestors’ blood-suffused labia?
I think you just ruined a Chris de Burgh song.
Thank you. Scientists then reverse-tested this idea: if heterosexual men find red sexy, then women would be more likely to wear that colour when they are fertile.
WOMEN DON’T KNOW WHEN THEY’RE FERTILE.
Stop shouting, subconsciously. Scientists theorise that women, while not consciously being aware of their oestrus, demonstrate behaviours signifying that their body is going through it.
Andrew Elliot and Daniela Niesta at the University of Rochester, New York, surveyed a hundred American women in 2008. They asked participants what colour top they had on and when their last period was, and then got slapped for asking personal questions calculated how likely participants were to be ovulating. They found 40 per cent of the ‘likely fertile’ group were wearing red or pink versus only 7 per cent of the rest, which is CRAZY but needs to be replicated with more people before I’ll be completely convinced.
It isn’t just visible changes that are absent in human sexuality. We don’t release pheromones either. Or rather, we might, but our noses and brains aren’t very good at noticing and responding to them any more. Pheromones are airborne hormones that allow animals to convey physiological information to each other: ‘I’m scared,’ ‘I’m ovulating,’ ‘I’m your brother.’
Worst Christmas card ever.
Humans may have some faint pheromonal stuff going on. Scientists are still attempting to confirm this. There’s a famous study that found strippers made more in tips during their oestrus phase. It’s the kind of thing we want to be true: an echo of something ancient, useful to our prehistoric ancestors, now earning a woman in perspex heels more coin. The experiment had the dancers register how much money they made each day as well as tracking their cycle. Some of the participants were on hormonal contraception and did not see a rise in tips, while the women ovulating saw their cash increase on fertile days. There were only eighteen women in the study, so it’s far too small to extrapolate anything meaningful from it. Reading it, I also questioned if the increase in tips was proof that male customers could subconsciously smell pheromones, or if the women behaved in different ways, were flirtier or friendlier when ovulating? Or wearing red?!
I’m absolutely better at my job during the middle of my cycle, which has nothing to do with feeling or looking sexy and everything to do with not being angrily depressed. If you’d like to find out more about my horrible personality and menstrual cycle, read my first book, Animal!
Although women can’t pinpoint when they’re ovulating without technical aids, scientists have found behavioural differences that might increase a female’s chance of reproductive success during that time. Studies have found that ovulating women pay more attention to grooming and dressing, are more likely to have a one-night stand, more likely to have sex without using a condom, and if married are more likely to ‘cheat’. There was also the astonishing discovery that heterosexual women are attracted to more masculine men while ovulating.
What does ‘more masculine’ mean?
The scientists defined ‘more masculine’ characteristics as ‘strong chin, brow and jaw’, which are facial indicators of higher testosterone, and ‘broad shoulders, muscly’, which indicate higher testosterone in the body. In one study fertile women chose the ‘masculine type’ 15 per cent more often than those in the unfertile group.
Hmm.
Don’t sulk.
You’d be sulking if I said men preferred big bouncy boobs.
It is for that exact reason I’ve sulked my entire life.
Experiments involving sweaty T-shirts are popular with scientists seeking to discover the invisible processes that attract us to certain partners. It’s been found that people are drawn to those whose immunological profile (the major histocompatibility complex or MHC) is genetically different from their own, which is incredibly sensible, because offspring born of parents with differing MHC will be equipped with a more varied and thus more effective immune system.
Relevant to what we’re considering, several sweaty T-shirt studies have found that men prefer the smell of ovulating women – their odours were rated more pleasant – and, even more astonishingly, that men’s testosterone levels were raised by sniffing the sweat of women mid-cycle, but not at other times. It’s an exciting area of science that needs more study to illuminate what hints the female body might be giving out, and what the possible effects might be on the male body, all happening beneath our notice.
A few other species have concealed ovulation – dolphins, grey langurs and vervet monkeys – but the difference is that they’re all promiscuous. They don’t form pair bonds to raise their young. The females have multiple partners, and no one knows or cares who’s the daddy. It is theorised that concealed ovulation reduces aggression in these species; the males don’t fight and kill each other over access to fertile females, because they don’t know that they are. This is almost certainly a factor in human evolution too. Constant sexual signalling is the price we pay for increased male survival. Another advantage is reduced infanticide because paternity is in doubt. A male animal is less predisposed to kill young that could share his genes. How lovely of him.
Homo sapiens lost the explicit signalling of our fecund period either because it wasn’t reproductively useful, or because of the advantages of having it hidden. One possible benefit, which would have powerfully shaped the social aspect of our species, is that if multiple males have mated with a female, they might all be willing to contribute resources and protection to the child. This means more food and increased safety, both for mothers and for their young. This theory allows that tribes composed of several families might actually be more invested in each other’s success if there was some genetic overlap. So go on, shag your next-door neighbour, it’s good for the whole street.
There’s a paper from 1979 arguing that hidden oestrus would’ve motivated a change in male behaviour. Anthropologists Richard Alexander and Katherine Noonan suggest that our species started out as promiscuous as our chimp and bonobo relatives, a system that creates much ‘wasted’ mating. I am sure everyone enjoyed themselves, but from an evolutionary perspective, it was a waste of time and energy. A male who stayed with one female and copulated throughout her cycle would’ve been more successful in replicating his genes. Rather than hopping from female to female with no guarantee of who’s fertile, through-the-month mating would guarantee that there was definitely a window of fertility at some point. Thus the monogamy trait was selected for, and males became devoted. But let us not overly romanticise this pairing up millions of years ago. While a human male exhibits bonding behaviours – I’ve seen you pushing prams in the park and crying at your wives’ funerals – that is not the end of male sexuality, though, is it?
IS IT?
Sex and Chickens
There’s an apocryphal story of President Calvin Coolidge and his wife being shown around a barnyard by a farmer. As th
e couple admire a hen coop the farmer points to the rooster and proudly announces, ‘He can go twelve times a day.’
‘Tell that to my husband,’ quips Mrs Coolidge.
The First Lady shows with her sauce that even the most powerful man in the world can be undermined when it comes to his own virility. Hang on, though, because her husband has a comeback:
‘Same hen every time?’
‘Oh no, no,’ the farmer says, shaking his head, ‘different hens.’
‘Tell that to my wife!’ Coolidge wins. One–nil to men. Straight women go for a cry behind the pigpen.
The Coolidge effect is a term used by biologists, zoologists and anthropologists to describe a renewed interest in sexual activity when an unfamiliar female is introduced. Like we were discussing earlier, in our species and many others, males’ ability to procreate is limited only by how many females they have access to. While the human male might be deeply pair-bonded, this does not switch off his appreciation for sexual cues from other directions. Especially new ones, novel ones. And this is why porn is such a successful arousal tool for men.
An ex-boyfriend of mine had a consuming relationship with pornography that I only found out about several months into our relationship. He had fancied me at the start but, like microwaving popcorn, after a noisy beginning there was a sudden drop-off. Sex went from daily to monthly and I dealt with it very badly. Culturally we’re all familiar with a sexually frustrated male. He can be found in sitcoms and movies hilariously dealing with ‘blue balls’ or badgering a partner. There aren’t many examples of horny, rejected women.
I tried to communicate my feelings by crying hysterically. It’s an unhelpful paradox that a person is at their least sexy when sexually frustrated. It’s particularly difficult to seduce someone when you’ve snot running down your face. I also knew that Nicholas was still masturbating. He had a sex drive, it was just motoring in the opposite direction. I found this impossible to process – I was right there, in my pants and weeping, why didn’t he want me? It was still early in the relationship, the microwave hadn’t pinged, yet it’d got to the point where he wouldn’t kiss me on the mouth in case it ‘gave me ideas’.