This is Improbable

by Marc Abrahams

  That’s the poetic, simple way of putting it. But prostitution is by tradition considered vulgar, so the team also gives a vulgar, all-words description: ‘An individual will start to sell prostitution if the price for selling the first amount of prostitution, minus the costs of a worsened reputation for doing so, exceeds the shadow price of leisure evaluated at zero prostitution sold.’

  That, in theory, is the story of prostitution. But it’s not the only one.

  As with competition among prostitutes, competiton among economists who have theories of prostitution can be spirited. Lena Edlund, of Columbia University in New York, and Evelyn Korn, of Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen in Germany, have also worked up a theory that uses partial differential equations. They call it, modestly, ‘A Theory of Prostitution’. Della Giusta, Di Tommaso, and Strøm cite Edlund and Korn’s theory – but say there are other theories that are ‘more sophisticated’.

  Prostitution is a difficult, dangerous profession. In addition to all of their obvious hardships, prostitutes must also endure the cold, small knowledge that economists still argue as to exactly what, why, and how they do their work.

  Della Giusta, Marina, Maria Laura Di Tommaso, and Steinar Strøm (2007). ‘Who’s Watching? The Market for Prostitution Services.’ Journal of Population Economics 22 (2): 501–16.

  Edlund, Lena, and Evelyn Korn (2002). ‘A Theory of Prostitution.’ Journal of Political Economy 110: 181–214.

  ‌Seven

  ‌‌of Us, in Bed

  In Brief

  ‘Penile Sufficiency: An Operational Definition’

  by C. M. Earles, A. Morales, and W. L. Marshall (published in the Journal of Urology, 1988)

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Quills and copulation • Tipping points of lap dancing • East Germans hooking up with West Germans • Scholarly perversion in the twenty-first century • The Kiss-Throwing Doll • Beetle hearts stubbie • Curiousity about castration • Stick figure sex • Gueguen, breast man • Brindley in plain view • Come now, rhinoceros • You never sleep alone

  Albert and His Porcupine Pricks

  How do porcupines make love? Wendy Cooper discovered the answer while poking around the basement of the Australian National University library in Canberra one day near the turn of the millennium. Cooper is a parasitologist. She studies parasites, not porcupines. She also, in the course of her work, studies scientific journals. It was via this latter method that she acquired her professional knowledge of porcupines’ prickly procreation procedures.

  Cooper found two studies written (one with co-authors) by Albert R. Shadle of the University of Buffalo, New York, dating from 1946. Shadle was chairman of Buffalo’s biology department from 1919 to 1953. One paper is called ‘The Sex Reactions of Porcupines (Erethizon d. dorsatum) Before and After Copulation’. The other is ‘Copulation in the Porcupine’.

  Wendy Cooper digested the information and published a summary, carefully worded to make sense both to porcupine specialists and to laypersons. From the outset, she is direct: ‘How do porcupines make love? You would probably think the answer is “very carefully”, but you would probably be wrong.’

  The porcupines in the study were part of a colony that Shadle kept at the University of Buffalo. The colony consisted of five females (Maudie, Nightie, Prickles, Snooks, and Skeezix) and three males (Old Dad, Pinkie, and Johnnie).

  Come mating season, the scientists would place a male into a cage that already contained a female. Wendy Cooper describes the subsequent action. First came courtship: ‘When the male encountered the female porcupine he smelled her all over, then reared up on his hind legs ... If she was prepared for mating she also reared up and faced the male, belly-to-belly. In this position most males then sprayed the female with a strong stream of urine, soaking her from head to foot. She would either 1) object vocally, 2) strike with her front paws, as though boxing, 3) threaten or try to bite, or 4) shake off the urine and run away. If ready for mating the female did not object strongly to this shower.’

  Then the porcupines did their business: ‘The male made sexual contact from behind the female. The spines of both animals were relaxed and lay flat. His thrusts were of the ‘usual nature’ and were produced by flexing and straightening the knees. Males did not grasp the female in any way. Mating continued until the male was exhausted ... If males refused to co-operate, the female approached a nearby male and acted out the male role in coition with the uninvolved male.’

  This research project was potentially hazardous for the porcupines – and for the scientists. But other reports written by Shadle offer perspective.

  Shadle’s interest in porcupine-human interaction had been longstanding. It began at or about 10:50 a.m. on 20 January 1947: ‘During the examination of one of the porcupines in the vivarium of the University of Buffalo, the animal became excited, and, as a result of its struggle, fell backwards from the porcelain top of the table. She fell upon the antero-lateral surface of the junior author’s right leg, embedding her spines primarily in the belly of the tibialis anterior muscle. Apparently the mid-sacral region of the animal’s back made contact with the leg, for the embedded quills were similar in length, diameter, and color to the spines in that area. The force of the fall of the 12.5-pound animal drove its quills through the heavy laboratory coat, the trousers, and deeply into the flesh of the leg.’

  Good scientists do not fail to get good counts and measurements. Shadle and his colleague Donald Po-Chedley determined that ‘79 quills had penetrated the skin deeply enough to secure firm anchorage’, and that the deepest penetration was sixteen millimetres into the leg.

  A 1955 paper written by Shadle sums up his two decades of experience. ‘Many hundreds of quills have penetrated various parts of the author’s own body in numbers of one or two, to as many as forty at one time’, he says. ‘Usually the fingers, hands or arms were the areas quilled, but on one occasion forty were driven into the forehead and bridge of the nose by one stroke of a porcupine’s quill-studded tail, but glasses prevented any injuries to the eyes.’ Then, he shares his main discovery: that removing a quill ‘is very painful unless done with a quick movement which jerks the quill straight back in the opposite direction from which it entered the flesh’.

  ‘The penetration of porcupine quills into the human body is never a pleasant sensation’, Shadle wrote. ‘But twenty years of experience in working with a porcupine colony, and continued handling of these spiny animals, have convinced the author that description of the discomfort of being quilled is often very much exaggerated.’

  Shadle, Albert R., Marilyn Smelzer, and Margery Metz (1946). ‘The Sex Reactions of Porcupines (Erethizon d. dorsatum) Before and After Copulation.’ Journal of Mammalogy 27 (2): 116–21.

  Shadle, Albert R. (1946). ‘Copulation in the Porcupine.’ Journal of Wildlife Management 10 (2): 159–62.

  –– (1955). ‘Effects of Porcupine Quills in Humans.’ American Naturalist 89 (844): 47–49.

  Shadle, Albert R., and Donald Po-Chedley (1949). ‘Rate of Penetration of a Porcupine Spine.’ Journal of Mammalogy 30 (2): 172–73.

  May We Recommend

  ‘Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?’

  by Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, and Brent Jordan (published in Evolution and Human Behavior, 2007, and honoured with the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in economics)

  The authors, at the University of New Mexico, explain: ‘All women made less money during their menstrual periods, whether they were on the pill or not. However, the normally cycling women made much more money during estrus (about US $354 per shift) – about US $90 more than during the luteal phase and about US $170 more than during the menstrual phase. Estrous women made about US $70 per hour, luteal women made about US $50 per hour, and menstruating women made about US $35 per hour. By contrast, the pill users had no mid-cycle peak in tip earnings ... This also results in pill users making only US $193 per shift compared to normally cycling women
making US $276 per shift – a loss of more than US $80 per shift.’

  German Sexual Unification

  A study called ‘The Sexual Unification of Germany’ tells what happened, on paper and in some people’s heads, when East Germans hooked up with West Germans.

  After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just plain how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners.

  Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

  Sharp focused on a single question: ‘What happened to GDR [German Democratic Republic] sexuality when it was confronted with the sexual mores of West Germany?’ ‘The answer’, she writes, ‘appears to have been an explosion of discourse surrounding sex.’ In other words: lots of talk, not much action.

  In press accounts, though, the joint was jumping. For a little while, anyway. Sharp describes one of the main storylines: ‘While the traditional behavior of conquering armies (killing the men and raping the women) was obviously inappropriate for Western men after the collapse of Communism, something very similar seemed to be happening on a metaphorical level ... The context was the ideological battle between East and West, the cold war being slogged out in the arena of sexuality, with orgasmic potential replacing nuclear capacity.’

  The tabloid press enjoyed a circulation-boosting ‘brief obsession with GDR sexuality’. And a grand yet debilitating obsession it was: ‘GDR women were represented as products for the fantasies of Western men, while the East German men were dismissed as both socially and sexually inadequate.’ Sharp also recounts a West German man’s televised claim that ‘GDR women are not really uglier than West German women, and they dress as well. But the real advantage is that they are more [modest, undemanding, easily satisfied]’.

  On the other side of the former fence, a GDR sexologist named Dr Kurt Starke ‘linked findings about women’s greater sexual enjoyment to the social policies of the GDR’. The daily tabloid BILD-Zeitung countered with the headline ‘Do GDR Women Really Come More Often? The Orgasm Professor Is Talking Rubbish’ above a story in which an East German nurse named Adelheid said: ‘We really don’t have more orgasms in the GDR. Not me, anyway, because I have to work up to 12 hours a day and that doesn’t leave much time for love.’

  For the most part, Sharp tells of two Germanies united first by hype about sex, and then by disappointment as most people’s sex lives, no matter where they lived, remained humdrum.

  The report ends with a deflating comment from journalist Regine Sylvester, who tried to sum up both her own experience and that of the entire nation. The supposed ‘sex boom’ that happened right after unification, Sylvester opined, ‘did not turn the Federal Republic into a noisily copulating society, nor did the official taboos turn the old GDR into an ascetic one’.

  Sharp, Ingrid (2004). ‘The Sexual Unification of Germany.’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 13 (3): 348–65.

  A Catalogue of Perverse Behaviour

  Perversions get a new lease on life, at least chronologically, whenever a new century begins. William L. Salton, a New York City clinical psychologist, rang out the old and rang in the new by writing a study called ‘Perversion in the Twenty-First Century: From the Holocaust to the Karaoke Bar’. It appeared in 2004 in the Psychoanalytic Review.

  After describing some of the many psychological theories about the differences between perversions and non-perversions, Salton in essence takes a cold shower and shakes his head. ‘[I will] attempt neither to disprove nor to contradict the theories cited in the preceding sections’, he writes. ‘Instead, I hope to augment and combine them.’

  He attempts this by sharing the story of a patient who reluctantly came under his care: ‘The patient, whom I will call “Alan”, is a 28-year-old male of Gypsy descent. He was referred by the criminal court following repeated convictions for stealing complimentary bathrobes from the rooms of upscale hotels.’

  Alan’s lawyer repeatedly ‘was able to plea bargain probation and psychological counseling, rather than incarceration, when it was determined that Alan did not take the bathrobes to sell them, or to steal whatever contents a guest might have left inside. Instead, he brought them home in order to masturbate into them. He would then discard the bathrobe when it no longer held his sexual interest, thus requiring him to stalk and steal again.’

  Alan also had a goal to perform karaoke in a bar in all fifty American states. In short, Alan had some problems. Having told us about them, Salton augments and combines a variety of traditional psychological theories, trying to devise a treatment.

  Salton also celebrates some of his predecessors. ‘Perversion’, he observes cheerily, ‘has always been of interest to mental health professionals.’ He writes most admiringly about a study that is, roughly speaking, a much grander, twentieth-century equivalent of the one he is preparing. Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 452-page book Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1906, helped give birth to the modern scholarly approach to perversion. Salton says the book ‘fascinated psychotherapists and theoreticians alike’, being fundamentally ‘a catalogue of perverse behaviors and practices that would rival anything on today’s Internet’. The book also introduced new words (most influentially ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’). It sported a delightful index that could teach a thing or two even to non-German readers. Here are three swatches from that index:

  Dementia paralytica

  Diebstahl auf Grund von Fetischismus

  Effeminatio

  Kohabitation

  Koketterie

  Konträre Sexualempfindung

  Melancholie

  Menstruation

  Metamorphosis sexualis paranoica

  Misshandlung von Weibern

  Despite these bows to the past, Salton’s twenty-first-century study is primarily about poor Alan the complimentary bathrobe thief. Much of Alan’s inner world, Salton writes, ‘remains a mystery ... I hope and look forward to having a chance to write about Alan’s further development in treatment. I plan to call the next article: “From the Karaoke Bar to the Depressive Position”.’

  That follow-up study has yet to make its appearance before an eager public.

  Salton, W. L. (2004). ‘Perversion in the Twenty-First Century: From the Holocaust to the Karaoke Bar.’ Psychoanalytic Review 91 (1): 99–111.

  An Improbable Innovation

  ‘Kiss-Throwing Doll’

  by William B. Nutting (US Patent no. 3,603,029, granted 1971)

  The patented Kiss-Throwing Doll

  Anyone who tries to patent a kiss (the romance book publisher Harlequin, for one, which in February 2011 filed an application for ‘The Essential Romantic Kiss’) must contend with Nutting. His invention features (says Mr Nutting) ‘a central shaft upon which I mount a rotatable driving spool for oscillatory movement under the influence of a drawstring in one direction and under the bias of a coils spring in the other direction’. Metaphorically, has anyone every devised a more perfect description of the romantic kiss?

  Beetle Bottle Shag

  Certain Australian males are physically attracted to one particular type of beer bottle. An experiment in Western Australia demonstrated that beer bottles known there as ‘stubbies’ get recycled in an unanticipated way. Stubbies are squat little bottles, 370 millilitres in capacity. A study published in 1983 begins with the statement: ‘Male Julodimorpha bakewelli White were observed attempting to copulate with beer bottles.’

  Julodimorpha bakewelli (white) are beetles. Prior to 1983, few people were aware that the beetles were having their way with the stubbies. It is still not common knowledge.

  Darryl Gwynne, then of the University of Western Australia (he has since moved to the University of Toronto), and David Rentz, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Canberra,
tried to alert the world. They published two reports filled with intense but delightful technical detail. ‘On two occasions a flying male was observed to descend to a stubbie and attempt to copulate’, they write. ‘A search was made for other stubbies in the area and two others, with associated beetles, were located. The males were either at the side or “mounted” on top of the bottle, with genitalia everted and attempting to insert the aedeagus. Only one stubbie without a beetle was located. A short experiment was conducted in which four stubbies were placed on the ground in an open area.’

  The experiment was a success. The beetles loved the bottles. Gwynne and Rentz later tried to prise them off, but found this not easy to do. One beetle, they observed, was so attached to its bottle that it stayed faithful despite being attacked and gnawed by ants. Gwynne and Rentz witnessed two deaths.

  The scientists developed a theory that explains the nature of the seemingly unnatural attraction: ‘It was apparent that it wasn’t any remaining contents in the stubbies that attracted the beetles; not only do Western Australians never dispose of a bottle with beer still in it but many of the bottles had sand and detritus accumulating over many months ... The brown glass of the stubbies bore a resemblance to the coloration of the beetle; in addition, the rows of regularly-space tubercules on the top and bottom of the bottle reflected the light in a similar way to the pits on the elytra of the beetle.’

  Gwynne and Rentz issued a warning to their fellow citizens: ‘Improperly disposed of beer bottles not only present a physical and “visual” hazard in the environment, but also could potentially cause great interference with the mating system of a beetle species.’