Testosterone Rex

by Cordelia Fine

  Certainly, hypothetical paper-and-pencil tests of sexual behaviour are limited, and this isn’t to present Conley’s studies as the last word on the matter. Other research, for instance, found no evidence that men and women perceive different social risks from taking on multiple sexual partners, or that this contributes to sex differences in the desired number of sex partners.59 Nor is the point that women’s and men’s sexuality is really just the same. But these studies perform a useful service in drawing attention to what appears to be easily overlooked: the many different social factors, still unequal for women and men, that feed into sexual decision making. Ironically, the need for this reminder was highlighted by a dismissal of Conley’s findings by a prominent psychologist, on the grounds that females’ interest in having sex with celebrities “may be motivated by more than sex.”60 As if sex, in the normal course of events, is separate from, and untouched by, identity, reputation, gendered norms, notions of “conquests” and “sluts,” peer pressure and prestige, power, economics, relationships, culturally shaped sexual scripts, body shame, or any other complex part of one’s inner and outer life.

  This brings us to the important point (expanded on in the next chapter) that sexual behaviour viewed through the lens of the Bateman worldview filters out our humanity. Consider how Evolutionary Psychology–inspired researchers explain why attached men in their studies turn down offers of casual sex. Apparently obvious explanations—moral values, commitment, loyalty, simple lack of interest in having sex with someone who isn’t the person they love—are ignored; instead, sexual restraint is explained in terms of reproductive outcomes weighed by “the risk of losing a primary partner with good reproductive prospects following the revelation of infidelity.”61 Sex stripped of everything human sounds more like… mating, and as we’ll see in the next chapter, it’s not clear how much of that humans actually do.

  None of this, by the way, is intended as cheerleading for the notion that monogamy is really men’s “natural” preference, or promiscuity women’s.62 As University of Minnesota evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk argues in Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, evidence from a variety of sources suggests that humans have successfully paired and reproduced using all sorts of social arrangements, varying by time, place, and circumstance. “As with diet, as with exercise, as with all the other features of our biology that people want to make into a single ‘natural’ way—we don’t have just one natural pattern of the sexes,” she concludes.63 Even polyandry (a woman with two or more husbands) is, in particular demographic and ecological conditions, seen more often than previously supposed among small-scale hunters and gatherers and foraging horticulturalists, across many parts of the world, suggesting that “polyandry may have existed throughout human evolutionary history.” Interestingly, social groups are “apparently capable of instituting (and abandoning) fairly high rates of polyandry in a very short time frame.”64 In a piece aptly titled “Humans Are (Blank)–ogamous,” University of Massachusetts Boston anthropologist Patrick Clarkin points out that although you’d think, “given the importance of sex and mating in evolution, that natural selection would have put a straight-jacket on it and given us a stricter blueprint to follow… that doesn’t seem to be the case.”65

  SCIENCE HAS MOVED A LONG WAY from a Testosterone Rex view of sexual selection in which, in accordance with universal evolutionary design, sports cars are the peacock tails with which competitive men compete for fertile female vessels, laying the psychological foundations of sex inequality. As we saw in the previous chapter, decades of research in evolutionary biology has been reexamining and challenging the Bateman-inspired principles at the foundation of the Testosterone Rex view; from the supposed cheapness of sperm, to the assumed pointlessness of female competition. Gone are the days when commentators could pointedly refer to, say, the patriarchal dynamics of the elephant seal household, in discussions about humans. The old assumption that sexual selection has created near-universal sex roles—males mostly like this, females mostly like that—has been replaced with growing recognition of the diversity of courtship and parental roles both across and within species.

  This across-species variability means that there is no universal template for how genetic and hormonal components of sex play out to affect brain and behaviour—a point we’ll come back to in Chapter 4. And the within-species species variability in “sex roles”—think bush crickets, dung beetles, hedge sparrows, and most obviously ourselves—points to a no less important conclusion (that we’ll return to later in the book). Sexual selection hasn’t locked such roles into sex-linked genes and hormones, but allows for individuals to be profoundly influenced by their social, material, physical, (and in our own case) economic, cultural, and political circumstances. This is important because, as we saw in the Introduction, the implications of the Testosterone Rex view of the effects of sexual selection extend well beyond the bedroom. Ultimately, that old tale claims that it isn’t just sexism and discrimination that sustains the glass ceiling—not completely. At the core of this inequality are the whisperings of evolution. To men, it murmurs That’s right… keep going, son. I know it may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that spending eighty hours a week in a science lab becoming increasingly pale and weedy, and possibly developing rickets, will make you more attractive to scores of young, beautiful, fertile women, but trust me on this. Instead, to women, evolution is whispering Are you sure all this hard work is worth it? Why not go home, invest more in the few kids you’ve got? Oh, and maybe brush your hair a little? It’ll make it glossier—more youthful.

  But this old story is on its last legs, and it’s time to give birth to its successor. As my mothers’-group friend Lily and her partner discovered, new arrivals don’t always wait until everyone is perfectly ready to welcome them. So too, here. It doesn’t matter whether you’re cheering it on in the birthing suite, or rushing away in a wheelchair clutching your head. It’s on its way.

  CHAPTER 3

  A NEW POSITION ON SEX

  AT ONE MEMORABLE POINT IN PROCEEDINGS, THE MASERATI-driving beau gave me a pair of Bulgari sunglasses. Perceived from the traditional sexual selection perspective, this was a brilliant strategic move: like the weaving of the intricate bowers with which male bower birds seduce female bower birds. It almost started to seem as though he had come into possession of a tattered old book titled Making Sexual Selection Work for You: A Man’s Manual, and was following it closely. One Evolutionary Psychology perspective on consumer behaviour, for instance (with a head nod towards the superficially similar habit of male baboons in offering food to females in return for sexual access) suggested that “gift giving could have evolved as a distinctly male courtship strategy” that enables men to “flaunt their resources.”1 But although some writers apparently find the habit irresistible, within evolutionary biology it’s generally considered rather bad form to attempt to explain the human condition by way of airy gesturing to superficially similar patterns in other animals.2 Even among nonhuman animals, behaviours that look the same in two different species can have very different functions and evolutionary histories.3 And while I don’t pretend to be an expert in baboon psychology, I’m confident that a morsel of baboon fodder lacks the important weight of social meaning reflected in the expensive sparkle of Bulgari sunglasses. A recent analysis of gift giving in Nazi concentration camps, for instance, provides a compelling and moving illustration of how very un-baboon-like human gift giving can be. The main motivations to give gifts in this powerfully “identity-stripping context,” the researchers concluded, were to assert agency, to form and reestablish social identities through relationships, and to restore a sense of humanity.4 In humans, gifts “reveal an important secret: the idea which the recipient evokes in the imagination of the giver,” as one scholar put it.5 And how. British weather provides few valid opportunities for shaded eyewear, but even so, the Bulgari gift caused a collision of identities, held versus projected, of epic proportions
. No member of my family had ever before owned a designer accessory and, for years, the sunglasses provided a rich source of amusement to my family. We all thought fondly of the man who so generously gave them. But we couldn’t help but recognize the humour in what was, I’m sorry to say, a little like trying to attract a baboon with a peacock tail.

  While nonhuman animals have their own trials and tribulations, this is just not something they have to worry about. The peahen doesn’t wonder if the peacock’s tail isn’t perhaps a little too showy for her particular tastes and values; the male bower bird is free, I think, from anxieties that his bower doesn’t reflect well on his prospects. Yes, we are animals, and we have evolved. But the uniquely human dimension we bring to everything we do, including the biological basics of birth, eating, excretion, and death, underscores how misleading it is “to assert the equivalence of, say, bird plumage and sports cars in attracting mates,” argues University of North Carolina at Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks.6 The previous chapters disrupted the tight link in popular imagination between cheap sperm, vast reproductive potential, and an evolutionary drive towards a distinct male sexual nature. This chapter unmoors us altogether from the traditional view of sexual selection, with the idea that human sexuality is not only—perhaps not even primarily—about bringing together reproductive potentials. As Marks warns:

  To confuse human (cultural) sexuality and (natural) reproduction is classically pseudo-scientific. Of course sexuality is for reproduction—if you’re a lemur. If you’re a human, sexuality is far more than for reproduction; that is what evolution has done for human nature.7

  Since he then suggests that “if you imagine sex to be biological, rather than bio-cultural, you’re probably not going to have much of it”—read on.

  IN A LONG AND THOUGHTFUL ESSAY, Macquarie University anthropologist Greg Downey argues that “in order to change popular understandings of evolution, we need not simply better data, but also better stories.” His proposed alternative narrative to the “man-the-promiscuous-horny-hunter/woman-the-choosy-chaste-gatherer” story is a “long, slow sexual revolution,” at the core of which is the understanding that “sexual expression in humans… has long been much broader than just to get gametes together successfully.”8 Importantly, this isn’t a special pleading for humans to be considered outside of an evolutionary perspective. In fact, there’s a compelling case to be made that sex doesn’t serve purely reproductive purposes in other primates either.9 The principle of “exaptation,” whereby a trait that evolved for one function is redeployed for another, is now a standard one in evolutionary biology.10 The textbook example even comes from the distinctly nonhuman characteristic of feathers, thought to have evolved first in dinosaurs for warmth, then for sexual display, and finally for flight in birds. Today, they continue to serve all three functions. John Dupré makes the point in his typically droll fashion, noting of his computer that “just because much of the underlying technology was developed with military applications in mind doesn’t entail that my computer is constantly on the verge of planning a nuclear attack, or designing some instrument of mass destruction.”11 No doubt the initial function of our adaptive sexual desires and activity was reproduction, but this doesn’t preclude it now having other functions. Sexual pleasure creates a “loophole in the evolutionary scheme,” suggest Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton in With Pleasure: Thoughts on the Nature of Human Sexuality, which “permits sexual pleasure to be co-opted to other [nonprocreative] purposes, such as the facilitation of bonding and the reduction of personal and interpersonal tensions.… The intense pleasure that accompanies sex may serve to motivate copulation and thereby facilitate reproduction, but this is no longer its sole function.”12 This isn’t the same as saying that humans sometimes have sex for reasons other than the conscious intent to reproduce, which is obviously true. One survey of students yielded no fewer than 237 distinguishable reasons for having sex,13 my favourite of which is “I wanted to change the topic of conversation.” (I’ve always wondered in which settings this is a motivation for sex. Dull dinner parties? Lab meetings that have turned to the awkward question of who forgot to order the pipettes?) Rather, the point is that its functional role goes beyond the merely reproductive.

  Why this should have come to pass I will not attempt to explain, and for that I make no apology. Academic hypothesizing about human behavioural evolution reminds me of nothing so much as playing Pictionary with my dad. My father has many strengths, but none of them lie in the direction of the visual arts. Playing Pictionary, he doesn’t so much draw a picture as happen to form a line or squiggle on the paper while maniacally gesturing with a pencil in his hand. (Although, technically, incorporating elements of charades into Pictionary is cheating, it is tacitly understood within the family that my father needs all the help he can get.) The researchers who speculate about the evolutionary origins of the human condition are, to my mind, in much the same position as someone teamed with my father in a Pictionary game, desperately trying to discern a meaningful picture from hopelessly inadequate information. (It’s fire!… No, you fool—surely that circle there is social complexity?… Or wait—could it be a big baby’s head?)

  Fortunately though, there are several here-and-now clues to the non-reproductive purposes of sex in humans. Exhibit A we met in the previous chapter: the frequency of sexual activity even when there’s no chance of reproduction. Given the costs and risks involved in sex, that doesn’t make a lot of sense if the sole purpose is reproduction. In fact, for this very reason, in most animals hormones play a critical role in coordinating sexual activity, ensuring that sex only takes place when fertilization is possible. Why outlay the biological expense of souped-up secondary sexual characteristics and gamete production, or take the risks inherent in courtship, mating, and fighting, if there’s no chance of reproductive success? If you are a male bird, for example, to sing an elaborate song of courtship that could attract the attention of a predator may only be a risk worth taking during the frenzied breeding season. In keeping with the same principle, outside of the breeding season when females are infertile and unreceptive, one might as well keep down biological costs by running a smaller size in gonads until spring is once again in the air. Human mating is conspicuously not like this. And even compared with other primates, in which sex is also released from hormonal control, our sexual activity stands out as especially unproductive.14

  Exhibit B for non-reproductive sex is on a related theme: humans routinely engage in sexual pairings and acts, that not only often don’t—but actually can’t—lead to pregnancy. Women don’t just have sex with men when they are not ovulating, but also when postpartum or postmenopausal. And sometimes, of course, it is not men with whom they are having sex, just as nontrivial proportions of men sometimes, often, or always prefer to have sex with other men. There are also many human sexual activities, like touching, kissing, and oral sex that likewise have no reproductive potential.

  Exhibit C for a non-reproductive role for sex in humans is the absence of a penis bone in men, argues anthropologist Greg Laden, humans being the only ape for which this is so.15 As a consequence, the efficiency of erection and orgasm is greatly reduced in men compared with most other apes:

  Male sexuality involves a much more elaborate, longer term, and complex set of psycho-sexual-social elements than usually found in apes, that are linked to social bonding. There are of course all sorts of exceptions, but typical, normal adult male human sexuality is actually somewhat complex and nuanced and not ape-like in many ways. Yes, folks, compared to Pan troglodytes, our nearest relative, human male sex is all about relationships.

  Of course, we readily accept this when it comes to women’s sexuality. In fact, Naomi Wolf brought the relational view of female sexuality to a whole new level in Vagina: A New Biography, claiming that

  his gazing at her, or praising her, or even folding a load of laundry, is not merely rightly thought of as highly effective foreplay; it is actually, from the female bo
dy’s point of view, an essential part of good sex itself.16

  Although I realize I have just observed that sex can take imaginatively non-reproductive forms, to include the folding of laundry does seem to take the thesis a little too far, for women and men alike. Certainly no one, to my knowledge, has argued for the critical importance of a tight bundle of carefully paired socks for successful male arousal, or the stimulating effects of the miracle that is the perfectly folded fitted sheet. So although it would have promised the easiest solution to date to women’s unfair domestic burden, I suspect that it would be no small task to persuade men that although it may seem as though they are doing household chores, they are actually having sex. (Honey, truly—this is the best sex I’ve ever had. Could you iron the tea towels too?) But the considerable overlap between the sexes in their interest in a one-and-only sexual relationship (as well as in uncommitted sex) should dispel stereotypical contrasts in which only for women is sex about relationships. Indeed, in the previously mentioned survey of students’ reasons for having sex, for both women and men, the top-rated reason was pleasure, followed closely by love and commitment.17 As Andrew Smiler pleads: