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

by Jesse Bering

  The anthropologists Nicole Hess and Edward Hagen explored this question of whether female social aggression is innate. They rounded up 255 undergraduates—men and women ranging from eighteen to twenty-five years of age—and asked them to read and mull over the following social scenario, which I’ll summarize here.

  Let’s say you’re at a campus party and out of the corner of your eye you notice one of your classmates (another male student for male participants and another female student for female participants) conversing with the teaching assistant for a class you share with this other student. The other student is overheard saying some rather nasty lies about you; in particular, he or she is telling the teaching assistant that you haven’t been working on a joint project for the class. Instead, this person says, you’ve been slacking off, coming to class with a hangover, and partying in Baja. Your TA glances over at you, with your beer in hand, and then glances away quickly as if disgusted. Then your duplicitous classmate walks over to you and says innocently, “Hey! How are things going? Hasn’t the weather been great lately?”

  Once participants read over this little story, they completed a questionnaire about how they would have liked to respond to this tattling person. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “disagree strongly” and 10 being “agree strongly,” participants were asked to respond to statements such as “I feel like punching this person right now,” “I feel like telling people at the party that this person is clueless and spews useless comments during lecture,” and “I feel like saying, ‘Yeah, the weather has been nice.’” Whereas the first two items are measures of direct and indirect aggression, respectively, the last item presumably tapped into the participant’s willingness to turn the other cheek, so to speak. Importantly, Hess and Hagen also asked the participants how appropriate they thought various acts of violence against the treacherous classmate would be.

  Their findings indicated a clear sex difference in aggressive responses, with women overwhelmingly compelled to retaliate by attacking the offender’s reputation, mostly through gossip. This gender effect panned out even after controlling for participants’ evaluation of the social appropriateness of such acts. In other words, even though the women realized malicious gossip wasn’t socially appropriate, this was nevertheless their preferred first point of attack. Men, on the other hand, were more evenly divided in their response but failed to show the same preferential bias for acts of “informational warfare” against the unlikable classmate.

  Although most researchers acknowledge the speculative nature of evolutionary arguments in this area, social aggression among reproductively viable females is usually interpreted as a form of mate competition. Hess and Hagen, for example, suggest that the sex differences uncovered in their study would likely have been even more pronounced in a younger group of participants. Evolutionarily, historically, and cross-culturally, they point out, girls in the fifteen- to nineteen-year-old range would be most actively competing for mates. Thus, anything that would sabotage another female’s image as a desirable reproductive partner, such as commenting on her promiscuity, physical appearance, or some other aberrant or quirky traits, tends to be the stuff of virile gossip.

  Also, the degree of bitchiness should then demonstrate a sort of bell-shaped curve over the female life course. On the surface this seems mostly true. Anecdotally, I can’t think of a single postmenopausal woman who seems hell-bent on undermining another woman’s dating life—unless, perhaps, that involves spreading rumors about the sexual rival of her fertile daughter, in whom she has a vested adaptive interest. Then I can actually name names.

  The psychologist Anne Campbell’s work on sex differences and aggression has managed to carefully tease apart the many complex strands of cultural transmission and hormonal mediators in female violence. Campbell has argued that much of the sex differences in aggression can be understood in terms of “parental investment theory.” Parental investment theory was developed in the early 1970s by the biologist Robert Trivers. One of its basic implications is that since human mothers make a disproportionately greater contribution to (and physical investment in) the offspring’s survival than human fathers, women have evolved to be generally more reserved than men in mating strategies. Typical male physical violence, Campbell argues, is largely a form of showy sexual competition between men for reproductive access to the most desirable women. The type of social aggression we’ve just observed in women also appears to be a form of intrasexual competition for the most desirable men, but it avoids the comparatively higher cost of physical harm to women’s precariously fertile bodies.

  No parent wants to think he or she is rearing a socially insensitive daughter. But remember that psychological science is a discipline based on statistically significant, aggregate differences between comparison groups. In the present case, there are observed differences in the preferred aggressive-retaliatory styles between the sexes—ones that continue to appear even after controlling for social norms. But there’s also, of course, fairly dramatic individual variation. The more we understand about the evolved pressures underlying our behaviors, the more we can get a grip on them and evaluate our own motives. One of my favorite thinkers, the feminist cultural constructivist Simone de Beauvoir, wrote famously that “one isn’t born a woman, but becomes one.” While it’s true that culture exerts strong pressures shaping expressions of gender disparities, it also helps to know the biological mold that society must contend with.

  PART VI

  The Gayer Science: There’s Something Queer Here

  Never Ask a Gay Man for Directions

  I always seem to be the guy people ask for directions. That is to say, me, the spatially challenged, head-to-the-ground, asocial personality trying to avoid eye contact with any given passerby. This was especially the case while I was an expatriate living in Belfast. Usually I tried to wing it so that I didn’t come across as completely stupid. But try as I might, my response always ended up sputtering its way into a wan shrug and the trusty fallback “I’m so sorry, but I’m an American. I’m afraid you’ve asked the wrong person.” Given America’s cartoon-character status throughout much of Europe, being an apologetically naive Yankee greased my way out of a lot of awkward social encounters in the United Kingdom, so this tactic usually worked just fine. (Unless I got a chatty person who wasn’t in any hurry and I was his or her first live link to the New World. Then I was in for a lengthy discussion about Obama and Disney World.)

  But the truth is, I called Northern Ireland home for almost six years and I should have been able to give directions like a local. It’s not as if people were asking me how to get to some little-known footpath in the Mourne Mountains; they wanted to know how to get to the pharmacy or the quickest route to the student union at the university where I worked. It’s not just giving directions I struggle with, either. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a knack for getting lost. I’ve wasted more of my life wandering around parking lots, hospitals, and campuses than I care to know. Maps? Anathema. I might as well be looking at Mayan hieroglyphics on a tree-bark roll.

  What makes my “condition” even more ironic is that, according to family legend, I’m descended from the great Danish navigator Vitus Bering. Well, he wasn’t all that great, since he got shipwrecked on the Commander Islands and lost nearly half his crew before dying of an unknown disease. But I imagine he would have at least needed to know his way around a nautical map to have been commissioned by Peter the Great and hailed as the first European to spy the southern shores of Alaska. So if I come from such Euclidean-headed genetic stock, why is my own brain slow as molasses when it comes to finding my way around town?

  According to mounting evidence being gathered by the psychologist Qazi Rahman and his colleagues, it may well have something to do with the fact that I’m gay. Mind you, it’s not that I’m poor at directions because I’m gay, but rather Rahman has discovered a nontrivial neural correlation between these two psychological traits. This correlation is similar in nature to the
finding that left-handed individuals demonstrate better memory for events than right-handers due to their generally larger corpora callosa, a neurological boon that facilitates episodic recall. Southpaws are better at recalling memories not because they’re left-handed but because of the common physical (brain) denominator underlying the expression of both traits.

  Because of atypical hormonal influences on the developing fetus during prenatal growth, including the amount of circulating androgens (for example, testosterone) present in the mother’s womb, homosexuals (both men and women) often display several telltale “bio-demographic” markers—residual bodily characteristics that indicate the prenatal effect of these hormonal factors. For example, you may already know about the well-publicized 2D:4D effect, scientific shorthand for the peculiar finding that for both straight women and gay men, the length ratio between the second and fourth digits (fingers) is, on average, greater than it is for gay women and straight men. Since the brain is just another physical template, there are also differences between straights and gays in brain structure (notably in the hippocampus) and therefore cognitive abilities. For example, gay men and straight women tend to outperform gay women and straight men on most verbal measures, whereas straight men outperform the other groups on measures of spatial intelligence.

  In a study reported in Behavioral Neuroscience, Rahman and his colleagues found that gay men are more like women than like straight men in that they are more dependent on left/right landmark strategies for navigation (for example, “turn right at the church”) than on the Euclidean orientation strategies preferred by straight men (for example, “the bar is five miles in an easterly direction”). And in a follow-up study in the journal Hippocampus, Rahman and his coauthor, the psychologist Johanna Koerting, found that heterosexual males are different from gay men, straight women, and gay women in that they perform significantly faster on a task requiring them to scout out novel terrain in order to find a hidden search target. (Note that the researchers only tested people who regarded themselves as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. Bisexuals were excluded.)

  Now, before you go thinking up exceptions to these general findings, you contrarian you, note that they refer to aggregate population-level differences. Although I personally match Rahman’s cross-sex neurocognitive model for gay brains to a tee, my partner Juan’s brain is a satellite navigation device that could have given old Uncle Vitus’s a run for its money. And Juan, unlike me, has a pronounced 2D:4D ratio. Furthermore, in science, a statistically significant difference between comparison groups may actually translate to negligible differences in the real world. Finally, Rahman is quick to point out that it’s not as though gay men simply have women’s brains, or that gay women have men’s brains. Rather, the brains of homosexuals are more like neurocognitive mosaics of both sexes. For example, lesbians do not appear to differ from heterosexual women on cognitive measures except for verbal fluency, where they score in the male-typical direction.

  A final note. I once happened upon a finding indicative of another physiological difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. In addition to our navigational shortcomings, evidence suggests that gay people produce different armpit odors from straight people and that these scents are detectable. So perhaps if I stopped wearing deodorant, this would deter people from asking me for directions … along with just about anything else.

  “Single, Angry, Straight Male … Seeks Same”: Homophobia as Repressed Desire

  I wish I could say that I decided to come out of the closet in my early twenties for more admirable reasons—such as love or the principle of the thing. But the truth is that passing for a straight person had become more of a hassle than I figured it was worth. Since the third grade, I’d spent too many valuable cognitive resources concocting deceptive schemes to cover up the fact that I was gay.

  In fact, my earliest conscious tactic to hide my homosexuality involved being outlandishly homophobic. When I was eight years old, I figured that if I used the word “fag” a lot and on every possible occasion expressed my repugnance for gay people, others would obviously think I was straight. Although it sounded good in theory, I wasn’t very hostile by temperament, and I had trouble channeling my fictitious outrage into convincing practice.

  I may have failed as a homophobe, but unfortunately many people succeed. And it turns out we may have something in common: many young, homophobic males may secretly harbor homosexual desires (whether they are consciously trying to deceive the world about them, as I was, or are not even aware they exist). One of the most important lines of work in this area dates back to an article published in 1996 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in which the researchers Henry Adams, Lester Wright Jr., and Bethany Lohr report evidence that homophobic young males may secretly have gay urges.

  In this study, sixty-four self-reported straight males with a mean age of twenty years were divided into two groups (“non-homophobic men” and “homophobic men”) on the basis of their scores on a questionnaire measure of aversion to gay males. Here, homophobia was operationally defined as the degree of “dread” experienced when placed in close quarters with a homosexual—basically, how comfortable or uncomfortable the person was interacting with gay people. (There is debate in the clinical literature about the semantics of this term, with some scholars introducing other constructs such as “homonegativism” to underscore the more cognitive nature of some people’s antigay stance.)

  Each participant then agreed to attach a penile plethysmograph to his, well, “lesser self.” This device, which we’ve met before, is “a mercury-in-rubber circumferential strain gauge used to measure erectile responses to sexual stimuli. When attached, changes in the circumference of the penis cause changes in the electrical resistance of the mercury column.” Previous research with this apparatus (the plethysmograph, not the penis—well, actually both) confirmed that significant changes in circumference occur only during sexual stimulation and sleep.

  Next, the participants were led to a private chamber where they were shown three brief segments of graphic pornography. The three video snippets represented straight porn (scenes of fellatio and vaginal intercourse), lesbian porn (scenes of cunnilingus or “tribadism,” which is, essentially, vulva rubbing), and gay male porn (scenes of fellatio and anal intercourse). Following each randomly ordered video presentation, the participant rated how sexually aroused he felt and also his degree of penile erection. Go on. Guess the results.

  Both groups—nonhomophobic and homophobic men—showed significant engorgement to the straight and lesbian porn, and their subjective ratings of arousal matched their penile plethysmograph measure for these two types of videos. However, as predicted, only the homophobic men showed a significant increase in penile circumference in response to the gay male porn: specifically, 26 percent of these homophobic men showed “moderate tumescence” (six to twelve millimeters) to this video, and 54 percent showed “definite tumescence” (more than twelve millimeters). (In contrast, for the nonhomophobic men, these percentages were 10 and 24, respectively.) Furthermore, the homophobic men significantly underestimated their degree of sexual arousal to the gay male porn.

  From these data, the researchers concluded that “individuals who score high in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli.” Of course, it isn’t clear whether these people are unconsciously self-deceiving or consciously trying to conceal from others their secret attraction to members of the same sex. The Freudian defense mechanism of reaction formation—in which people’s repressed desires are manifested by their fervent emotional reactions and hostile behaviors toward the very thing they desire—could explain the former. (From Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”) The latter implies an act of deliberate social deception, such as my eight-year-old self’s misguided scheming. It could of course be a bit of both, or work differently for different people. Who is to say whether al
l those inconveniently outed public figures (such as the televangelists Eddie Long and Ted Haggard, the conservative psychiatrist George Rekers, and the politicians Mark Foley and Larry Craig)—the very incarnations of this phenomenon—were self-deceiving or whether they knew they had full-blown homosexual urges all along?

  Adams and his colleagues’ interpretation of these plethysmograph findings have not gone unchallenged. In an article published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the researcher Brian Meier and his colleagues argue that Adams’s findings can be better interpreted as the homophobic group’s “defensive loathing” of gay males rather than a secret attraction. Drawing an analogy to other phobias, they state, “We believe it is inaccurate to argue that spider phobics secretly desire spiders or that claustrophobics secretly like to be crammed into dark and tight spaces.” These investigators reason that Adams’s homophobic sample experienced erections in response to the gay male porn due not to sexual arousal but to their anxiety over the images, which in turn provoked the physiological response of penile engorgement.

  In my opinion, however, this “defensive loathing” reinterpretation by Meier is a bit off-kilter. Although it is true that ambient anxiety has been shown to increase the degree of sexual arousal in response to stimuli that are already sexually arousing, I could find no evidence that anxiety alone can give a man an erection. At least I hope this is the case. I get anxious about public speaking. If, on top of everything else, I have to worry about getting an erection during my talks, perhaps I ought to just cancel my appearances. Likewise, by these investigators’ logic, male arachnophobes should get a mild tickle down there whenever they spy a spider scurrying across their desk. I suppose that’s possible, but it seems rather far-fetched to me.