by Sara Pascoe
Hunter’s study found that penguins sometimes steal rocks from each other, and if caught are attacked. But in a few instances, females were observed in extrapair copulations, after which they’d take a rock or two back to their own nest and the male wouldn’t attack. It seemed to the human observers that there was a tacit understanding, a deal. They theorised about the advantages of this practice (for the male, genetic fitness of offspring due to mate diversity; for the female, an investment into potential offspring’s survival) but were not sure whether copulation was in direct exchange for a stone or was to avoid conflict. Dr Hunter said she believed ‘what they are doing is having copulation for another reason and just taking the stones as well. We don’t know exactly why, but they are using the males.’ The human equivalent of this would be a hook-up based on attraction (which is always about procreation at an unconscious level), and then she helps herself to fifty quid from your wallet afterwards. You’re cool with it, it’s non-typical behaviour, but it’s a way of investing in the future of any offspring created. I feel like you’d be less likely to prevent someone taking cash from your wallet after sex than before … I’ll try this with my boyfriend later and let you know.*
Dr Hunter speculated that for an Adélie female this steamy affair extrapair mating could be a way of bonding with a new male in case her current partner dies, but that the male engages ‘purely for sexual satisfaction’. It seems that even when anthropomorphising we project our sexist double standards onto animals. We are all conditioned to believe males want/need/enjoy sex and that’s enough, but a female must have a reason. She couldn’t possibly just want to get her rocks off. That is not a pun, don’t lose respect for me.
Here’s the thing. Dr Hunter observed very few of these sex/rock exchanges – she estimates ‘only a few per cent’ in the total interactions studied – which leaves me with many more questions. If such a practice was beneficial to survival surely it would be more widespread. What differentiated the females who partook in extra-pair mating? Were their nests particularly devoid of rocks? Were their mates rubbish at providing? Ha ha, we’ve caught me projecting my bias onto the penguins – she must be desperate or needy. Perhaps The Secret Diary of a Cold Girl begins in exactly the same way as her human equivalent’s, looking down the lens and flirtily asserting, ‘I love sex and I love pebbles – and I know you don’t believe that I enjoy the sex, but I do.’ Either way, this behaviour is not effectively understood so I wouldn’t go around quoting it as evidence of transactional sex in nature.
A more illuminating study was conducted by a biology professor called Larry Wolf in 1975. His paper is about purple-throated Carib hummingbirds and how he observed the females using sex to get food. Hummingbirds have incredibly fast metabolisms as they expend a great deal of energy flapping their silly wings. They eat flower nectar, pollen, insects and tree sap – and they need a lot, consuming about half their body weight every day to survive. That’s like me eating five stone of doughnuts daily and still looking like a shiny fairy with a beak, what a life! The birds are also incredibly territorial, each one claiming a small area of plants and shrubbery for itself. But nature can be very sexist; male hummingbirds are bigger and stronger than females, and they want the best territories with the loveliest, most sugary flowers. You may be thinking, ‘Male hummingbirds are well girly,’ so let me tell you that they guard their flowers fiercely and fight off any interloper birds. The puny females must either make do with a less nutritious habitat or form a pair bond with a male who will share his bounty. Or there’s a third option: a female may exchange sex for temporary access. In times of drought a female will quickly starve and die if she relies on her sub-par garden. If she enters a male’s territory he’ll fight her UNLESS she ‘flirts’ with him. Then he’ll permit her to drink delicious nectar in the lead-up to mating, after which he reasserts dominance and chases her away. In human terms this would be like visiting a male neighbour who’d punch you if you started raiding the cupboards, but if you’re wearing a low-cut top, laughing at his jokes and touching him on the arm, then he’ll watch you eating ham from the fridge quite peacefully. Maybe you’ll even slurp some soup during the sex itself, but when it’s over he’ll kick you out without breakfast. This would be your neighbour knowing that you’re starving but not helping unless you sleep with him. This is survival sex.
It might be relevant to know that the behaviour observed in these birds wasn’t a mating strategy, or at least did not appear to have a reproductive incentive. The mating season had not yet begun when the study was conducted, and in specimens collected by Wolf the males’ testes were not yet enlarged and the females weren’t ready to lay eggs. I am trying to work out how Wolf could have known these details without cutting open the birds, and the answer is he couldn’t. He’s a murderer and I’ve called the police.
While we wait for the feds, let’s investigate a further instance of animals paying for sex. Capuchin monkeys are closer to our own species than penguins and hummingbirds but still separated by several million years of divergent evolution. They are small, leapy guys, full of personality – you’ll recognise them from TV and showbiz. Ross from Friends had a capuchin called Marcel who also appeared in 30 Rock and numerous movies, which is cruel because I’d like to have appeared in those things. I think if casting directors saw how cute I look eating mango I’d get more work.
The capuchin experiment took place at Yale University in 2006. Keith Chen gave the monkeys silver tokens, then taught them to exchange those tokens for snacks. The study ascertained that the monkeys could obey certain economic principles, e.g. if peanut butter goes up in ‘price’, buy cheap grapes instead, and vice versa. All very interesting in terms of cute lil’ primates grasping the concepts of inflation and relative value. Maybe if they are so skilled and intelligent we should stop doing experiments on them? I’d read in articles online that as soon as the capuchins had an ‘economy’ they used this ‘money’ to buy sex and porn. I read in a book called Porn Panic! that Chen had ‘invented the monkey brothel’. I read in a science journal that the females mating for tokens were proving that transactional sex is hardwired into monkey behaviour. Then I read the original study, which doesn’t mention anything about sex at all. BORING.
I googled ‘monkey brothel’, had an existential crisis, and eventually found the details I wanted in a New Yorker article titled ‘Monkey Business’. One day during the study, a capuchin had escaped his cage, grabbed the tray containing tokens and lobbed them to his friends. This was annoying for the experimenters; flooding the market with new currency will always lead to devaluation. This monkey was the Bank of England printing money to bail out the bankers. So now you have this Wolf of Wall Street situation going on in the capuchin lab. The monkeys are newly rich with tokens, jumping around and demanding snacks, while Chen describes seeing ‘out of the corner of his eye’ a mating, followed by the male giving a token to the female, which she promptly exchanged with the experimenter for a grape.
I think Chen’s ‘brothel’ is going to be poorly reviewed on PunterNet.
There’s too much assumption in seeing a token changing hands after mating and saying it must be ‘payment’ for sex. Especially as Chen only observed this once, and from the corner of his eye – the least reliable part of vision. The experimenter states that he took ‘measures’ to ensure this never happened again. I wonder what he did? The anti-prostitution lobby would love to know!
There’s a whole theory about transactional sex in primates which has been misconstrued and misrepresented. The pop science book Mismatch states: ‘Male chimpanzees and macaques have been shown to give meat to ovulating females, with the idea that they will be able to copulate with them in return for this. This is called the “meat-for sex theory” in scientific speak.’†
The meat-for-sex theory suggests that male chimpanzees swap bits of dead animal carcass (meat) for sexual access to females (sex), but studies have NOT proved that anything like a direct trade takes place. Yes, they have seen
male chimps giving meat to ovulating females, but not exclusively. Over months of observation it was found that fertile periods in females did not encourage more hunting in males, nor were ovulating females given more meat than their non-fertile friends colleagues other chimps.
The quote above is misleading. It makes a copulation-for-resources trade sound like a human business deal when it is a far more generalised behaviour. Science magazine made the same mistake. Underneath a photo of a chimpanzee holding some bone and gristle they published the caption: ‘Meat for a mate. A male chimp offers meat in exchange for sex with a female.’ Again, this gives the impression that there is a literal transaction taking place – ‘Here’s your pork chop, Stephanie, now take your knickers off’ – when that isn’t the case at all. Studies on chimps in the Ngogo and Gombe communities both found that meat sharing didn’t give males any immediate mating advantages. What they did find was that over a much longer time (three years) females were more likely to mate with males who had periodically shared protein with them in the past. So rather than being directly transactional (pork-chop-bend-over, in scientific speak) this appears to be about bonds, familiarity and the attractiveness of a male as a proven provider. The better hunters had more meat to share and so shared more often. These males were also of higher social status due to the size and strength that enabled their superior hunting, and those attributes combined to make them desirable to females. Even I think they sound sexy and I’m vegan.
The relationship between food provision and sex in our species is complicated. We have a considerable body dimorphism between the sexes. Just as male hummingbirds are larger than females, just as male chimpanzees are bigger, faster and stronger than their mothers and daughters, humans are also unequally sized. This size discrepancy has ramifications: the potential for violence, the possibility of provision and protection.
How would male strength and fitness have affected the women of pre-agricultural times? If the men of the tribe hunted more successfully than her, she may have been reliant on them for a portion of her sustenance. When she got pregnant, an increased need for nutrition combined with a decrease in physical agility made her even more dependent on the generosity of others. This continued after the birth and through the several years of breastfeeding.
We’ve gone through this already.
And I’ve no doubt all this is in Diana’s mind as she lies in bed debating the merits of fee-paying cuckoldry with her husband.
* He only had £4 and kept asking what I wanted it for. I wasn’t expecting resistance and had to create a credible fiction about topping up a parking meter, with the additional lies of car ownership and ‘Yes, I CAN drive, I just don’t do it in front of people.’
† The full title of the book, by Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt, is Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day and What We Can Do About It. It was recommended to me by a professor of anthropology called Gil Greengross and it does have lots of interesting ideas in it, but it also oversimplifies or exaggerates the results of certain studies and makes a lot of sweeping statements and conclusions. Like this one from page 114: ‘You could even argue that the large number of stand-up comedians who are “physically challenged” suggests that humour is an alternative mating strategy for men who would not get a look-in on account of their appearance or status.’ It turns out that by virtue of my job not only am I a man, I’m an ugly one.
More Indecent Proposal
Debating her survival sex Diana dabbles in philosophy to assert that the ‘self’ and ‘physical self’ are separate and distinct:
DIANA
It wouldn’t mean anything. It’s just my body. It’s not my mind, it’s not my heart.
She argues that the parts of herself which do mean something, the parts which she owes to her husband, are metaphysical, emotional. That perhaps flesh can be rented without any loss to self or love. Diana doesn’t phrase it as poetically as me but I’ve probably thought about this longer than she has. Years ago my uncle cheated on my aunt. It was unfortunate that we all knew about it, but my family never stops gossiping and enjoying each other’s misfortunes and tribulations. So we all knew he cheated and then we all knew that she’d forgiven him. She had to legitimise it to all of us. ‘It’s only sex, not love,’ she defended her defence of him. But years later she told me, drunk, that it felt like everything and nothing depending on how she looked at it. ‘It’s only bodies and touching and a few minutes of animal and then over.’ My aunt was right, it was meaningless. ‘Except it’s everything.’ She was right twice and caught in contradictory truths. I think of this when I turn over ‘sex work is work’ in my mind, because it is, and then it isn’t. Sex and meaning can be pulled apart but reunite quickly. Isn’t that what we are struggling with? Even when we are conscious and intellectual and reasonable, our physiological responses might be more basic – which David from Indecent Proposal is going to demonstrate for us beautifully.
The film leaps out of bed and into a legal office. A rotund lawyer takes a call from David. Does he know who John Gage is? Of course he does, ‘he’s a billionaire and a major poon hound’. Awkward pause. Does David wish to sell his wife via a lawyer who speaks more respectfully about women? Or does he want the man buying his wife to be less of a player? We’ll never know. The silence is over. David explains how they met Gage and what the deal is. ‘How could you do this?’ asks the circular lawyer – we assume the guy is an uptight monogamist who thinks you shouldn’t rent your wife out – ‘I could have got you TWO million.’ It’s a misdirect, hahaha, this film is a comedy. Now the lawyer says he has to ask about ‘the moral issue’ … his fee, another misdirect, hahaha. The lawyer wants 5 per cent of the million. David is the pimp and the lawyer is the pimp’s pimp and we’re all chuckling away in the nineties.
The scene transitions, taking the lawyer with it. Now he is sitting opposite John Gage and going through the stipulations of the sex contract. We can see it’s very professional and above board because there is a fountain pen. The men have a fun chat discussing what happens if Gage is impotent (he still pays) or dies in the act (he still pays*). Finally, all the men are happy with the deal and they leave the office to collect the person who has been sold. Diana looks pale and worried as her husband and lawyer leave. Demi Moore is doing some delicate acting, a wobbly ‘holding back tears’ face. John Gage tells Diana not to worry, he doesn’t bite. How reassuring to know that the person paying to have intercourse with you won’t use their teeth.
David is having a celebratory snack with his sphere lawyer, who tells him, ‘I couldn’t have got five hundred for my girlfriend. Not that I’d do that. But it’s okay that you did.’ It’s a rollercoaster of a sentence that manages to reinforce that women have a monetary value, insult his own partner, whom he appears to think he owns, and then assert moral respectability. He adds, ‘For a million bucks I’d sleep with him.’
HEY THAT’S AUDREY’S JOKE.
Also, it’s not a million bucks, it’s a million bucks minus 5 per cent, which is $950,000. The lawyer of all people should know that. David checks his watch and realises what time it is: time to change his mind! He runs through the hotel looking for John Gage’s room, he is sweating and rolling his eyes. He catches an elevator – I don’t think he’s been in one before, he’s bashing his fists on the walls rather than pressing the buttons or doing a wee. John Gage’s apartment is empty apart from a Hispanic cleaner. ‘Up, up,’ she gestures, and points in a way I thought was crudely sexual until I realised she meant THE ROOF.
David arrives on the top floor as a helicopter takes off with Diana in it. She’s not driving because she’s not being played by Tom Cruise. David’s hair spreads out in all directions, flailing in the wind. I know it’s just air displaced by the helicopter but it looks like really emotional hair acting.
John tells Diana that she’s in charge, but she wasn’t driving the helicopter and she’s not driving this. People who hire the services of sex workers repeatedly reassure themsel
ves of ‘choice’ as an antidote to the fact that they’re paying someone to do something they don’t want to.
But that’s all employment—
Is this pragmatism? Okay.
The film hides the sex between Diana and Gage, we are left to imagine it. We do not know if it was work or pleasure. Diana reappears at the hotel in the morning. David is exhausted from running around and punching lifts. He smears her lipstick and then they smooch passionately. The film does not allow us to do a scientific examination of David’s sperm load the next time he ejaculates but we must presume it would have high motility due to sperm competition. John Gage’s too, actually.
Perhaps David could write ‘How to Sell Your Wife to a Billionaire’ for Literotica?
The film is half over, indecency has been proposed and consummated. David and Diana go to the bank and find that the house David was building has been purchased by somebody else, bummer.
Diana tends to ripe tomatoes on a sunny day, but David wants to talk about when she had sex with Gage. ‘Was it good?’ he asks. David thought he could get over it, but he can’t. Being a human being, a conscious animal, means that we often have a split between what we think and what our body feels. Our intellect and our wife may remind us ‘it meant nothing, it was just sex’, but natural selection has built us to be jealous. David is battling this even though he was sculpted by a scriptwriter rather than evolution. He is rooting through Diana’s bag for clues, shouting and throwing stuff – I bet Professor Takahashi would love to slip David into an fMRI and see what his fictional amygdala is up to.
