Posted: Mar 20, 2011 2:45 am
sprite wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote: My explanations still hold; the awkwardness of the situation and the habituation (the level of exposure males have to pornographic images) could result in a sex difference that is independent of any biological difference.
But neither men nor women had been exposed to bonobo sex before and the straight women will have been exposed to lesbian sex more than straight men to gay sex so habituation is not the issue here. And the awkardness of the situation is the same for both sexes.
The specific exemplars are irrelevant, as the effect will be a result of generalisation and not a concretely learnt concept. In other words, if I'm driving along and I see a slightly orange truck with flashing lights and the word "FIRE" on the side, I'm going to treat it like a fire truck even if it's not red. The beauty of learning is that we don't need to be reinforced for specific behaviors in order for us to display them.
sprite wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:I'm not sure what point the "secrecy" of them is? Cultural fads are caused by common environmental factors, whether everyone engaging in them are aware of the popularity of the thing is irrelevant.
I would agree that what goes on in the head re. specific sexual fantasies have got there from images from the environment.
I did say earlier that women's 'rape' fantasies may be due to the environmental portrayal of sex being mainly created by men so women take their images from the expression of male sexual 'wants'.
This is a problem we have re 'what do women want' when women have, and have had, such a minor public presence. Women are reactive to expressions by men rather than being initiators of what occurs in public.
And that's why some of us look to wider nature for some clues of what women might themselves be - Hrdy's'The Woman That Never Evolved' for example.
No doubt you would argue that this is irrelevant to the here and now but personally I'm sick of hearing about the great mystery that is the human female. I absolutely believe that as well as looking at the male-created world we live in and and in which women react, that the evolutionary biology of sex and the sexes provides some essential basics. If we do not understand those basics then we simply continue to flounder around and women continue to be susceptible to sexual manipulation.
The problem is that we have to establish that these basics apply at all.
sprite wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by "male bias in the representation of female nature"?
Perhaps my previous point gives you a clue?
Or to take Darwin as an example - the coy (rather than discriminating) female etc. But then Darwin also came up with 'female choice' as one side of sexual selection. It took one hundred years for this to actually even start to be accepted.
And then suddenly with feminism and 'sexual liberation' and 'sexual freedom' female animals are 'discovered' to be mating with far more males than they 'ought' according to the science.
Then we get thrown over to the polar opposite - women are actually at least as promiscuous as men. It all fits with the current thinking about the sexes being the same and that monogamy is unnatural and enforced by religion etc etc. Men can get loads more sex with loads more women, sexual rejection by females of males isn't 'natural', rape isn't real, women love to be in sex work, men don't 'naturally' want to stay around with one woman and raise kids together. Women don't want this either.
But hold on. Evolutionary biology and what happens in other species never showed evidence for this.
One version gives us the 'madonna' and the other version the 'whore' ie the two unreal female natures that men want depending on whether they want a wife or casual sex.
I believe there are some basics about sex which need to be understood.
And I believe that knowing as much as possible about the evolution of sex and the sexes is the best protection against manipulative use of cherry-picked or even false evidence.
I'm not sure if "whore" is the correct word to use for the idea that women are just as promiscuous as men, as men aren't "whores". This idea seems to be consistent with what we find in psychology; that men and women think about sex just as often, both rank sex as equally important in their lives, etc etc. This doesn't mean that women are whores, of course, because men aren't whores - there is variation, some are indiscriminate and fuck anything that moves, some are virginal altar boys, and most are pretty selective depending on whether they like the person or not.
I agree that there might be a patriarchal bias in the interpretation of this fact - that is, just because women "want it" just as much as men doesn't mean that rape doesn't occur, because rape occurs in men too. It doesn't, or shouldn't, justify any excuse that "secretly" she wanted it, and legally such an excuse would get thrown out of court when there is evidence of requests for the man to stop. Most of the claims you've brought up appear to be pretty broad and ones that are partially true but clearly inapplicable to large groups of people - for example, "women love to be in sex work" is essentially a meaningless statement. Some will enjoy it, some will hate it, and most will just see it as another job. As long as these women aren't forced into it by other people though, and they are consenting adults, then whether they love it or not isn't too important and the evolutionary nature of female sexuality shouldn't even come into it.
At the base of it though, I think it's important to separate "male bias" from "patriarchal bias".
In what sense, behaviorally? In some species, undoubtedly.
sprite wrote:As you probably think that irrelevant, do you think that human sexuality is competely learned? That we are born blank slates re. our sexuality?
Not at all, but undoubtedly some of it is. The difficulty is figuring out which is which.
sprite wrote:It is actually difficult to tackle this with someone who only considers the here and now relevant, but I'll give it a go.
I want to go right back to anisogamy. I don't know how much you know about this but basically once upon a time ()sex cells were of one size. Selection led to sex cells of two distinct types (I can discuss this in much more detail if you wish). At about the same time multi-celled animals evolved. These first animals were hermaphrodites (I can go in to the reasons this is most likely so if you wish) so bodies of one type produced the two types of sex cell ie not yet male and female bodies.
Selection led to two sexes which now experienced different selection pressures depending on whether they produced eggs or sperm.
While sharing more or less the same genome mechanisms evolved to alter development depending on whether the body was producing one sex cell or the other.
So we get sexual dimorphism.
If sexuality is the same for both sexes then how could sexual dimorphism evolve?
This is a misleading question. The issue is not whether sexuality has been the same for both sexes in our evolutionary history, the question is what aspects of our current behavior can be explained by evolutionary processes and what aspects can be explained by learning processes.
sprite wrote:*snip*
So your question 'What difference between male and female sexuality?' if you just mean humans implies that you think that humans are either monogamous and so have little difference like gibbons, which evidence very much goes against, or you think that humans have evolved something unique which means they can have different selection pressures on males and females but these do not affect their bodies and behaviours - any difference is about something else.
So you are suggesting that while in other species differential reproductive success within each sex is different and results from differences in bodies and behaviours and leads to the spreading of certain different traits in each of the sexes, in humans differential reproductive success has done nothing.
Or do you think differential reproductive success in other species also does nothing which is inherited?
No, what I was asking for was simply evidence based examples of differences in gender based sexuality (in humans). And, specifically, evidence which helps us differentiate between aspects that are learnt, and those that have evolved.
sprite wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:And it's also necessary to understand how our evolved biology is massively shaped by learning and culture. Hence why indisputably biological things like hunger and thirst are often a function of learning and the environment.
From things you have said elsewhere I'm presuming that this is basically about pleasure/pain doing the teaching?
So if we see a difference in pleasure and pain between the sexes what would that tell us?
I'm not sure what you mean by this... We see no difference in the fundamental learning processes of males and females. The "pleasure/pain" variable of learning is one of the oldest evolved traits that we know of, and it's likely to be universal across all species (at least, it is universal in all tested species).
sprite wrote:Two quite different examples.
Firstly back to hermaphrodites. In most, though not all, simultaneous hermaphrodites each one tries to avoid being inseminated while trying to inseminate the other. Is there some pleasure connected to insemination and pain connected to being inseminated? Why would that be? In some cases there is in fact genuine pain - being stabbed and the seminal fluid burning through the skin, for example. But even in the case of fish where the gametes are simply being released there is still this difference. It would appear to be painful to release eggs but not sperm? So we get 'sperm' trading where the most keen to mate releases eggs first - does the more painful thing? - and then the exchange commences.
Why have they evolved to experience different pleasure or pain in relation to eggs and sperm do you think?
In the few hermaphrodites where it seems to be preferable to receive the sperm it appears to be because the sperm is digested ie used as food rather than to fertilize eggs. Far less painful when sperm is a useful food source. (Then we get males evolving chemicals in the ejaculate or the 'love darts' of snails which stop their sperm being digested by the mate).
I'm not sure what this example is trying to suggest?
sprite wrote:Secondly a quite different example, chimpanzee (and bonobo) female dispersal.
Males always stay in their birth group, females mostly disperse.
There was a fascinating tv documentary recently about a community of chimpanzees that has become isolated in a steep narrow valley. The land around them was bare and dangerous to venture in to. One female had reached puberty and kept going to the edge and looking across the bare land. She actually did set off to find a new community but returned a few days later having obviously failed to cross the bare land even though it was only a few miles to forest and other chimpanzees.
So the males, presumably, feel pleasure in remaining in their birth group but the females when they reach puberty feel pain and seek pleasure elsewhere? The sexes experience differences in pleasure and pain? Why? Does this not mean that they have some innate difference which means they experience these pleasure/pain differences?
It's impossible to tell from such an example, as the females would have vastly different learning experiences from the males..
This doesn't seem relevant to my original point though, which was that even fundamental biological needs are not simply a function of evolution. As a very simple example, even though eating and hunger is most likely an evolved trait, we still eat even when we aren't hungry - like when we go out on dates, or to cheer ourselves up, or at birthday parties, etc. The point is that sometimes we do topographically identical behaviors for vastly different reasons, and if we tried to attribute the "cheering up eating" to an evolutionary process, then we'd be flat out wrong. The same applies to thing like sex - given the correct learning environment, a person with a "low sex drive gene" (for simplicity's sake) could become the most lascivious horn dog, and equally someone with the "aggressive sex gene" could become someone who isn't turned on by anything but very gentle, sweet lovemaking.
In other words, we do these behaviors for a number of vastly different reasons, and to treat them all as a singular group is a mistake.
You haven't demonstrated that though. You've just pointed out that sexual selection is a real evolutionary process, that reproduction cycles can form part of sexual selection, and then asserted that human behavior can be explained by this process.
sprite wrote:It is not about conscious decision making necessarily but as you might argue it is perhaps about pleasure and pain. Hence the extreme pain women feel regarding true rape.
Or that girls feel in societies where they are married off to men twice their age or older though no doubt a pleasure for the men.
Are you really suggesting that our aversion to rape is because it means that we have no control over our evolutionary futures?
sprite wrote:It would be a very unfortunate state if we had a situation where men and women were assumed to have the same pleasure/pain experience rather than different ones. I'm sure this is part of the problem regarding sexual rejection for men. Even some have asked this question on these forums, and a gay friend once asked me the same ie why not just enjoy the sex? So we get all kinds of theories from men about how women are teasing them, leading them on, manipulating them, being vengeful etc etc. If men think women really feel the same as they do about sex ie any sex is better than none, then we have a serious problem.
Some women do, some women don't. But that's not really the question, because even if we could demonstrate that biologically men and women have the same default setting for sex, we would still expect men to find it more pleasurable than women in our current society. So the fact that we find this doesn't tell us anything about our evolutionary past as it is predicted by two separate theories.
I'm confused by your last line: do you really think men believe that "any sex is better than none"? Part of the reason I wanted to differentiate "male bias" from "patriarchal bias" above is precisely this reason - stereotypes exist for both sexes and the patriarchy can be damaging to both. So, this bias might lead to a belief that women should be pure virgins and any girl that ever has sex is a "whore", but it also leads to the hilariously mistaken view that men love sex, that it takes up a lot of their life, and that they'd do almost anything to get it.
I think we do have a problem, but it's probably more to do with the cartoon characters of each sex that our society has created.
sprite wrote:This is not like hunger or thirst which is the survival part of natural selection, it is about sex/reproduction which is about two different sexes where selection acts differently (except in true genetic monogamy).
It's still the same principle - biological processes are appropriated by learning mechanisms.
sprite wrote:If you then argue that the differences men and women feel about pleasure in connection to sex is learned then if women say that 'actually that experience was painful' the response from him is that it is only because she has learned incorrectly? Could she not argue that, no, his pleasure in that experience is because he has learned incorrectly? Who decides?
This is an odd response. Are you suggesting that if your evolutionary explanation is correct, then it's perfectly reasonable for the man to respond to the women by suggesting she has evolved incorrectly? It's nonsensical.
We're talking about science, the results are descriptive not prescriptive. If men and women have evolved to enjoy sex to different levels, then that's just a fact, neither one is "right" or "wrong". Our legal system covers the rest - if a man wants to argue that he didn't rape a woman because she's evolved/learnt to secretly like sex as much as him, he'll still get thrown in jail if she didn't consent to it.
sprite wrote:Sex is not about sharing fluids but about a one way journey of sex cells from him to her. Not a minor difference.
Arguably true, but discussing the evidence surrounding how this affects behavior is the problematic part. This is the key part of the disagreement. I accept sexual selection occurs, and I accept that it's probably occurred in humans (I see no reason to doubt it). However, this doesn't not mean that we can automatically attribute any differences between men and women to sexual selection, and just because a behavior is sexual does not validate that leap in logic at all.