Science and Lust

Rebecca Coffey

• Publisher: Beck and Branch
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780997264449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sexual Health & Sexuality

In twelve lively essays by award-winning science journalist Rebecca Coffey, SCIENCE & LUST answers questions you never thought to ask.

How did kissing and romantic love evolve in humans? What do rats in polyester pants have to do with human sexuality? Are the wives of tall men really happier? Why do women prefer men in (or near) red? What are the telltale signs of the female narcissist? What are some science tips for building sex appeal? Are extramarital affairs really dangerous to a man’s health? And is it true that women can’t always tell when they’re sexually aroused

Coffey’s journalism has been featured in The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Oakland Tribune, Scientific American, Discover magazine, PsychologyToday.com, and on radio and television nationwide.

Science and Lust is Volume 1 of the BRAINY SEX series. More information is at www.BrainySex.com.

Do Pygmy Chimps Dream
of Electric Lips?

Maybe you’ve already heard.

In the fall of 2016 a 1993 study about rats wearing polyester won one of Harvard University’s Ig Noble prizes, awarded to bona fide scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

Ahmed Shafik had dressed 75 male rats in different types of pants. Some pants were polyester. Some were a polyester-cotton blend. Some were cotton. Some were wool. The rats had to wear the pants for 12 months. During the course of that year, the rats wearing polyester had far less sex than the other rats. Shafik speculated that the electrostatic potentials of their polyester pants generated electrostatic fields that reduced the sex drives of those rats.

And he may have been right. But something else might have accounted for at least some—and maybe even all—of the reduced sexual activity.

Could it be that no female rat of discernment wants to have sex with a guy wearing polyester? Rather than showing an effect on sex drives of electrostatic fields, did the Shafik study reveal a cultural impediment to intimacy in rats? In rat society, is polyester passé?

And, if cultural differences can ruin a rat’s intimate life, can it also lay waste to a human’s?

Look First to Freud

In his 1930 treatise Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud claimed that humans need help keeping innate, beastly impulses at bay. He thought humans are more individualistic than communally minded, and he said that their selfish, instinctive urges toward pleasure create psychological trouble when they bump up against civilization’s demand for conformity. Freud believed that men and women are hardwired to be as self-centered and destructive as the great apes are, and that it is civilization that forces them to live cooperatively.

That point of view pretty much prevailed until the late 1960s when British zoologist Desmond Morris suggested that Freud might be wrong about humans—and about all great apes. Morris thought that humans aren’t self-centered and destructive by heritage because the great apes aren’t self-centered and destructive. Like Freud, who was somewhat of a genius at catching headlines, Morris was a great front man for his own ideas. He wrote The Naked Ape, which in 1969 was published to much acclaim. In it and in interviews that were part of his book tour he made just enough surprising observations and speculations to—well, to sell 23 million copies. Here are two such observations and speculations.

Observation: Women evolved larger breasts and plumper hips than are typical of non-human primate females. Speculation: Walking upright meant that their swollen, red labia were no longer “in men’s face” so to speak. Breasts and buttocks evolved to serve as attractants.

Observation: Relative to body size, men have the biggest penises of all primates. Speculation: This, too, is a direct result of erect posture. Once everyone was standing up and frankly assessing each other, men, like women, needed an attractant.

Unlike Freud, who thought that humans’ bestial heritage is a problem that needs reigning in, Morris proclaimed that humans’ heritage helped both humans and their primate ancestors thrive. Yes, it may have been six million years ago that the human line separated from that of its primate cousins. But at least around 44 million years of primate hardwiring predated that split. Biologically and neurologically, modern humans are much more animal than human. We may be animal culturally, as well. Great apes today live cooperatively in small, isolated tribes that are governed by the tribes’ rigid social hierarchies. Which is to say, even great apes have a civilization, and probably they did long ago.

Seen through this lens, civilization is not, as Freud thought, a recent invention that prevents humans from acting out their most base impulses. Rather it’s an expression and refinement of our early animal culture that, even today, helps us be our best animal selves.

Rather convincingly, Morris argues that the difference between tribal homo sapiens sapiens and today’s homo sapiens sapiens is merely that there are now about 200,000 – 300,000 times more people per square inch than there were way back when. (Actually, he said “100,000 times more,” but Earth has become far more populated since 1969.) According to Morris, crowding, not human nature, is the primary problem disrupting modern behavior. Morris likens the crazy behaviors of some of today’s humans to the disturbing, introverted, anti-social behaviors of caged wild animals. Caged chimps smear their excrement, pluck their hair, and bite themselves, sometimes fatally. So can especially harried humans, sometimes.

If Morris was right instead of Freud, the idea that ethics and morality are somehow a result of civilization is hogwash. Instead, they reflect our bestial past. In which case people who extol decency, righteousness, and honor as uniquely human qualities have got their facts topsy turvey. What’s more, if civilization itself is characteristic of primates in general, there is no such thing as “pre-civilization” or “pre-culture” regarding human heritage. Any search to understand how culture has enriched or diminished humans’ experience of intimacy shouldn’t bother comparing non-human primate behaviors with human ones.

It might be more helpful to look at intimate behaviors across today’s living cultures. But “intimate behaviors” is too broad a category to easily consider. Even “kissing” is, because there is a splendid variety of them.

Kissing

A point on which Morris and Freud agree is that kissing may have originated in the mother-infant bond. When adults kiss their infants—or each other—they may be re-exciting the pleasure they once took in being nursed. Morris thinks they may also be re-exciting the pleasure of receiving pre-masticated food spit lovingly into their mouths. Regarding bottle babies, plenty of whom enjoy kissing—well, it may be that, evolved as we all are from the great apes and their eons of nursing love, we are all hard-wired to like it.

Alas, just as the first nursing human baby neglected to take pen in hand and make note of his or her pleasure at taking in nutrition, no one recorded the pleasure of the first romantic kiss. We do know, however, that lips were eroticized no later than about 5,000 years ago. The Sumerians decorated their lips and eyes with crushed gemstones. Roughly 3,000 years later Cleopatra painted her lips with red pigments squeezed from mashed-up bugs.

Red has survived in lip color ever since.

Why Red?

The color itself seems to be of primal importance to humans. In research published in 1969 anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay analyzed 110 languages and found that all had names for black and white. Whenever one of the studied cultures had a name for a third color, the color named was red.

Research psychologist Andrew Eliot and social psychologist Henk Aarts later reported that, in their lab, the sight of the color red enhanced the force and velocity of adults’ motor output. They speculated that, to prehistoric humans, that color signaled danger. But women hardly paint their lips red in order to instill fear in men. Might red also signal berries? Fresh meat? And, if so, does red...