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	Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 (Archive Post)

Masturbation as Cultural Construct

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Knowing Thyself

Historian Thomas W. LaFleur explains how the stigma of masturbation rose and fell (heh) in Solitary Sex.

What set the ball rolling was the publication in 1712 of the indulgently titled Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES.

In London's booming coffeehouse scene, its 17 printings sold like so many thousands of lattes. Its unnamed author, Mr. Laqueur determines, was John Marten, who had earlier written a popular treatise on venereal disease, and who was clapped in irons in 1708 for obscenity. Marten had then reappeared as a "surgeon," purveying remedies for ills caused by "willful self-abuse," which his book luridly detailed. ...

So a trade came to flourish, from then until World War I, in devices like erection alarms, sleeping mitts, cradles that raised bedsheets away from danger zones, and hobbles to keep girls from spreading their legs. The last of those, notes Mr. Laqueur, highlighted one startling aspect of the contagion: that it affected women as much as men. ...

But the cultural practice that most provoked anxiety about solitary pleasures, in Mr. Laqueur's view, was the reading of novels [which] put readers at risk of "the solipsism of private vice." Many paintings depicted bourgeois women in private, enrapt with love letters, or spent after their "one-handed books" tumbled aside as they swooned, variously en déshabille or fully in flagrante. ...

The frequency of this coupling of fiction and friction surprised Mr. Laqueur. "I hadn't understood that this was part of the commercial revolution in print," he says.

7:34:45 PM    comments [] trackback []
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Monday, September 1, 2003

Hidden Ovulation + Narrow Pelvis = Why Your Wife Won't?




Here's an essay/excerpt from a new book called Sex, Time and Power. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, so I don't know if I can actually recommend it, but it does seem to have a VERY provocative thesis.

BIG BRAIN, NARROW PELVIS
By Leonard Shlain

Since our genetic makeup has changed very little in the last 150,000 years, I will make the key assumption that the main features of modern men's and women's reproductive life histories do not differ substantially from those present at the outset of our species. There can be no doubt that culture can affect sexual behaviors, but the features I will be referring to are more basic. For example, I assume that the average length of a contemporary woman's menstrual cycle and that of a current man's obsession with sex are both innate traits that ancestral humans exhibited. ...

I will hypothesize that the male's behavior evolved soon afterward in response to the female's lead. In fact, I will argue that the history of our species could be written from the perspective that males have spent the last 150,000 years trying to regain the power they so emphatically lost to females when we differentiated away from Homo erectus. By examining the habits of modern human males and females, we can infer the many changes that emerged when the new, improved Homo sapiens female debuted in Nature's garden.

The catalogue begins with the absence in Eve's daughters of some sort of signal that would inform a male that they were ovulating. Unlike the vast majority of other females, the one belonging to the human line does not advertise her ovulatory burst. With very few exceptions, other species' females have a distinct period of sexual receptivity during which they experience a powerful instinctual drive to mate. To the males of her species, a female emanates a distinctive "green light," whether olfactory, visual, auditory, gestural, or some combination thereof. These episodic heights of female sexual desire are exquisitely timed to coincide with her ovulation. Previously uninterested males are alerted by her attention-grabbing signals.

Estrus, as this upsurge is called in female primates, promotes harmony between the sexes. When both male and female are equally excited about mating, it is likely that they will have an amicable and mutually rewarding encounter. Obviously, a considerable benefit accrues to the species if mating occurs in synchrony with ovulation. Sperm meets ovum, and conception occurs. Eve's daughters, however, lack this most basic sexual semaphore, having replaced it with concealed ovulation. Human ovulation is so cryptic that most women remain unaware when, precisely, their eggs have departed from their ovaries.

Further obscuring the timing of her ovulation, the human female acquired the potential to engage in sex, if she desired, 365 days of the year, during pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, and even after menopause. ...

The innovations distinguishing the human female from other mammalian females mentioned thus far pale when compared with her most spectacular new feature. She became the first species who possessed the willpower to refuse consistently to engage in sex around the time she was ovulating. For that matter, she was the first animal of either sex , of any species, capable of deciding to remain celibate if she so desired.

This resolve is the heart of Response W. This is the gift Natural Selection bestowed upon her for having to endure Factor X, high maternal mortality and painful childbirth. It is something that had heretofore never existed in the animal kingdom. Philosophers call it Free Will. And herein lies the crux of relations between the sexes. African Eve and her daughters developed the determination to choose consciously a course of action that overrode the instinctual circuits that drive every other species' females to copulate when they ovulate. Females of some other species may be able to choose which male among multiple suitors upon which they wish to confer their favors; an occasional female of any species may decide not to mate with anyone or at any time. But the human species was the first in which all the females evolved the capacity to decide consciously to refuse to mate during any one ovulation or all the time.

* * * *

Leonard Shlain is the Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF. He is also the author of "Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light" (HarperCollins, 1991) and "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image"(Viking, 1998).

Has anybody else out there read this yet? How does it vary from Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind?



I'm also interested in whether this guy has a political axe to grind. His statement of his thesis is a bit worrisome in that regard.

6:58:24 PM    comments [] trackback []
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