bluprnt 4 rvolution: Sex

Oh, penis chopping humour

This is a great article from Salon on one family's decission to circumcise their son. I like to think I would have chosen otherwise but their family sounded horrid. Sometimes I think Italian guilt hedges Jews' but I just might be wrong.

A snippet,

"The foreskin, the article continued, is a natural part of the human anatomy, and there's no reason it should be removed. And then the kicker: "Parents should enjoy the arrival of a new child with as few worries as possible. The birth of a son in the US, however, is often fraught with anxiety and confusion. Most parents are pressured to hand their baby sons over to a stranger, who, behind closed doors, straps babies down and cuts their foreskins off..."

That was about enough. The article was actually shrill beyond measure. I knew there was a reason I hadn't taken women's studies classes in college."

Full article in more:

The unkindest cut

When our son was born, my wife decided circumcision was barbaric, but my parents insisted it was an essential Jewish tradition. Behold the sad tale of how one foreskin tore a family apart.
By Neal Pollack

Jan. 09, 2007 | A couple of weeks before my son, Elijah, was born, I was doing something very important on my computer when my wife, Regina, entered my office.

"I was curious about something," she said.

"Sure."

"I wanted to know if you had any feelings about circumcision."

"Nope."

"I was doing some research..."

With Regina, that's always a dangerous clause.

"The American Pediatric Association doesn't recommend circumcision anymore. It used to be medically recommended, but now they're neutral."

"I would say that I'm neutral on the topic as well."

"They don't use anesthetic, Neal. They cut off nerve endings and it decreases sexual sensitivity. In two words: It's barbaric. I can't do it to him. I just can't."

"You must leave me to think on this question for a while," I said, and yes, I do talk like that sometimes.

I went to the usual source for village elders who are trying to solve a tough ethical problem: An article in Mothering magazine. Regina had helpfully supplied the link for me. It said that Western cultures, until the nineteenth century, had no tradition of circumcision. The Greeks and the Romans passed laws forbidding "sexual mutilation" after coming into contact with the cultures of the Middle East. It became more common during the anti-masturbation hysteria of the Victorian era. Doctors claimed that circumcision cured everything from epilepsy and tuberculosis to headaches, eczema, and bed-wetting. At this point, the article became truly interesting and relevant, if a bit didactic and terrifying. It called circumcision a "radical practice" that didn't begin until the cold war era, "part of the same movement that pathologized and medicalized birth and actively discouraged breastfeeding." Until the 1970s, hospitals didn't even have to seek parental permission to perform the surgery.

The foreskin, the article continued, is a natural part of the human anatomy, and there's no reason it should be removed. And then the kicker: "Parents should enjoy the arrival of a new child with as few worries as possible. The birth of a son in the US, however, is often fraught with anxiety and confusion. Most parents are pressured to hand their baby sons over to a stranger, who, behind closed doors, straps babies down and cuts their foreskins off..."

That was about enough. The article was actually shrill beyond measure. I knew there was a reason I hadn't taken women's studies classes in college. Still, I thought, maybe circumcision is wrong after all. Maybe everything I'd always thought about my penis, and, by extension, the world, is also wrong. For the first time in two decades, I'd been forced to stare my Judaism right between the ringlets. I'd arrived at my first Reb Tevye moment; I was no longer the tailor Motel Kamzoil.

On the one hand, I thought, Jewish men get circumcised. It's what we do, or what gets done to us. I've been circumcised my whole life, and my dick works fine. Hell, I thought. It works better than fine.

On the other hand, maybe Regina was right. Maybe circumcision really did decrease sexual sensitivity. Was that something I wanted to deny my son? Wouldn't his life be painful enough? Wait a second. My son wasn't even born yet, and I was already thinking about the quality of his future orgasms. Something felt improper.

This was a very hard decision for me, so I did what any good Jewish boy would do in such a situation.

I called my mother.

"Hey, Mom," I said.

"Neal! Honey! It's wonderful to hear your voice! How are you?"

"OK."

"And how's Regina feeling?"

"She's hanging in there."

"Poor thing."

"Yeah. Listen, Mom, I wanted to talk to you about something."

"Of course, honey."

"Regina and I were thinking about not circumcising Elijah..."

It's hard to describe exactly what my mother's voice did at that moment, but "convulsed" is probably the closest word I can find.

"No, oh, no no no Neal. Don't say that to me. We're prepared to take anything. But you have to circumcise him."

Prepared to take anything, I thought. What did that mean?

"Regina did this research. And..."

"I don't care about Regina's research. She's not Jewish."

"But we were thinking..."

My mother began to openly weep on the phone.

"Oh my God, Neal! I can't believe you're doing this to me! You have to circumcise! You have to!"

"My wife..."

"Your wife is immaterial here. You can't betray six thousand years of Jewish tradition."

Suddenly, my generation's sin of intermarriage lay fully on my back. The fate of the entire diaspora rested on my decision. I saw a God I didn't particularly believe in waving an angry finger at me. An innocent medical inquiry had turned into Sophie's Choice.

"You can't forsake your people," my mother said. "Promise me." I began to quiver.

"I promise, Mother," I said.

"And please don't tell your grandmother about this. She wouldn't understand."

"Yes, Mother."

I sounded like Norman Bates, saying, "Yes, Mother" like that. When I hung up the phone, I went into the bedroom, where Regina had propped up her feet.

"Well?" she said.

"My mother says we'd betray six thousand years of Jewish tradition."

Regina had been ready for that answer. "Oh, does she, now? We'll just see about that! I will not circumcise my son! I will not put him through that pain! I can't bear it!"

"Yes, dear."

Now, just as my mother had five minutes earlier, my wife began to weep.

"You can't make me do it, Neal! You can't! Promise me!"

"Yes, dear."

"Hold me."

"I need some time to think."

I went to the back of the house and closed the door. My parents had said some other strange things to me during the pregnancy. On one family visit, they'd been teasing me, saying that Elijah would probably end up being a "Republican engineer," whatever that was. I said that I'd love him no matter what he became.

"Now you know how we feel," said my mother.

Nice.

Regina pounded on the door.

"Neal! I'm furious with your mother! I'm not Jewish and she's going to have to deal with that! We have to talk, now!"

At that moment, I wanted to buy a plane ticket to Uruguay and never come back. I've always wanted to go to Uruguay because I know that if it got boring, I could be in Brazil or Argentina by lunchtime. But there I was instead in Austin, Texas, and my rational brain had ceased functioning. Something deep, primal, and lizardy emerged. I clawed at my face and pounded my head against the door. What the fuck was wrong with these people?

I subsequently waged a subtle family campaign that mostly involved calling my sisters and saying, "You won't believe what Mom said to me." Regina told some friends, who were suitably appalled, but powerless. My parents were more systematic. They called every member of the family and all of their friends, no matter how distant, to tell them of my potential betrayal. Aunt Estelle e-mailed me to say something like: "We have no idea what's going on with you and your parents. If it were up to us, we'd probably circumcise, but we support your decision either way." That was sweet of her, but the message indicated that my parents were near hysteria. Regina's family, meanwhile, was politic. My sister-in-law said that it would probably be good if Elijah "looked like Daddy," but went no further than that. They were good Protestants and they stayed out of our affairs.

A week went by. I couldn't bear talking to my parents. My brain was a fetid goulash of guilt and resentment. Through a sister, I learned that my mother had said, "I guess I never thought about the fact that Regina wasn't Jewish before."

It's not as though my parents are super-Jews themselves. They go to synagogue, but only occasionally. When they do, they usually complain that everyone there is old and that the dinner they went to with friends afterward was "just OK." I was Bar Mitzvahed because that's what Jews did, not because of some familial covenant with God, or so I thought. Regina's mother, on the other hand, is a devout Sunday churchgoer who prays before dinner and plays in the church handbell choir. One afternoon before Regina and I were married, her mom blurted out poolside, "Neal, how Jewish are you?"

I said, "Um, ahm, I had a Bar Mitzvah and my family, um ... we don't go to temple all the time, but..."

Regina later explained to me that this was the wrong answer. I'd had my anti-Semitism antennae up, but her mother didn't care what my religion was, as long as I was religious. For her, devotion trumped sect. She didn't particularly want to see her daughter with a devout hedonist; the grandson of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, on the other hand, would probably have been fine.

Our wedding had been deliberately, almost absurdly secular. My mother said, "I will not set foot in a church," to which I replied, "What are you, the Bride of Dracula?" But honestly, I didn't want to get married in a church, either, so a lawyer friend of Regina's family married us in her mother's backyard. The ceremony featured a brief denomination-neutral Scripture reading, a testimonial by one of Regina's bridesmaids that mentioned Kahlil Gibran in defiance of my wishes, a Roy Orbison song, and a recitation of The Owl and the Pussycat. Faith wasn't part of our lives, and it was off the table at the wedding. But with Elijah's birth pending, our secular chickens came home to their secular roost.

My father called. I was in no mood to hear from him.

"We're very upset by this," he said. "Your mother hasn't slept."

"Tough. I've got other problems."

"You listen to me, young man!"

"No. You listen to me!"

"We've decided that if you don't have him circumcised, he won't be our grandson."

There is no other hand!

"Are you out of your fucking mind?"

"We demand it."

"You're in no position to demand anything."

"We haven't said anything about you moving to Austin, of which we disapprove, or about that terrible house, or about the kid's stupid name..."

That was it.

"Stupid name?" I said. "Fuck you ... Bernard!"

And then I hung up. More face-clawing, head-pounding, floor-pounding, and Cro-Magnon yowling ensued. Meanwhile, Regina was already a week overdue, and going on about how the stress of Peeniegate would harm Elijah's brain chemistry. That was baggage I wished she hadn't carried on.

She and I lay in bed and talked seriously. What I felt toward my parents went far beyond anger, past resentment, veering toward something close to temporary hatred. This was our first major decision for our child, and my own mother and father were trying to completely take it out of our hands, based on arguments that we found superstitious and naïve. But I also had a larger family to consider, aunts and uncles and cousins and sisters, and, beyond that, a generation of nieces and nephews and second cousins to come, not to mention "six thousand years of Jewish history." If we decided not to circumcise, it might very well rip open a wound in my family life that would take decades to heal (though by writing the previous five pages, I may have just done that anyway).

"We have to," I said.

"I know we do," said Regina, and she began to cry.

That evening, I called home.

"We've decided to circumcise," I said.

"Good," my father said. "I feel like that will connect him to my father. And my grandfather before that. And down through the generations."

He was sincere, and I almost found myself touched. But I must have missed that lesson in Hebrew school. Our traceable family goes back to rural Germany in the eighteenth century whether or not I let someone cut off the cover of my son's glans. After the argument was settled, my mother sent me an e-mail that read, in part, "I hope you will always remember how you treated your parents."

I chose not to reply.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The earliest days of Elijah's life were full of decisions, not as emotionally overwrought as those brought on by Peeniegate, but still difficult. I started to wonder when the "fun" part of fatherhood would kick in. That first night in the hospital, Regina was immobile on camel tranquilizers. I slept, or was supposed to sleep, on a mat on the windowsill of her room, which would have been the perfect size for me if I were Billy Barty. But there was to be no sleep. I spent most of the night trying to figure out how to clean up the steady stream of black tar-like poo that was oozing out of Elijah's asshole. The nurses were sympathetic, since they deal with dozens of new dads every week who cry for help when the defecation starts. They're used to seeing a wastebin full of goo-smeared paper towels.
To my parents' infinite credit, they'd landed in Austin by ten a.m. the day after Elijah was born. I saw them out the window of our room. They had silly grins on their faces, and my dad was carrying an enormous mustard-colored teddy bear with a red bow around its neck. By the end of the day, the bear was on the windowsill, Regina was sitting up, and we were all taking turns holding this sweet-smelling sack of wheat on our shoulders. I took special pleasure in rocking in the chair the hospital had provided, singing a song of my own devising to Elijah. It went like this:

"He's Elijahroo/He's a piece of poo/Watcha gonna do?/Whoop-de-whoop-de-whoo!"

Elijah seemed to like that. He also liked it when we all sang his "theme song," to the tune of the theme from Bonanza. It went: "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum…Elijah! (Ba-ba-ba-ba) Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum. Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum…Elijah! (Ba-ba-ba!) Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum!" And so on.

Elijah began to wail for no discernible reason.

"Oh, Elijah," I said. "Don't be such a goddamn baby!"

For me, all was happy cell-phone calls and merry e-mail. I've always been fond of occasions that force people to talk to me nicely whether they want to or not. By those standards, this was the preeminent moment of my life. One e-mail, from someone with whom I hadn't been in touch lately, said, "We love you and we love your baby!" Now that was how people should talk to me, I thought. I was a man now and I'd earned respect the hard way, so I definitely deserved a nap.

After forty-eight hours in the hospital, Regina was up and lurching about. Elijah hadn't malfunctioned. I have no idea when it's appropriate for the father to leave the hospital, but I knew that I'd be of much greater use to my family if I got a good night's sleep in my own bed. Regina didn't protest much. "I'd rather have you refreshed and helpful than grumpy and insane," she said.

I picked Hercules up from the neighbor's and let him give me a big long stinky slurp, while I said things like "You've got a new wittle baby brother, yes you do, yes you do..." The house was empty and quiet. I sat in my blue easy chair and reveled in my domain while watching Turner Classic Movies. I made myself a cup of peppermint tea. I took a bubble bath. I treated myself so well you'd think I'd just given birth. By ten p.m., I was in bed with the dog, fresh cotton sheets, and a genre novel. This would be the most peaceful night of my life.

At midnight, the phone rang.

"The nurses are in here," Regina said.

"OK."

"They say he's lost weight."

"That's normal. He's a huge baby."

"They want to supplement with formula."

"Ridiculous. Just tell them no."

We'd done some reading that said formula, while containing all necessary nutrients, didn't have the same disease-blocking attributes as mother's milk. Regina was determined to make Elijah the world's healthiest child.

"They're going to do it unless our pediatrician tells them otherwise," she said. "And he's out of town."

"Oh."

"It's gonna hurt his immune system," she said.

"One dose of formula is going to hurt his immune system?"

"What should I do?"

This was a snap decision that required wisdom I didn't possess. I tried to think of a smart Jewish man from history, like Solomon, and what he would advise. Let's see. Offer to cut the baby in two, and the person who protested the loudest would ... that one didn't work.

"I'm not sure."

Thus, Elijah got supplement he didn't need, and we'd once again learned that the whole point of the world was to unintentionally conspire against its inhabitants. Everyone else, the postpartum nurses at St. David's Memorial Hospital in particular, was trying to destroy our family. For that last twenty-four hours Regina was in the hospital, they became our enemy. First they made our healthy child eat out of a formula tube. Then they said they wouldn't let us check out of the hospital unless we agreed to take him to the pediatrician the next day. After we agreed, they still wouldn't let us check out, because we'd forgotten to record the last time Elijah had urinated.

Amazingly, he did pee, and the next morning, we drove to our pediatrician's office. We'd chosen a nice guy named Rivas, who was about our age. It was sobering to realize that doctors were no longer older authority figures. Rivas bounced into the room.

"How are we all feeling?"

At that moment, I felt about as mentally sharp as a mushroom, but I said, "Fine."

"He didn't mean you," Regina said.

"Right."

We laid Elijah on a cushioned table. Rivas leaned over him.

"Why are you here again?"

"The nurses told us to come," said Regina.

"This child is healthy. I'll see you in three months."

Now, with other health issues out of the way, circumcision loomed. More than two years later, we learned about a guy from Houston called "Max the Mohel," a pediatrician from Houston who performs pretty much every bris in Texas. Since the vast majority of these ceremonies occur within three hours from his home, that's not quite as big a challenge as it sounds. We didn't learn about Max the Mohel in time, but we wouldn't have used him even if we had. Strangely, my parents didn't want a bris. All they cared about was the surgery. It's not like we knew anyone in town to attend a bris anyway; we'd only been living there two months. Also, perhaps I mentioned earlier that Regina didn't want it done at all.

Our pediatrician refused to perform the operation. He recommended a urologist to us. Eight days after Elijah was born, we went to the urologist's office. This is how it works, he said. He would put Elijah on a board and strap down his hands and feet. Then he'd slide a metal ring over the top of the penis, which would cut off the circulation to the foreskin and gradually kill the nerve endings. Over the next week, the foreskin would gradually turn black, and then it would rot off, and then Elijah would be permanently connected to his ancestors.

When Regina called about the procedure, they told her that the doctor used topical anesthetic. That made her feel a little better. When we were actually in the doctor's office, we asked him about that.

"Of course we don't use topical anesthetic," he said. "Everyone knows that stuff doesn't work."

We wouldn't put our son through pain without anesthetic! But by then, it was too late. The doctor took our baby from us and told us to wait in the hall. A few minutes after the procedure, he said, he'd let Regina in to nurse. I went into the waiting room, sat with a six-month-old issue of Sports Illustrated, and tried to remember a time when I wasn't an adult.

Regina and Elijah came out. He was screaming. She was bawling.

"Babe..."

"Let's just go!"

And so I drove us home, which was strange enough considering that Regina usually does all the driving, but even stranger because my newborn son was in the backseat howling because someone had just lopped off the tip of his penis, and my wife was holding him, weeping as though her soul was being ripped from her body, and my heart and throat and face felt clogged with sorrow and grief and mucus and shame, and I could barely see the road through a film of tears and I thought, Oh, this is just fucking great.

About an hour later, my parents, who had since returned to Phoenix, called to see how Elijah was doing, both on the line at the same time.

"How's Elijah?" my mother asked.

"He's asleep. He cried a lot."

"He'll be fine. It didn't hurt at all."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

From the book: "Alternadad" by Neal Pollack. Copyright (c) 2007 by Neal Pollack. Published by arrangement with Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc.
-- By Neal Pollac

Oh! The Woes of the Porn Industry

Apparently the porn industry has its panties in a bunch over HD TV. Becasue of all the detail, porn stars are lining up to have plastic surgery, heaven forfend their faithful minions realize they are actual women.

The biggest problem they find with the technological conversion? Razor burn.

Women, testosterone, and desire

Yet another article from the NYT, this time on testosterone and female sexual desire. Apparently there are about a million testosterone treatment creams being researched by such altruistic angles as Proctor & Gamble (also currently marketing a tampon for girls who haven't gotten their periods yet). Once I had the opportunity to see such a testosterone cream at a Cake Party long ago. Would you believe that the instructions said to rub it in, around your clit, for like 5 minutes? This struck me as completely hillarious.

Anyway, I've been speaking with some girlfriends with babies these days about loss of desire and apparently its so widespread for like a year after birth. You don't even start ovulating again after giving birth until you're breast feeding less than 6 times a day (i.e. when your baby is on solids). So I feel like there's this MASSIVE pink elephant that no one talks about surrounding pregnancy and sexual desire. I am here, doing my part for the ladies.

Interesting factoids:

In a study from 1992 by Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociology professor, and others, 43 percent of women reported some sexual dysfunction, the most prevalent being loss of libido.

Until menopause, women produce, on average, a tenth of the amount of testosterone that men do.

Although the neuroanatomical path of testosterone can be mapped, its underlying behavioral mechanism is not known.

German researchers, writing in The Journal of Endocrinology in 2001, posited the following: "Testosterone might have direct effects on cognitive behavior, e.g., influence the awareness of sexual cues, but it is also suggested that testosterone may act peripherally to enhance sexual pleasure and thereby increase sexual desire and even sexual activity, circumstances and partner permitting."

Professor Laumann's study indicates that by age 30, three-quarters of Americans are either married or living with someone, but they are starting to have "partnered sex" less often than people in their 20's. In their 30's, more people are having sex with a partner a few times a month, and fewer are having sex a few times a week. By their 40's, this disparity more than doubles for both men and women.

Sexual incompatibility is cited as a top reason for divorce in the United States.

Helen Fishcher, our favorite oxitocin researcher, devided up human feelings about these matters into three groups:

LUST: the craving for sexual gratification; Lust is associated primarily with testosterone in both men and women

ROMANTIC LOVE:a focused attention on another, often compared to an opiate-like state; Romantic love is linked with the natural stimulant dopamine and perhaps norepinephrine and serotonin

ATTACHMENT: the feelings of calm, security and union with a long-term partner. Feelings of attachment are produced primarily by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, which at elevated levels can actually suppress the circuits for lust.

very interesting.

selective hormaonal excrution

This is amazing. Elephants have this gland between their eyes and ears that discharges this phermone called frontalin from their temporal lobe. As if that wasn't cool enough, there's two types of frontalin mixed in their come-hither concoction. They are called minus and plus.

Young males have more of the plus frontalin.
But as they mature, the mixtures of plus and minus even out.

So, when the elephants are young, the plus frontalin does nothing for them.
But the even mixture attracts females and repulses males.

It was also cool because they said it's easier to study this in elephants, rather than rats, because when elephants respond to something, it's easy to tell what they think.

Elephants are amazing.

Artists have more sex

Acording to thisthis study, professional artists and poets averaged 4 to 10 sexual partners, while other (British) people averaged only 3.

Aside from both being surprisingly low, this is interesting because it backs up a theory I've always abhored. One Dr. Miller decided that men developed artistic ability in order to woo females. Like bower birds. And females developed the ability to appreciate art so that we could better pick a mate. Booo.

I guess to test the theory, one could see if artists had more babies than others. But still, I think I will automatically hate all theories in which females just evolved things because males were evolving them.

Also interesting, "Volunteers were also assessed for character traits associated with schizophrenia which has previously been linked to creativity. "

Old Sex

This is a beautiful new blog that posts rare old erotica daily. It's just lovely.

Oestrogen makes you pretty

This article falls into the catagory of things I just don't know what to do with. It claims that the more oestrogen you (being female) had in your body during puberty, the prettier and healthier you will look as a woman. They did a study of 59 women and said there was a "very strong coorelation" with the 30 guys and gals who judged beauty.

But I just can't believe it! That one hormone would govern such a complicated affair as beauty. It's social! And political! And has a lot to do with diet! Just one hormone is far too simplistic. And scarey! What happens when New York socialites get their hads on this stuff for their pre teen daughters? I guess it was bound to happen....

Ethnoanimalistical breast augmentation

From the ever-fascinating Stu:
(apparently he's working on bringing them to North America)

BETTER THAN SILICON

Young girls from East Africa (mostly Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda) use whirligig beetles (Gyrinidae) and predaceous diving beetles (Dytiscidae) to stimulate breast growth. The girls will hold the live beetles up to their nipples, where the beetles bite in a defensive reaction. This practice was most widespread in girls in rural communities that were from 7 to 12 years of age.

The bite of the beetles is described as a stabbing, burning pain that eases after 30 to 60 minutes. Two to three days after the bite the breast will be slightly swollen. Most of the girls also reported that their breasts grew bigger in the 6-12 months following the treatment. This bit of ethnobiological knowledge is unique in that it is almost entirely passed on amongst the young girls and not from mother to daughter as would be more common for other traditional knowledge.

In practice in Uganda is slightly different than in Ethiopia and Tanzania. It was common in a bit older girls, from 14 to 15, if they found their breast development to be unsatisfactory, and they would be told about it by their grandma instead of their peers. Also, antlion larvae would sometimes be used instead of the beetles.

Similar practices have also been recorded in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Congo, although it isn't as widespread there.

Water beetles in general produce a wide variety of compounds that are antibacterial and antifungal, as well as often acting as an anaesthetic, narcotic, or toxin to vertebrates. Gyrinids produce a variety of unique norsesquiterpenes in their pygidial glands. These compounds are structurally related to nepetalactone, the active component of catnip. Dytiscids have prothoracic glands that secrete large quantities of a great variety of steroids. Some of the steroids that have been isolated are: progesterone, androsterone, deoxycorticosterone, testosterone, estradiol, cholesterol, and mirasorvone.

Reference:
Kutalek, R., and A. Kassa. 2005. The use of gyrinids and dyctiscids for stimulating breast growth in East Africa. Journal of Ethnobiology 25(1): 115-128.

iDolltry

This is a fascinating article from Salon that it is worth watching their advertisment for.

It's about Real Dolls, these life-sized, silicone, posable, fully-pennetratable, dolls that sell for over 6 grand to lonly men. Amazing. You can even buy different faces and swap them. The article is very wholistic and thankfully does not take the "oh my god , the perves!" angle.

The interesting men are those who have chosen to make the dolls the object of their love rather than just a toy. Those who have been spurned by women and will never go back. There are even tons of websites for these men to show off their dolls and all the hot sex they have convinced themselves they have.

I know, no one's surprised by any of it.

It's just all so modern.

sperm shopping

This is a fascinating article about the history of sperm shopping and the man who took it upon himself to beg genuses to masturbate into cups in order to save humanity.

Super natural selection.

Darwin would have fainted.

Hitler would have jumped up and down and clapped his little leather hands together.

In the end it's about marketing. How to sell the stuff of life.

The "godiva of sperm, prime cuts of American man."

Bizarre Hairworm Reproduction Strategies

First of all, I would just like to say that I knew about this ages ago and if you're interested in finding out even more about the hairworm and other strange organisms, JUST YOU WAIT, becasue "Even More Bizarre Earthlife Reproduction Strategies" by yours truely and Stuart Crawford will be out any day now, that is, any day we get around to starting it....but it will be done soon, by Christmas.

So, the worms, they are aquatic, but they infest grasshoppers, no one knows how, and they slowly eat them and grow and grow. They somehow create protines that cause the grasshopper to only eat what it wants the grasshopper to eat. THEN, when the grasshopper is but a head and an exoskeleton, and the worm is litterally four times the length of the grasshopper, the worm causes the grasshopper to jump into a body of water, so the worm can escape, which it does, and the grasshopper drowns. AMAZING! You can see the grasshopper poised for suicide in the picture.

They also mention another awesome reproduction strategy, that of a wasp that parasitizes an orb-weaving spider in Costa Rica.

"The night before the wasp larva kills its host, it somehow reprograms the spider's web-building activity so that instead of its usual temporary web, the spider constructs a durable platform ideal for the larva to pupate on.

Somehow the larva reprograms the spider into executing, over and over again, just the first two steps in a five-step subroutine from the early phase of web-building.

If the larva is removed just before it can kill its host, the orb weaver will spin a platform-style web that and the following night, but revert to its usual web on the third night, as if it has shaken off some mesmerizing chemical the wasp has injected into its nervous system."

How girl are you?

According to the BBC's online brain gender test, I am 75% male, despite my B cup and apparently functioning uterus.

It's FUN! You are given a series of visual, emotional, and intellectual tests and they tell you how men and women usually score.

Yes, duh, it's flawed, but I'm sure any survivor of childhood therapy will find it as thrilling as I did.

In case you are curious, I'm better than most men and most women on everything except for word association. I got angles perfect, a balanced brain for spot the difference but almost in the guy range, I'm left brained, I'm ever so slightly worse than most women for empathizing, and ever so slightly worse than men for systematizing, my finger ratio is 1:1, I totally ROCKED 3-D shapes thinking I would suck, I split the money 50:50 like any good Montessori child, and I prefer only the manliest of man faces.

Sex crazed anthropologists

You know how funny it is to read studies from the 50's and how they thought black people had smaller heads so they were not as smart? I think there's a lot of that sort of possibility in this study in Discover, but it's still completely interesting.

An anthropologist at U of Arkansas decided that Lucy, everyone's favorite Australopithecus afarensis homonid, was promiscuous because the few male body parts they have from her same species are on average 50% larger than her. This, according to people who apparently do not have anything better to do with their time, means that a few big males probable dominated the mating.

Apparently species where the males are much larger than the females are that way so that males can fight each other for the females. And normally pair bonding species are of similar sizes. So I have two questions:

1) What about species where the females are larger, as is the norm in the animal world?

and 2) If large males are large to fight off other males, does this not imply that winning males simply took the females they were fighting for? And if so, are we forced to once again examine rape as a driving force behind human evolution?

Porn makes you blind

I don't know what to think of this study. It claims that people, more-
so for certain people, will go blind after seeing pornographic images or super gorey ones. I think the use of the word "blind" is just fun because of the stereotype of masturbation making you go blind. Becasue it would seem like people were just distracted more than unable to see.

But what is interesting is that they think the brain might work differently for shocking images than common ones. But I have to think about my whole porn addiction theory. I wonder if people who get addicted to porn are similar to people who get addicted to gore? I mean, it would be nice if all of Gwar's fans were also fans of irony but some of them are completely serious.

Also, I just think the link between sex and violence is always fascinating.

Don't read this, you might cry

You can always trust Stu to uncover studies like this:

Reed et al. (2003) did a study to look at what the causes are of reoccurring yeast infections. They started with a sample of 148 women with yeast infections, 33 of which had a reoccurance of the infection during the study. They then looked at what factors made it most likely for the yeast infection to have reoccurred.

What they discovered was that it didn't matter if their partner was harboring lots of yeast or not (disproving the theory that men act as a reservoir to reinfect women with yeast). There's already lots of the yeast (Candida spp.) all over us, it's presence on the woman's partner didn't really matter.

What they did find is that women who had cunnilingus performed on them were 2.94 times more likely to get a yeast infection again. The next most likely cause was if the woman masterbated using her own saliva (making her 2.66 times more likely to become infected again).

This study didn't look at nonoxynol-9, I hope cunnilingus isn't quite as bad as that...

Eating lots of bread, and not drinking milk, also increased the chances of yeast infection.

REFERENCES

Reed, B. D., P. Zazove, C. L. Pierson, D. W. Gorenflo, and J. Horrocks. 2003. Candida transmission and sexual behaviors as risks for a repeat episode of Candida vulvovaginitis. Journal of Women's Health 12(10): 979-989.

Reed, B. D., D. W. Gorenflo, B. W. Gillespie, C. L. Pierson, and P. Zazove. 2000. Sexual behaviors and other risk factors for Candida vulvovaginitis. Journal of Women's Health & Gender-Based Medicine 9(6): 645-655.

You are your genes

This is perhaps one of the best article I've read in a while. It's from the NYT and about how recent science has discovered a variety of genes in animals that govern complex behaviors, even a mating dance (see picture above). I coudl pull out neat excerpts but you really need to read the entire thing. It will make you change how you look at life.

The article was offline at NYT so it's all in "more."

July 19, 2005
A Gene for Romance? So It Seems (Ask the Vole)

By NICHOLAS WADE
Biologists have been making considerable progress in identifying members of a special class of genes - those that shape an animal's behavior toward others of its species. These social behavior genes promise to yield deep insights into how brains are constructed for certain complex tasks.

Some 30 such genes have come to light so far, mostly in laboratory animals like roundworms, flies, mice and voles. Researchers often expect results from these creatures to apply fairly directly to people when the genes cause diseases like cancer. They are much more hesitant to extrapolate in the case of behavioral genes. Still, understanding the genetic basis of social behavior in animals is expected to cast some light on human behavior.

Last month researchers reported on the role of such genes in the sexual behavior of both voles and fruit flies. One gene was long known to promote faithful pair bonding and good parental behavior in the male prairie vole. Researchers discovered how the gene is naturally modulated in a population of voles so as to produce a spectrum of behaviors from monogamy to polygamy, each of which may be advantageous in different ecological circumstances.

The second gene, much studied by fruit fly biologists, is known to be involved in the male's elaborate suite of courtship behaviors. New research has established that a special feature of the gene, one that works differently in males and females, is all that is needed to induce the male's complex behavior.

Social behavior genes present a particular puzzle since they involve neural circuits in the brain, often set off by some environmental cue to which the animal responds. Catherine Dulac of Harvard has found that the male mouse depends on pheromones, or air-borne hormones, to decide how to behave toward other mice. It detects the pheromones with the vomeronasal organ, an extra scent-detecting tissue in the nose.

The male mouse's rule for dealing with strangers is simple - if it's male, attack it; if female, mate with it. But male mice that are genetically engineered to block the scent-detecting vomeronasal cells try to mate rather than attack invading males.

The mice have other means - sound and sight - of recognizing male and female. But curiously, nature has placed the sex discrimination required for mating behavior under a separate neural circuit aroused through the vomeronasal organ.

"It was very surprising for us," Dr. Dulac said.

The gene that was eliminated from the mice is a low-level member of a presumably complex network that governs the inputs and outputs necessary for mating behavior. The most striking behavioral gene discovered so far is a very high level gene in the Drosophila fruit fly.

The gene is called fruitless because when it is disrupted in males they lose interest in females and instead form mating chains with other males. The male's usual courtship behavior is pretty fancy for a little fly. He approaches the female, taps her with his forelegs, sings a song by vibrating his wing, licks her and curls his abdomen for mating. If she is impressed she slows down and accepts his proposal. If not, she buzzes her wings at him, a gesture that needs no translation.

All these behaviors, researchers discovered several years ago, are controlled by the fruitless gene - fru for short - which is switched on in a specific set of neurons in the fly's brain. The gene is arranged in a series of blocks. Different combinations of blocks are chosen to make different protein products. The selection of blocks is controlled by a promoter, a region of DNA that lies near but outside the fru gene itself.

So far four of these fru gene promoters have been found. Three work the same way in both male and female flies. But a fourth selects different blocks to be transcribed, making different proteins in males and in females. This difference, it seemed, was somehow the key to the whole suite of male courtship behaviors.

Last month Barry J. Dickson of the Austrian Academy of Sciences provided an elegant proof of this idea by genetically engineering male flies to make the female version of the fruitless protein, and female flies to generate the male version. The male flies barely courted at all. But the female flies with the male form of fruitless aggressively pursued other females, performing all steps of male courtship except the last.

How does the male form of the fruitless protein govern such a complex behavior? Dr. Dickson and his colleagues have found that the protein is produced in 21 clusters of neurons in the fly's brain. The neurons, probably connected in a circuit, presumably direct each step of courtship in a coordinated sequence.

Surprisingly, female flies possess the same neuronal circuit. The presence of the male form of fruitless somehow activates the circuit , in ways that are still unknown.

Fruitless serves as a master switch of behavior, just as other known genes serve as master switches for building an eye or other organs. Are behaviors and organs constructed in much the same way, each with a master switch gene that controls a network of lower level genes?

Dr. Dickson writes that other such behavior switch genes may well exist but could have evaded detection because disrupting them - the geneticist's usual way of making genes reveal themselves - is lethal for the fly. (Complete loss of the fruitless gene is also lethal, and the gene was discovered through a lucky chance.)

Though researchers like to focus on specific genes, they are learning that in behavior, an organism's genome is closely linked to its environment, and that there can be elaborate feedback between the two.

Honeybees spend their first two to three weeks of adult life as nurses and then switch to jobs outside the hive as foragers for the remaining three weeks. If all foragers are removed from a hive, the nurse bees will sense the foragers' absence through a pheromone and assume their own foraging roles earlier. As the colony ages however, there are too few nurses, so some bees stay as nurses far longer than usual.

Gene Robinson, a bee biologist at the University of Illinois, has found that a characteristic set of genes is switched on in the brains of nursing bees and another set in foraging bees. This is an effect of the bees' occupation, not of their age, since both the premature foragers and the elderly nurses have brain gene expression patterns matched to their jobs.

Evidently the division of labor among bees in a hive is socially regulated through mechanisms that somehow activate different sets of genes in the bees' brains.

A remarkable instance of genome-environment interaction has been discovered in the maternal behavior of rats. Pups that receive lots of licking and grooming from their mothers during the first week of life are less fearful in adulthood and more phlegmatic in response to stress than are pups that get less personal care.

Last year, Michael J. Meaney and colleagues at McGill University in Montreal reported that a gene in the brain of the well-groomed pups is chemically modified during the grooming period and remains so throughout life. The modification makes the gene produce more of a product that damps down the brain's stress response.

The system would allow the laid-back rats to transmit their behavior to their pups through the same good-grooming procedure, just as the stressed-out rat mothers transmit their fearfulness to their offspring.

"Among mammals," Dr. Meaney and colleagues wrote in a report of their findings last year, "natural selection may have shaped offspring to respond to subtle variations in parental behavior as a forecast of the environmental conditions they will ultimately face once they become independent of the parent."

A full understanding of these behavior genes would include being able to trace every cellular change, whether in a hormone or pheromone or signaling molecule, that led to activation of the gene and then all the effects that followed. Dr. Robinson has proposed the name "sociogenomics" for the idea of understanding social life in terms of the genes and signaling molecules that mediate them.

The genes discovered so far mostly seem to act in different ways and it is hard to state any general rules about how behavior is governed.

"It's early days and we don't have enough information to develop theories," Dr. Robinson said.

A question of some interest is how far the genetic shaping of behavior exists in people. Larry J. Young of Emory University, who studies the social behavior of voles, said that, in people, activities like the suckling of babies, maternal behavior and sexual drives are likely to be shaped by genes, but that sexual drives are also modulated by experience.

"The genes provide us the background of our general drives, and variations in these genes may explain various personality traits in humans, but ultimately our behavior is very much influenced by environmental factors," he said.

Researchers can rigorously explore how behavioral genes operate in lower animals by performing tests that are impossible or unethical in people. "The problem with humans is that it is extremely difficult to prove anything," Dr. Dulac said. "Humans are just not a very good experimental system."

The nose knows sex appeal

An article from New Scientist talks about a new study finding that women prefer odours from potential partners who are genetically dis-similar. This contrasts to earlier studies that claimed women prefered the faces of men who were genetically similar.

Apparently, it all has to do with "the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) - [har har] the huge molecule on cells, unique to each individual, which helps our immune systems to distinguish native from alien cells....The underlying theory is that humans avoid the dangers of inbreeding, and maximise the chances of having genetically fitter children, by selecting partners who have a vastly different MHC from their own."

I think it's rather silly to say "women prefer this, men prefer that." Human diversity is so vast. I think certain people are inclined to find people who are genetically dissimilar and somepeople like to keep it in the family. Humans specialize like bees. There are so many different strategies.

Chicken safe sex

Male cocks [let's all be mature about this] will sometimes have sex with their hens without ejactualting and wasting sperm. Apparently, this keeps them faithful and well satisfied.

This is a great sentence: "The finding may explain why males of many species - from insects to mammals - engage in seemingly meaningless sperm-free sex. "

Har har.

Crazy!: "In 2003, Pizzari and his colleagues showed that male chickens allocated their precious seed according to the likelihood of fathering children. Unfamiliar females always received a fulsome dose, while hens with which the cock had already mated several times ended up receiving little more than ruffled feathers."

Oh man, those mad scientists: "Using cleverly designed harnesses, which prevent cocks from depositing semen into a females’ reproductive tract, the team was able to create two distinct groups - hens that had been mounted, but received no sperm, and hens who had successful, sperm-transferring copulations. ...They found that females that experienced fruitless mountings were equally resistant to subsequent courtship from other males as those females who had received sperm. In fact, the more mountings each female received, the longer her period of fidelity."

Another great sentence: "It is tough to tell why hens, so apt at choosing the best cocks - and expunging semen from undesirable mates just seconds after copulating - could be led astray by such a simple ploy"

A great Article from New Scientist.

A reason to circumcize

If you know me at all, and you very well might not, you know that I'm completely against circumcision. I think its a sick and outdated practice with no basis in actual heath for men who are not going for months without showering. I also think it might be one of the reasons men are so obsessed with their dicks. Imagine that your first experience in life is having someone chop off a piece of your genetalia, it must be traumatic.

BUT, low and behold, my (circumcized) ex boyfriend just sent me this article about how circumcision can lower your chances of contracting HIV by as much as 70%!!!!

Why woudl this work? "Laboratory studies have found that the foreskin is rich in white blood cells, which are favored targets of HIV."

This is amazing. Although it should be put in context. The study was only partially completed because the researchers didn't want to make uncircumcized guys feel bad or something. Very strange. It was done in Africa, in regions where HIV infection is at 30% (east and south Africa).

But, "the lower risk may be the result of cultural practices among those who circumcise. HIV rates are low in Muslim communities, for example, which practice male circumcision but also engage in ritual washing before sex and frown on promiscuity."

So I'm not sure the extent to which this study applies to people in North America.

Gay, straight, or lying

This is really the sort of study I live for.

In a recent and huge study (5,000 men), only 6.9% of men said they were attracted to other men, and a mear 1.7% said they were bisexual.

THEN, and this is the good part, "a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men."

They used 101 young men: 33 bisexuals, 30 heteros and 38 homos.

So, they're implying that that 1.7% is lying. Possibly to themselves.

Apparently, "And a 1994 survey by The Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40 percent of gay men had described themselves as bisexual." Interesting...

This is great: "Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men. Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about 3/4 of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals."

I love the "using a sensor." Phrases like that are my main reason for going for the primary source to read things like "we attached the electrodes to the scrotum after shaving it, bla bla bla." How can you imagine to get an honest response after an experience like that?!?!?!? The scientists act like "This is the truth. What you say is questionable but what your penis tells us in out labratory is the real truth." But maybe those guys who aren't getting hard for girls in the lab really ARE aroused by actually sucking on someone's tits. EVERYONE loves boobs! We're hard wired to.

And 1/3 of the guys in every group were not aroused at all. According to our friend Dr. Loyd, this should be ample proof that men, in fact, have not evolved to have erections. But I digress.

The article goes on to have the rational people of the world say "everything is more complicated that that" like we usually do. And good points are made.

In a similar study, only 1.5% of women were found to be bisexual. Which I think is odd. I woudl imagine more what with how cool it is and how we're completly trained to lust after girls from the get go. But apparently women who claim bisexualty actually increase the blood flow to their genetalia when shown images of naked women and men.

The best sentence: ""You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"

Full article in "more"

July 5, 2005
Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited

By BENEDICT CAREY
Some people are attracted to women; some are attracted to men. And some, if Sigmund Freud, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and millions of self-described bisexuals are to be believed, are drawn to both sexes.

But a new study casts doubt on whether true bisexuality exists, at least in men.

The study, by a team of psychologists in Chicago and Toronto, lends support to those who have long been skeptical that bisexuality is a distinct and stable sexual orientation.

People who claim bisexuality, according to these critics, are usually homosexual, but are ambivalent about their homosexuality or simply closeted. "You're either gay, straight or lying," as some gay men have put it.

In the new study, a team of psychologists directly measured genital arousal patterns in response to images of men and women. The psychologists found that men who identified themselves as bisexual were in fact exclusively aroused by either one sex or the other, usually by other men.

The study is the largest of several small reports suggesting that the estimated 1.7 percent of men who identify themselves as bisexual show physical attraction patterns that differ substantially from their professed desires.

"Research on sexual orientation has been based almost entirely on self-reports, and this is one of the few good studies using physiological measures," said Dr. Lisa Diamond, an associate professor of psychology and gender identity at the University of Utah, who was not involved in the study.

The discrepancy between what is happening in people's minds and what is going on in their bodies, she said, presents a puzzle "that the field now has to crack, and it raises this question about what we mean when we talk about desire."

"We have assumed that everyone means the same thing," she added, "but here we have evidence that that is not the case."

Several other researchers who have seen the study, scheduled to be published in the journal Psychological Science, said it would need to be repeated with larger numbers of bisexual men before clear conclusions could be drawn.

Bisexual desires are sometimes transient and they are still poorly understood. Men and women also appear to differ in the frequency of bisexual attractions. "The last thing you want," said Dr. Randall Sell, an assistant professor of clinical socio-medical sciences at Columbia University, "is for some therapists to see this study and start telling bisexual people that they're wrong, that they're really on their way to homosexuality."

He added, "We don't know nearly enough about sexual orientation and identity" to jump to these conclusions.

In the experiment, psychologists at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto used advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers to recruit 101 young adult men. Thirty-three of the men identified themselves as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as homosexual.

The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.

Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.

Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.

But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.

"Regardless of whether the men were gay, straight or bisexual, they showed about four times more arousal" to one sex or the other, said Gerulf Rieger, a graduate psychology student at Northwestern and the study's lead author.

Although about a third of the men in each group showed no significant arousal watching the movies, their lack of response did not change the overall findings, Mr. Rieger said.

Since at least the middle of the 19th century, behavioral scientists have noted bisexual attraction in men and women and debated its place in the development of sexual identity. Some experts, like Freud, concluded that humans are naturally bisexual. In his landmark sex surveys of the 1940's, Dr. Alfred Kinsey found many married, publicly heterosexual men who reported having had sex with other men.

"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual," Dr. Kinsey wrote. "The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats."

By the 1990's, Newsweek had featured bisexuality on its cover, bisexuals had formed advocacy groups and television series like "Sex and the City" had begun exploring bisexual themes.

Yet researchers were unable to produce direct evidence of bisexual arousal patterns in men, said Dr. J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and the new study's senior author.

A 1979 study of 30 men found that those who identified themselves as bisexuals were indistinguishable from homosexuals on measures of arousal. Studies of gay and bisexual men in the 1990's showed that the two groups reported similar numbers of male sexual partners and risky sexual encounters. And a 1994 survey by The Advocate, the gay-oriented newsmagazine, found that, before identifying themselves as gay, 40 percent of gay men had described themselves as bisexual.

"I'm not denying that bisexual behavior exists," said Dr. Bailey, "but I am saying that in men there's no hint that true bisexual arousal exists, and that for men arousal is orientation."

But other researchers - and some self-identified bisexuals - say that the technique used in the study to measure genital arousal is too crude to capture the richness - erotic sensations, affection, admiration - that constitutes sexual attraction.

Social and emotional attraction are very important elements in bisexual attraction, said Dr. Fritz Klein, a sex researcher and the author of "The Bisexual Option."

"To claim on the basis of this study that there's no such thing as male bisexuality is overstepping, it seems to me," said Dr. Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center in San Francisco. "It may be that there is a lot less true male bisexuality than we think, but if that's true then why in the world are there so many movies, novels and TV shows that have this as a theme - is it collective fantasy, merely a projection? I don't think so."

John Campbell, 36, a Web designer in Orange County, Calif., who describes himself as bisexual, also said he was skeptical of the findings.

Mr. Campbell said he had been strongly attracted to both sexes since he was sexually aware, although all his long-term relationships had been with women. "In my case I have been accused of being heterosexual, but I also feel a need for sex with men," he said.

Mr. Campbell rated his erotic attraction to men and women as about 50-50, but his emotional attraction, he said, was 90 to 10 in favor of women. "With men I can get aroused, I just don't feel the fireworks like I do with women," he said.

About 1.5 percent of American women identify themselves bisexual. And bisexuality appears easier to demonstrate in the female sex. A study published last November by the same team of Canadian and American researchers, for example, found that most women who said they were bisexual showed arousal to men and to women.

Although only a small number of women identify themselves as bisexual, Dr. Bailey said, bisexual arousal may for them in fact be the norm.

Researchers have little sense yet of how these differences may affect behavior, or sexual identity. In the mid-1990's, Dr. Diamond recruited a group of 90 women at gay pride parades, academic conferences on gender issues and other venues. About half of the women called themselves lesbians, a third identified as bisexual and the rest claimed no sexual orientation. In follow-up interviews over the last 10 years, Dr. Diamond has found that most of these women have had relationships both with men and women.

"Most of them seem to lean one way or the other, but that doesn't preclude them from having a relationship with the nonpreferred sex," she said. "You may be mostly interested in women but, hey, the guy who delivers the pizza is really hot, and what are you going to do?"

"There's a whole lot of movement and flexibility," Dr. Diamond added. "The fact is, we have very little research in this area, and a lot to learn."

from The New York Times

Penis on the brain

From New Scientist:

AT LAST we know where the penis is represented in the male brain.

The genitalia's location on the "homunculus", the brain's map of body parts, has been in dispute since the 1920s. Now Christian Kell at the University of Frankfurt in Germany has put eight men into an MRI scanner to help settle the question. Using a soft brush, Kell stroked parts of each volunteer's body while recording brain activity.

Each man's penis was represented in the same place - flanked by the areas for the toes and abdomen - Kell told the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping annual meeting in Toronto. "The only depressing thing," he says, [...wait for it...] "is that the representation is very small."

genetic basis for female orgasms?

The much-blogged New Scientist has an article on a study that just came out on the genetic factors behind female orgasms. Expect to see it in the New York Times in....two days. Anyways, the study was done by Tim Spector who apparently has a lengthy phone list of twins who he can call and ask about whatever he wants. Those responses, people seem to feel, tell us the difference between what is genetic and what is not. I remain suspicious.

The article says genetics explain 45% of the variability of female orgasms, i.e. those women who can and can't achieve orgasm. "Whether that basis is anatomical, physiological or psychological remains uncertain" says Tim. I think we need to add "social" to that list but I can't imagine an evolutionary biologist would agree with me.

So, the results, 35% of women said they could always achieve orgasm through masturbation and 14% of women could never have an orgasm, regardless of the stimulation. And the twin factor explains 45% of the variability.

What would also be interesting would be to look at those women who can achieve orgasm and then look at the size of their clits.....

They also make no distinction between clitoral orgasms and G-spot ones. Which would be quite important when comparing intercourse to masturbation.

But then they just take the ball and run like hell with it. Dr. Elisabeth Lloyd (can you hear the feminists Booing?) used that 14% of women who can't have an orgasm to say that there is no biological reason for females to have an orgasm. (can you hear the feminists laughing?).

Perhaps, one day, Dr. Lloyd will google herself, come upon this site, and respond to my many problems with her logic. That would be wonderful.

So, if I may, Dr. Lloyd, first of all, because we cannot find the reason for something, must we assume that it does not exist?

Secondly, do not human embrios default to female and, only when triggered, do the labia fuse together and the ovaries sink to make the male reproductive system?

I am also really sick of evolutionary biologists acting like everything always is considered beneficial only if it makes us have more babies. Humans are SOCIAL creatures. Things (bahaviours) can be beneficial on that level as well and be selected for, even if they dont make us reproduce like crazy. Let's look at our friends, the bonobos. Female orgasms are clearly beneficial to their society because they make for strong social bonds. To be fair, they do bring that up in the article.

Even so, I don't see the logic in this statement, "The finding that many women cannot achieve orgasm because they do not have the genes for it shows that the ability to orgasm is not a trait for which there has been strong evolutionary selection." 14%! Come on people! What percentage of women have been raped? What percentage of women live in loveless marirages for economic reasons and have zero desire to have sex? I would imagin that patriarchy alone could account for 14% of women not being able to achieve orgasm...

If I am wrong on this, I would appreciate it if someone coudl set me straight.

Full article in "more"

Genes blamed for fickle female orgasm
00:01 08 June 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper

Is this the ultimate excuse for poor performance in bed? “Sorry, darling,” the man says, just before falling asleep. “It’s your genes.”

According to a study published this week, up to 45% of the differences between women in their ability to reach orgasm can be explained by their genes. Despite decades of surveys and conjecture about the role of culture, upbringing and biology in female sexual function, from Freud in 1905 to the Hite report in 1976, this is the first study of the role of a woman’s genes.

Its findings suggest there is an underlying biological basis to a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm. Whether that basis is anatomical, physiological or psychological remains uncertain, says Tim Spector of the twin research unit at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, UK, who carried out the study.

“But it is saying that it is not purely cultural, or due to peer pressure, or to differences in upbringing or religion,” he says. “There are wide differences between women and a lot of these differences are due to genes.”

Mixed results
Spector’s team asked more than 6000 female twins to fill out a confidential questionnaire about how often they achieved orgasm during intercourse and masturbation. They received 4037 complete replies, which included answers from 683 pairs of non-identical twins and 714 pairs of identical twins. The women’s ages ranged from 19 to 83, and about 3% were lesbian or bisexual.

Only 14% of the women reported always experiencing orgasm during intercourse. Another 32% of the women reported that they were unable to achieve orgasm more than a quarter of the time, while 16% never achieved it at all. Comparing the results from identical and non-identical twins suggests that 34% of this variation in ability to orgasm during intercourse is genetic.

The idea behind twin studies is that pairs of twins grow up in similar environments. So if identical twins are more similar in some way than non-identical twins, then that similarity must be down to their identical genes rather than the environment.

Unsurprisingly, more women were able to achieve orgasm through masturbation, with 34% saying they could always do so. However, the figure for those who could never achieve it was only slightly lower, at 14%. The analysis suggests that 45% of this variation is genetic.

Men cleared
Spector says he was surprised by the similarity in the numbers of women unable to experience orgasm either through intercourse or masturbation. “With masturbation there are fewer external factors – i.e. men,” he says. “So the higher heritability value for masturbation gives us a clearer picture of what’s going on.”

The discovery of a genetic basis for the ability of women to orgasm raises questions about its evolution. One theory is that it is a tool for mate selection, the idea being that males best able to bring females to orgasm are also the best males to help raise children. Another is that the female orgasm produces movements that increase sperm uptake, and therefore fertility.

But studies of other primates suggest otherwise. Female stump-tailed macaques have orgasms too – but mainly during female-female mountings, which hardly supports the fertility or mate-selection idea.

Bonobos engage in highly promiscuous sex and mutual masturbation, complete with orgasms, a practice that is thought to promote group cohesion. This supports yet another theory: that orgasm is important in bonding.

Accidental echo
But even if orgasm does play this role, it cannot be crucial in humans. The finding that many women cannot achieve orgasm because they do not have the genes for it shows that the ability to orgasm is not a trait for which there has been strong evolutionary selection, says Elisabeth Lloyd of Indiana University in Bloomington, author of The Case of the Female Orgasm. This supports her theory that as far as orgasms are concerned, women have been riding on the genetic coat-tails of male evolution, and that the female orgasm is merely an accidental echo of the male one, the equivalent of male nipples.

Lloyd says the findings also challenge the notion that the failure to achieve orgasm represents “female sexual dysfunction”, an idea popular with companies keen to sell remedies for this so-called disorder. “What definition of ‘normal’ could possibly justify labelling a third of women as ‘abnormal’?” she asks.

Even if struggling to achieve orgasm is nothing unusual, Spector says it might be possible to find ways to make it easier. Though hundreds of genes could be involved, “that doesn’t mean we couldn’t find the genes and pathways, if this was taken more seriously as a problem”, he says.

Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.0308)

More fun with Oxytocin

So the world will soon know all about oxytocin because it makes people trust each other more, even to the point of handing over cash.

Yet you, my faithful blog reader(s), have known for years of the power and mystery of oxyticin!

I would like to believe that my blog had some small part in the growing popularity of my favorite neuropeptide, but I don't.

Maybe it will be available on the market soon and I'll finally get to try out my expirement of trying to fall in love with random people....my friend said it woudl more just make me lactate....so it might never happen.

I never know about these studies though, when they ask people to pretend they have $5 and how much of it would they give away, I just can't imagin a person woudl act as they woudl in real life...so I remain suspicios.

Newscientist article and Wired article.

Sour grapes on female orgasms

This woman, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, has decided that, because the clitoris is made up of the same tissue as the penis in males, and because all women don't have G-spot based orgasms every single time they have sex, that the female orgasm is a left over remnant of male-based evolutionary biology and serves absolutely no evolutionary purpose, akin to the male nipple. (the full article is in "more")

I feel bad for her.

Let's figure out why she's wrong.

* Women who have more orgasms want to have sex more and would have more kids. Plane and simple.

* Just because the cervix has contractions during the day does not mean that those a woman has after an orgasm and during sex could not serve to pump sperm towards the egg and, as I've heard, alter the Ph of the acidic vagina, which can be toxic to sperm.

* I don't get what she means by saying the clitoris was "left over" from male evolution. Is she assuming males evolved, hung out for a while, and then females evolved from them, out of a rib perhaps? No. I've heard also that all fetuses are first female, and then morph into males if hormones/chromosomes dictate it.

* This is a perfect example of why evolutionary biologists are so absurd. You simply CANNOT take such a complex thing as the female orgasm, and its absense in the lives of many unfortunate women, and look at it from a physical and evolutionary aspect alone. You must consider the social context. MAYBE there is a lot of bad sex out there? Huh? Dr. Lloyd? Know anything about that? Maybe there are a lot of women who have been trained by our culture to think of their sexuality as scary and sort of bad and simply do not have the comfort levels necessary to have an orgasm.

* If anything female orgams have *driven* a massive amount of evolution. As they alluded to in the article, it does seem that it is far easier to orgams from partners one has a relative level of comfort around. If we're going to look at sociobiological evolution, then we must assume that emotions are also the cause and result of a lot of evolution as well. And emotions play a huge role in whether or not that orgasm occures. Which can tell a women a lot (consciousoly or subconsciously) about compatability and reliability of a partner.

* Women also relased tons of endorphens when they orgasm. Some scientists have even gone so far as to speculate that they are one of the driving hormonal factors behind love.

* As women get older, they have more and more orgasms. This could be behind a drive to have sex as the ideal repruduction time dims.

* Think of your own and post it in the comment section!

May 17, 2005
A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm
By DINITIA SMITH
Evolutionary scientists have never had difficulty explaining the male orgasm, closely tied as it is to reproduction.

But the Darwinian logic behind the female orgasm has remained elusive. Women can have sexual intercourse and even become pregnant - doing their part for the perpetuation of the species - without experiencing orgasm. So what is its evolutionary purpose?

Over the last four decades, scientists have come up with a variety of theories, arguing, for example, that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce or that it leads women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring's chances of survival.

But in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution," has no evolutionary function at all.

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts - a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

In that early period, the nerve and tissue pathways are laid down for various reflexes, including the orgasm, Dr. Lloyd said. As development progresses, male hormones saturate the embryo, and sexuality is defined.

In boys, the penis develops, along with the potential to have orgasms and ejaculate, while "females get the nerve pathways for orgasm by initially having the same body plan."

Nipples in men are similarly vestigial, Dr. Lloyd pointed out.

While nipples in woman serve a purpose, male nipples appear to be simply left over from the initial stage of embryonic development.

The female orgasm, she said, "is for fun."

Dr. Lloyd said scientists had insisted on finding an evolutionary function for female orgasm in humans either because they were invested in believing that women's sexuality must exactly parallel that of men or because they were convinced that all traits had to be "adaptations," that is, serve an evolutionary function.

Theories of female orgasm are significant, she added, because "men's expectations about women's normal sexuality, about how women should perform, are built around these notions."

"And men are the ones who reflect back immediately to the woman whether or not she is adequate sexually," Dr. Lloyd continued.

Central to her thesis is the fact that women do not routinely have orgasms during sexual intercourse.

She analyzed 32 studies, conducted over 74 years, of the frequency of female orgasm during intercourse.

When intercourse was "unassisted," that is not accompanied by stimulation of the clitoris, just a quarter of the women studied experienced orgasms often or very often during intercourse, she found.

Five to 10 percent never had orgasms. Yet many of the women became pregnant.

Dr. Lloyd's figures are lower than those of Dr. Alfred A. Kinsey, who in his 1953 book "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" found that 39 to 47 percent of women reported that they always, or almost always, had orgasm during intercourse.

But Kinsey, Dr. Lloyd said, included orgasms assisted by clitoral stimulation.

Dr. Lloyd said there was no doubt in her mind that the clitoris was an evolutionary adaptation, selected to create excitement, leading to sexual intercourse and then reproduction.

But, "without a link to fertility or reproduction," Dr. Lloyd said, "orgasm cannot be an adaptation."

Not everyone agrees. For example, Dr. John Alcock, a professor of biology at Arizona State University, criticized an earlier version of Dr. Lloyd's thesis, discussed in in a 1987 article by Stephen Jay Gould in the magazine Natural History.

In a phone interview, Dr. Alcock said that he had not read her new book, but that he still maintained the hypothesis that the fact that "orgasm doesn't occur every time a woman has intercourse is not evidence that it's not adaptive."

"I'm flabbergasted by the notion that orgasm has to happen every time to be adaptive," he added.

Dr. Alcock theorized that a woman might use orgasm "as an unconscious way to evaluate the quality of the male," his genetic fitness and, thus, how suitable he would be as a father for her offspring.

"Under those circumstances, you wouldn't expect her to have it every time," Dr. Alcock said.

Among the theories that Dr. Lloyd addresses in her book is one proposed in 1993, by Dr. R. Robin Baker and Dr. Mark A. Bellis, at Manchester University in England. In two papers published in the journal Animal Behaviour, they argued that female orgasm was a way of manipulating the retention of sperm by creating suction in the uterus. When a woman has an orgasm from one minute before the man ejaculates to 45 minutes after, she retains more sperm, they said.

Furthermore, they asserted, when a woman has intercourse with a man other than her regular sexual partner, she is more likely to have an orgasm in that prime time span and thus retain more sperm, presumably making conception more likely. They postulated that women seek other partners in an effort to obtain better genes for their offspring.

Dr. Lloyd said the Baker-Bellis argument was "fatally flawed because their sample size is too small."

"In one table," she said, "73 percent of the data is based on the experience of one person."

In an e-mail message recently, Dr. Baker wrote that his and Dr. Bellis's manuscript had "received intense peer review appraisal" before publication. Statisticians were among the reviewers, he said, and they noted that some sample sizes were small, "but considered that none of these were fatal to our paper."

Dr. Lloyd said that studies called into question the logic of such theories. Research by Dr. Ludwig Wildt and his colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany in 1998, for example, found that in a healthy woman the uterus undergoes peristaltic contractions throughout the day in the absence of sexual intercourse or orgasm. This casts doubt, Dr. Lloyd argues, on the idea that the contractions of orgasm somehow affect sperm retention.

Another hypothesis, proposed in 1995 by Dr. Randy Thornhill, a professor of biology at the University of New Mexico and two colleagues, held that women were more likely to have orgasms during intercourse with men with symmetrical physical features. On the basis of earlier studies of physical attraction, Dr. Thornhill argued that symmetry might be an indicator of genetic fitness.

Dr. Lloyd, however, said those conclusions were not viable because "they only cover a minority of women, 45 percent, who say they sometimes do, and sometimes don't, have orgasm during intercourse."

"It excludes women on either end of the spectrum," she said. "The 25 percent who say they almost always have orgasm in intercourse and the 30 percent who say they rarely or never do. And that last 30 percent includes the 10 percent who say they never have orgasm under any circumstances."

In a phone interview, Dr. Thornhill said that he had not read Dr. Lloyd's book but the fact that not all women have orgasms during intercourse supports his theory.

"There will be patterns in orgasm with preferred and not preferred men," he said.

Dr. Lloyd also criticized work by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, who studies primate behavior and female reproductive strategies.

Scientists have documented that orgasm occurs in some female primates; for other mammals, whether orgasm occurs remains an open question.

In the 1981 book "The Woman That Never Evolved" and in her other work, Dr. Hrdy argues that orgasm evolved in nonhuman primates as a way for the female to protect her offspring from the depredation of males.

She points out that langur monkeys have a high infant mortality rate, with 30 percent of deaths a result of babies' being killed by males who are not the fathers. Male langurs, she says, will not kill the babies of females they have mated with.

In macaques and chimpanzees, she said, females are conditioned by the pleasurable sensations of clitoral stimulation to keep copulating with multiple partners until they have an orgasm. Thus, males do not know which infants are theirs and which are not and do not attack them.

Dr. Hrdy also argues against the idea that female orgasm is an artifact of the early parallel development of male and female embryos.

"I'm convinced," she said, "that the selection of the clitoris is quite separate from that of the penis in males."

In critiquing Dr. Hrdy's view, Dr. Lloyd disputes the idea that longer periods of sexual intercourse lead to a higher incidence of orgasm, something that if it is true, may provide an evolutionary rationale for female orgasm.

But Dr. Hrdy said her work did not speak one way or another to the issue of female orgasm in humans. "My hypothesis is silent," she said.

One possibility, Dr. Hrdy said, is that orgasm in women may have been an adaptive trait in our prehuman ancestors.

"But we separated from our common primate ancestors about seven million years ago," she said.

"Perhaps the reason orgasm is so erratic is that it's phasing out," Dr. Hrdy said. "Our descendants on the starships may well wonder what all the fuss was about."

Western culture is suffused with images of women's sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.

"Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function," Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is "natural" to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

"Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women," Dr. Lloyd said. "And indirectly for men, as well."

Dangerous men are cool.

Yet another "duh' article from New Scientist. Well, sort of, I guess. It's not big surprise that men preform for each other. Feminists wrote about this decades ago with the whole "homoerotic triangle" thing: the idea being that much of male womanizing is for the sake of other males, rather than the woman in question. All you have to do is watch men look at each other for approval and you can see what's happening.

But part of me distrusts the article. No rational woman would say "yes, I think it's hot when a guy does a backflip off a swing." but you've got to admitt that it's cool when you see it. And you can't help but be impressed. Or, I can't, I guess.

But then again (watch, as rebecca argues with herself in blog form), in one particularly blissful event in my recent past, I was surrounded with 5 guys, all hot, all wanting to make out with me, as we swang on the swings under the stars at a park in Victoria. One of them showed us all how to do backflips and we all tried and it was lovely. And then we had a contest to see who could jump the farthest off the swings. Except one guy didn't participate in this plumage flaunting, was thuroughly disgusted by the whole affair, and let me know it the next day. We dated for 6 months. So maybe there is some truth to it.

But for the record, I could jump the farthest.

"WHETHER it's driving too fast, bungee-jumping or reckless skateboarding, young men will try almost anything to be noticed by the opposite sex. But a study of attitudes to risk suggests that the only people impressed by their stunts are other men.

Futile risk-taking might seem to have little going for it in Darwinian terms. So why were our rash ancestors not replaced by more cautious contemporaries?

One idea is that risk-takers are advertising their fitness to potential mates by showing off their strength and bravery. This fits with the fact that men in their prime reproductive years take more risks. To test this idea, William Farthing of the University of Maine in Orono surveyed 48 young men and 52 young women on their attitudes to risky scenarios. Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men (Evolution and Human Behaviour, vol 26, p 171).

“Men thought women would be impressed by pointless gambles, but women in fact preferred cautious men”Reckless thrill-seekers might be trying a more subtle route to women's affections. Men say they prefer their same-sex friends to be risk-takers, and women prefer high-status males. "So if he has higher status among other men, women might like him for his status, even though they don't like the risk-taking in itself," Farthing says."

Bird assholes

Anthopomorphization runs wild!

I think it's funny that there was that study of bird personalities a while ago and now they've discovered that there are bird assholes. "In conclusion, it is our observation that the male great grey shrikes are complete assholes."

Just kidding of course! I'm resisting, RESISTING, the urg to bring my morality into the animal kingdom...but it's so hard. Anyway, I wonder if they found any male birds who decided to stay at their nests with their lovely wives and not leave them for younger birds with firmer breasts....

Real diamonds for the mistress...
(From New Scientist)

IT IS not just human males who seduce prospective paramours with expensive gifts while bringing home cheap trinkets for their long-term partners. Some male birds do it too.

Great grey shrikes mate for life and raise offspring each breeding season. But the males also sneak away and mate with other females. To charm both long-term partners and mistresses the males offer gifts of food.

To test whether the males put more effort into their dalliances than their "marriages", Piotr Tryjanowski at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, and Martin Hromada at the University of South Bohemia in Ceské Budejovice, the Czech Republic, recorded gifts made by 22 male shrikes to their partners and mistresses. They found that the average energy content of a gift to a mistress was 75 kilojoules, while gifts given to partners averaged about 19 kilojoules. Males often caught lizards, voles and other birds for their mistresses, which required six times as much effort to catch as the insects that they gave their partners (Animal Behaviour, vol 69, p 529). "It is like a saying in Polish," says Tryjanowski. "Artificial jewellery to the wife and real diamonds for the mistress."

The sexiness of oyseters and clams

From New Scientist:
Oysters may deserve their sexy reputation

FABLED for its power to turn ordinary mortals into sex gods, nothing beats the oyster as the prelude to a night of passion. And no, it's not all hype.

High levels of a chemical that boosts libido have been found in clams, a close relative of the oyster, suggesting that their reputation is not undeserved.

Even their texture is enough to turn some people on. "Oysters are so sensual just in their nature," says Diane Brown, the Los Angeles-based author of The Seduction Cookbook, "They have that slippery, slurpy sensation when you eat them that makes them very seductive."

Raul Mirza at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and his colleagues compared levels of the amino acid N-methyl-D-aspartate in Mediterranean clams and other animals. Previous studies in animals have shown that the chemical affects sex drive by raising testosterone production. The clams had around double the level found in rat brains, the team told the American Chemical Society's annual meeting in San Diego, California.

Monkey Sex

I just watched a National Geographic documentary on Gorillas from the 70's, back when National Geographic actually got political. It was really funny though. They had all this footage of when the US and English societies were first exposed to this massive dark ape through pictures and even film from the 1920's. There were numerous horror films and of course King Kong.

If you know anything about gorillas, you know that they don't attack people unless they're being attacked, but all of the older pictures and footage were of course picturing these violent creatures. But what's more is that in most of them, they had the gorilla taking their women to have sex with them. AMAZING! HILLARIOUS! The white man's fear of huge black sex extends into the animal kingdom! They never said it in the documentary but it was obvious from the footage. This is such a pop psychology dissertation waiting to be written, if it hasn't already.

You have to think, 1920, women just got the right to vote. Jazz is luring white women in just about every major city into the heart of black neighborhoods. And suddenly everyone knows about an even BIGGER, even BLACKER creature, and all the movie people can think about is how it will take their white women.

Or who knows, maybe women were like "hmmmm...." You never know.

Evolutionary basis for perversity

From NYT article: "Neanderthals may have seen their first modern Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel....The question is "Did Neanderthals and modern humans do it?"

DUH! That's all I have to say. Well, no it isn't.

Recently I came up with a theory to explain modern perversity: There exist humans who want to fuck anything, quite litterally. Animals, fruit, little kids, their own kids, bottles and just about anything else with a hole in it. I really have no idea if these perversions are universal but they do seem so wide spread. Men seem born with this "what can I stick my dick in?" sort of natural curiosity. Lord knows half of the appeal of Star Trek was the idea of having sex with aliens.

So I think this makes sense as far as evolution goes. In dire situations, we have the ability (and desire) to keep reproducing by having sex with whatever happens to be lying around. Yes, those desperate selfish genes could be behind all those rural people supposidly having sex with their families and farm animals.

So yeah, duh, Homo sapiens and Neadrethals had sex. But the article makes a good case against them ever reproducing.

Full article in "more."

For Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, Was It De-Lovely?
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: February 15, 2005

he scientists did not get around to the nitty-gritty question until the fourth hour of a two-and-a-half-day symposium on Neanderthals, held recently at New York University.

A strong consensus was emerging, they agreed, that the now-extinct Neanderthals were a distinct evolutionary entity from modern humans, presumably a different species. They were archaic members of the human family, robust with heavy brow ridges and forward-projecting faces, who lived in Europe and western Asia from at least 250,000 years ago until they vanished from the fossil record about 28,000 years ago.

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Neanderthals may have seen their first modern Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel. The two people almost certainly came in contact in Europe in the last centuries before the dwindling Neanderthal population was replaced forever by the intruding modern humans.

Taking his turn at the symposium lectern, Dr. James C. M. Ahern, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wyoming, acknowledged: "Neanderthals are different. The degree of difference is relatively vast, but that is not the most interesting question out there."

The question was, he continued, "Did Neanderthals and modern humans do it?"

There it was, out in the open again, the question that has persisted since the first fossils of these people were discovered in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1856. Could the two people with a shared distant ancestry and family resemblance have interbred? Is there any evidence that Europeans today carry some Neanderthal genes?

For the international gathering of scientists, the issue exposed the uncertainty over the definition of species. Its conventional meaning is a group of interbreeding creatures that are reproductively isolated from others. Hybridization of species is rare in mammals. One common example is the mating of an ass and a mare, producing the sterile mule.

The conferees debated, but never resolved, the possibility that Neanderthals could have been an evolutionary and anatomical species, distinct from Homo sapiens, but not strictly an isolated biological species. That is, the two species may have been enough alike to mate and produce fertile offspring.

Again, Dr. Ahern encapsulated the issue, "How much difference is too much" for viable interbreeding to occur?

Dr. Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, noted that some species apparently less close than Neanderthals and modern humans can interbreed and produce hybrids. Dr. Stringer is a leading proponent of the theory that modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa as early as 150,000 years ago and then spread to Asia and Europe, replacing the remnants of archaic humans they encountered there.

Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a Neanderthal expert at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not at the meeting, contends that the 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy found in Portugal appeared to be a Neanderthal-Homo sapiens hybrid. The interpretation has so far been viewed with skepticism.

Dr. Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said that he and colleagues had looked for answers in the patterns of genetic variation in contemporary human populations and the analysis of ancient DNA from fossils of Neanderthals and early modern humans. Neither approach, he said, provided any indication of interbreeding between the two species.

"That does not rule out some genetic contribution" from Neanderthals to Europeans' ancestry, Dr. Stoneking said.

Dr. David Serre of McGill University in Montreal described the analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA found in 24 Neanderthals and 40 early modern human remains. The results seemed to exclude any significant contribution of Neanderthal genes to Homo sapiens, perhaps less than 1 percent. Therefore, he concluded, they were "two distinct biological species."

Dr. Katerina Harvati, also of the Planck Institute in Leipzig, recently conducted research applying a "quantitative method" to determine the degree of anatomical difference that justifies classifying specimens as different species. She and colleagues examined the variation of specific parts of the craniums and faces of modern humans and Neanderthals as well as 12 existing species of nonhuman primates. The two living species of chimpanzees, for example, appeared to be more closely related to each other than Neanderthals are to humans.

Dr. Harvati and Dr. Terry Harrison, a paleontologist at N.Y.U., organized the symposium, "Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives."

More than species differences may have kept Neanderthals and humans sexually apart, if indeed that was the case. Their opportunities may have been limited.

Dr. Ahern said in an interview that it was "surprising how little overlap there was" between the two species in Europe." It had been thought that modern humans from Africa began arriving in Europe about 40,000 years ago and so could have competed with and mingled with the local population for at least 12,000 years. But the dating of fossil and archaeological evidence is now being revised, leaving much less time when the two species could have had close contact.

"It's a real scientific problem," said Dr. Randall White, an archaeologist specializing in European ice age culture at N.Y.U. "How to interpret the overlap of Neanderthals and modern humans, their interactions and cultural exchanges, the causes of Neanderthal extinction, all depends on what are the real dates of their possible contact."

Some of the most solid evidence for overlap, the researchers said, does not appear until toward the end of the Neanderthals' known existence, when their populations were probably sparse.

Dr. Stringer said some explanations for Neanderthal extinction were being re-examined. Perhaps the technological superiority of modern humans was "not as clear-cut as some of us thought," he said. Perhaps Neanderthals, though adapted to a cold climate, could not survive the rapid and repeated changes of cold and warm periods of that time.

"It was not bad genes but bad luck for the Neanderthals," Dr. Stringer said. "Modern humans may have had no direct effect on Neanderthal extinction. They actually walked into empty spaces where Neanderthals had already disappeared."

Dr. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History was not entirely joking when he suggested that few genes were exchanged because "no self-respecting Neanderthal female would fancy a Homo sapiens male."

In making a case for the distinct differences between the two species, Dr. Tattersall showed slides of upright skeletons of the two. But skeletons are unrevealing of Paleolithic desire.

I'm doomed

This article from the NYT reports on a study claiming men are attracted to women who are less powerful, smart, and gainfully employed. They keep falling for their secretaries and maids and such.

"The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise. "

The study likes to imagine it's all biological. They say it's because evolution has selected for men who like lesser females so that there's less of a risk of infidelity and they won't have to raise other men's children. Which is dubious at best. I seriously doubt we could find a correlation between powerful women and infidelity. Although it would be an interesting study.

I think a better sociobiological hypothesis would be male's subconscious desires to marry women who would raise offspring well rather than be their partner in crime. I consider this tragic but it seems to be a complete trend in my life that my smart male friends go out with hot dumb girls who don't make them think and might even suck in bed. I call this the "pet girl" scenario. And do the men care? no. Why? because they suck. And they also might be inclined that way biologically.

But that is only part of the picture. To deny there are social influences on a dynamic like this in a society like this would be absurd. American society was/is patriarchal, or at least there are impressions of it still floating around. And feminism was a huge ball buster for so many men. You could totally read this as a backlash. A retreat into cozier times and paradigms. You can see it on TV with all the fat ass dumb ass guys married to hot women who treat them like babies - the Homer scenario.

Also no one mentions that perhaps smarter women are choosing themselves not to marry. Maybe they consider their carreers before having kids. This seems like an obvious omition.

Although in reality, I totally understand it. I just don’t think a pet boy would entertain me for long enough to sustain a long term relationship. I guess it just means I have to date brilliant men....sigh....

Full article in "more"

January 13, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Men Just Want Mommy
By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON

A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it, they look upon the men they work for as "the moon, the sun and the stars." It's all about orbiting, serving and salaaming their Sun Gods.

In all those great Tracy/Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. Moviemakers these days seem far more interested in the soothing aura of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, as a Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid. The maid, who cleans up after Mr. Sandler without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman. The wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm. Picture Faye Dunaway in "Network" if she'd had to stay home, or Glenn Close in "Fatal Attraction" without the charm.

The same attraction of unequals animated Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," a 2003 holiday hit. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson falls for his sultry secretary. A writer falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

(I wonder if the trend in making maids who don't speak English heroines is related to the trend of guys who like to watch Kelly Ripa in the morning with the sound turned off?)

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection, rather than affection.

As John Schwartz of The New York Times wrote recently, "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame."

A new study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggests that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors.

As Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, summed it up for reporters: "Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them.

"The hypothesis," Dr. Brown said, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference in their attraction to men who might work above or below them. And men did not show a preference when it came to one-night stands.

A second study, which was by researchers at four British universities and reported last week, suggested that smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

I asked the actress and writer Carrie Fisher, on the East Coast to promote her novel "The Best Awful," who confirmed that women who challenge men are in trouble.

"I haven't dated in 12 million years," she said drily. "I gave up on dating powerful men because they wanted to date women in the service professions. So I decided to date guys in the service professions. But then I found out that kings want to be treated like kings, and consorts want to be treated like kings, too."

Forget lavender... it's breast milk!

This is a great little snippet from New Scientist that claims that the smell of breast milk to women without children increases sex dive by 24% and fantasies by 17%!!! Amazing!

The logic is that there's a chemical cue in the milk that encourages women to conceive when times are favorable (because other women could do it). BUT, I disagree with the chemical cue part. The article says that they can't locate the chemical responsible and I think this might be one of those things that are partly social and partly biological.

Acording to studies I've read in the past, the biggest turn on smell for women is baby powder. At first it's sort of perverse, but it's serving the exact same function as breast milk. It's reminding women of babies and the smell means that other women are able to have them so conditions must be favorable. And there's obviously no chemical cue in baby poweder that triggers brain activity in women, but through social mechanisims, we've come to associate baby poweder with babies, so it can serve the same function. Which is interesting: that a smell with a socially derived meaning could have biological responses.

After that, I've heard that women also get turned on by lavender and men get turned on by licorace so go figure.

Your brain in love

Anterior Cingulate - This section of the human brain shows the Anterior Cingulate Cortex activated. This part of the brain is known to be involved in responding to synthetic drugs that induce feelings of euphoria. It is associated with happy states, attention to one's own emotional state, and especially social interactions which involve assessing one's own emotions as well as the emotions of others.

Medial Insula - This section shows the Medial Insula activated from a section of the brain viewed from the top. This area of the brain is related to a variety of emotional functions. The appearance of lesions can indicate severe emotional consequences, among them are those related to the interpretation of visual input.

Putamen and Caudate Nucleus - This is a rear view of the brain. It shows three of the love hotspots activated: the Putamen, the Caudate Nucleus, and the Medial Insula. The Putamen and the Caudate Nucleus both lie deep within the brain and are two of the most commonly activated areas with regard to both positive and negative emotions.

These fMRI brain scans were done by Professor Semir Zeki and his team at University College London (and come from the Discovery website). They tested women and men by showing them images of the person they were in love with and then showing them pictures of others, then recorded increased blood flow to these areas of the brain.

Professor Aron at State University in New York found that a way to induce love and attraction in both partnerships and total strangers is to stare into the other person's eyes for 4 minutes straight without blinking. Also, he claims that we can missattribute emotions of fear and excitements as love, so it makes sense to watch scary movies and such. Here is an interview with the Professor. He says kindness is the strongest indicator in having a successful long term relationship and that makes me think he's hokey, but who knows.

Handsome men have better sperm

This is an extremely fascinating article that I forgot to post from months ago. It pretty much says that men who were rated most attractive by women (i.e. most symmetrical according to the latest research) have the most healthy and fast sperm.

I've recently been thinking about how people with stereotypically hot faces most often have stereotypically hot bodies and why that it. I guess this pretty much explains it: when you're genetically awesome, all features of you are more attractive, face, body, voice, all of it.

But at