>[lbo-talk] Why think anthropologically (at least sometimes)
>Bill Bartlett billbartlett at dodo.com.au
>Fri Jun 3 19:12:38 PDT 2005
<snip>
>Pair bonding between women and men is an advantage however. Hence
>orgasm, which has been shown to play a part in bonding. The
>advantages of orgasm in terms of conception, which CB argues are its
>sole function, are actually minimal or non-existent. Far more
>crucial is what happens AFTER conception, the nurturing of the
>fetus (which necessarily involves that the mother prosper.) Then
>the long years of nurture, care and education of infant.
<snip>
>The only mystery is why anyone would deny that this is the explanation.
Charles Brown claims that female orgasm was selected for because it promoted reproductive success by compensating for costs of pregnancy and labor pains; and Bill Bartlett asserts that female orgasm was an evolutionary advantage because it promoted reproductive success by fostering pair bonding. What would make Charles' theory convincing? Evidence that women who have more orgasms during copulation tend to have more children than those who have fewer or none during it. What would make Bill's theory persuasive? Evidence that women who have more orgasms during copulation are more likely to make men with whom they have orgasm bond with them and invest in care and nurture of their children than women who have fewer or none during it.
Why reject both Charles' and Bill's theories? Because both fail to offer any empirical evidence to support them, nor do they consider evidence that puts their theories into question.
Consider female genital cutting, which either diminishes or eliminates the capacity for female orgasm depending on the types of cutting. You would expect that cut women have fewer children than uncut women, if female orgasm were in any way linked to reproductive success, but such is not the case: "To date, no study has found an association between reproductive capability and FGC. While the Jones et al. study in Burkina Faso found that women who have been cut are more likely to experience obstetric complications, a 1998-1999 NHRC study found that women who were circumcised married earlier than uncircumcised women, and that circumcised women had greater total fertility than uncircumcised women (Reason 2004). Another study based on DHS surveys in the Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, and Tanzania found that, when controlling for confounding socioeconomic, demographic and cultural variables, circumcised women, grouped by age at circumcision, did not have significantly different odds of infertility nor of childbearing than uncut women (Larsen and Yan, 2000)" (Elizabeth F. Jackson, Philip B. Adongo, Ayaga A. Bawah, Ellie Feinglass, and James F. Phillips, "The Relationship between Female Genital Cutting and Fertility in Kassena-Nankana District of Northern Ghana," Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, <http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=51579>, March 31-April 2, 2005, p. 4). If anything, diminishing or eliminating the capacity for female orgasm appears to make females more reproductively successful than leaving it intact.
Elizabeth A. Lloyd (cf. <http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LLOCAS.html>), in contrast to Charles and Bill, presents much evidence from such relevant fields of inquiry as embryology, primatology, and sexology. You may examine her argument and evidence in her conference paper "All About Eve: Bias in Evolutionary Explanations of Women's Sexuality" (Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, <http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000853/00/chapter_2.pdf>, March 23-24 2001). We've already established the fact that "It is crucial to note that the penis and the clitoris are the 'same' organ in men and women; there is an organ in the primordial, undifferentiated embryo that turns into a penis if it receives a dose of hormones, otherwise it matures into a clitoris. In other words, the penis and the clitoris have the same embryological origins and are thus called 'homologous' organs" (Lloyd, "All About Eve," p. 22). Based on primate research, Lloyd demonstrates that female orgasm among nonhuman primates is rare and that "the best evidence for female orgasm" in species among whom it is observed, such as stumptail macaques, "arose in homosexual mounts" during which the mounting female exhibited "all of the physical features of the orgasmic response in the males," rather than copulation during which such features were absent (Lloyd, pp. 26, 34). That being the case, the earliest human females, much like primates, must have discovered the joy of orgasm during masturbation or homosexual plays or both, rather than copulation -- unless the earliest human males were more solicitous of female pleasure than today's males, which is rather unlikely. Even today, Lloyd's review of sexological literature shows that "the numbers for orgasm all of the time with unassisted intercourse generally fall around the 15-35% range (Terman 1938; Chesser 1956; Tavris and Sadd 1977; Hite 1976; Fisher 1973), while the reported percentages of women who reliably have orgasm with intercourse, _both_ assisted and unassisted, range from 38-53%." (p. 25).
In short, women discovered and developed their capacity for orgasm on their own, for their own pleasure rather than reproduction, in spite of men who either have neglected it or sought to curtail or destroy it (as in the case of female genital cutting).
>[lbo-talk] Why think anthropologically (at least sometimes)
>Bill Bartlett billbartlett at dodo.com.au
>Fri Jun 3 19:12:38 PDT 2005
<snip>
>It is a terrific advantage for the child to have two parents devoted
>to this task.
If two parents are more advantageous than one parent, three, four, or more parents are even more advantageous than two. As a matter of fact, the practice of making the entire community responsible for each and every child would be the most advantageous. Given likely much lower survival rates of children, higher rates of maternal deaths during childbirth, and lower life expectancies of both men and women at the dawn of humanity than at present, it would make more sense to expect a communal approach to child rearing than a nuclear family model, as the latter would have likely left many children without parents back then. -- Yoshie
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