Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But the bonobo’s conspicuous absence is notable not just in discussions of war. Look for the missing bonobo wherever someone claims an ancient pedigree for human male violence of any sort. See if you can find the bonobo in this account of the origins of rape, from The Dark Side of Man: “Men did not invent rape. Instead, they very likely inherited rape behavior from our ape ancestral lineage. Rape is a standard male reproductive strategy and likely has been one for millions of years. Male humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans routinely rape females. Wild gorillas violently abduct females to mate with them. Captive gorillas also rape females.”14 (Emphasis is in the original.) Leaving aside the complications of defining rape in nonhuman species unable to communicate their experiences and motivations, rape—along with infanticide, war, and murder—has never been witnessed among bonobos in several decades of observation. Not in the wild. Not in the zoo. Never. Doesn’t that warrant a footnote, even? The Mysterious Disappearance of Margaret Power Even apart from doubts raised by bonobos, there are serious questions worth asking about the nature of chimp “warfare.” In the 1970s, Richard Wrangham was a graduate student studying the relation between food supply and chimp behavior at Jane Goodall’s research center at Gombe, Tanzania. In 1991, five years before Wrangham and Peterson’s Demonic Males came out, Margaret Power published a carefully researched book, The Egalitarians: Human and Chimpanzee, that asked important questions concerning some of Goodall’s research on chimpanzees (without, it must be said, ever expressing anything but admiration for Goodall’s scientific integrity and intentions). But Power’s name and her doubts are nowhere to be found in Demonic Males. Power noticed that data Goodall collected in her first years at Gombe (from 1961 to 1965) painted a different picture of chimpanzee social interaction than the accounts of chimpanzee warfare she and her colleagues published to global acclaim a few years later. Observations from those first four years at Gombe had left Goodall with the impression that the chimps were “far more peaceable than humans.” She saw no evidence of “war” between groups and only sporadic outbreaks of violence between individuals. These initial impressions of overall primate peace mesh with research published four decades later, in 2002, by primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber, who conducted a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on social behavior in primates. After reviewing more than eighty studies of how various primates spend their waking hours, they found that “in almost all species across the board, from diurnal lemurs—the most primitive primates—to apes…usually less than 5 percent of their day is spent in any active social behavior whatsoever.” Sussman and Garber found that “usually less than 1 percent of their day is spent fighting or competing, and it’s unusually much less than 1 percent.” They found cooperative, affiliative behavior like playing and grooming to be ten to twenty times more common than conflict in all primate species.15

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But why? Within the framework of the standard narrative of human sexuality, what scientists call female copulatory vocalization (FCV) is a major conundrum. You’ll recall Steven Pinker’s claim that “[i]n all societies, sex is at least somewhat ‘dirty.’ It is conducted in private….”1 Why would the female of such a species risk attracting all that attention? Why is it that from the Lower East Side to the upper reaches of the Amazon, women are far more likely than men to loudly announce their sexual pleasure for all to hear? And why is the sound of a woman having an orgasm so difficult for heterosexual men to ignore?2 They say women can hear a baby crying from a great distance, but gentlemen, we ask you, is there any sound easier to pick out of the cacophony of an apartment block—and harder to ignore—than that of a woman lost in passion? If you’re one of the ten or fifteen people alive who have never seen Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally, go watch it now (it’s easily accessible online). It’s one of the best-known scenes in all of modern cinema, but if the roles were reversed, the scene wouldn’t be funny—it wouldn’t even make sense. Imagine: Billy Crystal sits at the restaurant table, he starts breathing harder, maybe his eyes bug out a bit, he grunts a few times, takes a few bites of his sandwich, and falls asleep. No big laughs. Nobody in the deli even notices. If male orgasm is a muffled crash of cymbals, female orgasm is full-on opera. Full of screaming, shouting, singing people standing around with spears, and table pounding sure to quiet even the noisiest New York deli.3 Female cries of ecstasy aren’t a modern phenomenon. The Kama Sutra contains ancient advice on female copulatory vocalization in terms of erotic technique, categorizing an aviary of ecstatic expression a woman might choose from: “As a major part of moaning, she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck and partridge.” A goose? Honk if You [image file=image_rsrc68G.jpg] Sex! But apart from barnyard erotic technique, it just doesn’t make sense for the female of a monogamous (or “mildly polygynous”) species to call attention to herself when mating. On the other hand, if thousands of generations of multiple mating are built into modern human sexuality, it’s pretty clear what all the shouting’s about.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Margaret Power’s questions cut to the heart of the matter: why fight if there’s nothing worth fighting over? Before the scientists started provisioning the apes, food appeared throughout the jungle, so the chimps spread out in search of something to eat each day. Chimps often call out to the others when they find a fruiting tree; mutual aid helps everyone, and feeding in the forest isn’t a zero-sum endeavor. But once they learned that there would be a limited amount of easy food available in the same place each day, more and more chimps started arriving in aggressive, “noisy hordes” and “hanging around.” Soon after, Goodall and her students began witnessing the now-famous “warfare” between chimp groups. Perhaps for the first time ever, the chimps had something worth fighting over: a concentrated, reliable, yet limited source of food. Suddenly, they lived in a zero-sum world. Applying this same reasoning to human societies, we’re left wondering why immediate-return hunter-gatherers would risk their lives to fight wars. Over what, exactly? Food? That’s spread out in the environment. Societies indigenous to areas where food is concentrated by natural conditions, like the periodic salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, tend not to be immediate-return hunter-gatherers. We’re more likely to find complex, hierarchical societies like the Kwakiutl (discussed later) in such spots. Possessions? Foragers have few possessions of any nonsentimental value. Land? Our ancestors evolved on a planet nearly empty of human beings for the vast majority of our existence as a species. Women? Possibly, but this claim presumes that population growth was important to foragers and that women were commodities to be fought over and traded like the livestock of pastoralists. It’s likely that keeping population stable was more important to foragers than expanding it. As we’ve seen, when a group reaches a certain number of people, it tends to split into smaller groups anyway, and there is no inherent advantage in having more people to feed in band-level societies. We’ve also seen that women and men would have been free to move among different bands in the fission-fusion social system typical of hunter-gatherers, chimps, and bonobos. The causal reverberations between social structure (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial), population density, and the likelihood of war is supported by research conducted by sociologist Patrick Nolan, who found, “Warfare is more likely in advanced horticultural and agrarian societies than it is in hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies.” When he limited his analysis only to hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies, Nolan found that above-average population density was the best predictor of war.21

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Maria used the face-sorting experiment with the thirty-six posed faces. It doesn’t depend on words at all, let alone emotion words, so it worked nicely across the language and culture barriers. We’d created a set of photos using dark-skinned actors, because our originals featured Western faces that didn’t look like Himba tribespeople. Our Himba subjects understood the task immediately, as we had hoped, and were able to sort the faces spontaneously by actor. When asked to sort the faces by emotion, the Himba clearly diverged from Westerners. They placed all the smiling faces into a single pile, and most of the wide-eyed faces into a second pile, but then made many different piles with mixtures of the remaining faces. If emotion perception is universal, then the Himba subjects should have sorted the photographs into six piles. When we asked our Himba subjects to freely label their piles, smiling faces were not “happy” (ohange) but “laughing” (ondjora). Wide-eyed faces were not “fearful” (okutira) but “looking” (tarera). In other words, the Himba participants categorized facial movements as behaviors rather than inferring mental states or feelings. Overall, our Himba subjects showed no evidence of universal emotion perception. And since we omitted all reference to English emotion concepts in our experiments, those concepts are a prime suspect for why the basic emotion method appears to give evidence of universality.14 [image file=image_rsrc7AN.jpg] Figure 3-5: Maria Gendron (right) working with a Himba subject in Namibia, beneath a tent attached to Maria’s truck There was still one mystery remaining, however: another group of researchers, led by psychologist Disa A. Sauter, had visited the Himba a few years earlier and reported evidence of universal emotion “recognition.” Sauter and her colleagues brought the basic emotion method to the Himba using vocal sounds (laughs, grunts, snorts, sighs, etc.) instead of photos of posed faces. In their experiment, they offered brief emotion stories (translated into Otji-Herero) and asked their Himba participants to select which of two vocalizations matched each story. The Himba did this well enough that Sauter and her colleagues concluded that emotion perception was universal. We were unable to replicate these results with a different group of Himba participants, even using the published method and the same translator as Sauter did. Maria also asked another group of Himba subjects to freely label the vocal sounds, without accompanying stories, and again, only the laughing sounds were categorized as expected (although they labeled the sounds as “laughing” rather than “happy”). So why did Sauter and her team observe universality when we did not?15

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Those who claim this just means men are more likely to be repressing some universal human bisexuality will have to consider sexologist Michael Bailey’s fMRI scans of gay and straight men’s brains while they viewed pornographic photos. They reacted as men tend to do: simply and directly. The gay guys liked the photos showing men with men, while the straight guys were into the photos featuring women. Bailey was looking for activation of the brain regions associated with inhibition, to see whether his subjects were denying a bisexual tendency. No dice. Neither gay nor straight men showed unusual activation of these regions while viewing the photos. Other experiments using subliminal images have generated similar results: gay men, straight men, and lesbians all responded as predicted by their stated sexual orientation, while nominally straight women (“I contain multitudes”) responded to just about everything. This is just how we’re wired, not the result of repression or denial.14 Of course, signs of repression aren’t hard to find in sex research. There’s plenty. For example, one of the long-standing mysteries of human sexuality has been that heterosexual men tend to report having more sexual encounters and partners than heterosexual women do—a mathematical impossibility. Psychologists Terry Fisher and Michele Alexander decided to take a closer look at people’s claims regarding age of first sexual experience, number of partners, and frequency of sexual encounters.15 Fisher and Alexander set up three different testing conditions: The subjects were led to believe their answers might be seen by the researchers waiting just outside the room. The subjects could answer the questions privately and anonymously. The subjects had electrodes placed on their hand, arm, and neck—believing themselves (falsely) to be hooked up to a lie detector. Women who thought their answers might be seen reported an average of 2.6 sexual partners (all the subjects were college students younger than twenty-five). Those who thought their answers were anonymous reported 3.4 partners, while those who thought their lies would be detected reported an average of 4.4 partners. So, while women admitted to 70 percent more sexual partners when they thought they couldn’t fib, the men’s answers showed almost no variation. Sex researchers, physicians, and psychologists (and parents) need to remember that women’s answers to such questions may depend on when, where, and how the question is asked, as well as who’s asking. If it’s true that women’s sexuality is much more contextual than most men’s, we might need to reconsider a lot of what we think we know about female sexuality. In addition to the distortions created by the age bias we discussed earlier (are twenty-year-olds representative?), how useful are the responses of women answering questions in a cold classroom or laboratory setting? How would our understanding of female sexuality be different if George Clooney distributed the questionnaires by candlelight and collected them after a glass of wine in the Jacuzzi?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  If you aren’t confused already, consider that research psychiatrist Andrey Anokhin and his colleagues found that erotic images elicit significantly quicker and stronger response in women’s brains than either pleasant or frightening images without erotic content. They showed 264 women a randomly ordered collection of images ranging from snarling dogs to water skiers to semi-naked couples getting hot and heavy. The women’s brains responded about 20 percent faster to the erotic images than to any others. With men this eager responsiveness was expected, but the results among the supposedly less visual, less libidinous women surprised the researchers.5 The female erotic brain is full of such surprises. Dutch researchers used positron emission tomography (PET) to scan the brains of thirteen women and eleven men in the throes of orgasm. While the brevity of the male orgasm made reliable readings difficult to get, the heightened activity they found in the secondary somatosensory cortex (associated with genital sensation) was what they’d expected. But the women’s brains left the researchers befuddled. It seems the female brain goes into standby mode at orgasm. What little increase in cerebral activity the ladies’ brains exhibited was in the primary somatosensory cortex, which registers the presence of sensation, but not much excitement about it. “In women the primary feeling is there,” one of the researchers said, “but not the marker that this is seen as a big deal. For males, the touch itself is all-important. For females, it is not so important.”6 Every woman knows her menstrual cycle can have profound effects on her eroticism. Spanish researchers confirmed that women experience greater feelings of attractiveness and desire around ovulation, while others have reported that women find classically masculine faces more attractive around ovulation, opting for less chiseled-looking guys when not fertile.7 Since the birth control pill affects the menstrual cycle, it’s not surprising that it may affect a woman’s patterns of attraction as well. Scottish researcher Tony Little found women’s assessment of men as potential husband material shifted if they were on the pill. Little thinks the social consequences of his finding may be immense: “Where a woman chooses her partner while she is on the Pill, and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences have changed and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man.”8 Little’s concern is not misplaced. In 1995, Swiss biological researcher Claus Wedekind published the results of what is now known as the “Sweaty T-shirt Experiment.” He asked women to sniff T-shirts men had been wearing for a few days, with no perfumes, soaps, or showers. Wedekind found, and subsequent research has confirmed, that most of the women were attracted to the scent of men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) differed from her own.9 This preference makes genetic sense in that the MHC indicates the range of immunity to various pathogens. Children born of parents with different immunities are likely to benefit from a broader, more robust immune response themselves.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  But why? Within the framework of the standard narrative of human sexuality, what scientists call female copulatory vocalization (FCV) is a major conundrum. You’ll recall Steven Pinker’s claim that “[i]n all societies, sex is at least somewhat ‘dirty.’ It is conducted in private….”1 Why would the female of such a species risk attracting all that attention? Why is it that from the Lower East Side to the upper reaches of the Amazon, women are far more likely than men to loudly announce their sexual pleasure for all to hear? And why is the sound of a woman having an orgasm so difficult for heterosexual men to ignore?2 They say women can hear a baby crying from a great distance, but gentlemen, we ask you, is there any sound easier to pick out of the cacophony of an apartment block—and harder to ignore—than that of a woman lost in passion? If you’re one of the ten or fifteen people alive who have never seen Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally, go watch it now (it’s easily accessible online). It’s one of the best-known scenes in all of modern cinema, but if the roles were reversed, the scene wouldn’t be funny—it wouldn’t even make sense. Imagine: Billy Crystal sits at the restaurant table, he starts breathing harder, maybe his eyes bug out a bit, he grunts a few times, takes a few bites of his sandwich, and falls asleep. No big laughs. Nobody in the deli even notices. If male orgasm is a muffled crash of cymbals, female orgasm is full-on opera. Full of screaming, shouting, singing people standing around with spears, and table pounding sure to quiet even the noisiest New York deli.3 Female cries of ecstasy aren’t a modern phenomenon. The Kama Sutra contains ancient advice on female copulatory vocalization in terms of erotic technique, categorizing an aviary of ecstatic expression a woman might choose from: “As a major part of moaning, she may use, according to her imagination, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, green pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose, duck and partridge.” A goose? Honk if You Sex! But apart from barnyard erotic technique, it just doesn’t make sense for the female of a monogamous (or “mildly polygynous”) species to call attention to herself when mating. On the other hand, if thousands of generations of multiple mating are built into modern human sexuality, it’s pretty clear what all the shouting’s about.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Unlike her closest primate cousins, the standard human female doesn’t come equipped with private parts that swell up to double their normal size and turn bright red when she is about to ovulate. In fact, a foundational premise of the standard narrative is that men have no way of knowing when a woman is fertile. As we’re supposed to be the smartest creatures around, it’s interesting that humans are thought to be almost unique in this ignorance. The vast majority of other female mammals advertise when they are fertile, and are decidedly not interested in sex at other times. Concealed ovulation is said to be a significant human exception. Among primates, the female capacity and willingness to have sex any time, any place is characteristic only of bonobos and humans. “Extended receptivity” is just a scientific way of saying that women can be sexually active throughout their menstrual cycle, whereas most mammals have sex only when it “matters”—that is, when pregnancy can occur. If we accept the assumption that women are not particularly interested in sex, other than as a way to manipulate men into sharing resources, why would human females have evolved this unusually abundant sexual capacity? Why not reserve sex for those few days in the cycle when pregnancy is most probable, as does practically every other mammal? Two principal theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, and they couldn’t be more different. What anthropologist Helen Fisher has called “the classic explanation” goes like this: both concealed ovulation and extended (or, more accurately, constant) sexual receptivity evolved among early human females as a way of developing and cementing the pair bond by holding the attention of a constantly horny male mate. This capacity supposedly worked in two ways. First, because she was always available for sex, even when not ovulating, there was no reason for him to seek other females for sexual pleasure. Second, because her fertility was hidden, he would be motivated to stick around all the time to maximize his own probability of impregnating her and to ensure that no other males mated with her at any time—not just during a brief estrus phase. Fisher says, “Silent ovulation kept a special friend in constant close proximity, providing protection and food the female prized.”18 Known as “mate guarding behavior” to scientists, contemporary women might call it “that insecure pest who never leaves me alone.”

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Or would you answer “angry” in each case, or simply, “I feel bad”? How do you even know the answer? These are mysteries that the classical view of emotion doesn’t acknowledge. I didn’t know it at the time, but as I considered emotion categories in all their diversity, I was unwittingly applying a standard way of thinking in biology called population thinking, which was proposed by Darwin. A category, such as a species of animal, is a population of unique members who vary from one another, with no fingerprint at their core. The category can be described at the group level only in abstract, statistical terms. Just as no American family consists of 3.13 people, no instance of anger must include an average anger pattern (should we be able to identify one). Nor will any instance necessarily resemble the elusive fingerprint of anger. What we have been calling a fingerprint might just be a stereotype. 2 9 Once I adopted a mindset of population thinking, my whole landscape shifted, scientifically speaking. I began to see variation not as error but as normal and even desirable. I continued my quest for an objective way to distinguish one emotion from another, but it wasn’t quite the same quest anymore. With growing skepticism, I had only one place left to look for fingerprints. It was time to turn to the brain. * Scientists have long studied people with brain damage (brain lesions) to try to locate an emotion in a specific area of the brain. If someone with a lesion in a particular area of the brain has difficulty experiencing or perceiv ing a particular emotion, and only that emotion, then this would be considered evidence that the emotion specifically depends on the neurons in that region. It’s a bit like finding out which circuit breakers in your house control which parts of your electrical system. Initially, all breakers are on and your house runs normally. When you shut off one breaker (giving your electrical system a lesion of sorts) and observe that your kitchen lights no longer function, you’ve discovered a purpose of the breaker. The search for fear in the brain is an instructive example because for many years, scientists have considered it a textbook case of localizing emotion to a single brain area—namely, the amygdala, a group of nuclei found deep in the brain’s temporal lobe. * The amygdala was first linked to fear in the 1930s when two scientists, Heinrich Klüver and Paul C. Bucy, removed the temporal lobes of rhesus monkeys.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The photos were of pretty party people—young strangers making sultry, self-serious faces. Girls in dark lipstick, boys with red pupils, some caught unawares by the loud white flash of my camera, others posing fashionably or simply raising an eyebrow or faking wide smiles. Some photos appeared to have been taken on a downtown street at night, others in a dark, low-ceilinged interior with Day-Glo fake graffiti on the walls. I didn’t recognize anybody in the photos. In one, a group of six clubgoers huddled together, each holding up a middle finger. In another, a skinny redhead flashed her breasts, revealing lavender pasties. A chubby black boy in a fedora and tuxedo T-shirt blew smoke rings. Male twins dressed as heroin-thin Elvises in slouchy gold lamé suits high-fived in front of a Basquiat rip-off. There was a girl holding a rat on a leash hooked to the bicycle chain she wore around her neck. A close-up shot showed someone’s pale pink tongue, split to look like a snake’s and pierced on both forks with big diamond studs. There was a series of snapshots taken in what I guessed was the line for the toilet. The whole place looked like some arty rave. “Expect road closures, hurricane force gales, coastal flooding,” the weatherman was saying. I dug the remote out from between the sofa cushions and turned the TV off. One photo had fallen under the coffee table. I picked it up and flipped it over. A small Asian man stood still and apart from the crowd at the bar. He wore blue coveralls splattered in paint. I looked closely. He had a round face and ruddy acne scars. His eyes were closed. He seemed familiar. Then I recognized him. It was Ping Xi. There was a streak of pink glitter across his cheeks. I put the photo down. • • • IT HAD BEEN MONTHS since I’d even thought of Ping Xi. Whenever Ducat had popped into my mind, I’d tried to winnow my focus down to the simple memory of the long walk to the Eighty-sixth Street subway station, the express train to Union Square, the L train across town, the walk up Eighth Avenue and left on Twenty-third Street, the hobble over the old cobblestones in my high heels. Remembering the geography of Manhattan seemed worth hanging on to. But I would have preferred to forget the names and details of the people I’d met in Chelsea. The art world had turned out to be like the stock market, a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism, fueled by greed and gossip and cocaine. I might as well have worked on Wall Street. Speculation and opinions drove not only the market but the products, sadly, the values of which were hinged not to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual—a value impossible to measure, anyway—but to what a bunch of rich assholes thought would

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  him to one and all. If anyone argued, she would say that they did not know him the way she did. Sukarno was well pleased, and had the book distributed far and wide. It helped gain sympathy for him in Indonesia, where he My sixth brother, he who was now being threatened with a military coup. And Sukarno was not had both his lips cut off, surprised—he had known all along that Adams would do a far better job Prince of the Faithful, is called Shakashik. • In his with his memoirs than any "serious" journalist. youth he was very poor. One day, as he was begging in the streets of Interpretation. Who was seducing whom? It was Sukarno who was doing Baghdad, he passed by a splendid mansion, at the the seducing, and his seduction of Adams followed a classical sequence. gates of which stood an First, he chose the right victim. An experienced journalist would have re-impressive array of sisted the lure of a personal relationship with the subject, and a man would attendants. Upon inquiry my brother was informed have been less susceptible to his charm. And so he picked a woman, and Enter Their Spirit • 223 one whose journalistic experience lay elsewhere. At his first meeting with that the house belonged to Adams, he sent mixed signals: he was friendly to her, but hinted at another a member of the wealthy and powerful Barmecide kind of interest as well. Then, having insinuated a doubt in her mind (Per- family. Shakashik haps he just wants an affair?), he proceeded to mirror her. He indulged her approached the door-every mood, retreating every time she complained. Indulging a person is a keepers and solicited alms. form of entering their spirit, letting them dominate for the time being. • "Go in," they said, "and our master will give Perhaps Sukarno's passes at Adams showed his uncontrollable libido at you all that you desire." • work, or perhaps they were more cunning. He had a reputation as a Don My brother entered the Juan; failing to make a pass at her would have hurt her feelings. (Women lofty vestibule and proceeded to a spacious, are often less offended at being found attractive than one imagines, and marble-paved hall, hung Sukarno was clever enough to have given each of his four wives the im- with tapestry and pression that she was his favorite.) The pass out of the way, he moved fur- overlooking a beautiful garden. He stood ther into her spirit, taking on her casual air, even slightly feminizing himself bewildered for a moment, by adopting her hair color. The result was that she decided he was not what not knowing where to turn she had expected or feared him to be. He was not in the least threatening, his steps, and then advanced to the far end of

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Morgan was especially interested in the evolution of family structure and overall social organization. Contradicting Darwinian theory, he hypothesized a far more promiscuous sexuality as having been typical of prehistoric times. “The husbands lived in polygyny [i.e., more than one wife], and the wives in polyandry [i.e., more than one husband], which are seen to be as ancient as human society. Such a family was neither unnatural nor remarkable,” he wrote. “It would be difficult to show any other possible beginning of the family in the primitive period.” A few pages later Morgan concludes that “there seems to be no escape” from the conclusion that a “state of promiscuous intercourse” was typical of prehistoric times, “although questioned by so eminent a writer as Mr. Darwin.”25 Morgan’s argument that prehistoric societies practiced group marriage (also known as the primal horde or omnigamy—the latter term apparently coined by French author Charles Fourier) so influenced Darwin’s thinking that he admitted, “It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” With his characteristic courteous humility, Darwin agreed that there were “present day tribes” where “all the men and women in the tribe are husbands and wives to each other.” In deference to Morgan’s scholarship, Darwin continued, “Those who have most closely studied the subject, and whose judgment is worth much more than mine, believe that communal marriage was the original and universal form throughout the world…. The indirect evidence in favour of this belief is extremely strong….”26 Indeed it is. And the evidence—both direct and indirect—has grown much stronger than Darwin, or even Morgan, could have imagined. But first, a word about a word. Promiscuous means different things to different people, so let’s define our terms. The Latin root is miscere, “to mix,” and that’s how we mean it. We don’t imply any randomness in mating, as choices and preferences still exert their influence. We looked for another term to use in this book, one without the derogatory sneer, but the synonyms are even worse: sluttish, wanton, whorish, fallen. Please remember that when we describe the sexual practices in various societies around the world, we’re describing behavior that is normal to the people in question. In the common usage, promiscuity suggests immoral or amoral behavior, uncaring and unfeeling. But most of the people we’ll be describing are acting well within the bounds of what their society considers acceptable behavior. They’re not rebels, transgressors, or utopian idealists. Given that groups of foragers (either those still existing today or in prehistoric times) rarely number much over 100 to 150 people, each is likely to know every one of his or her partners deeply and intimately—probably to a much greater degree than a modern man or woman knows his or her casual lovers.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  It was in graduate school that I felt my first tug of doubt about the classical view of emotion. At the time, I was researching the roots of low self-esteem and how it leads to anxiety or depression. Numerous experiments showed that people feel depressed when they fail to live up to their own ideals, but when they fall short of a standard set by others, they feel anxious. My first experiment in grad school was simply to replicate this well-known phenomenon before building on it to test my own hypotheses. In the course of this experiment, I asked a large number of volunteers if they felt anxious or depressed using well-established checklists of symptoms. 1 I’d done more complicated experiments as an undergraduate student, so this one should have been a piece of cake. Instead, it crashed and burned. My volunteers did not report anxious or depressed feelings in the expected pattern. So I tried to replicate a second published experiment, and it failed too. I tried again, over and over, each experiment taking months. After three years, all I’d achieved was the same failure eight times in a row. In science, experiments often don’t replicate, but eight consecutive failures is an impressive record. My internal critic taunted me: not everyone is cut out to be a scientist. When I looked closely at all the evidence I had collected, however, I noticed something consistently odd across all eight experiments. Many of my subjects appeared to be unwilling, or unable, to distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. Instead, they had indicated feeling both or neither; rarely did a subject report feeling just one. This made no sense. Everybody knows that anxiety and depression, when measured as emotions, are decidedly different. When you’re anxious, you feel worked up, jittery, like you’re worried something bad will happen. In depression you feel miserable and sluggish; everything seems horrible and life is a struggle. These emotions should leave your body in completely opposite physical states, and so they should feel different and be trivial for any healthy person to tell apart. Nevertheless, the data declared that my test subjects weren’t doing so. The question was . . . why? As it turned out, my experiments weren’t failing after all. My first “botched” experiment actually revealed a genuine discovery—that people often did not distinguish between feeling anxious and feeling depressed. My next seven experiments hadn’t failed either; they’d replicated the first one. I also began noticing the same effect lurking in other scientists’ data. After completing my Ph.D. and becoming a university professor, I continued pursuing this mystery.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  “Stop counting, mother,” I said, bending over her hospital bed. And she stopped on three. All afternoon she had been telling numbers as she died. She kept saying, “3, 2, 5, 3, 2.” I said, “Stop counting, mother.” She stopped again on three. What were they? Were they a telephone number or a street address? They were coordinates for a map I did not have.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  James is widely cited for saying that each type of emotion—happiness, fear, and so on—has a distinct fingerprint in the body. This essentialist idea is a key fact of the classical view, and generations of James-influenced researchers have searched for those fingerprints in heartbeats, respiration, blood pressure, and other bodily markers (and have written some bestselling books on emotion). James’s statement has a catch, however: he never said it. The widely believed claim that he did comes from a hundred-year-old misinterpretation of his words through the lens of essentialism. James actually wrote that each instance of emotion, not each category of emotion, comes from a unique bodily state. This is a wildly different statement. It means you can tremble in fear, jump in fear, freeze in fear, scream in fear, gasp in fear, hide in fear, attack in fear, and even laugh in the face of fear. Each occurrence of fear is associated with a different set of internal changes and sensations. The classical misinterpretation of James represents a 180-degree inversion of his meaning, as if he were claiming the existence of emotion essences, when ironically he was arguing against them. In James’s words, “ ‘Fear’ of getting wet is not the same fear as fear of a bear.”13 How did this widespread misunderstanding of James arise? I discovered that one of James’s contemporaries sowed the confusion, a philosopher named John Dewey. He came up with his own theory of emotion by grafting Darwin’s essentialist views from Expression onto James’s anti-essentialist ideas, even though they are fundamentally incompatible. The result was a Frankenstein’s monster of a theory that inverted James’s meaning by assigning an essence to each emotion category. For the finishing touch, Dewey named his concoction after James, calling it “the James-Lange theory of emotion.”* Today, Dewey’s role in this jumble is forgotten, and countless publications attribute his theory to James. A prominent example is the writings of neurologist Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes’ Error and other popular books on emotion. To Damasio, an emotion’s unique physical fingerprint, which he calls a somatic marker, is a source of information used by the brain to make good decisions. These markers are like little bits of wisdom. Emotional experience, according to Damasio, occurs when somatic markers are transformed into conscious feelings. Damasio’s hypothesis is actually a child of the James-Lange merger, not of James’s actual views on emotion.14 Dewey’s misinterpretation of James is one of the great mistakes in modern psychology, forged by essentialism in the name of Darwin. It is ironic, not to mention absurdly tragic, when Darwin’s name is invoked to lend authority to essentialist scientific views, when his greatest scientific achievement was to vanquish essentialism in biology. So why is essentialism so powerful that it can twist the words of great scientists and misdirect the path of scientific discovery?

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Symons’s bold declaration was an expression of faith in parental investment theory and the central importance of paternity certainty in human evolution. But Symons was dead wrong on both points. As he wrote those ill-fated words in the late 1970s, primatologists in jungles along the Congo River were learning that bonobos are precisely the happily promiscuous and nonpossessive apes whose existence Symons declared impossible. And the Mosuo (pronounced MWO-swo—also referred to as Na or Nari), an ancient society in southwest China, are a society where paternity certainty is so low and inconsequential that men do indeed raise their sisters’ children as their own. Women and men should not marry, for love is like the seasons—it comes and goes. YANG ERCHE NAMU (Mosuo woman) In the mountains around Lugu Lake, near the border between China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, live about 56,000 people who enjoy a family system that has perplexed and fascinated travelers and scholars for centuries. The Mosuo revere Lugu Lake as the Mother Goddess, while the mountain towering over it, Ganmo, is respected as the Goddess of Love. Their language is rendered in Dongba, the sole pictographic language still used in the world today. They have no words for murder, war, or rape. The Mosuo’s relaxed and respectful tranquility is accompanied by a nearly absolute sexual freedom and autonomy for both men and women.4 In 1265, Marco Polo passed through the Mosuo region and later recalled their unashamed sexuality, writing, “They do not consider it objectionable for a foreigner, or any other man, to have his way with their wives, daughters, sisters, or any other women in their home. They consider it a great benefit, in fact, saying that their gods and idols will be disposed in their favor and offer them material goods in great abundance. This is why they are so generous with their women toward foreigners.” “Many times,” wrote Polo, with a wink and a nudge, “a foreigner has wallowed in bed for three or four days with a poor sap’s wife.”5 Macho Italian that he was, Polo completely misread the situation. He misinterpreted the women’s sexual availability as a commodity controlled by the men, when in fact, the most striking feature of the Mosuo system is the fiercely defended sexual autonomy of all adults, women as well as men.

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  It’s hard to conjure a more purely competitive entity than the human spermatozoa. Imagine a teeming school of microscopic salmon whose entire existence consists in straining upstream toward a one-in-several-hundred-million shot at reproduction. Longish odds, you might say. But not all creatures’ sperm face such overwhelmingly slim chances. In some species of insects, for example, fewer than a hundred sperm line up for the race to the ovum. Nor are all sperm tiny in comparison to him that sent them. Some species of fruit fly have sperm that measure almost six centimeters when uncoiled—several times larger than the fly himself. Homo sapiens is far down at the other extreme, depositing hundreds of millions of tiny sperm at the drop of a hat. [image file=image_rsrc68D.jpg] Hard Core in the Stone Age Here’s a head-scratcher. Why do so many heterosexual men get off on pornography featuring groups of guys having sex with just one woman? It doesn’t add up, if you think about it. It’s more cone than ice cream. And the suggestive strangeness doesn’t end with the counterintuitive male-to-female ratio; it’s male ejaculate that puts the money in the money shot. Researchers have confirmed what porn producers already know: men tend to get turned on by images depicting an environment in which sperm competition is clearly at play (though few, we imagine, think of it in quite these terms). Images and videos showing one woman with multiple males are far more popular on the Internet and in commercial pornography than those depicting one male with multiple females.14 A quick peek at the online offerings at Adult Video Universe lists over nine hundred titles in the Gangbang genre, but only twenty-seven listed under Reverse Gangbang. You do the math. Why would the males in a species that’s been wearing the shackles of monogamy for 1.9 million years be sexually excited by scenes of groups of men ejaculating with one or two women? Skeptics may argue that this arousal could reflect nothing more than commercial interests or a passing fashion. Fair enough, but what to make of experimental evidence that men viewing erotic material suggestive of sperm competition (two men with one woman) produce ejaculates containing a higher percentage of motile sperm than men viewing explicit images of only three women?15 And why does being cuckolded consistently appear at or near the top of married men’s sexual fantasies, according to experts ranging from Alfred Kinsey to Dan Savage? As far as we know, there is no corresponding taste among women for erotica featuring multiple overweight middle-aged ladies with cheap tattoos, bad haircuts, and black socks having sex with one hot guy. Go figure.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The creatures in cartoons used to be brought to life before one’s eyes: first, the tabula rasa of an empty screen, which is then seen to be a drawing board, over which the artist’s brush sweeps, a few strokes creating the characters, who only then begin to move. Or the convention of the magical ink bottle, framing the action fore and aft. The characters are sucked back into the bottle at the end, just as they had spilled out of it at the start. These devices describe the process of Le Chiendent , where one sees a silhouette from the first page fleshed-out more and more as the novel progresses, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth , 1959), where in the stillness of his room the narrator contemplates several objects, including a steel engraving, which is then “animated,” a fiction spinning out of it. “We create ourselves in time,” says one of the characters at the end of Le Chiendent , “and the old book snatches us up right away with its funny little scrawl [handwriting].” 5 In involuted works, characters readily communicate with their creators, though the relationship is not always ideal. One may recall an early Bugs Bunny animated cartoon (c. 1943) in which there is a wild running battle between the rabbit and the artist, whose visible hand alternately wields an eraser and a drawing pencil, terrible weapons which at one moment remove the rabbit’s feet so that he cannot escape, and at another give him a duck’s bill so that he cannot talk back, not unlike the lot of the characters in Invitation to a Beheading , who are taken apart, rearranged, and reassembled at will. But characters are not always as uncomplaining as Cincinnatus. In the next-to-last box of a 1936 daily strip, Chester Gould pictured his hero trapped horribly in a mine shaft, its entrance blocked by a huge boulder. The balloon above Dick Tracy’s stricken face said, “Gould, you have gone too far.” The concluding box was to have shown a kindly eraser-bearing hand, descending to remove the boulder; but The Chicago Tribune’s Captain Patterson, no doubt a disciple of Dr. Leavis, thought Gould had indeed gone too far, and rejected that strip. Considerably less desperate is Shakespeare’s direct address to Joyce in Nighttown: “How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun,” that moment being Bloomsday, this book, and Joyce’s stab at greatness. 6 “O Jamesy let me up out of this,” pleads Molly Bloom to Joyce, 7 and in the hallucinated Nighttown section the shade of Virag says, “That suits your book, eh?” When in acknowledgment his throat is made to twitch, Virag says, “Slapbang! There he goes again.”

• From Sex at Dawn (2010)

  Faced with the mysteries of woman, Sigmund Freud, who seemed to have an answer for everything else, came up empty. “Despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul,” he wrote, “I have not yet been able to answer…the great question that has never been answered: what does a woman want?” It’s no accident that what the BBC called “the most famous image in the history of art” is a study of the inscrutable feminine created by a homosexual male artist. For centuries, men have been wondering what Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was thinking. Is she smiling? Is she angry? Disappointed? Unwell? Nauseated? Sad? Shy? Turned on? None of the above? Probably closer to all of the above. Does she contradict herself? Very well, then. The Mona Lisa is large. Like all women, but more—like all that is feminine—she reflects every phase of the moon. She contains multitudes. Our journey into a deeper understanding of the “feminine soul” begins in a muddy field in the English countryside. In the early 1990s, neuroscientist Keith Kendrick and his colleagues exchanged that season’s newborn sheep and goats (the baby sheep were raised by adult goats, and vice versa). Upon reaching sexual maturity a few years later, the animals were reunited with their own species and their mating behavior was observed. The females adopted a love-the-one-you’re-with approach, showing themselves willing to mate with males of either species. But the males, even after being back with their own species for three years, would mate only with the species with which they were raised.1 Research like this suggests strong differences in degrees of “erotic plasticity” (changeability) in the males and females of many species—including ours.2 The human female’s sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male’s. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire. Young males pass through a brief period in which their sexuality is like hot wax waiting to be imprinted, but the wax soon cools and solidifies, leaving the imprint for life. For females, the wax appears to stay soft and malleable throughout their lives. This greater erotic plasticity appears to manifest in women’s more holistic responses to sexual imagery and thoughts. In 2006, psychologist Meredith Chivers set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to men and women, both straight and gay. The videos included a wide range of possible erotic configurations: man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, lone man masturbating, lone woman masturbating, a muscular guy walking naked on a beach, and a fit woman working out in the nude. To top it all off, she also included a short film clip of bonobos mating.3

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Thou art not upon earth, as thou believest; but lightning, fleeing its proper site, 19 ne’er darted as dost thou who are returning thither.” If I was stripped of my first perplexity by the brief smile-enwrapped discourse, I was the more enmeshed within another; and I said: “Content already and at rest from a great marvelling, now am I in amaze how I transcend these lightsome bodies.” 20 Whereon she, after a sigh of pity, turned her eyes toward me with that look a mother casts on her delirious child; and began: “All things whatsoever observe a mutual order; and this is the form that maketh the universe like unto God. Herein the exalted creatures 21 trace the impress of the Eternal Worth, which is the goal whereto was made the norm now spoken of.