Monday, March 17, 2014

You know porn when you see it, don't you?

The other day we wrote a post reacting to a NYTimes article that said that we really don’t know what ‘life’ actually is, that life is only a ‘concept’ we have, not something we can rigorously define.  But one thing about life, whatever life is, is that reproduction is essential.  Successful reproduction proliferates viable genetic variation via both chance and natural selection.  Sex is the way that happens for many species, like us.  That makes sex very interesting to scientists (for purely abstract theoretical reasons, naturally), and to the general public who are the participants in the reproductive circus.

There are various theories about how sex is or how it should be done successfully, not so much in regard to positions, but as to who does it with whom.  As humans, we each have a vested interest in this, and this is at least in part why homosexuality as well as heterosexuality attract attention.  Many studies are done to see how sex works, that is, how the intense and selective competition takes place and all of that.  Because we’re all in this competitive arena together, we naturally are curious to keep an eye on what our fellow competitors are up to.  So, besides the titter, that makes sexual behavior newsworthy.

Of course, the intense scrutiny of behavioral evolutionists centers on the strategies by which males purportedly want to inseminate as many females as possible, to spread their genes, but females want to ‘catch’ their man since they have to care for the few children they can bear, and want a steady breadwinner to help out.  Since this is so fundamental to success, and has been that way so intensely for so long, sexual patterns are often said to have been inscribed deeply in our genes ages ago, to ensure that the genes’ bearers don’t just bear all, so to speak, indiscriminately, but bear fruit in the process. 

Impersonal sex
Thus, for completely scientific and detached intellectual reasons, the news media are curious about sexual behavior.  So a recent newsworthy description grabbed our attention (as scientists). 

The story relates to one aspect of contemporary sexual activity or, one might call it, ‘performing’.  Attractive young people having sex with many different partners, sometimes different from day to day.  The pairings are arranged at the last minute, more or less as a planned business matter.  The performers often don’t know the person they’re doing the very most intimate acts with, or afterwards wonder who s/he was.  They cannot be sure that they were protected from disease or pregnancy, partly because they may be under the influence at the time they’re engaged in their romp with these strangers.  You may see a record of their activity on posted videos showing the various sexual positions, devices, and activities that are involved.  Those activities may include serial sex or group sex—you name it! 

Of course, we must be talking about the porn industry, because there the evolutionary rules are apparently suspended for some reason.  Perhaps society seems to frown on the activity because its random impersonality leads to licentiousness that might upset the evolutionary apple cart.  Fortunately (you breath a sigh of relief!), at least this is a somewhat underground aberrant activity on the fringe of society.

Wrong!  What we describe is today’s ‘hookup’ culture.  This is what many college students (and hence educated and privileged and should-know-better, not just desperate deviant addicts) are doing.  They write and boast about it in their college newspapers.  Campuses are ringed with bars where the ‘auditions’ for partners take place.  The sex that results is no less real, varied, graphic, and impersonal than porn.


Hookup, or porn?
Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/11/15/does-hookup-culture-hurt-women.html

But there’s a difference
Actually, there is a difference between hookup culture and porn.  Porn performers work openly in daytime, with formal contracts, under at least partly regulated conditions.  They are clear in advance about what will be performed, and there is at least some protection related to medical health and contraception.  Their activities take place under controlled conditions, with witnesses.  No waking up afterwards and wondering what went down, with whom (or how many).  It’s completely voluntary, partners not chosen in a stupor.  And they are paid in money, not just beer and vodka.

If you think of it in this way, porn could be seen as a more savory kind of activity than hookup culture.  College students do often voice regrets about their hookup experiences with its drug or alcohol connections, its anonymity, its nocturnal furtiveness (porn is daytime work).  But they still do it regularly, even if they sometimes report feeling ‘used’.  One main difference is that porn is at least always planned for posting on the net, but hookup adventures less often so.

We aren't defending the porn industry which has both its advocates and its critics.  But we write because of a recent news frenzy that concerned a student at a prominent university whose porn activities were outed by a classmate.  This hit the headlines, and the performer (a women’s studies major) became an overnight media interview sensation (interviewed on Piers Morgan/CNN for instance).   She is unapologetic about the fact that she does this to help pay her way through college (here's one of countless stories).  By contrast, hookup culture, if anything, may reduce the performers' chances of getting through college successfully.

If hookup culture is so widespread--and even if we avoid asking why this doesn’t give pause to the evolutionary theorists (one can always find after-the-fact explanations of why this doesn’t really violate the assumed genetic mandates, even though it obviously seems to)--we can ask whether the porn industry is any sleazier, rarer, or more deviant than what’s happening right now in the local bars in your town. 

Why is a college student, doing what she does in what seems a responsible way compared to what her friends are doing in their seemingly less responsible way, considered a sort of shocking misbehavior sensation?  Why is she being scorned or even threatened, as she says, by frat boys and other classmates--who may be watching or up to similar acts?  Why isn't the question not about the porn industry and its exploitation, but rather about the turn of our society in recent years towards amateur porn under the name ‘hookup’?  (See this link from which we got our figure.)

There are a lot of things one can think about the meaning of this state of affairs, knowing that it is transitory and that sexual behavior varies greatly among countries and over time within country (and here we don’t even need to consider the current rise of acceptance for homosexual and transgender/transsexual aspects).  There’s a big nature-nurture difference of opinion about this**, but our own view is that evolution has indisputably given us the drives for sex, either because of its immediate pleasure and/or for whatever other cognitive reasons.  But when it comes to it, like so much in human affairs, culture rules.

One might almost wish that bars would impose similar standards as at least some of the porn industry apparently does, but that the hookup culture apparently doesn’t.

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**We will be screening any comments on this post to avoid it being mired in that divisive often polemical area.

7 comments:

Holly Dunsworth said...

It's a good point. However, I think it's quite possible that people have an inflated or exaggerated view of just how many college students are participating in hook-up culture.

Ken Weiss said...

You certainly raise a valid and complex point. My thinking was based on how openly our local students write about this and make it seem like what 'everybody' is doing. At least, I think, many are. But I don't know of course in any detail at all.

Kirk Maxey said...

Evolutionary scientists should not become overwrought just because someone else seems to be getting way too much sex, When a human being is born into the world, it cannot be foretold whether it will be thrust into a culture of Puritanism, Hook-up sex, Mayan sacrifice, or the Khmer Rouge insanity of the 1970s. Science simply watches calmly to see who emerges with a good size clutch of growing, healthy offspring, and who does not. A thoughtful, safety conscious female who films porn and emerges from college without debt and with her reproductive organs intact has made progress towards that goal. She is at a great advantage compared with a female in similar circumstances who contracts numerous STDs that terminate her fertility during bouts of intercourse when she isn't even fully conscious. However, both lag far behind the more chaste if boring female who does not attend college, marries her sexual partner, works as a cashier, and has two kids by the age of 20. That third female is the one, by virtue of whatever genes, thoughts, traits, and characteristics both malleable and fixed, that allowed her to pass her genes intact through the strange times and culture of the hookup sex generation.

Manoj Samanta said...

I usually find these research projects on evolutionary biology based on short term social cycle to be statistically poor, because they try to read too much from contemporary social behavior and that too of only a small class of entire human population of the world. If at all, the following cyclical pattern is more noteworthy and may be subjected to investigation.

Germany of 1920s was financially bankrupt and was trying to live on Keynesian steroid. I read a book written in 1931 about German economic projects and almost jumped out of chair. Everything written there about Germany sounded very similar to USA of today ("building another bridge in Munich using borrowed money to simply 'stimulate' the economy"). The description was so close that if someone replaced Germany by USA and changed the publication date to 2007, I could not tell.

We know a few other things about Germany of 1920s.
(i) The country had a glorious century and all Nobel laureates of the day as well as leading thinkers were from Germany.

(ii) The country had a 'sexual revolution'. The Institute of Sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) was founded in 1919 and one of its major goals was to study homosexuality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft

(iii) The most famous 'book burning' of the Nazis started with the library of this sexual institute. Germans did not protest too much about the book burning, because they did not approve of 'hookup culture' of Weimer era. Then the Nazis expanded the program to burning of all books written by Jews, and finally even called quantum mechanics 'Jewish science' and tried to ostracize Heisenberg by calling him 'white Jew', just because he was a theoretical physicist.

I hope you find those patterns more interesting than deriving too much about male-female evolution from limited data of US college kids of 2014.


Manoj Samanta said...

> She is unapologetic about the fact that she does this to help pay her way through college (here's one of countless stories).

The above is another symptom of terminally ill US university system and supports of my prediction of its collapse.

http://www.homolog.us/blogs/blog/2014/03/14/columbia-u-fires-senior-faculty-researchers-getting-80-salary-grants/

In the past, being trained by college had a bigger purpose of being able to show that a person is educated, scholarly and morally upright by the standards of the society. Now, 'going to the college' itself is considered the achievement, and every way of paying for it is socially acceptable.

Ken Weiss said...

I would generally agree about short-term evolutionary interpretations. I don't think we can really interpret local, culture-specific patterns in long-term evolutionary ways. Which is not to deny that genes have functions and that traits including behavior are affected by genes and by genetic variation.

Your comments on the US today and Germany are beyond what I know about in any detail, so I can't really comment, but clearly through history we know that attitudes and behavior related to sex have changed in major ways and rapidly. So a legitimate challenge is to understand the interaction between evolutionary derived 'drives' and so on, and how culture affects and molds them.

Manoj Samanta said...

Here is the book I mentioned. The title is 'The Bubble that Broke the World' and is based on essays published in 1931 and 32

http://mises.org/books/bubbleworld.pdf

I recommend it strongly, if not the entire book, definitely the chapter on Germany.