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.