Richard Conniff's Blog, page 88

Building Better Men (The Male Advantage–part 6)

There are of course things men can learn to do better.  There are ways we can steer some of our more aggressive impulses toward healthier ends (fewer murders, more jazz albums).  But let’s start by talking about how society can help.  It might seem obvious to say so, but characterizing masculinity as a failed brand of humanity just makes things worse.  It hurts men, because our self-worth comes largely from the idea that we play a useful and important part in the lives of the people around us.  It’s bad for women, too, because it leads men to live down to their low opinion. It’s bad even for a woman who wants to bypass nasty masculinity in favor of a hassle-free anonymous sperm donor.  Odds are better than even that she will give birth to little Mr. Wonderful.  And then the idea that males are a doomed gender will suddenly seem unbelievably short-sighted.

We are not a doomed gender, just a little raucous and disruptive.  And society can work with that, first by treating the educational system as if the male half of the classroom also matters.  At Mt. Carmel High School for boys, on Chicago’s South Side, Sister Helen Jeanne Hurley, a Carmelite nun pushing 80 (though she won’t say from which side), teaches math with the help of a nerf ball net above the blackboard.  Boys who do well on quizzes can go to the line for extra points, including a five-point hook shot from the back wall.  Objects flying through the air snap boys out of what the school euphemistically calls “a rest state.”   (Sister Helen, from the outside, over the light fixtures, YES!)   Mobility, even just swapping seats in mid-class, works, too.

Playing down competition in the name of self-esteem is standard elsewhere, thanks to well-meaning parents and a feminized educational system.  But at Mt. Carmel, competition is a basic teaching tool.  Jeff Enright, a former trial lawyer, has his honors history students choose up sides for a mock trial as they would on the playground.  Captains go to opposite corners to call out their choices, and new players bump fists as they line up beside their teammates.   “Now it gets embarrassing,” Enright says, when it’s down to just four or five kids still seated.  He singles out one kid who flubbed his part in the last mock trial: “Fallon, my advice to you is, learn the objections this time.”    Handing out gold stars for “great effort” or “terrific team play” is not Mt. Carmel’s style.   For most boys, it adds up to self-esteem only if somebody wins, meaning somebody else doesn’t.

“There have to be a lot of mountains to climb, and boys want to get to the top,” says Kathy Stevens, MPA, executive director at the Gurian Institute.  She works with schools to promote different ways of teaching boys and girls.  Boys, she says, “may help other boys get to the top, but they want you to know that they got there first.”  Because schools typically think this will be intimidating for girls, they take the opposite approach, expecting boys to learn like girls, sitting still in class and being nice to one another.  “Too often the women’s movement wants the boys to shut up,” says Stevens.  It fails boys—contributing to the high male dropout rate and low college attendance–and it fails society too:  “Each sex brings different skills to the table,” but only if each gets the necessary education.

Getting a Grip on Emotions (The Male Advantage–conclusion)

Alexythimic?

How about grown-up men?  How do we adapt to a society that increasingly acts as if we are not worth the trouble?   Psychologists argue that men need to continue moving away from narrow old notions of masculinity, because they no longer work in a more egalitarian world.  Most modern dads have long since figured out, for instance, that they are far happier escaping the limited old role of dad as the distant provider and dreaded disciplinarian.  But we still tend to be a little distant about our own emotional lives.  When psychologists talk about getting in touch with our emotions, it sometimes seems to me that they are asking us to become less like men.    Talking about stress, fear, depression, anger, and other standard male emotional issues seems like a way of undermining one of the best things about being a man—our sense of confidence, the belief that, even against overwhelming odds, we can still triumph, or die trying.

But acknowledging our fears may actually be a counterintuitive strategy for beating the odds in any situation, according to University of Chicago psychologist Sian Beilock, Ph.d.  She’s the author of the recent book Choke and an expert on performing under pressure.  In an experiment she co-authored recently in Science, test subjects wrote down their insecurities 10 minutes before a stressful situation—and got a significant boost in performance.  “The idea,” she says, “is that getting your worries down on paper in a sense downloads them from the mind, making them less likely to pop up and distract you in an important moment.”

I also like the paint-by-numbers system of re-connecting with our emotions outlined by University of Akron psychologist Ronald Levant PhD.   “Alexithymia,” from the Greek meaning “without words for emotion,” is the common male syndrome of numbness to our own inner lives, and Levant’s treatment for fixing it begins by building vocabulary:  In five or ten minutes, write down as many words for emotions as you can think of.  For a lot of men, says Levant, angry, lonely, worried, disappointed, afraid, and pissed off come up right away.  Caring and loving are less common.  The second step is to watch a movie or television show to practice reading emotions by paying attention to tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, and other signals:  That’s anger, that’s fear, that’s love.

Then Levant has his clients try the same thing on themselves:   “Every emotion has a physiological component–for instance, the way the heart races when you feel fear.  So notice how your body changes, write it down, and then ask who is doing what action and how does it affect you.”  The final step is simply to practice emotional self-awareness over and over, the way you would practice a golf swing or a tennis serve, so it becomes ingrained.  The idea isn’t to make the emotions go away.  But recognizing them can help us savor the good ones, and handle the troublesome ones more intelligently.

Women can also help by understanding that we sometimes express emotions in ways they might not immediately recognize.  Men are, for instance, entirely capable of experiencing The Big E, empathy, though conventional wisdom says we are too analytical and goal oriented for that sort of thing.   One line of psychological thought even holds that autism is just the ordinary male empathy-deficit taken to extremes.  But here’s a different way of looking at it:  For women, empathy typically elicits an emotional response.  They lift their eyebrows, coo, “Oh, poor baby,” and fold the unfortunate party in a warm hug.  This can feel good, but treating it as the One True Form of Empathy is like telling women that they can experience only one kind of orgasm.

Men tend instead to what Levant calls “action empathy.”  It’s a tactical more than an emotional response:  We see what the unfortunate party is experiencing and focus on what’s likely to happen next, what to do about it, and maybe even how we can help.  That is, we feel the other person’s pain and want to fix it.   It is yet another good thing about men.   But beware that if your wife has just gotten bawled out by her boss for poor record-keeping, and you offer to help her re-organize her computer, she might not instantly recognize that this is empathy.  Sometimes you just need to say it out loud: “That really stinks and I’m sorry.”  You might even try to hug her and coo, “Oh, poor baby.” Unnatural?  Maybe a little, but painless.  (And there‘s nothing wrong with thinking tactically:  It might just lead to sex.)

The bottom line is not just that men are good—and women, too—but that each needs to learn from the strengths of the other.  Balky feminists used to brag that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  But the reality is that men and women need each other like a fish needs a school.

Living well is about learning to swim together.

Religious Demand Drives Elephant Slaughter

My friend and editor Oliver Payne has a startling blog item today, based on Nat Geo’s “Blood Ivory” cover story.  Take a look.   Some of the culprits are surprising:

Elephants are being illegally killed across Africa at the highest rates in a decade, and the global religious market for ivory is a driving force. “Blood Ivory,” the cover story in the October issue of National Geographic, offers the first in-depth investigation of this untold story.

While it’s impossible to say exactly how many elephants are slaughtered annually, a conservative estimate for 2011 is more than 25,000. And thousands of those are dying to satisfy religious devotion, their tusks smuggled into countries to be carved into religious artifacts: ivory baby Jesuses and saints for Catholics in the Philippines, Islamic prayer beads for Muslims and Coptic crosses for Christians in Egypt, amulets and carvings for Buddhists in Thailand, and in China—the world’s biggest ivory-consumer country—elaborate Buddhist and Taoist carvings for investors. (Interactive graphic: elephant decline, poaching estimates, and ivory seizures.)

See National Geographic pictures from the “Blood Ivory” cover story >>

If someone in the Philippines wants to smuggle an ivory statue of the baby Jesus to the U.S., Msgr. Cristobal Garcia is happy to advise, writes National Geographic investigative reporter Bryan Christy.”Wrap it in old, stinky underwear and pour ketchup on it so it looks shitty with blood,” Garcia told Christy. “This is how it is done.”

Monsignor Garcia is head of protocol for the archdiocese of Cebu, the largest in the Philippines, giving him a flock of nearly 4 million in a country of 75 million Roman Catholics, the world’s third largest Catholic population. The tradition of carving ivory into religious pieces in the Philippines is so deeply rooted that in Cebu the word for ivory, garing, also means “religious statue.”

Christy reports that another prominent Filipino Catholic, Father Vicente Lina, Jr. (Father Jay), advises people to buy religious icons made of “new” ivory—”so the history of an image will start in you.” By “new” Father Jay means smuggled.

In 1990 a global ban on ivory trade came into force, and to get around it, Father Jay told Christy, Muslims from the Philippines’ southern island of Mindanao smuggle ivory in from Africa. It comes “through the back door. You just keep on paying so many people so that it will enter your country.”

The Roman Catholic catechism states that, “It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly.” Earlier this week National Geographic asked the Vatican to comment on the devotional use of ivory, which is fueling the current African elephant crisis. As of September 14, a statement had not been received.

“Ivory Removes Bad Spirits”

The elephant is revered in Buddhism and is a symbol of Thailand. Monks there give out ivory amulets in return for donations. Kruba Dharmamuni, a prominent monk known as the Elephant Monk, wears an ivory elephant-head pendant suspended from ivory prayer beads representing the 108 human passions.

“Ivory removes bad spirits,” Dharmamuni told National Geographic. Ivory also earns him money. The Elephant Monk takes in thousands of dollars a month from amulets of ivory and other materials sold in his temple gift shop.

In China, religious themes are common in carved ivory pieces. Newly rich Chinese are snapping up ivory in the form of Buddhist and Taoist gods and goddesses. Prices can be astronomical: Christy reports seeing a carved ivory Guanyin on sale for the equivalent of U.S. $215,000. Guanyin is the Buddhist goddess of mercy, a Madonna-like figure who doubles as a fertility goddess.

Buddhist monks in China perform a ceremony called kai guang, the opening of light, to consecrate religious icons, just as some Filipino priests will bless Catholic images made of illegal ivory for their followers. “To be respectful of the Buddha,” the report quotes a Chinese collector, “one should use precious material. If not ivory then gold. But ivory is more precious.”

The National Geographic October cover story also exposes key flaws in analysis and decision-making by the leadership of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which sets international wildlife trade policy. CITES approved a massive sale of legal ivory to China and Japan in 2008. That decision, the report concludes, has only increased the world’s appetite for illegal ivory, fueling the current elephant poaching frenzy across Africa. (Find out how you can help.)

See the Full National Geographic MagazineReport

Read “Blood Ivory” Online

New Monkey Species Discovered in a Snapshot

A thoughtful looking male of the newly-identified monkey species from the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Photo: M. Emetshu/PLOS One)

UPDATE:  Much of the world seems to be going gaga for this new species, known locally as the lesula, and that’s surely a good thing.  The (UK) Guardian goes entertainingly over the top.  Here’s an excerpt:

The photograph captures a sensitivity and intelligence that makes this monkey look like it is sitting for its portrait by Rembrandt. It reveals a staggeringly insightful, wise, and melancholy face. Like Rembrandt’s son Titus in the portrait of him by his father that hangs in London’s Wallace Collection, the lesula looks right back at its beholder, calm and pensive, examining you as you examine it. Its eyes have the depth and frankness of those seen in moving portraits on Roman-era mummies from the Fayoum, or in Antonello da Messina’s haunting portrait of a man gazing back out of a glassy oil panel.

And here’s a somewhat more earth-bound report on the remarkable new species discovery, from Mother Nature Network:

A shy, brightly colored monkey species has been found living in the lush rainforests at the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a find that utterly surprised the researchers who came upon it.

“When I first saw it, I immediately knew it was something new and different — I just didn’t know how significant it was,” said John Hart, a veteran Congo researcher who is scientific director for the Lukuru Wildlife Research Foundation, based in Kinshasa.

In fact, the find was something of a happy accident. Hart first spied the suspect monkey in 2007 while sifting through photographs brought back from a recently concluded field expedition to a remote region of central DRC.

Georgette and the snapshot that started the hunt for a new species (Photo: John Hart)

Yet the image that caught his eye hadn’t been taken in the field. It was snapped in a village, and showed a young girl named Georgette with a tiny monkey that had taken a shine to the 13-year-old.

Hart followed up with five years of field work, anatomical comparisons, and genetic analysis.  He and his co-authors officially introduced their fine, named Cercopithecus lomamiensis, yesterday in the online journal PLOS ONE.  The report on Mother Nature Network continues:

It turned out that the little monkey that hung around Georgette’s house had been brought to the area by the girl’s uncle, who had found it on a hunting trip. It wasn’t quite a pet, but it became known as Georgette’s lesula. The young female primate passed its days running in the yard with the dogs, foraging around the village for food, and growing up into a monkey that belonged to a species nobody recognized.

Further investigation revealed the full story of the strange monkey. It turned out that C. lomamiensis, a cryptic, skittish primate, roams a swath of dense rainforest some 6,500 square miles (17,000 square kilometers) …

The trees tower overhead, blocking out the sun, and the forest floor — the chief domain of the lesula — is steeped in a permanent gloom. The forest is full of sounds. At first light, the lesulas raise a lilting chorus of booming calls, distinct from the cries of their monkey neighbors who pass their lives in the trees high above the forest floor; at dusk, the cries of African grey parrots echo through the canopy. The earth is wet and soft, and feet sink into the ground with each step. There is a gentle, steady thud as fruit falls from the trees.

The very blue bottom

The business about the new species being colorful doesn’t show up adequately in the photographs, alas.  But here are the details:

“They have giant blue backsides,” Hart said. “Bright aquamarine buttocks and testicles. What a signal! That aquamarine blue is really a bright color in forest understory.” [World's Freakiest Looking Animals]

“So in terms of monkey viewing, females can definitely find males,” Detwiler said.
“We don’t really know what this means because it’s very uncommon for monkeys in this lineage,” she added.
The only other monkey to share this feature is the lesula’s closest cousin — the owl-faced monkey, a species that lives farther east. At first it was thought the monkeys were close kin, but genetic analysis suggests the two species split from a common ancestor about 2 million years ago.

Now that the new species has been formally identified, Hart said, the next task is to save it. Although the lesula is new to science, it is a well-established sight on the dinner table.

It’s not clear how large a population of the species survives, but the bush meat trade is already a threat:

Georgette, the girl whose lesula companion started it all, is now 18. “The animal was very attached to her,” Hart said. But one day the monkey disappeared.

“It was suspected that somebody in town had taken it in,” Hart said. “And it ended up in their cooking pot.”

Here’s the citation:  Hart JA, Detwiler KM, Gilbert CC, Burrell AS, Fuller JL, et al. (2012) Lesula: A New Species of Cercopithecus Monkey Endemic to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Implications for Conservation of Congo’s Central Basin. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44271. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044271

Two More from Madidi

I’m guessing these two are not friends.

Parrot snake, one of 50 snake species in Madidi (Photo: Mileniusz Spanowicz/WCS)

Female Blue-crowned Manakin (Photo: Mileniusz Spanowicz/WCS)

Feast Your Eyes: Bolivia’s Madidi National Park

A little more than 20 years ago, a group of naturalists visited an area on the eastern slopes of the Andes in Bolivia and  helped bring international attention to an Amazonian region of incredible, and unsuspected, diversity.   (I wrote about two of them, birder Ted Parker and botanist Al Gentry in this article last year.)  As a result in 1995, Bolivia created the Madidi National Park, protecting 4.5 million acres, an area the size of New Jersey, and all the species within it.

Now the Wildlife Conservation Society has put together a report showing that Madidi National Park contains 11 percent of the world’s birds (just as Parker had predicted), more than 200 species of mammals, almost 300 types of fish, and 12,000 plant varieties.

WCS also put wildlife photographer Mileniusz Spanowicz on the scene, and I have nothing to say but feast your eyes

A juvenile harpy eagle, the most powerful bird of prey in the world. Photo: Mileniusz Spanowicz/WCS

The crested forest toad, one of an estimated 100+ species of amphibians in the Madidi park. Photo: Mileniusz Spanowicz/WCS

One of more than 1000 species of butterflies estimated for Madidi park. Photo: Mileniusz Spanowicz/WCS

A juvenile wattled jacana, one of more than 920 species birds so far registered for the Madidi park. Photo: Mileniusz Spanowicz/WCS

Oneness with Nature

Over the weekend, I commented on Facebook about how Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder suffers from her ludicrous 1930s horror movie notion of the rain forest: “The scientists all agreed that they had never been deep into the jungle for more than eight minutes without thinking they would give everything they owned to be led safely out.”  I’ve spent a lot of time in rain forests, and it has often been wonderful–hunting for frogs or katydids by headlamp, watching the graceful gliding movement of tree snakes, seeing a school of parrots go brawling past at sunset on an Amazon tributary, or having a river dolphin come looming up beside me as I swam. 

But then I also recalled something I wrote in my book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time, and in the interest of fairness and balance, I am reprinting that here for your pleasure.  Just try to remember, it’s not all like this:

It is mosquito season again, time for entertaining unwholesome thoughts about nature. Just now, as it happens, I was reading one of my old journals from a trip somewhere in South America, when I turned the page. There, flattened next to the binding, was the dark smudge of a mosquito and, on the opposite page, its Rorschach image in dried blood, probably my own.

All the unheralded charms of the rain forest came rushing back: the way my clothes were always caked and sodden with mud, the way the howler monkeys roared their jocund welcome and flung excrement at my head, the feeling of sliding down wet clay trails and shuffling cautiously over a wobbly one-log bridge at midnight in the endless rain, with a dehydration headache welling up behind my dripping brow. But above all, I recalled the relief of finally making it back to camp, to sleep and to give sustenance to mosquitoes.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of experiencing this almost sacramental moment of union with Gaia, here is what it feels like. You drop your clothes in a clay-heavy heap, leaving your puckered flesh bare just long enough for the mosquitoes to roar in like Sooners at a land rush. This causes you to dive into your individual cocoon of netting drapery, and of course the mosquitoes follow. You spend the next ten minutes slapping and spattering winged droplets of your own blood all over the netting and the sheets. Then, having killed the last mosquito, you recollect that you have forgotten to pee, climb back out (after longing, in vain, for a catheter), and do it all over again.

According to my journal for that night, the sound of slapping finally died away, and there was a brief period during which the hostility and bone weariness of the day succumbed at long last to peace. Across the way, one of my travel companions looked up disconsolately at his white shroud and remarked: “I feel like a pupa.”

“I was beginning to think of you as a maggot,” the tough guy in the group replied. (Did I mention that I was traveling with field researchers who learned their manners largely from insects, and not social insects either?)

“I’ve got a tear in my mosquito net,” someone else said, as he started slapping again.

The tough guy immediately began speculating on whether it would be possible for mosquitoes to drain enough blood to kill a person and how long it might take. (The tough guy had apparently learned his manners largely from the botfly, a type of insect that gets its eggs under your skin, where the developing larvae wriggle and otherwise annoy you for weeks on end.)

“A mosquito only takes a millionth of a gallon per bite,” said the pupa. He was a decent guy who liked to smooth things over. “It couldn’t happen.”

“Brazoria, Texas, 1980,” said the tough guy. “There were so many mosquitoes they killed the cattle. Autopsies said half the blood in their bodies was missing . . .” He enjoyed trying to keep us awake at night with entomological horror stories.

“I wish I was home,” sobbed the guy with the torn netting.

“Home!” sneered the tough guy. I believe he would have spat to emphasize his contempt, were it not for his own mosquito netting.

Then, as if this were the one thing that might be better, he said, “We could be in the Arctic tundra.”

He proceeded to explain that spring in the tundra is so short and sudden that the snowmelt hatches all the dormant mosquito eggs virtually at the same instant. The entire population of mosquitoes then has about 20 minutes to mate, find a victim, get a blood meal, and lay a new batch of eggs before winter sets in again.

Some Canadian researchers once forced themselves to sit still in such a swarm long enough to report that they suffered 9,000 bites a minute.

“Those Canadians know how to have fun,” said the pupa.

Happy Birthday, Elliott Coues

“Never put away a bird unlabelled, not even for an hour,” a nineteenth century field guide advised, “you may forget it or die.”  The author was Elliott Coues (9 September 1842-25 December 1899), in his Handbook of Field and General Ornithology.

Naturalists did in fact die, in depressingly large numbers, and they could also be forgetful.  Attaching a label to the leg, with the chicken-scratched details of place, date and habitat, was the only way to make sense of a specimen months later, especially since naturalists then sometimes took dozen of specimens in a day. Collecting multiple individuals within a single species was a way to compile a thorough scientific record of normal variation—the little differences between juveniles and adults, or males and females, or separate populations on neighboring islands.  Even the ordinary differences among individuals in the same population could be crucial for sorting out where one species ended and another began.  Taking multiple specimens also mattered to some naturalists because selling duplicates to collectors back home was their only means of support.

Coues did his scientific work mainly in the service of the U.S. Army, where he was part of the great tradition of military surgeon-naturalists, and later for the Smithsonian Institution.  He joined the Army as a medical cadet in 1862, and served, including long periods on the American frontier, until 1881.  He was a careful scholar and what he once said about bibliography applied equally to his work as a taxonomist, “It takes a sort of an inspired idiot to be a good bibliographer, and his inspiration is as dangerous a gift as the appetite of the gambler or dipsomaniac—it grows with what it feeds upon, and finally possesses its victim like any other invincible vice.”

Orgasms and Woolly Mammoths

It is such good fun to see one of our public idiots reduced to a laughing stock in the national press.  Zoe Heller does it this week to Naomi Wolf in The New York Review of Books.  Here’s an excerpt:

The “linear, goal-oriented” sex that predominates in the West does not take sufficient account of women’s extreme sensitivity to the emotional conditions in which sex takes place. Both pornography and classic second-wave feminism have tended to promote sexual technique as the key to female sexual satisfaction. Feminists in particular have tried to persuade women that they can “fuck like men, or get by with a great vibrator…and be simply instrumentalist about their pleasure.” But these, Wolf argues, are damaging myths. In order to achieve high orgasm, women need to feel safe and protected. (Ideally, they will feel “uniquely valued” and “cherished.”) They need atmosphere (candlelight, attractive furnishings, dreamy gazes) and “unique preparatory tributes or gestures” (flowers, drawn baths). It also helps a lot, apparently, if their male partners address them as “Goddess.”

These are not, Wolf emphasizes, the culturally specific preferences of a high-maintenance woman, but the biologically determined requirements of all women. In prehistoric times, it was dangerous for women to enter the disinhibited trance state of high orgasm when they were copulating “in the vicinity of wild animals or aggressors from another tribe,” so choosing sexual partners who would value them enough to protect them in an emergency was paramount.

This would seem a very flimsy speculation on which to hang an entire theory about women’s hardwired need for precoital schmoozing. One of its several problems is that it fatally exaggerates the obliviousness of the orgasmic woman. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a female in the throes of more than culturally adequate passion can snap to attention with astonishing rapidity if one of her children happens to wander into her bedroom, and the response time might even be quicker if the intruder were a woolly mammoth.

The lure of having an evolutionary imprimatur for her ideas about female sexuality seems to harden Wolf to such objections. It is striking that when confronted with an evolutionary story that does not suit her prejudices—the idea, for example, that a cross-cultural male preference for a certain female waist-to-hip ratio might be an adaptive preference for fertile-seeming women—she is happy to reject it, without further elaboration, as “sexist.” Yet offered a no less controversial theory that happens to support her a priori convictions, she is all naive fascination. To support her view that vaginal orgasms are superior to the clitoral kind, she cites the phenomenon of “uterine upsuck” as proof that vaginal orgasms are evolutionarily “superefficient.”

Whether she knows it or not, investigations into the adaptive “purpose” of orgasms, vaginal or otherwise, are far more contentious and inconclusive than she suggests. The classic data on which the “upsuck” theory of female orgasm is based derive from one study, involving a single participant, conducted in 1970. And the fact that between a third and two thirds of women rarely or never achieve orgasm through intercourse would seem by itself a pretty conclusive argument against any evolutionary explanation for female orgasm. But there is a further problem with her argument. Why should a feminist woman who is having sex for nonprocreative purposes care whether what she is doing is “adaptive” or not? Wolf, it seems, has ended up in the dangerous position of giving certain sexual behavior greater value because it is “natural” or “evolutionarily valuable.”

As we have seen, Wolf’s belief that the vagina is integral to a woman’s sense of “core self” is predicated not just on the mystical experiences that the vagina “mediates” during orgasms, but on the continuing, salutary effects that orgasms have on the rest of a woman’s life. Wolf claims to find strong evidence in the biographies of women writers and artists (Georgia O”Keefe, Emma Goldman, Edith Wharton) that women often “create best after a sexual awakening or a particularly liberating sexual relationship.” When she canvasses women “from many different backgrounds”—friends, grad students, the 16,800 members of her Facebook community—their responses confirm that there is a connection for women between a happy sex life and enhanced confidence levels.

It seems reasonable, if banal, to suggest that having good sex makes women feel good, and that feeling good might make them more productive in other areas of their lives. But there is no evidence that this is a uniquely female phenomenon, or that the sex in question has to be the mystic kind, and one could cite any number of examples to support the opposite thesis—that the consuming pleasures of sexual love are apt to distract a woman from her desk.

It would be interesting to know how Wolf explains the creativity of virgin artists like Jane Austen and Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, or the rapturous experiences of history’s actual women mystics (whose lives tended to be short on liberating sexual relationships). Whatever moral Wolf draws from the fact that Edith Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence after experiencing orgasms for the first time is surely rather undermined by the fact that Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights after having no sexual intercourse at all. (She might have masturbated, of course, but Wolf specifically disqualifies masturbation as a method of achieving high orgasm: “A happy heterosexual vagina requires, to state the obvious, a virile man.”)

After consulting many research papers and interviewing many scientists, Wolf has decided that the sex–creativity link can be “explained” by dopamine, one of the brain chemicals involved in female orgasm. Dopamine, according to Wolf, is the chemical that fosters female focus and motivation. It is what makes women leap up from the rank sweat of their enseamed beds to write novels. Modern women who complain of depression need better sex and more dopamine, but patriarchal societies, fearful of sexually empowered women, prefer to fob them off with antidepressants. “Serotonin,” Wolf writes, “literally subdues the female voice, and dopamine literally raises it.”

Wolf literally does not understand the meaning of “literally” and her grasp of the scientific research she has read is pretty shaky too. By repeatedly confusing correlates with causes, she grossly exaggerates what neuroscience can reliably tell us about the functions of individual brain chemicals. Dopamine undoubtedly has a role in female orgasm. But it also has a role in schizophrenia and, by Wolf’s own admission, a panoply of addictions. Given this, it seems foolhardy on Wolf’s part to designate it “the ultimate feminist chemical.”

Do Snails Experience the Anguish of Paternal Uncertainty?

That thing on the left that looks like a flowery bathing cap, c. 1966, is actually a male Solenosteira macrospira festooned with eggs. Has that female on the right saddled him with the offspring from dalliances with other males? (P.B. Marko/Ecology Letters)

 

 

In case you missed it, Joe Palca had a nice piece on NPR this morning about paternal uncertainty in snails.  You should listen to the show, for the deft use of Monty Python taxonomy.  But here’s the meat-and-potatoes, or bacon-and-eggs, of the story:

In most snail species, the female deposits the eggs her partner has fertilized in the sand or attaches them to a rock. But when it comes to Solenosteira macrospira, the female deposits the eggs into papery capsules and attaches them to the male’s shell. And it’s the male who has to lug around these developing snails for months.

It’s not unheard of in the animal kingdom for males to bear the brunt of early child rearing.

Take sea horses, for example, says Richard Grosberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis. “Male sea horses take care of the offspring. Male water bugs also carry eggs and babies on their back. There are toads that do the same thing as well.”

But Grosberg says in the case of these sea horses and water bugs and toads, the offspring males are caring for are their own. Grosberg began to wonder if the same was true about these snails. It’s not an unreasonable question; it’s quite a Bacchanalian scene on the beach at mating time.

“There are thousands and thousands of males and female snails, all mixing and changing partners presumably, so we wondered whether or not the males that were caring for the babies were actually the fathers of the babies that they were caring for,” he says.

So Grosberg and his colleague Stephanie Kamel brought the males back to the lab and did paternity tests on those itty bitty snails the males were schlepping around. And lo and behold: “We found that in fact, very few of the offspring that the male was carrying around were his,” Kamel says.

In other words, says Kamel, not only was the male snail doing all the heavy lifting — and becoming an easy target for birds with a bunch of bright white eggs on his shell — “he was taking care of babies from, basically, 25 other guys.”

Kamel and Grosberg report their findings in the journal Ecology Letters.

From a strictly male-chauvinist-pig point of view, this behavior is incomprehensible. But Grosberg says it’s also odd biologically speaking because normally parents don’t put themselves out for the offspring of others.

“In purely selfish terms, the smart thing to do, if snails were smart, would be to only care for their own offspring,” he says.

But biologist Suzanne Alonzo of Yale University sees this snail sex saga somewhat differently.

“I find the results striking, but I actually don’t find them surprising,” she says. “I think they actually make a lot of sense.” By unselfishly carrying around the eggs of others, a male snail is showing that he’s a caring father and that makes females willing to mate with him.

“So as long as he mates with her and sires a bunch of offspring, it doesn’t really matter if they’re on his back or someone else’s back,” she says.

So yes, they’re carrying some other jerk’s kids, but then some other poor slob is carrying around theirs — a kind of molluscan version of all for one and one for all.