Hello, doesn’t grooming sound pretty much *exactly* like a backrub? And doesn’t everyone know that giving a person a backrub is a great way to get them relaxed and feel good and positive toward you so they may decide that they like you and they’re horny, and therefore they decide to have sex?

I’m sorry, but a person performing an intimate and pleasurable service for you so you’ll have sex with them is *foreplay*, not a commercial transaction. By this logic, women give men blow jobs in exchange for receiving intercourse. Therefore any man who had a woman get him up with her mouth before he had sex with her is a prostitute.

There are actually research programs that train monkeys to use money (i.e. tokens that have no intrinsic value but which can be exchanged for grapes and jello).

The researchers did see a male giving a female a token in exchange for sex (one token is enough to buy her a grape).

Monkeys have money??? And they’re blowing it on whores!??

Fucking stimulus package! CEO’s & primates get ALL the perks!!

If we stretch this metaphor far enough, any woman who’s gotten a <strike>mix tape</strike> back rub and then slept with the guy who gave it to her is now breaking her local jurisdiction’s prostitution laws.

Physical contact =? Currency

Sure, why not.

The justification for the prostitution interpretation is this—-this particular species of monkeys trades grooming for food and baby-sitting, which makes it a tempting metaphor for currency.

See, this is the bit that really makes me scratch my head. Because aren’t all three behaviors - grooming, providing food and baby-sitting -  things we do for family and friends? And isn’t sex really just the same, except that the persons with whom we have sex are generally not family? So the real take-away from this “study” seems to be that monkeys form relationships in which they mutually groom, provide food, care for infants and have sex. I’m having trouble seeing the prostitution thing.

I’ve never understood the idea that women would be genetically programed not to want or enjoy sex. Because that makes no sense from an evolutionary stand point. Shouldn’t the gender* with the larger downside to sex be the one with the stronger biological imperative towards it? Sex is much riskier for women then for men, because pregnancy and child-birth can be very dangerous (something which wingnuts tend to ignore). If you need both genders to be involved in order to reproduce then both genders need to want to reproduce, therefore both genders should feel rewarded for sex and the gender with the higher downside should be rewarded more. 

*I realize this should be sex, because I’m speaking in the biological sense, but since I’m using sex to indicate intercourse and it just got confusing.

and see sex as a collaborative way to spend time with someone you like—-much like playing a game together or going to see a movie

Anyone up for a little game of “Hide the sausage”?  No?  Perhaps curling up on the couch for an evening of “Saving Ryan’s Privates”?  Nothing?  Dammit, this analogy sucks too.

“Hello, doesn’t grooming sound pretty much *exactly* like a backrub?”

I was just thinking that.  This sort of physical interaction (backrubbing, hugging, hand-holding) has a pretty well-known use in basic human interactions of the same type (initiate sex, cement resource-sharing and close social relationships) where it’s self-evidently ridiculous to compare it to payment for a damn thing.  Not only that, but in instances where we use actual money as actual payment for those sorts of things, it’s considered pretty inappropriate or weird to throw that sort of physical bonding into the mix on top of it.

It’s easy to understand this.

The obvious interpretation of this is that female monkeys are more likely to have sex with males who treat them well and spend time with them doing things other than just leaping on them for sex.

But that would require extending that to humans, which would be a whole lot less satisfying to the people who read this sort of interpretation than the idea that all women are whores (and that’s why they ain’t getting any.)

So the real take-away from this “study” seems to be that monkeys form relationships in which they mutually groom, provide food, care for infants and have sex. I’m having trouble seeing the prostitution thing.

Well, you see, a family is really just one giant prostitution racket.  Your dad gives your mom an orgasm, and in exchange, she raises his offspring.  Your mom makes your dad dinner, and he gives her money out of his paycheck.  Parent raise their kids so that kids will grow up to work on the family farm and eventually pay for the parents in retirement.  Sisters and brothers only help each other out in so far as they can see some monetary pay off at the end of the day.  It’s all capitalism baby.  Altruism is a lie.  Society turns on the Almighty Dollar.  Bow to your plutocratic Lord and Master.

I seem to recall reading about this bit of “research” at least a year ago, which just goes to show that bad research, like urban legends or Haley’s Comet, never goes away, it just goes out of sight until you’ve forgotten about it, only to be heralded as a Brand New Sensation when it reappears.

Are the female monkeys whores because they have more than one partner? Is that where the prudes are getting the metaphor?

I have to agree with several other posters, in that it sounds nothing like the monkesy are engaging in prostitution and more like, “You mean, if we’re NICE to women they might want to have sex with us?”  But for some sociopathic assheads, money=nice.  Not realizing that just maybe “being decent human being instead of a waste of skin=nice” instead. 

But then again, if more people could figure out how to be decent human beings, we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems this society has.

and see sex as a collaborative way to spend time with someone you like—-much like playing a game together or going to see a movie

Anyone up for a little game of “Hide the sausage”?  No?  Perhaps curling up on the couch for an evening of “Saving Ryan’s Privates”?  Nothing?  Dammit, this analogy sucks too.

The analogy is fine.  You just need a partner who likes corny-ass puns and humor in the bedroom.

The justification for the prostitution interpretation is this—-this particular species of monkeys trades grooming for food and baby-sitting, which makes it a tempting metaphor for currency.

All those things seem like “community” to me.  We do these sorts of things all the time. People watch one another’s kids, share food, do favors for one another, run errands, etc. in a functioning community (which, admittedly, not all people have anymore).

Grooming is another one of those things that, in the monkey world, requires community since a monkey isn’t capable of doing it itself. We probably don’t have an adequate parallel in the human world since we don’t have routine non-intimate contact with others (except with little children and all their various messy bits). But I suspect it’s not analogous to backrubs because it’s more utilitarian. Maybe it feels good, but maybe it’s more like clipping toenails - a necessary but not stimulating activity.

it becomes very easy to believe that they don’t have a right to say no, especially after men perform the correct sequence of behaviors, the number of nits picked, as it were.

I had a roommate who was Jewish, and describing a failed date to me,(no sex) he said, “Even a JAP(Jewish American Princess) would’ve had a good time.”  He really felt betrayed although as to be expected, wasn’t very analytic, and my limited experience didn’t include knowing WHAT one had to do to provide a JAP with a “good time”.

That’s why I never had the attitude that I was owed sex for my time and money for a date, because I felt the date itself was what I got out of my ‘investment’, and keeping in mind the old American meme that Babe Ruth had a high strikeout record that never got the press of his tagline, the “Sultan of Swat”.

So monkeys like foreplay, and female monkeys prefer to mate with males who care about their physical enjoyment.  Nope, I don’t see anything about prostitution there.  Just wait though until some wingnut tries to insist that foreplay is prostitution, and good little wives should stop asking for it.  (Of course, this sucks for men too because most men like foreplay, but in these couples, it’s likely that plain intercourse is more satisfying for the man than for the woman.)

I wonder, did they even study the reaction of male monkeys when females groomed them?  Maybe the male monkeys are even bigger whores than the females, but we’ll never know because no one bothered to even consider that possibility.

Also, why are these people trying to use monkeys as role models anyway?  Am I the only one who thinks that’s a little weird?

The researchers did see a male giving a female a token in exchange for sex (one token is enough to buy her a grape).

See now, this would count as monkey prostitution.  I wonder why they use this shite about grooming instead.  Perhaps because the grooming is widespread and occurs in a natural context (and can thus be held up as an example of evolutionary development), while true prostitution is rare (just the once?) and only happened in a lab setting?

Chet, how do the monkeys store up their grooming “currency”?  Do they dig a hole in the ground?  Do they find a niche in a tree trunk?  Are there little monkey banks where they can deposit their grooming for future use?  Because the whole point of “currency” is that it’s an intangible object that represents something of value.

WOW….a story about monkeys screwing…...must be a super slow day in the old blogroom!!!! WTF!!

Seems the current posture in feminist circles is to look down one’s nose at the conservative evangelicals for rejecting Darwin, while simultaneously despising the evolutionary psychologists for taking him seriously.

How is it taking Darwin seriously to declare that grooming is prostitution?  It seems like the most blatant anthropomorphizing since they put pants on Mickey Mouse.

This seems to be a product of seeing everything as a means to an end and putting a price on everything.  It may show a flaw in the researchers worldview more than it shows prostitution in the animal world.

This is asinine. Primate researchers have known for decades that grooming in monkeys is a social behavior, not an economic one. Even if you must make an economic analogy, why not conclude that monkeys simply have no hang-ups about sex and regard it as just another personal favor to be traded, instead of labeling female monkeys—and by extension female humans—as hookers by nature?

“I wonder why they use this shite about grooming instead.”

Probably because even the straight-up monkey-prostitution incident is somewhat apocryphal.  I remember reading the article on the experiment the story appeared in.  The swap occurred during a little monkey uprising in which one or two of the subjects staged a little monkey bank robbery.  During the ensuing chaos—pretend monkey money everywhere, monkeys grabbing the little plastic chits and running with the ill-gotten gains—one of the researchers witnessed what he insisted was a male monkey offering a chit to a female monkey in a variation of the normal food-offering behavior, resulting in the female monkey copulating with the male monkey.  Not exactly reliable clinical evidence, nor did it appear to have been presented as such during the interview.

while simultaneously despising the evolutionary psychologists for taking him seriously. 

As usual, you’re wrong. I criticize bad science because I’m pro-science.  I hate seeing stuff that’s not science being passed off as science in the mainstream media. 

I realize that understanding the difference between fake and real science takes more than your current god-given allotment of three brain cells, though, so I suggest you move on and do something more suitable to your intelligence levels.  Have you considered going back and trying once again to see if you can get two Legos to stick together?  Just because you’ve been failing for a couple decades now is no reason to give up hope.  It’s not like you have anything better to do.

Seems the current posture in feminist circles is to look down one’s nose at the conservative evangelicals for rejecting Darwin, while simultaneously despising the evolutionary psychologists for taking him seriously.

Next you’ll be telling me that since I criticise people who deny the germ theory of diseases, that I should support anyone who accepts the germ theory of disease, even if they are pushing some medical quackery like colon detox or antibiotics for the flu.

Evolutionary psychology is not science, it is psuedo-science.  Since you probably don’t know the difference, I see no point in explaining it to you.  Try doing a little learning on your own.  I’m not sure whether or not you actually believe in evolution by natural selection, but you clearly do not understand it.  This particular load of evo psych is especially crap-tastic because the conclusion drawn from it is very weak.  The actual evidence points more towards monkeys like foreplay, not monkeys as whores.  Behavior is not completely biological, even among primates.  Whore-ness is not a Mendelian genetic trait.  Also, Darwin was not a god, nor was he ever treated as such.  As far as I know, Darwin didn’t suggest that evolution made all women whores and men johns, but even if he did, he doesn’t know everything.  The point of science is that it is refined over time as new evidence comes in.  This isn’t a flaw of science, it is a feature.

The fact that this was evo psych was enough to verify it was total crap. Evo psych is about as reputable as ID.

Uh, no, the exact opposite is true. Grooming is primate currency. They trade it, they barter with it, they hoard it.

You ever going to throw some reliable evidence behind this? Like, any at all?

Seems the current posture in feminist circles is to look down one’s nose at the conservative evangelicals for rejecting Darwin, while simultaneously despising the evolutionary psychologists for taking him seriously.  Of course if evo psyche is truly a science it will outlast all the barbs against it.

And if it’s the 20th/21st century equivalent of phrenology, then it won’t.

To be honest, I am actually a big big fan of the type of science that seeks to understand human behavior by looking to monkey models and cross-cultural anthropological studies to try to identify what is biologically human versus what is cultural. Unfortunately, the type of this science that gets popularized is invariably really, really, *really* bad. Like this one, for instance. Or the one that said that the presence of women increased men’s risk taking behavior with money, without measuring whether the presence of *men* increased women’s risk taking behavior or affected it in any way, and based on a study of undergraduates tried to extrapolate to monkeys. Or the ones where boy monkeys are reported to like playing with cars and girl monkeys with pots and pans, even though adult monkeys neither drive cars nor cook and therefore there can’t possibly be any sort of biological sex-related reason for these preferences.

You can’t look at a behavior that occurs in the context of one culture and say it’s a human universal that existed in our evolutionary past.

You can’t look at a behavior that has obvious multiple explanations, pick the one that would be most unpleasant in its implications, and declare that the behavior is evidence for that implication.

You can’t bring your *own* perceptions of sex roles to the behavior of animals if you’re trying to determine the degree to which animal behavior conforms to human sex roles.

You can’t declare that something is a human universal if there are human cultures that don’t do it, or that do the opposite.

Popular evo psych does all these things. Therefore it’s either not a science or a really bad science. I learned how to factor cultural differences into human studies of gender in my first year as an undergrad, so where are these people getting their degrees?

Um, what’s the difference between grooming as a mating ritual and grooming as payment for sex?

I’m pretty sure the difference is observer bias—and lack thereof.

I’m not saying that there isn’t necessarially an exchange. I’m saying there’s no proof of any. At all. In fact, the facts there are evidence that monkeys are socialable to other monkeys when they have sex. You may as well say male bird plumage and dance displays are a “gift” to the female and, as such, are part of an exchange of goods. If the animal involved wasn’t a primate, this notion would be obviously fucking stupid.

In any event, the better analogue of human sexual behavior is the Bonobo, and both that species and ours casually uses sex as a social mechanism. Sex becomes an economic mechanism in our society the moment we become obsessed with economics. Ancient Greek slaves and free women would use sexuality in order to improve their station. The absurd dinner = sex formula in the U.S. was an abuse of an earlier and similarly twisted courtship—> inevitable marriage. In both societies, you have a culture obsessed with resource allocation. Sex comes along for the noxious ride.

The article is trash: “We, more evolved primates. . .” The writer is a fucking moron who doesn’t know what the word “evolve” means in a biological context. But it actually proves my point. The article writer and the researcher quoted ascribe a consoumerist economic system to these primates’ behavior, at the exclusion of all other—and at least one far more likely—explanation because both of these fools come from such a system. The article titilates and then claims that a comparison to humanity is invalid—as far below the headline as possible.

I think any misogyny from the article is incidental to the shitty biology and market propaganda that it directly promotes.

My biggest problem with this study is that in order to reach its conclusions you need to start from the same presumption that wingnuts start from: that women do not want or need sex. If you disregard that presumption then the same “evidence” cited here to support the conclusion that female monkeys are prostitutes could support the opposite claim.

The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

If you presume that grooming is foreplay/indication of sexual interest, and that female monkeys have sex drives, then the conclusion you reach is that females will skip, or shorten, courtship rituals in order to make sure they get to have sex.

I’m also interested in the presumption that grooming is not mutually enjoyable (and maybe it’s not, I have no clue). Because if it is mutually enjoyable then it really can’t be payment. And then I wonder what happens when females groom males. So I took a look at the article, and it had this to say:

In fact, when female macaques groomed males, their services decreased sexual activity in males.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of that.

And re: the token thing. If the token can be used to buy food, then a male giving a female a token is precisely the same thing as giving food. And then you’re right back at the question of whether grooming/feeding/babysitting is a matter of altruism or quid pro quo or somewhere inbetween.

If we stretch this metaphor far enough, any woman who’s gotten a mix tape and then slept with the guy who gave it to her is now breaking her local jurisdiction’s prostitution laws.

Actually, that’s the problem with prostitution laws. They are arbitrary.

• Two market executives sleep with each other. One helps the other get a promotion worth 20k. Not prostitution.
• Two people go on a date. One is impressed that the other is casual with money and likes buying nice things for that person, so they sleep together. Total spent on the date: $450. Not prostitution.
• One person gives another a blowjob for $50. Prostitution.

What should have happened in that last case is the prostitute should have gone out to eat with the john first, or they should have inflated the price.

Prostitution is another battle in the class struggle. We know it only by indicia, not by substance. I personally don’t like it, but I cannot accept that streetcorner work is prostitution and sleeping one’s way into an acting gig isn’t. And by not accept, I don’t mean “I get it but I reject the logic,” I mean I honestly don’t see any fucking logic there. It’s as if most of civilization resorts to goddamn gibberish the moment the issue comes up. I am happily against prostitution (formal and otherwise, in my expanded definition) because it makes common cause with misogyny, but since that is the only ethical justification I have for it being illegal, I’d personally start a ruthless pogrom against johns, if I had any measure of power, and I’d gleefully apply it to status climbers and casual relationships with the zeal of a schitzophrenic* until the laws are torn off the books by a terrified populace.

Which is why I shouldn’t have any. Power, that is.

But you have to admit, it would be hilarious.

*During press conferences in response to ACLU and Senatorial complaints, I’d definately titter and giggle.

Chet, you’re making the same mistake that the writer of the Time article did—-conflating social currency with actual money.  Vastly different things, which is why we allow very selfish people who never do anything for anyone else to be rich.  If currency and social currency were the same thing, generous people who gave of themselves all the time would be the richest people in our society.  In reality, selfishness and greed are better qualities if you want to be rich.

That’s why prostitution can not be understood in social currency terms.  In fact, in many ways, it’s the opposite.  Social currency isn’t, as you mistakenly appear to assume, about goods and services and nothing but.  It’s about social relationships and building bonds.  One of the reasons that prostitution exists at all is so men can exploit a certain class of woman’s debased position to have sex with her without involving the other social bonds and social currency that tend to be part of dating-based sex.

Grooming is not foreplay, catgirl. (Or else, foreplay actually is sexual currency. I think the argument could be made that, for practical purposes, it’s often treated that way.) Lovers groom lovers, sure; but parents groom children and children parents, siblings groom each other, and it’s often saved and bartered for other favors and for food.

Well Chet, I think you have a dysfunctional sex life.  I kiss men as foreplay, but I also kiss children in a non-sexual way.  I give and receive massages as foreplay, but I also give them to my cat in a non-sexual way.  Heck, I even shampooed one guy’s hair as foreplay because that’s what he likes, and I’ve also washed children’s hair in a non-sexual way.  It’s a real shame if you think something can’t possibly be foreplay because you might also do the same thing in a non-sexual way.  Of course, with your view of women as whores who have to give you sex after a certain payment, I doubt your sex life is any good anyway.

lol at the fundie nut!

Darwin is not our prophet, little brained one. We can agree with him in some stuff and disagree on other stuff. This evo-psycho babble is bad science, leaping to conclusions from a very tenuous relation to a factual observation. I know you fundies do it all the time, but this is not science. Is make-believe. No wonder you are so fond of it!

I’m open to explanations from the “foreplay” camp as to why duration of grooming between two individuals would decline based on the availability of third parties.

Because grooming has a social bonding function. The larger group, the more individuals there are to groom in order to stay friends with everyone, and the less attention each monkey can give to any one other monkey.

No, it’s not. Currency is never an object. Often we use objects to represent currency, but currency is and has always been an abstract unit of value. A dollar bill is not a dollar - it’s the physical representation of a dollar. (That’s how a different bill of the exact same size, weight, and material can be worth five, ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred times as many dollars.)

That’s right—currency is an abstract unit of value.  That’s why grooming is not currency.  It is not abstract.  It’s an actual action.  I’m curious to see how you think monkeys “hoard” grooming from other monkeys and then trade it to a different monkey, which is something you can do with actual currency.

I think you’re confusing the concepts of “currency” in an economic sense and “social currency.”  Social currency is not the same thing as currency, which is why it has that little qualifying word “social” in front of it.

I’m a little confused that they think a fairly obvious conclusion is news… the obvious (to me at least) conculsion is that when there are more monkeys to be groomed (in this case available females) less time is spent per monkey. Isn’t that just basic math?

Oh, and Chet, you’d be winning more converts to your way of thinking if you could indicate *how* grooming can be “saved” by primates… so far no one has explained how that works, you just state an opinion not in evidence and expect the rest of us to have some kind of eureka moment. It doesn’t happen like that. If you can’t help us out (with facts) then we’re likely never going to end up on your side of the fence.

As always, step outside the discussion:  the question is not whether or not evo-psych can be used to disguise choadery.  The question is why the people pushing this are so horrifically damaged that they view basic intimacy—non-sexual touching, grooming, seeing to one another’s responsibilities—as “payment” for sex.  The implication is that they find the whole concept of friendship or human kindness of any type to be so awful that any time spent engaging in it is the equivalent of work time, to be billed at consulting rates. 

Awesome.

Chet said

Grooming is not foreplay, catgirl.

Why not?

Lovers groom lovers, sure; but parents groom children and children parents, siblings groom each other, and it’s often saved and bartered for other favors and for food.

That is stupid.

I gave a foot massage to a friend who had a chronic foot problem. Not foreplay.

I gave a foot massage to a lover. Foreplay.

OoooOOOOoooh, this context stuff is neat, eh?

Well, but you’ve based the conclusion that this is “bad science” on nothing but the fact that you don’t know what “currency” is, or can be.

I am not the poster to whom Chet was respoding. However, I have a very open definition of the term “currency” and concluded grooming is not currency based on the facts given by the article—and because I’ve seen other primate studies. I can’t speak for the other poster, but since the definition of currency didn’t cause me any hangups, I think the problem is Chet’s definition of evidence. Which is why your lack of evidence is not sufficiently troubling for Chet.

This is primate ethology. Applying it to people would be evo psych, but nobody has tried to do that except Amanda.

Actually, the article implied that the study had interesting applications to people, even though it disavowed the notion in the second to the last paragraph, a tactic we see in political media all the time. (“Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. . .(waaaaay at the bottom). . . or, actually, it probably doesn’t.”) So, yeah, the article was intended to reflect upon humanity. Assuming the researcher’s intent was accurately displayed in the article—and, yah know what, in retrospect, I can’t be sure it was, so I regret implying that he was a fool—but assuming it was, he had the same intent as the article writer and was disengenuous as well.

I’m open to explanations from the “foreplay” camp as to why duration of grooming between two individuals would decline based on the availability of third parties.

Maybe the females want to make sure they get their share of sex because they actually want sex.

Is that something you notice in your significant others? That they spend less time in foreplay if the neighbor is horny, too? I doubt it.

Well, the odds of your significant other wandering off to have sex with the neighbor instead is much lower in humans than in macaques.

If she feels that there is lots of competition from other females, maybe she wants to hurry up and get to the sex so she doesn’t miss out. I know I engage in less foreplay when I know that there is competition for my or my husband’s attention from children, chores that need to be done, guests who are going to show up later, etc. If we lived in a society where I or my husband might have sex with the guests, then perhaps you’d see me engaging in less foreplay because there are other adult females in my house and they might try to get my husband’s sexual attention, but humans don’t *usually* roll that way (at least I don’t.)

And humans will totally trade backrubs for chores done. That doesn’t mean that backrubs are *money*. And it doesn’t mean they’re not foreplay when they’re traded for sex.

<blockquote>Um, what’s the difference between grooming as a mating ritual and grooming as payment for sex?

Well, one difference would be the fact that the latter should follow an economic supply-demand curve, and the former shouldn’t. And, in these monkeys, there is such a curve:</blockquote>

WTF? No there wasn’t. They didn’t actually give you a curve. They gave you a behavioral pattern that would be consistent with females competing for sex. To use a curve as evidence, you’d need an actual damn curve. Then you’d still have to disprove the notion of female sexual interest driving any part of the process with is completely contradictory to what we know of most primates. Oh, that context again.

Is that something you notice in your significant others? That they spend less time in foreplay if the neighbor is horny, too? I doubt it.

They do if they intend to fuck their neighbors after they fuck me. Of course, that’s a pretty good way to make sure I won’t fuck them. The analogy given here is complete fail.

A better one: do you expect more foreplay at an orgy (10+ participants) or at a romantic dinner (2 participants)?

Chet:

You’ve never paid your friends and family for things? You’ve never paid your nephew $20 for a night’s babysitting? You never mowed the lawn for an allowance?

These are not evolutionary behaviors, they are very recent behaviors. Sharing food, childcare, shelter etc. are all significant aspects of human society going way back. Allowances are new, they didn’t exist before the very modern notion of childhood that was advanced during the early 20th century. So if you look back at human history (or frankly anywhere outside the particularly fortunate bubbles in the developed world to this day) you see families particularly, and communities more generally, sharing and working together and helping each other to survive. For thousands of years we didn’t pay kids to babysit their siblings or cousins (some parents still don’t) and we didn’t pay them for their farm labor either. I still don’t pay my parents when I eat at their home, nor do they pay when they eat at mine.

I also have a problem seeing grooming as currancy because grooming has intrinsic worth. Currency is a medium of exchange - it’s a placeholder for value. It doesn’t matter if it’s paper or metal or cocoa beans, but it needs to be static and useless in order for it to continue to exist as a medium.

Technically speaking, we should be referring to “grooming credits”, because that’s what’s actually being exchanged, here. I groomed so-and-so, and she groomed you, so now you have to groom me because you owe me. Grooming is transitive in apes that way, just like IOU’s and lunch favors.

You keep making this claim that favors done between monkeys and apes are transitive in the way that economic currency is (as in, one monkey can demand a favor from a second monkey because a third monkey has traded the favor that the second monkey owes it to the first one) and presenting ZERO evidence.  Show us a study or an abstract demonstrating that what you say is true, or stop claiming it.

Something to remember when it comes to science reporting is that journalists aren’t scientists, they aren’t educated in the field, and they’re also looking for the juiciest story possible. And there are also scientists who want as much publicity as possible, so they might angle their findings when talking to the press. In short, if you haven’t read it in an actual journal, take the story with heaps of salt. It’s not worth dissing an entire field of study because there are idiots who misuse it.

Now, regarding this actual story; the fact that lots of animals exchange goods and/or services for sex is A) not at all new, and B) not in any way indicative that “women are whores”.

For example there are penguins and other birds that are normally monogamous, where occasionally males will gather rocks and other nest-building supplies, give them to females who will them have sex with them, and then they both go their separate ways. The males get to spread their genes, the females get better nests than they could build with just one male (the “husband”, most often) helping them build it, so everyone wins. Or in this case the primates exchange grooming time, which is a long known method of “keeping score” amongst lots of different apes. This is not new, nor is it particularly controversial.

But the thing is, and this is very important, *this does not mean that prostitution is OK*. It also doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. It’s pretty much irrelevant to the topic of human prostitution. At most, what it says is that prostitution exists in various forms in various animals. But just because it exists in nature doesn’t mean that one should go “it’s natural, therefore OK!” Bears often eat their young, sheep rape other sheep to death, ants make tribal warfare on other ants, and we don’t think that any of those things are ok when human beings do it.

There’s a pretty compelling theory (though it needs more research still) that grooming in humans was replaced by language. Once bipedalism kicked in, so the theory goes, our hands became busy doing all sorts of things like whittling and carving and picking and sorting, and we needed a replacement bonding mechanism for the sort of time consuming hands-on grooming that goes on in primate societies.

A really good example of how this might be true is the gelada baboons, who are herbivorous grazers; they have to eat pretty much non-stop to get the energy they need from the meager grasslands of their habitat, so their hands are constantly busy plucking grass (since they’re not really evolved grazers like sheep, who can pick the grass directly with their mouths). This means they don’t do nearly as much grooming as other species of apes and monkeys. Coincidentally, and rather charmingly, they also maintain a pretty much constant stream of “conversation”, via a selection of grunts, moos and chatterings.

The “grooming is like language” line of thought starts from the assumption that grooming is a means of communicating and reinforcing social ties, rather than some kind of pseudo-capitalist reciprocal gain mechanism. Which is a lot more in line with how grooming actually happens in monkeys and apes (e.g. lower status members of the group grooming higher status ones for no reciprocation in order to signal their allegiance to that group member).

Grooming before sex seems perfectly compatible with this interpretation: the male and female establish a relationship before sexual contact occurs. If you absolutely cannot do ethology without reverse applying it to humans, then a better conclusion would be that if you want to get into a woman’s pants, try talking to her first.

Not a bad piece of advice, frankly.

But the thing is, and this is very important, *this does not mean that prostitution is OK*. It also doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

Yes, exactly!  Monkeys should not be our role models.

I’d personally start a ruthless pogrom against johns, if I had any measure of power

There is a “scared straight” program for johns courtesy of the LAPD, and it appeals to their self-interest(possibility of getting robbed or worse, STD, and the life that results from servicing a client base such as the john belongs to.

This is interesting, although it’s for a different species of macaque:

if it were true for those long-tailed hussies, it would explain a lot:

We investigated the proximate mechanisms that control orgasmic response in female macaques. During 238 h of observation of sexual behaviour in a large captive group of Japanese macaques,Macaca fuscata, 240 copulations were recorded involving 68 different heterosexual pairs formed by 16 males and 26 females. Female orgasmic responses were observed in 80 of 240 copulations (33%). The frequency of orgasms was not correlated with female age or dominance rank, but it was higher for copulations lasting longer and involving a higher number of mounts and pelvic thrusts. When the level of physical stimulation experienced by females during copulation was statistically controlled, the highest frequency of female orgasms was found among pairs formed by high-ranking males and low-ranking females and the lowest frequency among pairs formed by low-ranking males and high-ranking females. These findings suggest that the proximate mechanisms that control orgasmic threshold in female macaques are more responsive to social stimuli and less constrained by physiological limitations than previously thought.

Here’s another demonstration of why social currency isn’t currency:

I’m cooking food. A person comes to me and offers to trade me a backrub if I’ll give him some of the food I’m cooking. But I don’t like him, so I say no.

I’m cooking food at my restaurant. A person comes to my restaurant and offers me money for a meal. But I don’t like him, so I say no.

In the first case, we take it for granted that this is absolutely normal, reasonable, and anyone who has a problem with my behavior is probably an entitled little shit. In the second case, I am unreasonable and probably a bigot of some kind. Money systematizes human exchanges and makes them much more predictable. A person behaving reasonably and obeying social contract rules will almost always get a meal at a restaurant if they have the money to pay, but they will not always be offered food at a friend’s house.

Since monkeys can’t *tell* us what they’re doing, but researchers talk about the grooming “increasing the odds” of a sexual encounter rather than guaranteeing one, this is social exchange, not literal currency. People trade favors in the expectation, but not certainty, of being paid back, but they don’t pay money for something they might or might not get (this is why the NiceGuy view of sex as something women owe men is so very damaging, because if they think their Niceness is money and the women are denying them sex anyway, the women are doing something unpleasant and unfair… whereas if their Niceness is a favor, and sex is a different favor, well, doing a favor for someone comes with no guarantees whatsoever that they’ll reciprocate the favor or that they’ll do it the way you really want you to.

Alara:

But if I have my friends over to help me move (i.e. they do favors for me), I give them beer and pizza afterwards (i.e. I spend my real currency) in return. Just because “social currency” and “real currency” aren’t equivalent in all situations doesn’t mean that social currency isn’t traded amongst social animals.

we needed a replacement bonding mechanism for the sort of time consuming hands-on grooming that goes on in primate societies

Actually, it’s the fact that a network bonded by grooming can only contain a small number of members , language allows the group to expand widely beyond that number.

.

Furthermore, we found that grooming time is asymptotic when group size exceeds 40 individuals, indicating that time constraints resulting from ecological pressure force individuals to compromise on their grooming time. This was true across species, but a similar effect was also found within taxa. Cognitive constraints and predation pressure strongly affect group sizes and thereby have an indirect effect on primate grooming time. Primates that were found to live in groups larger than predicted by their neocortex size usually suffered from greater predation risk. However, most populations in our analysis were placed well within what we define as their eco-cognitive niche.

Applying it to people would be evo psych, but nobody has tried to do that except Amanda.

Incorrect.  I criticized the article for directly engaging in evo psych theorizing, and also using human metaphors to imply things about human psychology that do not compute.  Please reread.

I just wanted to mention that evolutionary psychology is NOT pseudo-science in and of itself, although often pseudo-science is passed off as evo psych.  This is most likely because the discipline is relatively new, and new fields of scientific study are always hijacked by bad scientists who like hide behind the cover of emerging technologies and studies.

The good news is that the field is quite rapidly laying a real scientific foundation upon which true understanding of natural selection’s role in human and animal behavior can be built.  Condemn this study, question the researchers’ conclusions, but don’t throw out an entire field of scientific study because some researchers within it make bad conclusions.

I don’t accept that as a given, and I don’t believe you can know that, either. The truth is that, in this and other threads, you’ve really shown that you have no idea why prostitution exists.

Are you one of those guys who thinks that most prostitutes are just good-hearted women who see themselves as freelance sexual social workers for sad, undersexed men?  Are pimps, in your view, the real feminists who just help good-hearted women and sad men conduct the only honest and loving relationship possible—-sex for money?

Just because “social currency” and “real currency” aren’t equivalent in all situations doesn’t mean that social currency isn’t traded amongst social animals.

True, but it also doesn’t mean that social currency and real currency are always equivalent, so therefore a male monkey grooming a female monkey is the equivalent of a man giving a woman money to have sex with him.  As others have said, this sounds much more equivalent to the human behaviors of backrubs/foreplay/taking out the garbage than prostitution, and the difference is the currency used and the social meaning behind each act.  There’s a difference between the “currency” you use to create and maintain an ongoing relationship in a social group and the “currency” you use to buy a service from someone you do not have a social relationship with.

“I’m a little confused that they think a fairly obvious conclusion is news… the obvious (to me at least) conculsion is that when there are more monkeys to be groomed (in this case available females) less time is spent per monkey. Isn’t that just basic math?”

It would seem to be.  There aren’t infinite hours in a day, and time an individual can spend on things other than foraging, sleeping, and offspring-minding does not grow proportionally with the number of available mates.  If copulating with x percent of the available females rather than y number of females is the goal, you’re going to by necessity see a decrease in the amount of time devoted to copulation with each individual female if the female population increases.  You’d see the same thing from the females’ perspective—if the object is copulating with a greater number of males, there’s less time to invest in each individual encounter.  If the object is maintaining frequency of copulation given more competition for a finite amount of male *ahem* attention, the female is going to be willing to skip to the endgame.

A better one: do you expect more foreplay at an orgy (10+ participants) or at a romantic dinner (2 participants)?

No fair, N1OC. You’re making the obvious point that Chet seems unwilling to understand.

The fact is that yes, one can view social currency as just another form of currency if one wants to. It pretty much ignores everything about human nature that we know (for example, modern humans not only do not put a monetary value on friendship, love, or family bonds, but we specifically deny such a value can be accurately accounted for. The big exception—misogynistic practices like dowry—have been supported not by an accounting of the value of love, but by a dehumanizing of the daughters being sold off).

Basically, this article argues that if a male monkey is nice to a female monkey, treating her in a way commonly understood in her species to denote friendship and closeness, she’s more likely to have sex with him, and therefore women are whores. That strikes anyone with any understanding of humans and our close relatives as akin to crafting a study showing that the sun is hot, and then taking that conclusion to show that therefore, the Earth is slutty for soaking up all that heat. The initial conclusion was obvious, but shows us something useful, that being that primates also have a social and ethical system that is related to ours at some level. The latter isn’t a conclusion, it’s a stereotype.

It’s handy to know that Chet keeps a mental running tally on every social interaction he has with others to make sure he’s “paid back” for being a decent human being.  I think that most people would define this type of behavior as being a cheap bastard or a selfish jerk.  Or both.

I’d actually point out that the beer-and-pizza example is evidence of the way that social currency and real currency are very different things.  If your friends move for you, you wouldn’t think it’s a appropriate to say, “Hey, instead of me buying you dinner, how about I just write you a check?”  Why not, if they’re they exact same thing? 

Because they’re not the same thing.  Feeding people is offering hospitality.  So is doing favors.  Hospitality is not, regardless of what Chet or anyone else thinks, a strict economic exchange.  It’s about cementing relationships.  That’s why the “everyone gets an orgasm” sex is different than “I come and compensate you with money”.  The difference is between sharing rounds of drinks with friends and paying an employee.  Except, of course, with prostitution most of the time, the closer analogy is wage slavery, paying someone dramatically below what they really deserve because you have a much higher social station and can get away with it.

“But if I have my friends over to help me move (i.e. they do favors for me), I give them beer and pizza afterwards (i.e. I spend my real currency) in return. Just because “social currency” and “real currency” aren’t equivalent in all situations doesn’t mean that social currency isn’t traded amongst social animals.”

I think what she’s getting at is that yes, ^this^ happens elsewhere, but we seem to be the only animals where your friends come over to help you move, and you promise them pizza and beer, and they ask you to give the pizza and beer that you owe them to a third party because they owe that person pizza and beer from when that person helped them move a month ago.  Monkeys don’t trade IOUs.

Seriously, if you have trouble understanding the difference between doing someone a favor and writing them a check, that’s serious social dysfunction.

Keep digging, Chet.

No, I’m just one of those guys who doesn’t claim to know what life is like for every single prostitute in the world, as you seem to.

I said “most” and “majority”.  Agreed that there’s a small percentage of prostitutes that make a lot of money, and an even smaller percentage of them could be doing something else, but don’t want to.  And there’s a small percentage of people who’d love to work 80 hours a week, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be alarmed if the average work week in the nation is 80 hours a week.

But that’s exactly the supply and demand I’m talking about. The female knows that the male has abundant choice for mates; she knows, therefore, that she’s competing against other females who may not demand as much grooming as she would like to.

No, no, no.  Is it really that difficult for you to even consider the possibility that a female might actually want the sex?  It’s not that she’s grudgingly giving up sex for less grooming because she knows she can’t get as much grooming.  It’s that she’s happily taking the sex she can get because the sex might be rationed and she doesn’t want to waste as much time on the foreplay, even though she enjoys that too.

Basically, this article argues that if a male monkey is nice to a female monkey, treating her in a way commonly understood in her species to denote friendship and closeness, she’s more likely to have sex with him, and therefore women are whores.

Yes, this is a perfect summary.  The conclusion they draw is very weak, to put it politely.

Alara:

But if I have my friends over to help me move (i.e. they do favors for me), I give them beer and pizza afterwards (i.e. I spend my real currency) in return. Just because “social currency” and “real currency” aren’t equivalent in all situations doesn’t mean that social currency isn’t traded amongst social animals.

Sure thing. But we don’t view this as remotely similar to prostitution. In fact, if you paid *them* directly they’d probably feel insulted. You may be using your real world currency to buy them beer and pizza, but the social exchange would work just the same way if you made them lemonade from the lemons growing on your own lemon tree and cooked them a homemade meal. You’re trading the real world currency for the item you’re offering them as a favor/gift.

We do in fact trade social currency all the time, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if there are women who will cheerfully have sex with a man because they feel really grateful that he helped them move, but that doesn’t make them prostitutes. Prostitution, the exchange of sex for money, is demonized in our society precisely because sex *is* currency on the social exchange and you’re not supposed to pay money for what you’re supposed to get with social currency (or offer *as* social currency.) Exchanging social favors for sex is *not* prostitution.

The *best* one could derive from a study such as this is to say that male macaques are more motivated to offer social favors such as grooming in exchange for sex than female macaques are. This might indicate that there is some degree of biological underpinning to the often-observed notion that men are more motivated by the offer of sex than women are. Given that women in most human cultures are clearly having their sexuality suppressed by culture to some degree, it’s impossible to say that that a biological mechanism is the only or even main reason for males to be more motivated by sex than females, but this study *could* make the argument that this is proof that there’s some biological component. But no, they’re trying to explain *prostitution*... which is a whole different ball of wax. Sex for friendly favors could be a literal exchange or could be “wow, I feel so affectionate and grateful to you for what you’ve done, it makes me attracted to you”, whereas money’s just money.

What I, and most people, actually keep track of is what they owe others, so that they can pay them back and actually be a decent human being.

But you don’t translate the value into dollars and cents, and try to pay back your social debts by writing your friends checks.  If social currency is Economics 101—-basically the same thing as money—-and not a way to create social bonds, that’s what you’d do.  You would also feel it’s basically the same thing to pay someone to pretend to be your friend as hang out with real friends while buying a round.

I don’t accept that as a given, and I don’t believe you can know that, either. The truth is that, in this and other threads, you’ve really shown that you have no idea why prostitution exists.

Wrong again.  I have many ideas about why prostitution exists; you just don’t like to hear them.

That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.

No, I don’t know it.  You apparently cannot tell the difference between behaviors that create community and bond relationships with “pay back”.  Normal people don’t keep a running tally in their head of what they do for other people on a daily basis.

Because social currency being currency, and all currencies being equally fungible, aren’t at all the same thing at all. I mean that seems pretty obvious.

And yet you argued that they were.  That was your argument—-that social bonding exchanges were the same thing as money.  And that therefore grooming a female before sex was the same thing as paying a prostitute to give you a blow job.  That one can make a direct equivalence between purchasing sex with cash and mutually beneficial relationships that people build through favors and exchanging affection.  Obviously, there’s a difference, or you’d just write checks to people to pretend to be your friends.

Females who want sex, therefore, have to be willing to accept a smaller “price” in grooming to get it.

No, because they are in it for the sex, and not for the “price”.

That’s a function of females wanting sex. Otherwise, why would they even care if male sexual access becomes more scarce?

If females want sex just for the sex, then of course it matters to them if there are fewer males around to give them what they want.

That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. What I, and most people, actually keep track of is what they owe others, so that they can pay them back and actually be a decent human being.

And yet NO ONE goes to a prostitute and pays her for sex to try and pay her back for a social favor she did for him previously.  The whole point of prostitution is that it’s two strangers who don’t have (and don’t want) a social relationship bargaining a service in exchange for money.

That’s the point.  Conflating social currency that cements social relationships (which is what grooming is) and economic currency that’s used to substitute for social relationships is idiotic.  That’s what this article is doing:  claiming that a social relationship with a member of your social group is the exact equivalent of an economic one with a stranger.  It’s like claiming that because I have sex with my husband, it means I should automatically accept $100 from any stranger on the street to have sex with them because, hey, the relationship is exactly the same.

My most innocuous statements are going to be misrepresented to make me look like a jerk?

It’s too easy, so yes.

I came here to discuss this study in good faith.

No you didn’t. You came here to “score points” against those damned slutty feminists. You haven’t made even a token effort at trying to fairly and accurately characterize your “opponents’” arguments. You’re here to “toot your own horn” as much as anything. Toot toot!

Is anybody else going to play by those rules?

Nope.

Foreplay is whatever folks do to create an energy balance for a sexual win-win. Sometimes money is spent toward that aim, but usually not. 

Prostitution is what people do to AVOID spending the energy working toward that win-win.  Ergo it is, by my definition at least, exploitation because one party (the prostitute) experiences a social/sexual “loss” from the purely commercial transaction.

SO, for researchers to demonstrate that monkeys engage in “prostitution” the way that PEOPLE do, they would need to prove that monkey laydeez 1) think like people; 2) treat sex the same way people do; 3) are socially vulnerable in ways that encourage purely commercial sex transactions; and 4) consciously agree to be exploited in exchange for some kind of barter currency. 

The whole premise is all sorts of fked-up.

Chet, the very existence of a gift certificate shows how much people like to put distance between social and economic currency.  It’s a way to give money without it being money, duh.  Keep digging.

As for people paying you directly, it’s either going to be someone much older, in what case they’re doing something a little different than mutually beneficial exchanges (many species have behaviors where elder/more powerful community member magnanimously distribute resources directly to demonstrate their power).

Of course, the monkey behavior is being related to dating, 21st century style, and the implication is that women demand upfront payment that’s the equivalent to cash before putting out, because it’s in our primate DNA.  (Let’s not even talk about cultures where the bride’s family has to pay a dowry.)  There is absolutely no reason to believe this, and your flailing around hasn’t come close to coming up with a reason.  Dating is modeled along peer-to-peer friendship networks, where making direct payments is gauche.

WTF?  Reducing the “price”?  You keep arguing that the female monkeys don’t want to have sex and have to be coerced into it.

Chet is so freakin’ dense I don’t even know why I bother.  Females have sex with less foreplay when there are few males in relation to females because they want sex, and Chet thinks this constitutes prostitution.  If males “give in” to sex more easily when fewer females around, then it’s not considered prostitution.  The only conclusion to draw from this is that Chet genuinely believes that sex is just completely different for males and females, and that females can’t possibly have sex for the same reason that males do.

In a couple hours I’ll be back to address whatever good-faith arguments have been made, I guess. I’m not holding my breath though.

Well, you haven’t made any good-faith arguments, so I’m assuming that you simply don’t know what they are and you don’t recognize the ones that are being made.

<i.Conflating social currency that cements social relationships (which is what grooming is) and economic currency that’s used to substitute for social relationships is idiotic.  </i>

I just want to repeat this, because Chet keeps nipping around the edges and finding silly non-exceptions like gift certificates to escape this basic reality.

Part of Chet’s mistake is that he’s thinking about sex in pseudomonogamous human terms.

Is that something you notice in your significant others? That they spend less time in foreplay if the neighbor is horny, too? I doubt it.

This only makes sense if your “significant other” monkey isn’t also going to have sex with your “neighbor” monkey. Otherwise, in a culture where sex isn’t about exclusivity and ownership, it makes absolute sense for resource allocation.

In fact, for other kinds of family-based physical affection it’s pretty much a given. If the 4-year-old is sad and needs a hug, I’d be pretty mean to spend the same amount of time tickling the baby on the changing table or cuddling with my spouse as I would if he were happily reading a book.

Btw, this:

We probably don’t have an adequate parallel in the human world since we don’t have routine non-intimate contact with others (except with little children and all their various messy bits).

Is, I think, very much a modern northern-european thing. I think lots of other cultures have and have had such contacts, from handholding to communal bathing to foo-washing to other rituals I don’t know enough anthropology to cite.

Wanna come over and <strike>see my etchings</strike> lemme pick your nits.

See, Chet, you need to ask why she’s let him get close enough to pick the nits and whether she’s already decided to mate with him provided he performs the correct mating ritual.

Animals have mating rituals.  Birds of Paridise do these incredible dances for females.  No dance, no get laid.  It doesn’t mean he’s “paying her” just that he’s performing the required ritual.

So, Chet, see, if a woman is being courted and she decides not to sleep with the guy until she knows him a little bit better; i.e., deciding whether he’s mean, interesting, (make your own list) does that mean he’s “paying” by refraining from being an asshole?  Do you seriously expect us to equate performing a mating ritual with giving a prostitute money?

Fail.  Massive Fail.

Shouldn’t the gender* with the larger downside to sex be the one with the stronger biological imperative towards it? Sex is much riskier for women then for men, because pregnancy and child-birth can be very dangerous (something which wingnuts tend to ignore). If you need both genders to be involved in order to reproduce then both genders need to want to reproduce, therefore both genders should feel rewarded for sex and the gender with the higher downside should be rewarded more.

See, there’s far too much logic in this hypothosis, plus, MOMMY INSTINCT overrides everything else.  Those pregnancy hormones, you know?  MOMMY INSTINCT is the sexual conservatives trump card, b/c children and sex can never be conflated.

Chet…even if I give you “grooming = currency” you can’t have monkey whores.  First off, you’d need to prove that sex is a currency as well.  Then the study doesn’t say that monkeys dont have sex at all unless there’s grooming involved—there’s MORE sex, but not NO sex.

Grooming is a pleasurable activity, and might very well help monkeys get in the mood, which is why more grooming could equal more sex.  Then again, if a monkey boy is down on the grooming favor list, he might not get to have sex as often as a monkey who pays his favors back, simply b/c the monkey girls know he doesn’t pay favors back. 

The biggest problem with comparing monkey behavior to prostitution is that it implies that our societal and cultural views of sexual activity can be carried across species.

I refuse to believe that monkeys had a Victorian Age.  I refuse to believe monkeys have Christianists who have decided sex is sinful unless engaged under specific and highly ritualistic circumstances.

I refuse to believe that monkey have sexual hangups.

And if monkeys aren’t hung up on the notion that women don’t like sex and only “give it up” in order to get something—>safety, food, grooming, then they can’t have monkey prostitutes.  It’s an analogy that’s not only ‘not cute’ but meaningless.

Females like sex.  It only becomes degrading when a society puts caste rituals on it.  Once it’s become degrading, and once it is only available under limited circumstance—then you can have prostitution, where even though a male hasn’t fulfilled the proper social rituals, he can find a properly debased woman to pay for sex.

Monkeys don’t have those hangups.

I need to head back to the lab. In a couple hours I’ll be back to address whatever good-faith arguments have been made, I guess. I’m not holding my breath though.

Your flouncing needs work.

“Hello, doesn’t grooming sound pretty much *exactly* like a backrub?”

Well, in a monkey context, it’s sort of a cross between giving someone a backrub and doing their laundry—both of which are, of course, amenities of most marriages.  And also have been used commercially as a cover for prostitution.

Well, in a monkey context, it’s sort of a cross between giving someone a backrub and doing their laundry—both of which are, of course, amenities of most marriages.  And also have been used commercially as a cover for prostitution.

Right, but not in that direction.

Human men don’t give prostitutes backrubs in exchange for sex; rather, the prostitutes give backrubs to give legal cover to the fact that actually, they’re there to give sex. Same with laundry. The person you pay to “do your laundry” might also give you sex because the laundry’s cover. But you’re not doing *their* laundry.

In a marriage, most often women do the laundry, which kind of implies that women do laundry for men in exchange for sex, which makes men prostitutes who put out for laundry services. I think everyone can agree that this is ridiculous.

OK, speaking as a cultural anthropologist, there are multiple levels of stupid going on in this study (and some of the comments supporting it).  What these monkeys are engaged in are social transactions, not economic ones.  The kinds of reciprocal interactions involved are those used to create and maintain friendships regardless of the sex of the animals involved and equally applicable in relationships where there is no sexual component.  Thus what we are seeing is that female monkeys are more likely to have sex with their friends than with others.  Friendship is, however, no guarantee of sexual access, it just heightens the probability.  At this point the comparison to prostitution, a purely economic transaction with no affective bond disintegrates.

There is actually nothing new about this study, other than its stupid evopsych spin.  We have known that female monkeys were more likely to have sex with males who engaged in mutual grooming, food sharing, protecting the female and her offspring (including those who could not belong to the male), etc., at least since Barbara Smut’s work with baboons in the 1970s.  I really do not know why it would surprise anyone that female monkeys would rather have sex with nice guys who help out and are their friends than with assholes.

I really do not know why it would surprise anyone that female monkeys would rather have sex with nice guys who help out and are their friends than with assholes.

Because some men conflate that with the realization that human women are less likely to have sex with NiceGuys (TM) who pretend to be their friends and follow them around than with “assholes,” here defined as “someone with personality.” So then the monkey thing just can’t be being a nice guy, because NiceGuys (TM) Don’t Get Laid. So then it has to be a purchase, otherwise it’s not faaaaaaaaaaaaaair and why couldn’t they have been born monkeys?!?!

Have not read all comments, but I’ll echo about refraining from bashing research as “bad science” unless you have read the published work AND have a decent grasp of other work in the field or a closely related field (or a supporting field, if specific to methodology like stats).

“Journalists” including our beloved blog writers often twist words, quote out of context or lead with sensationalism to sell a story, in my experience. And in any event, scientists with diarrhea of the mouth in the press are perfectly capable of executing good science, with proper training.
!!!OMG MONKEY PROSTITUTE!!!

Bashing the article, on the other hand IMO fair game…...

Here’s another that attempts to explain “biological currency”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22516331/

On a personal note:
I’m so gonna pick GoMamma’s nits when she gets home. Monkey love is HOT!

modern humans not only do not put a monetary value on friendship, love, or family bonds, but we specifically deny such a value can be accurately accounted for.

Chet, the very existence of a gift certificate shows how much people like to put distance between social and economic currency.  It’s a way to give money without it being money, duh.  Keep digging.

I had a cousin whose mother used to do typing and stuff for her and she’d pay her mom cash in return.

One time the mother was very indignant because her daughter tossed a 20$ bill on the desk, “Just like I was a prostitute!”

I think lots of other cultures have and have had such contacts, from handholding to communal bathing to foo-washing to other rituals I don’t know enough anthropology to cite

Bingo!  I can speak about my wives’ culture, where the babies sleep with the mother until they’re 2 or 3, and having one’ spouse do one’s personal grooming (not just cutting hair to save money) is very common, although YMMV. 

Also, it isn’t unusual for Chinese parents to have their children fix tea or do some chores at an early age without an allowance.  That’s why I bring my wife coffee in the morning, as to take advantage in my ECE barista background.

“Hello, doesn’t grooming sound pretty much *exactly* like a backrub?”

OMG! I’ve been under the impression I was supposed to pay my massage therapist with money. Who knew I could have just given him a handjob?

“Anyone up for a little game of ‘Hide the sausage’?”

Not right now Zifnab, I’m busy playing “Find the Little Man in the Boat”

Never really understood this attitude.  Seems the current posture in feminist circles is to look down one’s nose at the conservative evangelicals for rejecting Darwin, while simultaneously despising the evolutionary psychologists for taking him seriously.  Of course if evo psyche is truly a science it will outlast all the barbs against it.

It’s more being suspicious of much quackery surrounding EP, particularly when applied to humans. Evolutionary psychologists have long been accused of conflating what is with what ought to be, so justifying the status quo. Given how little data EP has to work on, and its tendency to create neat little parables and ‘just so’ stories, these criticisms carry much weight.

I hate the way that guy sneaks off just when I think I’ve got him down.

I think that some people really do think that money counts as a replacement for social interaction, and those people are sociopaths.  My own father id a perfect example.  Rather than cook dinner to give my mom a break, he would just buy dinner.  he also paid for a cleaning service to reduce my mom’s burden rather than picking up a broom and doing it himself.  And yet he thought these actions should count just as much.  I once asked my dad for a printer for Christmas.  He had my brother pick it out and buy it, and my dad just paid for it.  Heck, I could have just charged one to the credit card I had that got billed to my dad if I had known that’s the way he would do it.  As a kid, sometimes I would ask my dad for hot cocoa or a hot dog, and he would often just ask my mom to make it, and he never realized how much that hurt me.  My dad is a genuine sociopath, and doesn’t understand social situations other than imitating them or learning which act is most effective.  However, most people are not sociopaths and social interactions mean more than just their monetary value.

I actually don’t like gift certificates, either giving or receiving, but if I get one as a gift, I am thankful and don’t make a big deal about it.  I will occasionally buy them for people when I just don’t know what else to get them, like my pre-teen step-nephew that I didn’t know very well.  A lot of teens would rather have cash or a gift certificate anyway, because they have so few opportunities to make their own money and are mostly dependent on their parents.  Anyway, there’s a reason why people say “It’s the thought that counts”.  Even a gift certificate requires more thought than just cash.

In a marriage, most often women do the laundry, which kind of implies that women do laundry for men in exchange for sex, which makes men prostitutes who put out for laundry services. I think everyone can agree that this is ridiculous.

But Alara, men give women money to go to a coin-op and do laundry, so it’s still prostitution.  You see! </snark>

I have learned to ignore chet’s comments on any biology beyond the in-vitro sort of thing ever since he denied that animals learn, contrary to a great body of modern science.

I don’t get what the argument about the supply/demand curve (the one Chet is making) is supposed to show. Ok, so there’s a curve, which presumably relates something like the amount of time male monkeys are willing to invest in grooming to the general availability of sex. And? The whole point of the post (as I read it) was to demonstrate the falsity of wildly generalizing from monkeys to people. That still holds; monkey behavior seems pretty interesting, but I don’t see what bearing it has on the question of how people ought to do things, and it certainly doesn’t support a generalization to human behavior. Whether or not it’s good science on monkeys I have no idea, but I’m struggling to understand what kind of point Chet wants to make about this.

Every time I see Chareth Cutestory’s name, I regret not going for the moniker “Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog.”

Nice smackdown on Chet, all.

Chet + prostitution thread = 300 comments. Wait for it.

But grooming is currency in primates. That’s not anti-woman choadery, that’s how primates like chimps treat time spent grooming - as currency. If “currency” has any meaning - as a fungible but not necessarily physical token representing a certain amount of value - then grooming is currency among primates. This is not in any way a contentious or controversial finding in primatology. They bank it, they trade it, they hoard and exchange it, they do everything with “grooming credits” that we do with money. It’s money. That they’re trading it for sex makes it prostitution.

You know, it sounds like both “sides” might be right.  The primates may well use sex as a means of exchange, the females trading it for other favours such as food or grooming - but that this is within a context of an intimate troop, just one step up from a family, and quite distinct from whoredom as a commodity.  Humans may be taking a natural impulse and using it to cause all sorts of problems - consider the love of sweet tastes as an analogy.

Chet, how do the monkeys store up their grooming “currency”?

Er, inside each other’s memories?

This is asinine. Primate researchers have known for decades that grooming in monkeys is a social behavior, not an economic one.

Yeah, but that distinction only exists if you can seperate the two.  Without money, the social spehere *is* the economic sphere.

Interesting how the characterization changes depending on the author’s perspective. I wrote an article on baboons, and found that all but one species have “matriarchal” societies. The females decide which males they want to mate with, as they live in mixed groups. The source material that I was using stated that while the largest/strongest male was often the choice, smaller males would win over females by grooming them and their offspring, bringing them food, etc. This appears to be the same behavior seen in macaques, but the framing is completely different. For baboons, the author framed the females’ response as “You seem nice and attentive. I’ll mate with you.” Whereas the author of this article (study?) makes it sound like, “You want sex? It’ll cost you a bunch of berries and some of those leaves I like.”

The actual evidence points more towards monkeys like foreplay, not monkeys as whores.

The distinction between the two depends on being able to distinguish an economic transaction from an initmate, social transaction, does it not?

They’re in it for both the sex and the price.

Chet: do you believe for a second that a prostitute has sex with man X because she finds him so sexy and she’s so turned on she wants to sex him up?

No?

Oh, that’s right, prostitutes have sex with their johns in order to earn the money the john pays them because it’s primarily an economic transaction.

Whereas lover X and lover Y have a mutually reciprocating relationship where they both enjoy the dinner, the concert or game of Scrabble, and the sex. All of those elements form the mutually enjoyable social interaction the couple has.

Duh.

That’s why prostitution can not be understood in social currency terms.  In fact, in many ways, it’s the opposite.  Social currency isn’t, as you mistakenly appear to assume, about goods and services and nothing but.  It’s about social relationships and building bonds.  One of the reasons that prostitution exists at all is so men can exploit a certain class of woman’s debased position to have sex with her without involving the other social bonds and social currency that tend to be part of dating-based sex.

This is not incompatable with Chet’s views.  It just shows the difference between chimpanzee behaviour and any human context.

Whether or not it’s good science on monkeys I have no idea, but I’m struggling to understand what kind of point Chet wants to make about this.

I think this is the big problem with evo-psych, especially evo-psych as reported in weekly general-interest magazines. The study itself may have, for all I know, said something neat about monkeys, but trying to expand that to humans, and (as Chet did) trying to apply human economic structures to the monkeys seems unsound.

The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

This right here—about a male “getting lucky”—is the bias.

Human sex is not something men do to unwilling women nor is it something disgusting that women allow men to do to them.  Sex is something people do together.  if you don’t have actively participating people involved, it’s not sex.

The deeply ingrained beliefthat sex is something a man does to a woman, or that a woman begrudgingly allows a man to do to her, is the basis behind the “getting lucky” idiom and the problem with this whole article.

It’s taking human societal hangups about sex and trying to show that they occur in monkeys, instead of looking at monkey behavior as monkey behavior sans any human sociatal issues.

Mnem, your argument is incomprehensible. Pay a prostitute for paying them back for… wtf?

It’s only incomprehensible if you don’t understand the difference between social and economic currency, and that the payback for social currency is supposed to be another social act, not a cash transaction.  If you think that every social transaction is a de facto economic transaction, so therefore money is always an acceptable substitute for social currency, then I can see where you would be very confused about the difference between two people exchanging social currency and two people exchanging actual money.

You’re also going to be very confused when your girlfriend gets pissed off because you offer her money for doing the laundry when what she wanted was for you to vacuum the living room.  That would be because money and social currency are not actually fungible, much as you would like to pretend they are. 

And, again, this is why comparing monkey social rituals to human prostitution is stupid:  because human prostitution is a deliberate attempt to bypass social rituals by substituting money for a social act that would otherwise be necessary to obtain sex.

This appears to be the same behavior seen in macaques, but the framing is completely different. For baboons, the author framed the females’ response as “You seem nice and attentive. I’ll mate with you.” Whereas the author of this article (study?) makes it sound like, “You want sex? It’ll cost you a bunch of berries and some of those leaves I like.”

In Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography, she has a whole chapter on evo psych, and that really is the key issue. Primate behavior is what it is, and it surely has some relevance to human behavior, seeing as we’re primates. But the way those behaviors get interpreted and extrapolated to human behavior often says a lot more about the researcher’s biases than it does about the evolutionary origins of our behavior. It’s also good to remember that different types of primates have different types of behaviors. There are certainly some similarities, but baboons are not macaques are not chimpanzees are not humans.

PIATOR:

A few things:

First of all monkeys groom monkey who are not prospective mating partners.  How do you link, or delink, mating rituals from quid pro quo?  Further, she is juding him as a prospective father of her offspring not just (if at all) as a fun playmate.  I doubt monkeys even have the concept of quid pro quo.

You say the “social sphere is the economic sphere.”  Perhaps there just isn’t an economic sphere at all. 

I mean to say:
Is there a difference between:
I’m decent to a woman, she likes me, she’s thus attracted to me, she sleeps with me, and;
I give a hooker $200 and she sleeps with me whether she likes me or not.
There is and it’s not translatable into monkey.

Our society is more complex than that of other primates, obviously. But there are things we can learn about our evolutionary history from looking at primates and monkeys. There are clues there about how our society might have formed, about how our self-awareness might have formed. If there is an implication for human evolution in this study, it’s less to do with sex and more to do with an exchange of goods and services in a social context, which is interesting and complex behavior. If you’re too daft to see that economics stems from the social need to exchange goods and services, I really can’t help you. Not even the most complex human behavior springs forth fully formed from the aether.

And you know, not every study done on monkey behavior is about people. Sometimes it’s just about the monkeys. I’m assuming that the behavior reported in this study is actually what the scientists observed, and they’re not lying or making things up. Just because primates or other animals exhibit some behavior, that doesn’t mean there are current parallels in humans. There might have been, once, sure. But the beauty of self-awareness and evolution means that our behaviors are not set in stone nor dictated solely by our genes.

“Particularly in relation to sexual relationships, data are needed to assess whether biological markets can be used to predict male-female interactions.” This is the stated purpose of this study. The paper explicitly states that “Grooming has been observed to be linked to reciprocity and interchange in ways consistent with a trade of social acts,” and the author then goes on to cite several studies in which grooming has been observed to be a form of payment. The evidence appears to be on Chet’s side.

Seriously, if you have trouble understanding the difference between doing someone a favor and writing them a check, that’s serious social dysfunction.

Amanda, it’s teh fact that we can make that distinction that makes it a dysfunction, yes?

I think there’s evidence monkeys understand quid pro quo, but that doesn’t mean there’s a not a certain nonsensical quality to conflating grooming with exchange of money, even if it is somewhat transactional.

The distinction between the two depends on being able to distinguish an economic transaction from an initmate, social transaction, does it not?

And that’s the point—we humans use money as a substitute for a social transaction, because when you’re dealing with a large society, it makes more sense than bartering goods and services back and forth within a social group, which is what monkeys do.  That’s why if you do a favor for a friend and that friend pays you cash for it, you’re going to get pissed off—they’re trying to bypass the social transaction (do a favor for you in return) and close off the relationship by turning it into an economic transaction between strangers.

Meanwhile, on our very last walk to elementary school, my younger son and I took an extra few minutes to watch a Cardinal flirt with a female, bring the female something and feed her, and jump over the female back and forth (all this on a utility wire).  Then they mated and flew off together.

Free from the projection that overcomes observational scientists when dealing with monkeys, we simply concluded that the male was currying favor or showing what a good provider he was.

The paper explicitly states that “Grooming has been observed to be linked to reciprocity and interchange in ways consistent with a trade of social acts,” and the author then goes on to cite several studies in which grooming has been observed to be a form of payment.

I think precisely what we’re debating is to what extent exchanging social acts, even if there is a quid pro quo, is actually the equivalent of payment of money or true economic exchange. I don’t think there is any “evidence” on Chet’s side because the question of whether exchanging grooming is like exchanging favors or like paying cash is entirely subjective and in the eye of the human observer. Even if some researcher described it as payment, that’s still the researcher imposing his human view on the monkey behavior. It’s not “evidence” that anything is actually so. BECAUSE MONKEYS DON’T USE MONEY.

The paper explicitly states that “Grooming has been observed to be linked to reciprocity and interchange in ways consistent with a trade of social acts,” and the author then goes on to cite several studies in which grooming has been observed to be a form of payment. The evidence appears to be on Chet’s side.

Only if, like Chet, you draw no distinction in human society between money transactions and social transactions.  There is no concept of “prostitution” in monkey society because you’re exchanging one social transaction (grooming) for another social transaction (sex) and both parties get a social boost out of the exchange.

To immediately look at that social exchange and decide it’s monkey prostitution because it involves sex is pretty sick, and that’s exactly what the Time writer did.  Far more people are going to see the article in Time saying that monkeys having sex after grooming is just like human prostitution than are going to go back and read the original study, which is, you know, a problem since now thousands of people are going to think that Time is right and the study is saying that monkeys exchange sex for cash.

I’m assuming that the behavior reported in this study is actually what the scientists observed, and they’re not lying or making things up.

Yes, all of the comments on this thread have assumed the same thing. The question isn’t, did the monkeys do this, but what does it *mean* that they did it?

I haven’t read the original article. it’s possible that it’s *just* about the monkeys and there was no speculation as to how this applies to humans. However, I find that unlikely. Reporters don’t go mining scientific papers for ideas that they *can* turn to an application about humans; they mine scientific papers that purport to say something about humans, because that’s less work. And most scientific papers on monkeys and sex will include something about how this does or does not imply something for humans.

Papers that say things that don’t fit the existing cultural script don’t get repeated. Has anyone seen any papers reported about kangaroo mothers sacrificing their joeys to predators to increase their own odds of escape? How about the total lack of concern titi monkeys have for their offspring in comparison to their monogamous pair bond? I could do a paper about titi monkeys in which I suggest that being too close to one’s spouse leads one to distance oneself from one’s kids, but if I did, a. it would also be choadery because humans aren’t titi monkeys and b. it wouldn’t get picked up because it doesn’t fit the cultural script that women being obsessively in <strike>servitude to</strike> love with men is good for the babeez.

This doesn’t mean the *observations* were bad or wrong or that no one should do this kind of research; it means the conclusions drawn are nonsensical as they apply to humans, or “well duh” as they apply to monkeys (we have known for years that monkeys are more likely to mate with other monkeys who groom them and are generally nice to them.)

Wow, this comment thread move quite a bit since I last saw it.

For those that say that social favors aren’t currency because you can’t translate it directly into dollars and cents, and that it’s sometimes insulting when friends pay each other for favors,  I want to point out a few things I think could be important here:

First of all, most social animals move in circles where everyone knows everyone; i.e. extended families of a few dozen individuals. That means that they can all exchange favors with each other, because they can all remember who helped them and who they helped.

With humans, we live in much larger groups (there’s a few hundred thousand people in the city I live in, for example) and so I can’t get by simply by trading favors; it’s impossible to keep track of everyone. So, amongst us humans, social favors are limited to friends and family. I think that is why you feel slightly insulted when you do someone a favor and instead of getting an expected favor in return, they offer you cash: they treat you like a stranger. You certainly *can* exchange favors for real money, but that often has to be declared up front so it doesn’t feel odd; like “oh thank you for helping me move/mowing my lawn when I was sick/picking up my kids at the school/whatever, I’ll have to buy you a beer later on!” And even then, you’re expected to perform social favours for them, in return.

Now, nobody (including chet) walks around with a ledger where they keep perfect tally of who did what for whom when, but we all have a general idea of how much we have done for others and how much they have done for us. And if others fail to “pay us back” in favors, we get grumpy. “I always help him/her out, but s/he never does anything for me!” or the like. This doesn’t mean where helping others solely due to social obligation or because we want something in return or because we’re cold calculating greedy bastards, it’s just because we have an innate sense of what we think is fair and what isn’t. (And apes have this too, there’s a hilarious article about monkeys that felt they were being treated unfairly by the researchers and started throwing bananas at them).

Another thing is the grooming = backrub thing. I’m not a biologist or a animal behaviourist (or whatever it might be called) so I’m not an authority in this field, but my general impression is that grooming is something different for other primates than it is for us. Remember, they aren’t human beings, they don’t think exactly like us. Grooming is something they do for each other as “payment” in a bunch of other cases, so it’s not impossible that they do it here as well.

And, again, they aren’t human; if they have prostitution (which I don’t find unlikely at all) it has zero relevance to human prostitution.

you guys already covered the real smackdown on chet, but i’ll add that it makes me lol how he just had to let us know he was getting back to THE LAB. BECAUSE HE IS A SCIENTIST/KNOWS MORE THAN WE DO ABOUT COMPLICATED ECONOMOLOGICAL CRAP THAN WE DO.  SO THERE!

Yes, biologists know more than non-biologists about biology. Funny how that works out.

Consider this:

A study is done and three things are observed:

1.  Male monkey gives female monkey a bananna; she has sex with him.
2.  Male monkey gives female monkey a bananna; she keeps it but doesn’t have sex with him.
3.  Male monkey gives female monkey a bananna which she uses to beat the shit out of him with.

BUT:

Females monkeys are never observed to have sex with males who don’t give them bananna .
Is the bananna a payment to a whore or a social convention?

Only if, like Chet, you draw no distinction in human society between money transactions and social transactions.  There is no concept of “prostitution” in monkey society because you’re exchanging one social transaction (grooming) for another social transaction (sex) and both parties get a social boost out of the exchange.

Do I believe that monkeys have prostitution in the way that humans do? No. But I think that we arrive at this conclusion from different places.

“You mean, if we’re NICE to women they might want to have sex with us?”

LOL.  Isn’t it amazing that monkeys have figured this out?

I have learned to ignore chet’s comments on any biology beyond the in-vitro sort of thing ever since he denied that animals learn, contrary to a great body of modern science.

He’s lost me when he insinuated that citizens in Communist countries looked upon the Communist authorities like omniscient deities because they felt their presence was everywhere and thus, feared to speak ill of them even in their homes.

Didn’t seem to be clued in when I mentioned that most of those citizens weren’t as superstitious and unsophisticated as he was assuming…..but had such fears because they KNEW the authorities placed them under many forms of surveillance…..including placing electronic bugs in and around their homes. 

Information which could easily be gleaned from basic historical texts on Soviet/Russian, Chinese, Eastern European, or other Communist countries’ and a discussion with immigrants from those areas. 

You never get gift certificates on Christmas? They’re advertised as being “as good as cash”, you know.

If you actually believe this, I have several hundred acres of prime tropical beachfront real estate in Ulan Bator I can sell to you.  If that doesn’t suit you fancy, there’s also a certain bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan which may serve as a nice substitute…...

I can’t believe that neither exholt nor Ms Kate have mentioned their respective universities in this thread. Hardly a day goes by on Pandagon that we’re not regaled with tales of their stupid fucking colleges.

Are you one of those guys who thinks that most prostitutes are just good-hearted women who see themselves as freelance sexual social workers for sad, undersexed men?  Are pimps, in your view, the real feminists who just help good-hearted women and sad men conduct the only honest and loving relationship possible—-sex for money?

Wow I knew a guy who really thought all of that!  I used to feel sorry for him and tell my bf that I thought he was afraid of getting hurt (his marriage had ended badly).  My bf said, no he hates women.  And I was like, come on, he hates women?  And he said, yeah, all men who go to prostitutes hate women, trust me.

And then as time when on I came to observe that he was right and eventually even admitted it to him which I hate to do!

Because some men conflate that with the realization that human women are less likely to have sex with NiceGuys (TM) who pretend to be their friends and follow them around than with “assholes,” here defined as “someone with personality.” So then the monkey thing just can’t be being a nice guy, because NiceGuys (TM) Don’t Get Laid. So then it has to be a purchase, otherwise it’s not faaaaaaaaaaaaaair and why couldn’t they have been born monkeys?!?!

I love it!

Well after reading this thread all I can say is that maybe there are women who don’t like sex, and maybe there are women who want money or goods and services up front, but what I demand is performance.

you better be able to keep it up, and you better be able to make me come several times in one session.  If you suck the first time I’ll give you one more go, but if you suck again, you are out of there.

I can buy my own shoes man.

I can’t believe that neither exholt nor Ms Kate have mentioned their respective universities in this thread. Hardly a day goes by on Pandagon that we’re not regaled with tales of their stupid fucking colleges.

I think we either have a troll take over issue here, or, maybe, etomologista has inhaled too many pesticides and is failing to observe and interpret a dataset properly.

Sure, biologists know biology ... except when they don’t.  I have PhD biologists working as editors because they lack understanding of the areas of biology which have both emerged recently and provide the most employment. The field has changed and specialized so enormously in the past decade that a lab rat like Chet, who has said some things in past threads that directly conflict with any modern understanding of the subject matter at hand, can know their niche quite well and still be way out of their depth when it comes to other areas.

Sorry - entomologista.

I lay no claim to editorial skillz.

Entomologista, aren’t you married to Chet?

Not lying Chet - you straight out parroted the entirely outdated view that animals are entirely instinctual and automotons - a view very much at odds with recent scientific findings.

And another thing….

This study is:  A) a waste of grant money
              B) an exercise in single-factor determinism (see Cannibals and Kings)

Do we ask the question:  If every male who gets laid engages in back scratching, does every male who engages in back scratching get laid?  Might he also have to smell right and be a fairly robust specimen?

Study hell, the only thing it studies is the projection abilities of the so-called researcher.

Dan:

Putting the word “payment” in scare-quotes is pretty much an admission that it’s all just a bunch of anthropomorphized bullshit, don’t you think

Not really, I just wanted to emphasize that it’s not exactly equivalent to money-currency, but still roughly the same thing. (As I’ve said, it’s much more akin to favors, which is close to being the same as “money” currency, but with important differences). In the end I think a lot of it boils down to how you define “currency”, actually.

(I wish to emphasize that I’m not rabidly proclaiming grooming to be the same as currency, only that it’s my general impression that it’s often viewed that way, and that I don’t think it’s at all improbable that other primates follow the basic rules of quid pro quo. I could very well be wrong, I’m not a biologist, just someone who likes evolutionary theory. And monkeys. )

Not right now Zifnab, I’m busy playing “Find the Little Man in the Boat”

shouldn’t that be the little woman in the boat?

well, no one say blogs are not educational.  i now know more about monkey foreplay than I ever dreamed I’d know…

I don’t think there is any “evidence” on Chet’s side

Can anyone actually state what Chet’s side is, to his satisfaction?  I’m picking up a huge vibe of people dogpiling on him for their interpretations or projections of what he has said, rather than what he has actually said.

At the very least, if you want to say “Chet said this” or “Chet said that”, could you at least have the dency to quote him?

If this isn’t prostitution, if this isn’t an economic transaction, then how do you explain the supply-demand curve? Isn’t that kind of out-of-place in a “foreplay between lovers” model?

Males do things that make females more inclined to have sex with them.  And males with less sexual opportunities will do more things, while males with more sexual opportunities will do less.  That doesn’t seem like rocket science, or suggest anytime a male does something that makes a female more inclined to have sex with him, that he’ll do less if he doesn’t have to, then what he’s doing is like paying a prostitute.

thecynicalromantic -

I should have specified that I was refering to actual nice guys and NOT NiceGuys (TM), who are in fact just manipulative assholes.

The distinction between economic and social transactions is really quite simple.  Economic transactions, like prostitution, are largely or entirely impersonal and focused on economic advantage.  Social transactions are based on ongoing, substantial social relationships and are focused on creating or maintaining such relations.  Money (and the markets which make it necessary) developed to allow nonreciprocal economic exchanges with people with whom you have no ongoing social relationship.

Reciprocity, the exchange of favors, does indeed lie at the heart of friendship and social relationships.  That is because we form social bonds with those who pay attention to and take care of us rather than folks who ignore us except when they want something.  This is radically different from the purely impersonal economic exchange of prostitution, which is in fact the total opposite.

This is really not difficult, though some folks who seem overly wedded to the capitalist market mentality (and in consequence view all transactions through an economic lens) do not seem to grasp the distinction.  If the purpose of a transaction is to establish or maintain an ongoing social relationship (which is what we see with monkeys), then it is a social transaction and not an economic one.  Economic transactions, like prostitution, are a means to acquire a social good (in this case sex) without the need of an ongoing social relationship, which we do not see in monkeys.  The presence of instrumentality, that certain kinds of behaviors are employed to get certain kinds of results, in both cases does not create an equivalence between the two.

FWIW I have a Ph.D. in anthropology and have taught, researched, and thought about these issues extensively for more than 20 years.

Can anyone actually state what Chet’s side is, to his satisfaction?  I’m picking up a huge vibe of people dogpiling on him for their interpretations or projections of what he has said, rather than what he has actually said.

At the very least, if you want to say “Chet said this” or “Chet said that”, could you at least have the dency to quote him?

I agree with this, actually. I assume there’s history here that Im unaware off, but I don’t like people assuming other people are saying something they aren’t; that never leads to anything good.

I think there’s evidence monkeys understand quid pro quo, but that doesn’t mean there’s a not a certain nonsensical quality to conflating grooming with exchange of money, even if it is somewhat transactional.

Yes and no.  The base impulse might be the same - the exchange of favours rather than straight altruism - but the context is totally different.  There are no monkey whores - to be a whore requires selling sex as a commodity, and without money and a context larger than a troop, you don’t have commodities.

I find this interesting because it ties into some stuff I’ve come across involving food and food-exchange as a commodity vs as a social act.

Well, but that’s the question. Do these monkeys have any social relationship before they mate? After they mate? Any social relationship besides the grooming?

If you read the article, monkeys that were already going to have sex twice in an hour end up doing it four times instead.

At the very least, if you want to say “Chet said this” or “Chet said that”, could you at least have the dency to quote him?

PIATOR,

In the bit by me that you quote, I was actually responding to Entomologista, who I quoted right above where I said the bit you quoted. She was the one who said the “evidence” was on “Chet’s side.”

Speaking of having the decency to quote people if you are going to critique them.

Chet,

If all you’re saying is that offers of grooming makes female macaques more inclined to have sex with the male macaques doing the grooming, well, you’ll get no argument from me.

I understood you to be saying that the grooming is equivalent of an economic transaction in macaque society. Am I understanding you correctly?

I am saying that even if the exchange is reciprocal, we can’t really say with any certainty how that would translate to an economic transaction in human society, and any attempts to do so (my own guess is that it’s more than a backrub but less than a personal check) are purely subjective.

Chet, don’t you have <strike>a dog to torture</strike> your property to tend to?

If you read the article, monkeys that were already going to have sex twice in an hour end up doing it four times instead.

Oh, to be a monkey ...

Chet -

I went and read the original article (which is not as bad as the Time story) and the author does not specify.  Based on context and other work the answer is yes they do have an ongoing social relationship.  Macaques live in large troops with relatively stable membership (there is some interchange, but that mostly involves adolescents and reduces inbreeding) and most mating occurs within the troop, as is the case for most social mammals.  Newcomers and outsiders get less sex in general among primates than those who are established in the community.

I should also add that the whole business about the fact that males in troops with lots of females groom less applies to the attention given to individual females, not the aggregate time spent grooming.  What this means is that individuals with large social networks spend less time and attention on average and individual members of that network than those with smaller networks.  This does not mean that those individuals with larger networks do not actually spend more time in grooming and other social behavior in aggregate than those with smaller networks.  The author does not specify how much time in total is spent in grooming, just how much in individual interactions.  Nor is any information provide on the effective size of individual male social networks in troops with more or less females.

What the author actually proves is that female mate selection has created an evolutionary selective pressure which favors cooperative and sociable males.  Unfortunately it is framed in a rather silly “evolutionary market” theory.  This is the kind of grossly ethnocentric mentality which drives me crazy about a lot of evolutionary psych and related research.

The problem with the “currency” theory, of course, is that social grooming in primate groups occurs whether or not individuals get something in exchange for specific acts of grooming

Exactly!  Thank you.

Chet, here you are:

But grooming is currency in primates. That’s not anti-woman choadery, that’s how primates like chimps treat time spent grooming - as currency. If “currency” has any meaning - as a fungible but not necessarily physical token representing a certain amount of value - then grooming is currency among primates. This is not in any way a contentious or controversial finding in primatology. They bank it, they trade it, they hoard and exchange it, they do everything with “grooming credits” that we do with money. It’s money. That they’re trading it for sex makes it prostitution.

I read that as making a much stronger argument that grooming=money than you seem to be defending in your comment @ 6:23.

The basic premise, says Gumert, is called biological market theory, which follows the elementary principles of supply versus demand. When applied to the voluntary sex life of long-tailed macaques, it means that the price that one group is willing to pay for a commodity that the other group has depends on the scarcity or abundance of that commodity on the market.

If it’s not bunk evo-psych it’s bunk econ-theory.  The goof starts with the premise that human economic theory applies to monkeys, starts, mind you.  Then, of course, he gets a stop watch and forces the data into supply and demand curves.  The fact that males might get laid for other reasons is not studied.  There is no control group.  It’s junk science, pure and simple.

What the author actually proves is that female mate selection has created an evolutionary selective pressure which favors cooperative and sociable males.  Unfortunately it is framed in a rather silly “evolutionary market” theory.  This is the kind of grossly ethnocentric mentality which drives me crazy about a lot of evolutionary psych and related research.

This.

All I’m saying is the following:

4) Dismissing this study because macaques are perfect little angels and would never have sex except in the most egalitarian, feminist way possible is stupid.

1) The study may not be directly evo psych, but it is certainly informed by a related theoretical model (biological market theory), which has several epitomological problems with it.

2) In the normal sense of the term, monkeys do not have “currency” since they do not have money.  That you can make an argument that the exchange of favors is analogous to currency based exchanges does not make them the same.

3)  What most people are critiquing here is the representation in Time, which does in fact characterize it in that manner.  The study itself does not quite go that far but does imply a degree of degree of depersonalized calculation which is both unwarranted and not demonstrated by the data.  It is also clear that both the Time article and the original are making implications about the evolution of human behavior.

4) Nobody here is making that argument that I have read.

Nobody here is making that argument that I have read.

Maybe PIATOR could ask Chet to actually quote people.

Hey, the author of the paper is apparently affiliated with both the Biology and Psychology departments at Hiram College. And since it’s not the Primate Psychology Department, I’m thinking there’s a bit of evo-psych happening here. Unless of course he wrote a letter to the Time editors tearing them apart for misrepresenting his research.

DrDick’s synopsis at 6:32 is excellent.

DrDick’s synopsis at 6:32 is excellent.

Thank you.  This is what I do for a living.

A study is done and three things are observed:

1.  Male monkey gives female monkey a banana; she has sex with him.
2.  Male monkey gives female monkey a banana; she keeps it but doesn’t have sex with him.
3.  Male monkey gives female monkey a banana which she uses to beat the shit out of him with.

BUT:

Females monkeys are never observed to have sex with males who don’t give them banana .
Is the bananna a payment to a whore or a social convention?

Was it the 80’s? Because if you ignore observation 1, this describes my dating experience in middle school.

the author of the paper is apparently affiliated with both the Biology and Psychology departments

This does not necessarily implicate him as Evo Psych.  There are a lot of psychologists working in primatology who do not subscribe to this theory (I had a friend in graduate school who studied orgasm in female chimps for his MA thesis).  This is based on the idea that we can learn a lot about humans from the study of other primates with whom we share most of our biology and a lot of our behavior.  I generally share this notion, which is why I have read a fair bit of primatology (mostly from anthropologists).

Magis  on  06/23  at  05:20 PM
Hypothetical clipped.
Females monkeys are never observed to have sex with males who don’t give them bananna . 
Is the bananna a payment to a whore or a social convention?

Another analogy.

Male Blue Jays that perform a mating dance sometimes get sex; male Blue Jays that never perform a mating dance never get sex. Is the mating dance payment or social convention?

If this were birdies and not monkeys, we wouldn’t even be having this wacky conversation.

Chet:
There’s no such thing as “human economic theory”

Insofar as humans are the only ones making up economic theory, and economy theory made by humans applies first and foremost to humans, and we really don’t have any solid reason to apply to nonhumans, I think calling it “human economic theory” is a pretty sound description. It’s usually redundant, since normally no one is silly enough to take a sophisticated aspect of sentient behavior and shoehorn it onto primates whose social structures are significantly different than ours.

We have known that female monkeys were more likely to have sex with males who engaged in mutual grooming, food sharing, protecting the female and her offspring (including those who could not belong to the male), etc., at least since Barbara Smut’s work with baboons in the 1970s

Huh huh huh—her name is “Smut.”

That’s right, kids, I have nothing else to add to the conversation. Hey, I said some smart stuff up above, so this balances out.

There’s no such thing as “human economic theory”,

While perhaps infelicitously phrased, all economic theory is “human economic theory” and this is an accurate characterization of the theoretical model used here.  “Biological market theory” is derived from classical economic theory and presumes that those models can accurately describe and explain behavioral evolution (game theory is also related to these economic models).  While there may be some justification for the application of some of these models to primates, I have a bit of difficulty conceptualizing drosophila as “rational actors,” which is a central element of all of these models.  Likewise, the article itself does go rather far beyond “living things that rely on limited resources for survival have to find some way to apportion those resources amongst themselves.”  The author himself states clearly that the purpose of this study was to test whether such rational actor strategic resource maximization models could explain female mate choice in the macaques.  While the data could potentially support such models, the author nowhere tests and rejects alternative explanations.  That constitutes a seriously flawed research design.

DrDick, I agree that primatology can be a goldmine for insight on human behavior. I was responding to the “he’s not saying anything about people” line of reasoning that’s come up in this thread.

Huh huh huh—her name is “Smut.”

And her research at the time focused on female baboon mating behavior.  It generated those same snickers when I first read her work in graduate school in the mid-70s.

Liz212 -

I agree with you there.  The primary (if not only) reason psychologists study primate behavior is to understand human behavior.  There are three groups of scientists primarily involved in primatology research:  anthropologists, psychologists, and biologists.  Only the last is primarily or exclusively interested in primates in their own right.  The first two are primarily focused on developing animal models for human behavior.  I knew several members of the first two in graduate school.

Well, but that’s the question. Do these monkeys have any social relationship before they mate? After they mate? Any social relationship besides the grooming?

Yes, to all, because these are monkeys who are all in the same troop.  We’re not talking about monkeys who stumble across one another in the wild.  We’re talking about social exchanges between members of an established group.  That’s why Time comparing this grooming to prostitution is especially stupid in this case.

If an animal is a member of a group, it has social ties with that group.  That’s how groups work.

Chet, is your background in evolutionary biology?  If so, I can understand your confusion, because it is common in evolutionary biology to discuss primate grooming behaviors in “currency” terms.  From the strictest evolutionary point of view, grooming is a behavior that takes time and energy from an individual while giving back no concrete advantage.  The classic explanation for the question of why primates groom is that they get “social currency” out of it; individuals who groom regularly are more likely to get groomed in return, and, as studies like this suggest, may get other forms of social reward as well, such as more mating access.

The problem is that, while it can be useful to think of grooming as “currency” when you’re compiling hard statistics on number of times groomed vs. number of groomings received, etc., the currency thing is just a metaphor.  It’s an analogy that makes it easier for human researchers to understand what’s going on.  It’s nonsensical to argue that monkeys literally use grooming as currency, or that social interactions are exactly equivalent to financial interactions.

Which is what this article does.  It takes a perfectly decent, not especially surprising study on social reciprocation in macaques and turns it into OMG MONKEY HOOKERS.  It anthropomorphizes the monkeys and ignores the actual point of the study to make sexist speculations about how women are “naturally” whores.  And it pisses me off that scientists don’t seem to be able to get any research reported by the mainstream press unless they can give it this kind of sensationalistic but misleading slant.

DrDick, thanks for your excellent summaries of the study.

Shaenon -

Exactly right and the points I tried to make earlier.

Sure, biologists know biology ... except when they don’t.  I have PhD biologists working as editors because they lack understanding of the areas of biology which have both emerged recently and provide the most employment. The field has changed and specialized so enormously in the past decade that a lab rat like Chet, who has said some things in past threads that directly conflict with any modern understanding of the subject matter at hand, can know their niche quite well and still be way out of their depth when it comes to other areas.

But you’re never out of your depth, I imagine.

Which is what this article does.  It takes a perfectly decent, not especially surprising study on social reciprocation in macaques and turns it into OMG MONKEY HOOKERS.

Spot on.

Is it foreplay when the penis of a waterstrider gets rammed straight through the female’s sclera into her uterus?

Actually, it’s bedbugs that do that. It’s called traumatic insemination. Although some waterstriders do mate forcefully, I believe it is through the regular genital opening. The females of some species have evolved a sort of covering that protects the genital opening. This means that the males have had to evolve behaviors that get the females to open the covering.

But if you think that’s bad, you should see how Odonata do it.

Chet one of the problems with this study, to which I alluded earlier, is that it treats social grooming (and by extension all social reciprocity) as though it is specifically and solely associated with sex.  These kinds of social reciprocity discussed in the article are not restricted to sexual (or potentially sexual) interactions.  They are fundamental to all social interactions among primates and form the social glue which holds the groups together.  There is certainly a degree of calculation, but we really need to be careful about how much we infer in this regard.  About all we can say here with any certainty is that they do not invest lots of time on individuals who largely ignore them or where there is a marked discrepancy.  I have seen no evidence to support any close calculus of exchanges.

Social reciprocity serves a variety of social functions in primate societies, including reducing aggression and conflict, in addition to sex.  The author does not address this in his study, but it is quite clear from other studies that males do not always get sex when they exhibit these behaviors.  That is, male social grooming and other socially supportive behaviors are not exclusively about getting sex.  It may not even be primarily about sex, but we do not have the data to confirm or reject that.  The author is making a number of assumptions about monkey behavior which go untested.

Equally importantly, we do not have to assume such high levels of rational calculation to explain the evolutionary mechanism.  Nobody would argue that fish engage in such behavior, yet exhibit elaborate displays demonstrating surplus resources where females routinely preferentially choose those males with the most elaborate displays.

Which do you think is the greater sin of anthropomorphizing, though? Calling an exchange of currency for sex “prostitution”, or catgirl and other’s repeated assertions that grooming in this case is “foreplay”?

Given that monkeys are a hell of a lot like humans, and humans touch each other affectionately to get their partner in the mood for sex, it doesn’t seem to me over-anthropomorphizing to suggest that grooming is similar to foreplay, no.

However, saying that grooming is similar to prostitution, when prostitution is singled out by humanity *specifically* as a violation of social norms about sex because it does not involve the exchange of affection or of favors but of a commoditized transactional medium, comes very very close to saying that trading backrubs for sex is prostitution, or trading dinner for sex is prostitution, or trading laundry for sex is prostitution, at which point all human beings are prostitutes and the term means nothing.

Grooming is probably not identical to foreplay, just because in humans, sexual touching is reserved to a specific category of behavior that we share only with a limited set of social acquaintances, whereas affectionate touching can be shared with a much wider range of people… also, because grooming seems to be more necessary for monkey happiness than foreplay (or even backrubs) is for humans. But it’s a social transaction, not a financial transaction. There’s a much, much more accurate human model that represents what grooming is to monkeys, and by that model, what is going on is not prostitution but the “well, duh” of “you do something nice for me, and I’ll do something nice for you.” The exchange of favors between acquaintances, no matter how well they tote up who owes who a favor or calculate how much of a favor they have to do to get what they want, is not *morally* equivalent to money in humans, and calling it money is thus completely inaccurate. Humans put money in a special category *because* it can be transacted between complete strangers or people who actually don’t like each other at all.

In order to look at monkeys grooming each other in exchange for sex, you actually have to be *trying* to filter it through the lens of “women are nothing but bitches and hoes” to see “prostitution” there instead of the much more obvious analogies of mating rituals (from other animals) or friendly exchange of favors (from humans.) Or, you’re involved with a branch of science that seeks to understand all social transactions in terms of “currency”, some sort of commodity trading. If that’s the case, then yes, monkeys exchanging sex for grooming can be seen as “grooming is currency”. By the same logic, men may be offering women sex with a safe, known partner who has had time to learn how to please her in exchange for her performing domestic chores for him. If this is the scientific lens you’re using, then it’s perfectly valid to study in what ways men trade sexual favors to women in exchange for the things women do for them… but no article in Time is going to pick up such a study to prove that men are whores. The problem is that the rest of the world does not use that particular scientific lens; most humans see a huge difference between having sex with a person you like after they did something nice that made you feel good, and having sex with a person who paid you, and reducing all of that to “currency” may be useful for certain types of analysis but it’s a damn stupid way to talk to laypeople.

But grooming is currency in primates. That’s not anti-woman choadery, that’s how primates like chimps treat time spent grooming - as currency.

OMG! Are you serious?

If “currency” has any meaning - as a fungible but not necessarily physical token representing a certain amount of value - then grooming is currency among primates. This is not in any way a contentious or controversial finding in primatology. They bank it, they trade it, they hoard and exchange it, they do everything with “grooming credits” that we do with money. It’s money.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

That they’re trading it for sex makes it prostitution…
Chet on 06/23 at 08:53 AM

Um. No. It does not. They’re not “trading” at all, they are doing a sensual and mutually pleasurable thing that leads directly to another such thing. In a sense the same thing.

What we have here is a fundamental clash between worldviews. Chet, you are evidently taking the exchange metaphor that admittedly dominates our mainstream society to insane extremes here. Which to be fair, is what mainstream academic economists do all the time. But that doesn’t make it true.

If those economists had anything solid and useful to show for their “science” of exchange-fetishism, then I’d take them seriously.

Because the whole point of “currency” is that it’s an intangible object that represents something of value.
Mnemosyne on 06/23 at 09:15 AM

Actually, Mnemosyne, you are conceding way too much to Chet when you include “intangibility” in the definition of “currency.” To be fair, even he didn’t assert it is inherently “intangible”—but that’s a reasonable inference to draw from the framing mainstream, marginalist, economists approach economics from. But that’s a failed approach to understanding economics, or anything else.

Money has rarely been “intangible” in history, and even today, when in the past few centuries we’ve evolved forms of money that separate the tokens from material value, useful systems of currency do ultimately get grounded in stocks of material goods. Bank money of the modern type mobilizes the exchange value of material commodities that are simultaneously being used for their various practical purposes—this is its advantage. (The drawback is that the complex mediation between those goods and those using the currency is never completely reliable, and so even the soundest bank currency can and sometimes does break down in a crisis. But the advantage generally far outweighs the risks.)

In economic theory I’m a materialist, and that approach leads to much clearer understanding and more accurate predictions.

Primate researchers have known for decades that grooming in monkeys is a social behavior, not an economic one.
Karalora on 06/23 at 09:23 AM

Economics is social—it’s a subset of society—where society runs up against material constraints.

Reproduction, and social bonding in general, of course therefore has various kinds of economic aspects. I think I fundamentally agree with what you are saying here Karalora—especially the stuff before and after I didn’t highlight to nitpick! But the point of my nitpicking here is to stress where Chet goes off the rails.

Chet seems to think that “economics” is this abstract Platonic reality existing independently of concrete human societies. As a materialist I think of it as something that we had to invent, like math. Mathematics, I believe, represents and models material realities that do exist prior to us, whether we know about them yet or not. Mainstream economists think that the sorts of social relations we have under capitalism also exist in potential as absolute ideals human beings should be approximating. I don’t; I think of these relations and their rules as a mechanism we’ve developed for certain purposes, which at least in principle can be modified, or even superseded completely by different mechanisms. Therefore I’m very suspicious of people claiming to find similar relations existing prior to the stages of human history where we invented things like money—especially claiming to find these things among animals.

Human beings invented economies, in the human sense of economics. They didn’t invent us, though they do shape us.

OK, I’m going to wait until I’ve read through the tread to post this. But Chet’s bold pronouncements were too gobsmacking to wait to write this…
——-

Ok, there is no way I can properly read this thread anytime tonight. I’ve skimmed it enough to stand by what I’ve said thus far, so here it is.

Alara J Rogers -

Might I add that if we logically extend this analysis to other social interactions (which we must for it to hold in this case), that means that parents buy the affection of their children.

Currency itself is just a metaphor, it’s a way of abstracting things that are valuable into some number of units of value, mostly for purposes of exchange. But to say that something isn’t currency because it’s not a physical token you can hoard and steal is just absurd. One, it ignores all the various ways you can “steal” favors and take advantage of others, and two - it’s just transparently stupid to claim that something isn’t currency just because, if you have a lot of it, you can’t buy a yacht.

No, claiming that currency needs to be a physical token is pointing out the difference between social currency and money, aka currency. 

You could, in an extremely abstract way, claim that all interactions between two beings depend on “currency” of some kind, no matter whether it’s an action or a token, but that’s not the way the word is commonly used.  Currency is understood as something you give in direct exchange for a good or service.  Since the males who groomed the females did not automatically get sex every time, clearly the grooming was not currency except in the most tenuous way.

But, hey, if you need to hold on to your idea that animals can be taught how to utilize the Laffer curve in their social interactions, you do that.

I’ve never understood the idea that women would be genetically programed not to want or enjoy sex.

Well, the guys who suggest that are speaking from personal experience. And if there’s one universal objective point of view of reality, it’s that of a sexually frustrated, deeply self-absorbed straight man.

Some years—well, decades—ago I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. I read and understood it mainly for its anthropological content. As I recall, it stressed the distinction between “gift-exchange” societies (for instance, the society implied by Genesis for Abraham and such ancient “patriarchs” of the Old Testament, and “value exchange.” When I later discussed this with an anthropology professor he pointed out that gatherer-hunters were even prior to “gift-exchange;” they had a sharing economy. Because gift-exchange, as Hyde meant it, already involved a degree of concentrated property relations and social hierarchy unknown to our oldest ancestors.

I’d have to read the thread above far more thoroughly than I can to do justice, but I do get the impression a lot of people are taking for granted what Chet takes to extremes—that our modern notions of a value-exchange economy are equivalent to economics as such. And I just want to stress I think that’s not right.

But I think most of us agree, whether we label it distinctively “value-exchange” or just lump it in as “economics,” there is something appalling and disastrous about that kind of thinking being assumed to be the ground of all social existence. I think that if that’s how you feel, you’re on the right track.

At best, our modern notions of value-exchange create the framework of some useful social tools. But they were formed in the context of ruthless, abusive power, and largely serve such purposes as well, and it remains to be seen whether they can ever be reformed so as to not be a means of exploitation primarily. (I doubt it very much, but it’s worth trying since we might either make a fool of me and make it work, or evolve the better things I think we should in the course of trying.)

On the other hand, our society’s ideology is of course very much invested in propagating and projecting these values, no matter what the human cost.

Mark -

What you are saying is part of what I was getting at earlier in my discussions of social reciprocity.

I agree that the primary problem here is the factoring out of the grooming from the sex.  The grooming is part of the sex, even though it can occur without the sex. 

It’s as if someone said that gazing into your eyes is payment for sex, because lovers gaze into each others’ eyes.

rivki:  “Shouldn’t the gender* with the larger downside to sex be the one with the stronger biological imperative towards it?”

Only if you’re conscious of the downside and avoid sex as a result. 

If you *aren’t* consciously aware of the act’s cost, then an evolutionary advantage may be conveyed upon you if you are less free with this act.  Jumping off a cliff is only advantageous in an extreme life-or-death situation.  Animals who don’t jump off cliffs routinely have an advantage over those that do, in most cases.

having read the journal article, i must confess that it is substantially more informative than this thread.

it’s also much, much shorter.  it also doesn’t include the word “prostitution” anywhere. 

many of the complaints with the “article” i assume must refer to the Times article, not the Animal Behavior article - for clarity, let’s call it the paper.

the author of the paper describes a number of limitations to the social exchange model, such as consortship (coerced mating and subsequent mate guarding), which is considered to exist outside the bounds of “biological market theory” - focused as it is on cooperative trade - which the author is clear is only a subset of social relations in these animals. 

having worked directly with macaques, i find the equation drawn between grooming and sensual massage hilarious.  and calling it “foreplay” will cause you to seriously overestimate the prevalence of homosexuality in these animals. 

i think most of the arguments about what truly constitutes “currency” are somewhat beside the point.  maybe a better question is to what degree “biological market theory” has predictive value in regards to mating behavior.  there appears to be some. still, i don’t think the author of the paper says much that would be controversial, and the paper itself is fairly narrowly focused on primate ethology.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/rapper_dmx_faces_time_in_the_clink_for_animal_cruelty/

Animals who don’t jump off cliffs routinely have an advantage over those that do, in most cases.

The obvious exception being spare males during times of overpopulation or in evolved schemes of overpopulation.

Odonata aren’t as extreme as Lophiiformes, FWIW.

When I was in Zimbabwe, at the lion and cheetah park, some baboons jumped the fence of their enclosure and went running around free.  I guess that this is a lesson to us from their species that the path to success and self-determination is through leaping.

Why is it then that we undervalue our pole vaulters in relation to others whom we regard as having a higher status—such as CEOS and landlords and the like.

Aren’t the monkeys trying to TELL US SOMETHING, for heavens sakes!!!!!

DrDick, I think we like most of us are put off by the inherently reductionistic nature of the “value-exchange” worldview. It’s all well and good applied to the sphere in which it evolved—markets. But human beings didn’t have markets until some considerable time after we had agriculture, herding, specialized crafts, etc—which in turn is only a small fraction of the time we’ve been modern human beings, biologically speaking.

I wish—oh, wait, did I put it in my blog? Yes I did!

I wasn’t going to link to that thing because I haven’t updated it in over a year; this is in fact the second newest entry—and it’s from October—2007!

But heck, I pulled out the quote I wanted. That’s what “A Freeway In Hell” is for anyway, a scrapbook.

Oh, and I had planned to put my long long comments there and just put links in threads, For The Good Of The Community.

Maybe I should go back to doing that?

Anyway, let Thorstein Veblen say it for me!

The point being—a generally valid framework for understanding general human behavior has got to have more dimensions than this sort of “economism.” The fact that it’s creepy (with specifically creepy implications here) is directly related both to its fatuousness in one direction—and that this particular ideology evolved in a particular kind of exploitative society in another.

Specifically, a patriarchal one.

Mark, you’re about 6 hours late. Most of your points have been covered.

Most of your points have been covered too, Chet, but that doesn’t stop you from repeating yourself.  Sauce for the goose, guy.  Fair’s fair.

Chet—

Time is a finite commodity, which can be exchanged for experiences. Ipso facto, it’s a currency. Why are you spending your precious currency trying to prove to everyone here that you’re a massive choad?

But currency is not “aka money.” Money is a form of currency. It’s not the only form. For instance, gold in World of Warcraft is currency but it’s not money.

Do I really have to resort to dictionary.com?

money:  any article or substance used as a medium of exchange, measure of wealth, or means of payment, as checks on demand deposit or cowrie.

currency:  something that is used as a medium of exchange; money.

Again, you seem to be using some weird limited definition of your own to try and claim things that just aren’t true in the real world.  If you use your gold in WoW to buy goods and services, it’s money.  If you do a favor for someone in WoW, it is not money, even if you eventually get a social payback.

This is why comparing monkeys grooming one another with human prostitution is stupid:  because grooming is social currency, not actual currency, and the two things are not synonyms.  In fact, actual currency is a substitute for social currency, as many of us have told you over and over again, only to be completely ignored because it doesn’t fit the weird definition in your head of what “currency” is.

That seems stupidly wrong. We didn’t have markets until we had agriculture? Idiotic.

Perhaps to you, but it is in fact pretty basic social science.  Market exchange emerges only late in human history, actually well after the development of agriculture.  Markets emerged to allow people who produced different kinds of goods within the same society to exchange them.  Prior to that everyone produced pretty much the same kinds of things as everyone else in their society and social exchanges of various sorts predominated, mostly based on various forms of reciprocity and socially mandated sharing.

That seems stupidly wrong. We didn’t have markets until we had agriculture? Idiotic.

And yet it’s true.  Until human beings were able to create items that were in excess of what their group or tribe could use, there was no such thing as a market.  You need a surplus to have a market. 

Seriously, do you know anything about human history?  At all?  This is all stuff I learned in seventh grade when we studied the Mesopotamians.

Chet,

We didn’t have markets (to any appreciable extent) because we didn’t have surpluses which grew out of agriculture nor cities to have the markets in.

Mnemosyne -

Actually it is a product of occupational specialization, itself made possible by substantial surplus production.  Markets exist primarily to facilitate exchange within societies, not between them.  Market exchange, as mediated by money and regulated by law, also allows for exchange with strangers to whom you have no ongoing social relations.  Reciprocity and sharing only work in smaller scale societies where you know everyone and can exert social pressure on those who cheat.

What I don’t quite get here is why is it all couched in terms of supply/demand from the perspective of what males do to get females to have sex with them?  It seems like it is far more mutual and reciprocal, and the “currency” concept enters in when “what the male does” is framed in terms of females being the gatekeepers of sex.

Now the actual article is more observational in nature: monkeys do this.  The pop sci article seems to draw a frame that guys are horny, women are holding out, and males thus buy sex, with the price of sex from a female varying with the female supply.  Never is it phrased in terms of “horny females” and “males are in short supply”.  Not that that is objective either - it just demonstrates the problems with spin and framing of observational work.

There isn’t a field of science that is immune from this, btw - working with even national and international caliber science journalists to understand a major study, get it into lay language, and still get it right can be a tedious and frustrating process.  Things get much more difficult when some how “context” leaks into “agenda” and the study authors or even the damn journal editors massively overdrew the conclusions to begin with!

I should point out that humans were in fact producing surpluses well before the advent of agriculture (probably for about 20,000 years in some parts of the world).  The Indians of the Interior Northwest, who lived entirely off wild plants and animals, traded (without markets) over a million pounds of dried salmon, along with other commodities, every year at the time of contact with Euro-Americans.

That seems stupidly wrong. We didn’t have markets until we had agriculture?

No. We didn’t. We might have engaged in some light trading with a tribe we stumbled across, but until we had agriculture, we had no permanent home, no permanent roots, nowhere for a marketplace to develop. There’s no point trading wheat for gold when your tribe is as likely to stumble across either as the other tribe is. And while there was no doubt some trading within tribal units, sociology, specifically the study of extended family dynamics, is more informative of that sort of exchange than economics.

The whole problem with this study is the idea that economics, as understood by humans, is a useful method of studying animal behavior. It’s questionable whether economics is a useful way to study humans; the more we learn about people, the more we see that people aren’t rational actors, and human behavior doesn’t fit neatly into a supply/demand curve.

The simple fact is that modern humans divide economics from family life. I don’t keep track of what my daughter owes me for her upkeep, because despite the fact that my daughter is costing her mother and I a great deal of money, that money is simply money we’re willing to throw out the window for the privilege of having a kid. She’s a purely frivolous cost, and a pure cost/benefit analysis shows that my daughter brings no actual benefit to my ex-wife and I, and quite a bit of burden.

Save for the fact that we love her, and for that reason alone, we’re willing to do anything for her, give anything to her, lay down our lives for her.

Currency can’t adequately describe that, and can’t measure that, any more than currency can measure erotic love, or fraternal or sororal love, or any other form of love. Those things don’t compute into cold hard numbers. And thank the Ceiling Cat.

The problem of conflating social currency and “currency” as we understand it—money, goods, tangible things of value—is that some things aren’t currency-based. If I take my daughter bowling because she likes bowling, and I want to make her happy, what is the good I am trading my money for? My daughter’s happiness? What good is that to me? In currency terms, it isn’t useful at all, and yet it means the world to me. If a woman buys her boyfriend the new book by his favorite author, a book she’ll never read, and she knows her boyfriend still will love her and stay with her if she doesn’t, why is she buying it? There’s no economic benefit to it, other than that she’s made her partner happy.

There is an element of altruism to spending social currency. It is qualitatively different than a Dollar or a Euro.

If I take $100 and go to an erotic massage parlor that promises full release, that’s not altruistic. It’s a cold economic transaction. I buy an orgasm, the masseuse takes the money and spends it on something else. I don’t feel warmly toward the masseuse; I don’t feel anything toward her, any more than I would feel for my waiter when purchasing a steak dinner.

These are different things, social currency and “real” currency, and only a soulless creep could conflate the two.

Now, if one wants to view every interaction only through the prism of economics, a mother’s kiss and a lover’s hug and a tank of gasoline and a jug of milk as all part of the same thing, then sure, I guess Chet’s got a point. But that is not a natural assumption. That is assuming that the mother gives the kiss and the lover gives the hug for the same reason the farmer milks the cow and the terrorist-supporting regime pumps the oil. Or that the macaque grooms its friend only because it suits a rational, quantifiable interest.

As yet no one’s explained the obvious supply-demand curve.

Would that be the obvious supply-demand curve of which none of us has thus far gotten so much as a glimpse?

Mmmm?

(Now you may be talking about one of the several graphs in the Animal Behavior article, but if so, which one?  Is it the “Female To Male” graph?  [My best guess.]  Once again: if so, why not specify?  Why not let everyone in on the secret?)

Oh, dictionary games. How compelling! How will I ever show my face around here after being schooled by such an authority as dictionary.com?!

In other words, you’re going to stick with your bizarro-world definition of “currency” and ignore what those of us in the real world call it.  That’s what I thought.

There was no surplus of anything until agriculture? Another hilariously stupid assertion.

And yet true.  As DrDick said, this is all social studies 101 and not something new and surprising.  Only people who know absolutely nothing about human history would be surprised to hear that markets have not always existed.

Gosh, I guess you haven’t had the experience that I did - learning that not everything they told you in high school was true.

Wow.  I guess you don’t even know the basics of American society if you think seventh grade is high school.  How do you function day-to-day when you live in such complete ignorance of how our society operates and what basic concepts like “money” and “currency” mean?

a million pounds of dried salmon

You say aquaculture, I say agriculture, let’s call the whole thing off (fascinating factoid, btw). 

Would you say, DrDick, that the female monkeys might be taking into consideration factors other than the grooming behavior?

Chet:

Perhaps you can explain to my gf that asking for a backrub before sex really makes her a whore.  I promise to be there with gauze for your bleeding nostrils.

No. We didn’t. We might have engaged in some light trading with a tribe we stumbled across, but until we had agriculture, we had no permanent home, no permanent roots, nowhere for a marketplace to develop.

Not all hunter-gatherer societies were nomadic.  What was seen of the Native Americans by the earliest settlers in North America was really a remnant of what had once been, as diseases followed trading networks from Central and South America in the preceeding century.

A market is just a couple of people with things to trade. You’re telling me nobody traded anything until the days of agriculture? Nobody had extra anything?

Now you are revealing your own ignorance.  Not all exchanges are market exchanges.  People can and do exchange all kinds of things outside of markets.  Markets are a highly specialized form of social institution not present in all societies.  Social exchange is explicitly not market exchange.  The function of social exchange is primarily the creation and maintenance of social ties and incidentally economic.  In many small scale foraging societies most exchange is structured through socially mandated sharing and generosity (stinginess is the ultimate sin).  People also structure ongoing trading systems based on ritual friendships where the exchanges are based in reciprocity (gift exchange) between equals.  Market exchanges are exclusively or primarily economic transactions where each party seeks to maximize their gain relative to the other party or parties.  These are radically different things from a social (and economic) perspective.

Ah, remember when anything archeological could be ascribed to religious practices?  I think behavior psych, particularly with primates, is going through the same sort of growing pains in ascribing sexual motives to everything that the ape or monkey du jour does.

While agreeing (and having argued) that comparing social currency to money is inappropriate anthropomorphizing, I think the people comparing the grooming to a backrub are overstating the thing. I don’t think it’s sensuous, this grooming of theirs.

But you’re never out of your depth, I imagine.

Newtonian physics was a problem.  There are no massless, frictionless anythings, no isolated systems, etc. I did a lot better in quantum, for reasons that I don’t understand to this day.

I don’t think it’s sensuous, this grooming of theirs.

From what I’ve seen on TV, grooming seems to provide some tasty snacks for the groomer.

As Ms Kate observed, not all hunter-gatherers are or were nomadic, though all were up until about 20,000 years ago.  After that point some people in favored parts of the world (the Middle East for one) began settling down and intensively exploiting locally abundant wild resources.  That is in fact a necessary precursor of agriculture and happened in all the places where agriculture developed.  These people produced substantial surpluses (above what was needed to support the local population), which we know from the substantial storage facilities associated with their settlements and were not present anywhere prior to this.  This pattern was rare in the historic period because it was generally replaced by agriculture in most parts of the world.  It did persist in a few areas:  among the Ainu of Hokkaido, on the Northwest Coast of North America, in the Interior Northwest, Native California, and among the Native peoples of southern Florida.

All of these peoples traded and were characterized by some degree of internal social hierarchy, but they did not have markets or market exchanges.

I don’t think it’s sensuous, this grooming of theirs.

Well, according to the study it increases the frequency of wild monkey sex.

Think of grooming = foreplay like housework=foreplay (gotta get all those pop sci comparisons in!

I would also bet that mating activity is more pleasurable when you are not distracted by parasitic visitors in your fur.

I don’t think it’s sensuous, this grooming of theirs.

I think that depends on your definition of “sensuous”.  It is clearly not explicitly sexual and foreplay is probably not a good analogy, though the back rub may be.  It is clear that monkeys and apes get some kind of sensual pleasure from the activity and it certainly creates a sense of social well being.  It is kind of like social touching in humans (also hugging friends and children).

It’s amazing how I always seem to be some kind of tabula rasa for people to project their favorite opponents onto. In the meantime I’m still waiting for good-faith replies to my arguments. Why is that?

Perhaps it is your habit of declaring yourself as “misunderstood” when you are shown to be “incorrect” and then splitting hairs to “prove” otherwise.  Or maybe it is your habit of declaring those who have repeatedly cited scientific evidence or alternative hypotheses in opposition to your “factual” statements as “arguing in bad faith” or “not addressing your good faith arguments”.

I never said they were, and I never said that primates were undergoing market exchanges.

Why yes you did.  May I quote at length?

“No, look. There’s simply no way that “social science” or anyone else could know that. A market is just a couple of people with things to trade. You’re telling me nobody traded anything until the days of agriculture? Nobody had extra anything?

Nonsense. Even primates trade, barter, have markets; they certainly don’t have agriculture. Maybe I just don’t understand what you mean by “market.” Like, a literal market? Stalls and vendors? Sure, I doubt that existed until agriculture. But people gathering to trade and barter? Of course that existed before agriculture. “

Either that, or, you need to offer more grapes and pick and eat more parasitic insects.

Now I must leave you as I have to get up in the morning and teach this kind of thing to my actual students, who are much quicker on the uptake and actually interested in learning something.

I think Dr. Dick’s statement and your response just illustrated my point nicely.

BTW, I provided a link to what you did say - your own words don’t lie.

Think of grooming = foreplay like housework=foreplay (gotta get all those pop sci comparisons in!

and

I think that depends on your definition of “sensuous”.  It is clearly not explicitly sexual and foreplay is probably not a good analogy, though the back rub may be.  It is clear that monkeys and apes get some kind of sensual pleasure from the activity and it certainly creates a sense of social well being.  It is kind of like social touching in humans (also hugging friends and children).

That was my sense of it. Sensuous was probably a little vague. Not explicitly sexual.

When people keep giving the back rub example, I keep flashing back to high school, when you’d be hanging out with someone and you both wanted to mess around but you were too shy to just up and kiss the person and the best segue from hanging out to fooling around is to offer or ask for back rub.

I don’t understand how markets got into it;

I quoted the effin study, Chet.  That’s where it came from.

Several things:

One, those of you claiming there was no market of trading before agriculture are, how shall I put this, hilariously misinformed.  Extensive trading networks, predating agriculture, have been identified all over the world.  In the case of Americas, they’ve identified an extensive obsidian trade in Central and South America; because obsidian is rare, you can actually trace it to a particular quarry, which is often in a completely different cultural area from where the obsidian artifacts are found, with other people(s) in between.

The Adena culture, which was a burial cult from before 500 BCE in eastern North America, based in the Ohio Valley, had copper coming in from the Lake Superior area and seashells from the Atlantic coast.  In fact, Europeans directly exploited pre-existing trading networks: the French fur traders worked with the Huron and used their existing trading partnerships to introduce European goods in, while the network brought furs out.

Second, Chet isn’t wrong saying that grooming is currency among primates: that terminology is used by researchers.  You can argue that it’s an incorrect interpretation, but you have to take it up with the researchers in question.

Just a sampling:

Barrett, L. & Henzi, S. P. 2001. Grooming and family life. Exchanging services among female monkeys. In: In: Macdonald, D. (ed.) The New Encyclopedia of Mammals. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, pp. 306-307.

Barrett, L. & Henzi, S. P. 2001. The utility of grooming in baboon troops. In: In: Noë, R.; van Hooff, J.A.R.A.M. & Hammerstein, P. (eds.) Economics in Nature. Social Dilemmas, Mate Choice and Biological Markets. Cambridge Univ. Press. pp. 119-145.

Barrett, L. & Henzi, S. P. 2006. Monkeys, markets and minds: biological markets and primate sociality. In: Cooperation in Primates and Humans (Ed. by Kappeler, P. M. & van Schaik, C. P.), pp. 209-232. Berlin: Springer.

Henzi, S. P. & Barrett, L. 2007. Coexistence in Female-Bonded Primate Groups. Advances in the Study of Behavior, 37, 43-81.

Slater, K. Y., Schaffner, C. M. & Aureli, F. 2007. Embraces for infant handling in spider monkeys: evidence for a biological market? Animal Behaviour, 74, 455-461.

Chancellor, R. L. & Isbell, L. A. 2008. Female grooming markets in a population of gray-cheeked mangabeys (Lophocebus albigena). Behav. Ecol.

Now that is by no means saying that these researchers are correct: the issue is the subject of discussion and disagreement.  But the knee-jerk reactions displayed here are just that.  Being right while in ignorance of the work that’s out there doesn’t put you on the moral high ground, it means you lucked out.

This story made news in the UK too, we talked about it in episode 8 of the Edinburgh University Science Podcast:

http://www.eusci.org/2009/04/23/eusci-podcast-8/

Hm, just realised that that was a different story… that one was about trading meat for sex in chimps. But the narrative in the press was, unsuprisingly, the same.

Women do not exchange sex for sex.

*stifles*
*stifles*
*fails*

Bwahahahahahaha.

Are you one of those Nice Guys(TM) who never gets laid even though he does all the right things?  Lemme clue you in, pal.  Guys get laid because they’re layable, not because of flowers, couch moving or candy, etc., etc.

Yeah we buy things for women.  Yeah women seeking a permanent mate demand certain things but then so do men.  But, if you don’t think women have sex just for the hell/joy of it you must be a lonely man.

I’ve exchanged plenty of sex for sex (in point of fact, I can be downright predatory whenever interested in sex), but, then, I guess I’m just an evolutionary aberration.

Women do not exchange sex for sex.

Not with you, anyway.

Seriously, do you realize you just said “Women don’t like me and don’t want to have sex with me?” Why would you just come out and say that?

“Women do not exchange sex for sex.”

So, you’re intimately acquainted with the thousands of cultures that have existed in the last, oh, 20,000 thousand years, and how women behaved in them? Wow.

No one has brought up the fact that grooming is of tremendous importance for the health of the individual animal. There is no other way to remove parasites or inspect a wound(possibly lick it for cleaning purposes), make sure the fur lies correctly, etc. Without this instinct, primate troops wouldn’t be too successful, and I would say that the instinct comes before the creation of social relationships based on it. Trying to put this on a purely “economic” basis seems so narrow minded and grounded in this culture’s current obsession with tying all things to the desire for money.

The woman-hatred is displayed in trying to invent a female monkey desire for the “currency” and not the sex itself. Then implying that this is how human women think too. Flat out misogyny, flat out stupid. Not just for wrongsideofthetracks, but certainly the journalist and possibly some of the researchers.

Chet:

Once again, quoting from the study itself….

The basic premise, says Gumert, is called biological market theory, which follows the elementary principles of supply versus demand. When applied to the voluntary sex life of long-tailed macaques, it means that the price that one group is willing to pay for a commodity that the other group has depends on the scarcity or abundance of that commodity on the market.

(emphasis mine)

I mean, it’s sad and I want to help them figure out how to stop repulsing women right up to the point where they start blaming all women for being hard-wired to hate them.

I think it’s one of those things people have to learn for themselves, and nothing’s going to convince them other than their own experiences. Obviously some never do learn, but it’s surprising how sane and reasonable people can get once they grow up a little bit.

I do catch myself feeling some Nice Guy self-pity at times (silently, of course; I have no male privilege to back it up), so I see where the impulse comes from, but then I remember that women are people, not barriers to sex, and I lose sympathy for people who refuse to acknowledge that.

Yeah, junk science; I love the whole, “If it wasn’t for her I would totally be having sex with her right now” attitude.  It would be hilarious if its results weren’t so tragic.

And that seems to be the basis of most evo-psych - just dudes sitting around going, “I wonder why no one will fuck me.  Well, they pay me to watch monkeys, so I bet I can find out that they evolved to be that way!”

What really gets me is when gay women get that way, like does being female not make you realize that not every woman is exactly alike? It doesn’t happen often that I’ve seen, but it’s jarring.

INTPagan

I belong to a few atheist groups in southern Calif, where young men in their twenties seem to get off spouting libertarian nonsense and anti feminist opinions. It seems to me, that without the support of patriarchal religions, these young men are “hellbent” on finding or creating new excuses to marginalize women. There seems to be a very concrete need in too many men, especially those with limited experience due to age, to make women one-down, and themselves one-up.

Just saying that when I listen to these clowns, it seems the need to dominate comes first, and the “surprising” consequence that no women want to be with them comes second.

Now, if anyone could figure out why there is this need to play king-of-the-hill long after kindergarten, I’d be really grateful for the explanation.

I think there may also be an observer issue with the original study, the same sort of problem one might find in an observational study of humans.  To wit: you give a grad student a clipboard and check sheet and say “count how many times the (person or animal being observed) does this specific behavior”. 

If you are counting and timing grooming or food offering events, and specifically doing so for males (but not females), you might miss out on some important exchanges that are not directly sexual but may provide familiarity that leads to sexual activity.

Considering the fact that I’ve always insisted on paying for every other date, I must be trading sex for sex.  Plus I make more than my husband.  If anyone here wants to call my husband a whore, we’ll simply have to take this outside.

PS—My google ads:

Men Against Sexism—NOMAS
Conference to end Sexual Assault Portland State Univ—Oct 28-30:‘09
www.nomas.org

The women monkey shoe
Huge Selection. Compare Prices. Find monkey shoes

The first one, yay!  The second one, what the hell are monkey shoes, and can I exchange social currency for them if they are cool?

Nor does layable mean the same for female partners as it does for male partners. You do get that right, Romeo? When was the last time your nice legs got you laid? Huh?

That only makes sense inasmuch as the fact that “layable” does not mean the same thing for me as it does for my female friend, or for her as it does for her husband, or for him and his sister, or for her and her partner, so on and so forth.  “Layable” means different things for each person; there is not a monolithic definition for each gender.

And I’ve certainly slept with dudes because I thought they were nice-looking, and I don’t see the difference between a dude thinking that a woman’s legs are hot and me thinking that a dude’s shoulders are hot.  For goodness’ sakes, do you really buy that bullshit that women are only attracted to personality?  I mean, I’m pretty exclusive about that, but yes, there are times when women just want to fuck someone they think is hot and when men (like my partner in crime) want to have sex with someone with an awesome personality.  Get over it.

The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.

The number of minutes spent by whom doing what can be translated into a curve, but doesn’t necessarily start out as one.  Though in fact the study cited in Animal Behavior includes a graph which does look an awful lot like a supply-demand curve.  (Though I don’t think they call it a “supply-demand curve”.)  This is the graph which describes the number of minutes spent by males grooming females relative to the number of males versus females in the group.  I suppose this is the supply-demand curve you keep talking about: well and good.  What I can’t figure out is: why you don’t admit that this is the supply-demand curve you’re talking about?  Why not ‘fess up?  What’s to hide?  What’s the point?

Notice that wsott’s last post is a slam on whether or not INTPagan is “predatory” and that he completely drops the “sex for sex” part of the argument.  Because he loses.

Did I get this right?  Did you just call another poster easy?  So women who want to have sex are easy and only men can be predators?  I prefer the point upthread that if we look at exchanges in certain cultures at certain times, men prostitute themselves for clean laundry. 

And if you really think it is “rare” for a woman to want to “screw at the drop of a hat” (I never did find hat-dropping that sexy, myself) then please explain why it is that sometimes the female partner in a relationship wants sex more than the male partner, in a male-female dyad.  It is actually quite common.  Now, if you’re talking about different arousal curves, that has more to do with physiology (although some women do get turned on quickly) than levels of sexual desire, and proves absolutely nothing about who wants sex more.

Rare is the woman who wants to screw at the drop of a hat like men will and I don’t think that rare kind is you.

Wow, this is sad. Just to put this in terms you might understand, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t screw just any woman “at the drop of a hat,” no matter what she looks like, right? You probably like your women hot. Well, the bad news for you is that those women tend to like their men hot. Women have standards, just like you, and you’re not living up to them. Too bad.

Nor does layable mean the same for female partners as it does for male partners. You do get that right, Romeo? When was the last time your nice legs got you laid?

If you were physically attractive, and not an unpleasant douchebag whiner, you’d be getting laid. That’s how it works for everyone, male and female. The sooner you get it through your head that it’s not the size of your wallet keeping your dick dry, the better off you’ll be.

Shit, it’s like trying to argue religion with these guys. No amount of evidence and logic in the world will convince them they’re wrong.

My friend the wrestler lamenting his boring (but active) love life in college:  “it’s gotten to the point where I’ve been using my wrestler’s body to get laid.”  (As opposed to using charm because he felt a real connection.)

On the subject of legs, I tend to prefer lean and well shaped, like runners, cyclists, or some swimmers.  It is a damn shame that conventional male attire does not permit those of us who are into the male body to see much of it.

Another point: If you want to encourage women to have sex “at the drop of a hat,” try not calling them insulting names like “easy” when they do have casual sex with men. Not that they’d ever fuck you anyway, but you’d be working less against your own interest.

You made an all or nothing statement “[w]omen do not exchange sex for sex.”  In economically equal relationships, which are becoming more common, that statement makes no sense.  In my relationships, it makes no sense.

Your response re: INTPagan makes no sense, you slammed her for thinking she could be predatory, and aside from allegations of predation, did not challenge her assertion that she enjoyed sex and was happy to engage in it for no other reason than it was fun. 

*Newsflash* most women like sex.  For reals.  If that is not your experience, the problem could either be with you, or with the sort of women you are seeking out. 

Also, how do you know the macques are having “casual” sex?  Talk about anthropomorphizing.  And again, if you’re trying to show that due to differential physiological arousal for men and women, that has nothing to do with sexual desire.  Your “model” that women do not have “sex for sex” does nothing to explain one night stands, which often do not involve any economic transaction (unless you consider “going to the same party” to be an economic transaction, or if you think a woman who sleeps with a man who buys her a few beers is just a really cheap hooker—if so—that really says more about you than her, I promise).  And it is hard to get good numbers on which partner in a relationship wants sex more, but in cases where there is a differential sex drive, the evidence I’ve seen suggests it is just as likely to be the woman as the man who wants sex more.

AGH! I am so lost… um, if anyone has some spare time on their hands, could the people who have been posting the most, such as Chet, possible consolidate all their arguments into one post so I can remember who thinks what? I want to reply, but all the jumping around is driving me crazy!

Also: “When was the last time your nice legs got you laid? Huh?” When my mom met my dad, she found him attractive right off the bat, but wanted to know what his legs were like. When she saw him in shorts the first time, she was very happy.

Maybe you just need to wear shorts more often, wrongsideofthetracks. The ladies don’t know what they’re missing!

A lot of women make the mistake of confusing predatory with EASY. Unless you are into high school boys or husbands, you ain’t predatory.

Well, would you call it predatory whenever dudes troll for ass?  Because I’ve certainly done that (although there’s an advantage to being female and introverted, because dudes will come to you if you just sit there at a bar and you can pretty much take your pick).  If the difference is in what words we’re using, that’s one thing, but if you’re saying that my vagina makes me incapable of simply seeking out people to fuck then you’re a moron.  Also, I’m not easy, although I don’t think of “easy” as an insult (where your choice of that specific word makes it pretty clear that you do).  I am extremely picky, in point of fact, both in regards to looks (although my tastes there are quirky) and personality (where my tastes are fairly unwavering).

Rare is the woman who wants to screw at the drop of a hat like men will and I don’t think that rare kind is you.

You’d be wrong, especially considering that you’re not privy to my sex life.  Also, I guess no one told my partner in crime that he wanted to screw at the drop of a hat, because he’s extremely picky about who he’s with and won’t just fuck anyone since he is far more likely to demand an emotional connection with a sexual relationship than I am.

Either way this conversation is about what is common not that one time when you were at band camp.

Yes, because women only get horny in isolated situations; it couldn’t possibly be a high sex drive.

You’re a condescending douchebag, and I would seriously be surprised if you get laid by anyone of either gender.

INTPagan, I think we’re being “negged.”  It’s cute how he says he’s not insulting you, but goes on to insult you.  As though you would think—well he says he’s not insulting me so he must not be . . .  dear god.  If he wants to believe that women need more than an attractive offer of sex to reciprocate with sex, then yay for him. 

Seriously, though, for the rest of the world, you don’t need to bribe or maul someone into sex.  Women like sex.  If they women in your life do not, that says something about you.

And INTPagan, you are so right about shoulders.  I like legs, but shoulders and arms have always done it for me.

I have no problem with your sexual process. It’s the typical female style. But it’s not sex for sex

What is it, then? I don’t remember her saying the guys were paying her, or buying her flowers or dinner or anything else men are supposed to do to get into panties.

I do more than fine in the getting laid department cause I don’t pretend women behave like men.

And yet you don’t think women like sex for its own sake, to the point where you nonsensically deny that INTPagan like sex for its own sake, when she’s said that she’ll have it with men she’s just met at bars and has no previous emotional or monetary relationship with. Something isn’t adding up here.

No, I’m just kidding. I do believe there are women with poor enough taste to think guys like this are cute, and don’t think they have to have orgasms to enjoy sex.

Seriously, though, for the rest of the world, you don’t need to bribe or maul someone into sex.  Women like sex.  If they women in your life do not, that says something about you.

I think I’m getting what he’s saying, in a sense. He’s complaining to some extent that he can’t spread his legs and get a line of women to form the way he thinks INTPagan can. It’s not that women require actual payment for sex, it’s that men have to go to the trouble of approaching and talking to women, which he resents because he thinks he should get to lay back and enjoy the attention the way he thinks women do. At least that’s the best I can do with his insistence that INTPagan’s description of having casual sex with men at bars isn’t “sex for sex.”

Which goes back to what Amanda said about women’s agency being minimized, and how women’s efforts in things like spending a lot of time putting on makeup and shaving their legs and looking nice are completely erased in the eyes of people who want to think of women as obstacles to pussy access. In wsott’s eyes, if a (sufficiently hot) woman came up to him and said “wanna fuck?” he’d drop his pants right then and there, so she didn’t have to go to any effort to get sex from him. Except for how she spent time making herself look nice so a guy like him would want sex with her, because god knows he wouldn’t want it with some ugly, hairy bitch. Basically, it’s only men’s effort and men’s trouble that counts, no matter how minimal it is compared to what the vast majority of women have to do to get laid.

Wrongside:

Please glue catcher’s mitt on top of your skull.  You might get some of these.  You were the one that said women don’t have sex for sex alone.  It is you that intimated that there must be a quid pro quo.  Several women told you you were full of shit.  But of course you know them better than they know themselves.  My point was that women sleep with men because they find them attractive not because he bought them dinner.  Remember, this whole thing was about ‘economic theory.’

Your friend,
<strike>Magis</strike> Romeo

“Just sits there?” Hmmm. Lionesses don’t eat by lounging around till a zebra trots up and jumps into her mouth.

Further anthropomorphizing.  If it’s the most efficient method of actually achieving one’s desired goal - which would be to have sex with a partner who is worth the effort - then yes, that is the way one would go about doing it.  Zebras don’t generally go to the trouble of trotting into the mouths of their predators; potential sexual partners, on the other hand, are strangely much more willing to place themselves in a position to fuck.  Seriously, is sex with you so shitty that your potential partners view it as akin to being eaten alive?

I have no problem with your sexual process. It’s the typical female style.

No, the “typical female style” generally tends to be a woman waiting for men to approach her and then hooking them into a relationship, per popular culture.  I don’t want your damn drink (I might want a good conversation on the nature of reality, though) or your damn heart or any of that other shit if I’m sitting in a bar or on a matching website.  I want to fuck. Please keep your “I love you"s to yourself. 

But it’s not sex for sex, and it sure as hell ain’t predatory.

Then what is it sex for?  It’s not sex for a drink, since I would rather buy my own.  It’s not sex for friendship, as I find friendship with a one-night-stand to be rather awkward.  It’s not sex for conversation, excepting that conversation is part of how one demonstrates suitability as a sexual partner.  It’s certainly not sex for love, as I am only comfortable with romantic relationships with people with whom there is a previously established friendship that developed into something sexual, which precludes meeting someone for the purpose of establishing those kinds of bonds based on one meeting at a bar and a tumble later.  And what is actively seeking out sexual partners while keeping clear that the sex is not for any other purpose?  I use the word “predatory” because that is generally the way that people think of trolling for ass; however, again, if we are talking simple semantics, I would be happy to use another word.  I have my doubts that we are talking about simple semantics, though.  I certainly don’t intend harm to the people with whom I participate in casual sex; however, that does not mean that I don’t coldly seek them out for the purpose of having sex with them and then moving on with my life.  Perhaps you view the word “predatory” as implying what a lot of men do - seek out women to fuck and then degrade.  No, I don’t do that.  I simply seek them out for a specific purpose (while making it clear what purpose is in mind in the interests of avoiding harm) and then, once the purpose is completed, go about my business.

I typed the word “easy” as description, not as pejorative. If I was trying to irk you, I would have used “loose”. But I’m not a name caller.

“If I wanted to call you a whore I would just call you a whore, but of course I’m not calling you a whore because I don’t call people names.”

Continued…

I’m not interested in anecdotes about a guy who’s best man at his wedding would be a lady.

You can place all the aspersions you want on his masculinity (not that he would care since he is secure enough in his personhood that gender is not this huge deal to him), but he’s the one who gets laid pretty much at the drop of a hat, while you’re the dude trying to explain to me that women don’t want sex.

I don’t think your “partner in crime” is typical.

I don’t think anyone is typical.  See, I think human beings are all individuals with different tastes and sex drives and standards.  You’re the one saying, “Men will fuck anything while women want flowers and drinks and fucking cars and shit.” 

I’m also not interested in the sexual bravada of a self described extremely picky, introvert.

Yes, because having taste (as opposed to fucking people like, say, you) is definitely not a demonstration of self-esteem, nor is knowing myself well enough to know that I don’t like to overextend myself socially.  I mean, has it never occurred to you that thirty percent of the population is introverted, and yet that thirty percent has sex, even pursues sex?  Shocking!  Introversion does not mean shyness.  Introversion means that you need time to your own damn self, and you generally prefer not to seek other people out.  Why bother?  In this case, they come to you.  I can afford to be extremely picky, and it has nothing to do with money or gifts or what have you.  It has to do with what attracts me.  (And this is taking into consideration that I am not conventionally overly attractive.)

Who said anything about drives?  We’re talking behaviors.

Drives impact why you have sex, moron.  If you are not desiring of sex, you do not pursue it; if you are then you do.  I have sex for the sake of having sex because I like sex.  What is so hard about that to get through your skull?

Don’t go patting yourself on your back, cause you can simply spread your legs and get a line of men to form.

You seem to have missed the part where I was sitting at a bar fully clothed and selecting men in whom I was actually interested rather than reenacting “Debbie Does Dallas”.

This doesn’t make you special.

I don’t think any of this makes me special, and that’s my point - you are the one who is arguing that I am not normal, even though it’s more that you’re arguing that I am not actually me, but a strawman you have built up in your head, because the actual me isn’t normal.

I don’t call people “douchebag”.

That doesn’t put a damper on your own douchebaggery.

I’m surely not an introvert.

Should I congratulate you on being one of seventy percent of the population?  Is introversion a bad thing?  Are you so afraid of being alone and of introspection about your own inherent unfuckability that you feel the need to deny introversion in a forum like this?  What on earth does that even mean?

And I’m definitely not delusional about what gets women out of their panties.

And that’s why you’re spending your time arguing that women don’t actually want to be gotten out of their panties.  If your method of getting women out of their panties involves anything more than your personality (and your personality can include things like taking them to dinner or actually having conversations with them as if they were human beings) and your looks (which are very subjective and which may certainly be attractive to some people, provided you take adequate care of yourself by someone’s standards), you are not fuckable.  If women fuck you because you took them to dinner rather than because you treat them like human beings, if they fuck you because you brought them flowers rather than because they like you, you are not fuckable.  Period.

I do more than fine in the getting laid department cause I don’t pretend women behave like men.

Of course they don’t, but they generally don’t behave like women, either, because they behave like individuals.  Now, you may certainly be able to get laid whenever you find heavily socialized specimens who sadly think they owe you sex for your miniscule financial efforts, but if the only people you can get to fuck you are caricatures of what society thinks women should be, you are not fuckable.  Period.

Now be quiet and go get some grooming!!!

If by that you mean that I should shut up and wait for someone to buy me dinner, I’ll pass - my partner likes my opinionated self, and we both get laid without his having to do whatever it is you think women expect men to do.  You don’t seem to.

Hmmm….

Not going to make it to 300 as predicted above.  Oh well.

How about….

Woman:  *comes up and starts unbuttoning WSOTT’s shirt*
WSOTT:  Ummm…. Urrr…. wouldn’t you like an ice cream cone first?  Or maybe I could dash out and buy some earrings, or….
Woman:  Shut up.
WSOTT:  But surely you must want something, women don’t just have sex for nothing.  Hey! Did you wreck the car??!!  Did you….
Woman:  Forget it.  I’m not in the mood any more *actually is still horny and wanders off to find dildo with which she has a better chance of having an intelligent conversation.*

Come to think of it, how do you even behave “like a woman”?  Does that mean that I can only seek out guys while giving birth or bleeding out of my vagina?  I mean, those are female behaviours, but otherwise I’m not exactly sure how to act.

INTPagan, you’re awesome. I love this thread.

Thank you, junk science, and I will compound my awesomeness by bringing the thread to the aforementioned 300.  Someone pop the cork on the champagne bottle.

Ok, read back through some comments, and here’s my take. Ahem.

You cannot “hoard” the kind of currency we are talking about in regards to monkeys, because it’s all internalized. For example, Monkey A giving Monkey B a back rub results in B feeling good will toward A. However, A can’t *take* that good will and exchange it for a back rub with Monkey C. What humans have done is this tricky thing where they externalize their currency - so no relationships are required. This external version - money - is what pays for “prostitution,” something monkeys do not have because for them, it’s all internalized. However, not all human sex is prostitution, because we still have the original system of goodwill/affection, and when this system is used to determine who has sex with who, we call it a relationship.

Of course, we have another system, too - morality. For example, Human A might not like B, but if B is about to fall off a cliff A will step in to save them because they think it is the right thing to do. This is where Nice Guys get confused, because they think that if a guy buys a woman some flowers, the right thing for her to do is to have sex with him. I see this as distinct from prostitution, because I never hear anyone arguing that the right and *moral* thing to do is to have sex with someone when they pay you money for it, as in the typical transaction.

In this case, I feel like the author of the article is not actually trying to imply that the monkeys have an external system of currency like humans do - they are just inept at saying what they mean, so they call it prostitution. Rather, the author is saying that in monkey morality, when a back rub is given, the “right” thing to do is for a female monkey to have sex with the Nice G- I mean, the male. She may or may not experience a feeling of good will/affection that makes her want to have sex. I think this is a load of b.s., however, because my understanding is that monkeys do not have a system of morality like humans do *or* a system of externalized exchange. What happens within a troupe relies entirely on the bonds of affection Monkey A, Monkey B, and Monkey C share.

This makes me wonder - if monkey society today is similar to the society of our ancestors, did our idea of morality develop alongside our system of externalized currency, or did one come before the other? Did one bring about the other? Maybe our idea of what is “right” - or “Godly,” in some cases - exists only because that most “unGodly” and “immoral” of professions - prostitution - also exists.

Or, y’know, maybe monkeys are just prostitutes. That’s pretty edgy.

INTPagan,

Thanks for your two narrative comments.  Loved them.    I remember a discussion a girlfriend and I had about guys we were involved with who would do the whole “I don’t want to be in a relationship” thing, then act like they were in a relationship to get all kinds of non-sexual relationship bennies, and then decide they didn’t want a relationship again.  It was a head-scratcher, and made is us think, dude, we could have just boinked.

wsott, I already know men and women approach potential sexual partners differently. Hell, it makes me wish I were straight, because men sure as hell are easier to come by than women for someone as introverted as I am. And I don’t even have a problem per se with people who are satisfied with the current model. I think it’s a huge problem when women’s agency is denied to the point where a man thinks a woman is obligated to have sex with him because he bought her a drink, and worse still when women think that. My other problem is that many women would like to be more sexually aggressive, but are afraid of getting called “easy” or “slutty” or “loose” or other hateful names meant to punish them for wanting what they want so insecure men can feel superior to them. That’s what Amanda argues against all the time, and that’s a point I’m glad she advocates. 

What I resent is all the bullshit on here from the poseurs pretending every woman is a free-loving, aggressive nymphomaniac, but men just can’t see it.

No one ever said that. They were responding to your assertion that women don’t like sex for sex’s sake. We tend not to like it when other people tell us they know us better than we know ourselves. I don’t think that’s what you actually meant, and there was a cross-communication, but enough men do think that way that it’s hard to tell at first.

What I resent is all the bullshit on here from the poseurs pretending every woman is a free-loving, aggressive nymphomaniac, but men just can’t see it.

Name when when I said that every woman is a free-loving aggressive nymphomaniac.  I’ll be waiting.  In the meantime, what I really said, assuming that you are capable of basic reading comprehension, was that different people have different tastes and requirements and behaviours, and if women only fuck you because you bought them shit then you are not worth fucking in the first place.  If you think that my stating that I have sex for its own sake means that I’m saying that all women do, or that it’s not possible for me to do that because no women do that, you’re an idiot.

Also, WSOTT, you were thoroughly owned the last time the discussion of minimum requirements for physical attraction were discussed, considering that most men will not fuck a woman who has not, at bare minimum, shaved her legs, while most women will fuck a man who does not drive a fancy car as long as he has a shred of humanity about him.

Keep telling yourself that living in your mom’s basement is sexy, and that picking your date up on a Metro bus is so hot.

He seems to have a better personality than you.  I’m saying this with the caveat that I do not want to have sex with anyone here, I’m not hitting on anyone, I’m married, blah blah, but, even if a date with him was like that and a date with you was in a limo, I would take tha date with him in his mom’s basement and the Metro bus over your limo any day, you materialistic ass.  Just because you’re obsessed with material goods doesn’t mean that all women are.

Lemme clue you in Playa. Women find being taken to dinner attractive.

If it’s accompanied by good conversation, sure, and that’s what makes being taken to dinner good.  Being taken to places where you can walk and talk are even better.  The fact that you think it’s the dinner that gets your dick wet says a lot about you.

Whether men approach women or women approach men (or as is particularly clear in the case of people my age and my younger sister’s age, both) women can still trade “sex for sex.”  Even the whole approached/approacher dynamic isn’t that clear, as some of us know who’ve made accidental eye contact with another person across the room, or intentional eye contact to the same effect.  There’s a reason why British women call it “pulling” and it is not just what they wear, it is how they (and we) conduct ourselves (if we want to be approached, instead of to approach).

But you’re moving the target again, away from “sex for sex” to “who makes the first overt move” which is not the same thing, and among younger, more urban and alternative crowds, is much more evenly split between men and women, even if it is not 50-50 yet.  For half of my boyfriends, I made the first move.  (Well, the split is 3 me 2 them, b/c one guy who v. aggressively pursued me really doesn’t count as a boyfriend.)  I think that for my younger sister, it was more than half.  And we should split the approacher/approached duties at least somewhat (I understand that may be hard for introverts of both sexes), because frankly, we all behave better if we’ve had to be on both sides of the equations.

My husband has been aggressively pursued by women at bars (his friends have some pretty funny stories), I’ve seen women try rilly rilly hard to get into my younger brother’s pants (and fail, b/c he usually doesn’t notice they’re trying to pick him up), and once at a student mixer with med. and law students, a woman med. student kept coming over and trying to claim back the man who was talking to me (and who was also a med. student), putting her hands on him and trying to claim ownership, which he and I simply ignored.

But, if my brother catches a clue and takes one of those women home, or if that interloper ended up taking the med. student home (perhaps again, her possesiveness to me suggested either that they had slept together or that she wanted to make me think that they had), is the MAN in that situation not trading sex for sex?  If he is, then I really don’t see why this magically changes if the person with the vadge is approached.  I mean, in your world, how would lesbians ever manage to have sex?  I am not seeing it.

So you’re still wrong.

But you’re moving the target again, away from “sex for sex” to “who makes the first overt move” which is not the same thing, and among younger, more urban and alternative crowds, is much more evenly split between men and women, even if it is not 50-50 yet…I mean, in your world, how would lesbians ever manage to have sex?  I am not seeing it.

I do see what he’s trying, in his own hamfisted way, to get at. Women tend to be less obvious and aggressive than men, because we’re socialized to be that way, and because the consequences for us can be a lot harsher. Obviously not everyone fits this model, and it’s irritating when you encounter people who think they know how things work and determinedly ignore all traces of subtleties.

People like wsott think the “men chase, women wait,” model represents the ideal situation, and in fact we silly feminists should just accept that and conform to it, because it makes getting laid simple and predictable. Spend enough money on a woman and say the right things to her, and you’ll get her panties off, is how it works in his experience, because he’s probably managed to find the kind of women who were predisposed to be attracted to someone like him.

Just because you’re obsessed with material goods doesn’t mean that all women are.

Well, all the real women who count are. You aren’t, because you’re one of the weird ones. But don’t start thinking you’re special or anything.

junk science,

I think you may be giving him too much credit for good faith, here.  I think the arguments are made from a place of hostility and beliefs in superiority, not merely that we should stop being such dummies b/c men and women act in different ways (that are equally worthy of respect).

With regard to socialization, I think that is the key, and I think for both sexes it is a good thing that it is changing.  For example, I think I and people in my generation have a lot more opposite-sex friends than my parents and people in their generation do.  I think for the heteros among us, the easier it is to be friends, the easier it is to be lovers, and that for everyone it helps break down male/female socialization because it is much more likely for girls and boys, men and women, to share their experiences and to discuss the pressures they feel to behave in certain ways.

I think the arguments are made from a place of hostility and beliefs in superiority, not merely that we should stop being such dummies b/c men and women act in different ways (that are equally worthy of respect).

I don’t think he feels hostile, per se. I think he thinks he’s got it all figured out, that he knows the key to getting into a woman’s panties, and we silly feminists should stop pretending we’re not the gold-digging pussy vending machines he knows we are. His interpretation of the world works for him. He’s not a Nice Guy, per se, because he views himself as successful; he’s the kind of guy Nice Guys think they’re supposed to be. There’s a whole lot of superiority, smugness, and intellectual incuriosity in guys like that that I find incredibly boring and avoid as much as I can when I’m not in the mood to beat a blog comment thread to death.

Oh, no, he feels hostile - otherwise he wouldn’t feel the need to make backhanded insults about how I sat there and spread my legs for all takers, or used the word “easy”.  I think it has something to do with the fact that women won’t fuck him unless he drops a wad of cash.

Come now, he called you “easy,” not “loose,” and those words totally don’t mean the same thing. If he wanted to insult you, he would have just called you a dirty diseased whore, which he didn’t because he doesn’t call people names.

You’re right, and, I mean, I will, and have, slept with guys other than him and guys like him, so I guess I am kind of easy to sleep with, while being too picky to be actually actively sexual.

By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever referred to the idea of “getting women out of their panties,” even ironically, as many times in my life as I did today. I’m going to go throw up now.

go again with your nuggets of wisdom. Women have sex with men they find sexy. Wow how insightful. Hey, did you know the sky is blue?

And who, pray do tell, said “women don’t trade sex for sex.”  ‘Member that?  How does that square? 

And I’m definitely not delusional about what gets women out of their panties.

And….ummmm…..when you do, do they tense up and “think of England?”
Do you find it tedious to have to keep that tire pump around all the time?

My problem with you is that you are clinging to the bullshit that women never ever have sex just for sex sake.  Still pitching that bullshit.

&@*!!

Still pitching that bullshit?

Why Ms. Pagan, how very kind of you.  I think my favorite date was the Hot Air balloon over Park City.  My gf of, now 24 years, were new then.  Good chesse, good wine, crisp air, lots of laughs…ahh.  I’ve enjoyed your comments as well as those of Junk and Ismone.  Poor fool.  Here he has some very upfront women explaining everything he needs to know about modern women and he won’t learn.  There are none so blind as those who will not see nor deaf as those who will not hear.

Good bless all assertive women.  They are ever so much more interesting.  Life should be about fire and passion.  It isn’t, of course, but sometimes it is.  I guess I’ve been over rude to our friend but it strains my credulity that he has never ever met a ‘randy’ women.  Perhaps the wingnut world is just more different than I can believe.  Perhaps I’ve just been blessed, but all of the women I’ve been closely acquinted with had the gift of “divine letchery.”

For WSOTT, I feel sorry for him, actually.

If “all men are rapists” is thinkable, why is “all women are whores” blasphemy?

You’re the only one here who is generalizing about either gender, dipshit.  I know I’m not married to a rapist, and he most certainly has a dick and identifies as male.

I think both notions are fair game,

So, since all women are whores, are you calling yourself a rapist?

but obviously the latter is a sin on here.

Both conclusions are a definite sign of oversimplified black-and-white thinking as well as douchebaggery.

Hmmm.. maybe your high priestess Amanda can explain the difference to me.

Damn; I didn’t think anyone could see the rituals.

While you sit there and whine about how women won’t have sex for its own sake, I’m going to get laid.  Enjoy your miserable existence in which sex is only granted to you if you pay for it.

The sad part is that YOU could have added so much to the discussion. What is the “grooming” behavior of lesbians? Does butch “groom” femme.

Now, the funny thing is, I do know women who think like you, who sadly have to make their relationships conform to some supposed hetero ideal, because they, much like you, are wedded to black-and-white thinking and want to reduce human interaction to a few crude stereotypes. I do know a few women who tend to take on the stereotypically male role in a relationship, and some who behave the way you think straight women should. I don’t like to think most lesbian relationships are that boring and limited, though. Many of us feel free to like women because they’re women, and people, not stereotypes. It’s one nice thing about not having so much baggage of societal expectations weighing down your relationships. 

If “all men are rapists” is thinkable, why is “all women are whores” blasphemy? I think both notions are fair game, but obviously the latter is a sin on here.

I don’t think all men are rapists, and I don’t know any feminist who does. You seem to see a lot of hostility and bloody-mindedness in human relationships that I don’t.

Women don’t have sex for sex.

You don’t like fundamentalists, but you sure do like to repeat nonsensical mantras over and over in defiance of logic and evidence just like they do. Maybe you’d get along with them better than you think.

That’s right I compared you to a monkey. What you don’t like being compared to your primate cousins?

Sorry, I have no problem with the fact that I’m a primate. I don’t like being called a whore, but it would mean a lot more if it were coming from someone who were capable of making and following logical arguments.

Women do not exchange sex for sex.

Not moderated, not sometimes, not more likely.  DO NOT.  It was dumb then and it is dumb now.

Because most of the time women don’t have ulterior motives.

Is the cognative dissonance painful?

Sometimes do not?  Usually do not?  or DO NOT.

I’m glad you make sense to yourself.

But you still haven’t shown how it is that human females are incapable of trading sex for sex.  Which you somehow think is different than having sex for sex’s sake.

The fact that sometimes, people have sex for reasons other than just sex does not make it impossible to “trade sex for sex.” 

See, look, I don’t even have to make random pop-culture references or set up silly tests to show you’re wrong.  It is all here in black and white.

And of couse, you still don’t answer these questions about when it is you think a man is “trading sex for sex”  (additional query, if a woman is not trading sex for sex, how can a man?)

“But, if my brother catches a clue and takes one of those women home, or if that interloper ended up taking the med. student home (perhaps again, her possesiveness to me suggested either that they had slept together or that she wanted to make me think that they had), is the MAN in that situation not trading sex for sex?  If he is, then I really don’t see why this magically changes if the person with the vadge is approached.  I mean, in your world, how would lesbians ever manage to have sex?  I am not seeing it.”

Women, when counted as an entire group instead of as individuals, do not make as much money as men.

I swear, sociology is so far beyond you idiots that there’s no point explaining to you that your two or three anecdotes about how bitches don’t want to fuck you and make millions of dollars a year do not trends make.