March 11, 2013

Primitive man's sex life was free of perversions and hang-ups (studies show)

The comments in an earlier post about the lack of breast modesty before around 500 B.C. brought up the lack of lurid sexuality in general before then.

Julian Jaynes said that only after people became self-aware around that time -- exercising introspection -- did they become aware of their drives and urges, now viewing them as things that needed relief. If they weren't relieved, tension built up; hence the birth of anxieties about unmet urges. And once you think about how to relieve tension, our rational capacities generate a list of many solutions -- not just intercourse, but sodomy, oral sex, masturbation, getting jerked off, as well as those practices but with someone of the same sex.

These and other forms of deviance were condemned in the Old Testament, most notably in the stories about Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, written during the 6th century B.C. or shortly after. Yet in the Code of Hammurabi, written around 1780 B.C., proscriptions about sex only relate to rape, marriage, divorce, adultery, and slander -- weird things like sodomy, homosexuality, bestiality, etc. just did not occur to people back then.

Our best guess about what life was like far back into pre-history is what contemporary hunter-gatherers look like. They're not the exact same, but they are our best guess. Archaeology and history provide another guess, and I'll get to those in another post. This paper by Hewlett & Hewlett (2010) is the first to quantitatively study sexuality in "pre-state" (= primitive) societies, one a group of Pygmy hunter-gatherers (the Aka) and the other a group of slash-and-burn farmers (the Ngandu), both in central Africa. It also includes a review of other cross-cultural studies of sexuality.

It won't surprise readers here to learn that homosexuality is absent among both groups. However, you might not have suspected that masturbation is not only absent but unheard of.

Like homosexuality, it was difficult to explain self-stimulation to the Aka. They found it unusual and said it may happen far away in Congo, but they did not know it. A specific word did not exist for it. We asked men, in particular, about masturbating before they were married or during the post-partum sex taboo and all indicated this did not occur.

So it's not just that men are married and getting frequent sex -- even before they enjoy regular conjugal benefits, they do not masturbate, or know what it is to begin with. And it's not limited to the people in this study alone:

We asked Robert Bailey (personal communication) about his experiences of trying collect semen for fertility studies from Lese men in the Ituri forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He indicated it was very difficult to explain to men how to self-stimulate to obtain semen samples. He said that despite explicit and lengthy instructions three of four semen specimens came to him mixed with vaginal secretions.

They quote an earlier cross-cultural review by Ford & Beach (1951) of 190 societies of various types. The original:

Despite societal disapproval, there is evidence that adult males masturbate, at least occasionally, in a few societies other than our own, although this behavior is apparently rare. . . some women in a few societies other than our own occasionally masturbate, although the practice generally meets with social disapproval.

So that's why in Vacation, Cousin Eddie's son had to explain to Russ how to "bop your baloney." How to move during intercourse comes natural enough, but practices that were never a part of our evolutionary past need to be explained overtly (hopefully not demonstrated, in this case). They persist through cultural rather than genetic evolution.

Moving on:

Oral and anal sexual activies were unknown or very rare. Ngandu men who traveled to the capital city were familiar with oral sex and said they liked it, but said women in the village did not do it. One Aka woman said that a “man never puts the clitoris in his mouth; if he does he will vomit.”

And who said there's no such thing as the noble savage?

As for other societies, they don't mention oral sex in their cross-cultural review section. The first item I hit on from googling is the book Our Sexuality by Crooks & Baur, which mentions that outside of the modern world, only in the South Pacific islands do they practice oral sex; in sub-Saharan Africa it's unnatural or disgusting. There's no citation, but allowing it in for the sake of argument, primitive peoples still rarely or never practice oral sex. Here is an article mentioning that the Inuit (= Eskimos) don't practice oral sex either; they are historically hunter-gatherers.

That book also cites Ford & Beach (1951) to the effect that even kissing mouth-to-mouth is pretty rare -- only acknowledged in 21 of 190 societies (11%), and as something before or during intercourse in just 13 (7%). Kissing was therefore not part of our species' evolution. This explains why it's more common for a girl to be awkward/bad at kissing or giving oral than at actually getting it on. (I assume girls would say the same about us.)

Well, with so little awareness of kinky practices, they must be prudes who rarely get any action, or feel shy and ashamed when they do, don't reach orgasm, etc. In fact, the Pygmy hunter-gatherers have sex around 7 to 8 times a week on average, compared to 1 to 2 nights for contemporary Americans, with the Ngandu farmers being in between at 4 nights.

As for shame:

About half of the Aka men and all Aka women said either the man or woman can initiate sex, while among the Ngandu about half the men and women said either can initiate sex. Most Ngandu women said they were shy about initiating sex and complained about their husband’s advances. Aka women were not shy about initiating sex and did not complain about their husband’s advances.

I wonder if the Ngandu women are as shy/awkward as modern women are about initiating sex within a relationship, where generally the man takes the lead. Or if they complain as much as modern women do about their husbands asking for sex. Slash-and-burn farming is a good step away from hunting and gathering, though not as far away as settled large-scale agriculture and industry.

Finally:

We did not investigate how often men or women had orgasm during coitus. Ngandu and Aka had terms for male ejaculation, but not for female orgasm. All informants clearly understood female orgasm as they described women shaking and trembling during coitus. Aka and Ngandu men indicated they climaxed each time they had intercourse during the night, while women generally reported experiencing orgasm, but not necessarily each time.

These two sets of findings are a real wake-up call to modern people -- a lack of hang-ups about sex comes bundled with a lack of awareness of, interest in, or practice of non-reproductive sexuality, i.e. recreational sex or sex primarily for pleasure. Oral, anal, masturbation, and homos are all clear signs of a frustrated society, unable or unwilling or whatever to met their basic needs in a natural way and using their rational and rationalizing skills to met them in more unwholesome ways.

That comes through in the reasons that primitive peoples give for having sex. As the article mentions about the two focus groups, as well as others in the cross-cultural survey, their main concern is with making new children, not private or mutual pleasure. Although they do get some enjoyment out of it, they also stress that it can be hard work sometimes.

So, the sex lives of primitive or pre-conscious or "bicameral" people are, to put it bluntly, more like those of animals. Even your house cat, let alone a wild beast, doesn't masturbate, doesn't give or receive oral, or anal, doesn't act queer, doesn't get neurotic over his unmet sexual urges, has sex for procreative purposes only, and although they may do it frequently, it's less of an attempted endurance run and more a series of "wham, bam, thank you ma'am."

Dogs are more domesticated and likely screwed up in similar ways that modern human beings are. They do hump your leg, the furniture, etc. -- the doggie version of doing a blow-up doll. Dogs also whine a lot more than other animals, wild or tame, and make those pathetic, "look how pained I am" kind of eyes, that they might be capable of anxiety or neurosis like we are.

Religions are often assumed,  both by their adherents and their enemies, to be attempts to lift man up above his base animal nature. But the more you look at them, the more they look like cultural gadgets that we've invented to try to restore us to our more natural state -- hence all of that stuff about mankind before The Fall -- and away from the degradation, corruption, and perversion of civilized progress. The emphasis on sex as a primarily (though not exclusively) procreative act is just one case. That behavior is more animalistic than going down on someone or whacking off, which your cat would regard as proof #47 of why you're an inferior species.

It's the civilizing, liberalizing, progressive track that leads us toward becoming more humanoid than human. Suddenly the encouragement to try anything leads us into studying and memorizing some nerdy manual on kink techniques like the Kama Sutra, preoccupying ourselves with whether we're executing the instructions properly during the act, and worrying afterward about whether our customer ratings will be high or low.

Those things cause us to become self-conscious because our evolutionary history did not mean for us to go there, so we'll have to figure it out and monitor its progress consciously, when sex should be a case of "Let your mind go and your body will follow."

33 comments:

  1. Even your house cat, let alone a wild beast, doesn't masturbate

    Monkeys and apes do that kind of thing. Wiki seems to think its pretty common in horses as well.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sexual_behaviour

    Of course, I would probably have the inclination to think wiki has a pervasive liberal bias, but it seems hard to be totally dismissive on that basis.

    In evolutionary terms, stuff which doesn't really have a cost, like masturbation, which doesn't really reduce fertility (good for prostate cancer apparently) and doesn't expose to diseases, doesn't seem like it should be that much of an issue. That said, I would expect more social animals like humans to experience fewer incidences of it relative to more solitary animals.

    a lack of hang-ups about sex comes bundled with a lack of awareness of, interest in, or practice of non-reproductive sexuality, i.e. recreational sex or sex primarily for pleasure

    I wonder if there's any replication within modern society? I recall the recent findings that porn stars tend to be hedonically happier than non-porn stars, on average. Sexologists should have found something like this.

    My impression of primitive man is that sexual fetishes are unusual things, which are kind of learned cultural behaviors (as you say) and thus have a high chance of becoming extinct or not arising at all in small group settings.

    A larger culture has more of a cultural memory and there is low chance of these things which are not really fitness enhancing (or necessarily reducing) to go extinct). It is a lot like sophisticated tools or artistic motifs arising - hard to do with a small population size.

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  2. The lack of kissing might be related to the dangers of germ transmission? (just thinking Paul Ewald here--he has recently been saying that we likely transmit chronic infections from germs through not only sex but also deep kissing).

    Perhaps kissing among the groups you mentioned might result in acute infections so their evolution didn't render the lips touching as erotic? Just throwing stuff out here.

    As for not masturbating. Hmmmmm.

    I'm female. I can remember when I was about 5 years old that when I had to urinate and was somewhere I couldn't immediately reach a bathroom (class, and..well, actually I was very avers to using the school's public restroom so in primary grades I held it all day)crossing my legs and squeezing not only held back the urine, but it gave a pleasurable sensation of some other sort which my 5/6 year old brain knew nothing about.

    By the next year or so, I recall skating around the block with my little friends, and feeling the urge to urinate. By then, all the kids had plopped down for a rest on the side yard of a house. I joined them and just happened to lie down on my stomach, my genital area pressing on the grass. This helped hold the need to pee, but it also gave a great tingling, tickly sensation, so much so that I found I wanted to move my hips back and forth in a rubbing way against the ground. I guess somehow I knew this would look weird--something held me back--but I remembered the wonderful sensation.

    It wasn't too long after that that I discovered that if I pressed myself against the hard floor and moved back and forth (when no one was looking), I got the same sensation, even when I didn't need to urinate.

    That was my discovery of masturbation. From there, well....you know the rest. I can't imagine that children, even girl children of those tribes, have clitorises that respond differently to mine or to those of non-hunter gatherers. It's a pretty simply mechanism to the touch, is it not?

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  3. "That comes through in the reasons that primitive peoples give for having sex. As the article mentions about the two focus groups, as well as others in the cross-cultural survey, their main concern is with making new children, not private or mutual pleasure. Although they do get some enjoyment out of it, they also stress that it can be hard work sometimes."

    I don't buy the "main concern is with making new children" thing for a second and I can't believe you seem to, Ag.

    New babies are made BECAUSE a man, yes, a man in these groups, have a powerful sex drive and the urge to release is powerful and climax is pleasurable.

    The women sometimes find it pleasurable, sometimes find it a bore for a variety of emotional and biological reasons.

    The babies are the byproduct of pleasure.

    If you doubt that, take away the pleasure and see what happens to the baby production. It'll look like the number of children produced by gay men.



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  4. "Of course, I would probably have the inclination to think wiki has a pervasive liberal bias, but it seems hard to be totally dismissive on that basis."

    My take on the lit about animals as humans, especially since the '90s, is that it's mostly over-hyped, grasping at straws, or outright fraud (Marc Hauser). So they found some animal that rubbed its schlong against its leg once -- bfd.

    I'm talking about a well established practice, taking place regularly, for the purpose of reaching orgasm, and generally in place of the real thing. That includes masturbation, using the hands on someone else, oral, and anal.

    The children in the two societies studied by the Hewletts engage in mock-sex with one another, imitating the adults as a goof. It's like rough-and-tumble play or tickling. We see mock-activities in the animal world, so that's the most likely account of the non-procreative sex activities in the rest of the animal kingdom.

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  5. "sexual fetishes...have a high chance of becoming extinct or not arising at all in small group settings.

    "A larger culture has more of a cultural memory and there is low chance of these things which are not really fitness enhancing (or necessarily reducing) to go extinct). It is a lot like sophisticated tools or artistic motifs arising - hard to do with a small population size."

    Except that bopping your baloney is hardly rocket science. Easy to figure out, easy to pass on, and it requires no division of labor or specialization.

    Artisanal pottery, design motifs, etc., are complicated for any individual learning them, usually requiring a kind of apprenticeship, and generally take place within larger networks of division of labor and specialization.

    Also, when introduced into naive populations, if they really were so desired, like anti-malarial drugs, marijuana, or colorful ornaments, they'd be like, "Hey, maybe civilization isn't so bad after all."

    But when you tell them about whacking off, going down on another person's junk, one man jamming his rod up another man's butt, prostitution, pornography... they temper their enthusiasm for progress.

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  6. "In evolutionary terms, stuff which doesn't really have a cost, like masturbation, which doesn't really reduce fertility (good for prostate cancer apparently) and doesn't expose to diseases, doesn't seem like it should be that much of an issue."

    Well, oral, anal, and homo sex are out of consideration there. We know not only of the garden variety STDs like herpes, etc., but also cancers. From the "oral sex" article on Wikipedia:

    "In 2005, a research study at the College of Malmö in Sweden suggested that performing unprotected oral sex on a person infected with HPV may increase the risk of oral cancer. The study found that 36 percent of the cancer patients had HPV compared to only 1 percent of the healthy control group.

    "Another recent study suggests a correlation between oral sex and head and neck cancer. It is believed that this is due to the transmission of HPV, a virus that has been implicated in the majority of cervical cancers and which has been detected in throat cancer tissue in numerous studies. A The New England Journal of Medicine study concluded that people who had one to five oral sex partners in their lifetime had about twice the risk of throat cancer compared with those who never engaged in this activity and those with more than five oral sex partners had a 250% increased risk."

    They used to not suspect pathogens as the cause of cervical cancer, but that's another effect of HPV infection. My guess is a lot of cancers will turn out to be "cryptic" STDs, including ones spread by non-procreative practices. That could go a long way toward explaining why cancer is absent in primitive people -- kink kills.

    As for masturbation, we're probably rationalizing away the problem when we say it's not fitness reducing. The fact that it doesn't appear in pre-history, and only among advanced societies sometime during the first millennium B.C., doesn't appear in most primitive societies today, nor anywhere else in the animal kingdom -- all suggests that it does have unseen costs.

    Speculation is pointless for the practical purpose of avoiding fitness costs in your own life. But just for hypothetical fun, what could those costs be?

    Maybe another kind of cryptic infection, in both directions. Primitive man didn't have soap, so whatever he touched could be transferred down there too. It might be difficult for germs to enter the tiny urethra, although not impossible. And it'd be even easier for them to colonize and proliferate on the surface, particularly under the foreskin. Dark, warm, wet, enough nutrients if you can evolve to subsist on them.

    Also, after diddling yourself, you could transfer germs from the surface of your junk, as well as from inside the urinary tract / within the load itself, to any other part of your body that you touched afterward.

    Just tossing off ideas, but you get the idea.

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  7. "I wonder if there's any replication within modern society? I recall the recent findings that porn stars tend to be hedonically happier than non-porn stars, on average."

    Sounds like the wrong comparison. They need to look at a representative sample of people who are really into porn -- like the consumers, not the performers. Porn addicts are way more maladjusted and depressive and OCD than guys who don't watch much / any of it.

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  8. "The lack of kissing might be related to the dangers of germ transmission?"

    That's my thinking too. It must have hidden costs if so few societies practice it even today, let alone in the rest of the animal kingdom. Just imagine what your cat is thinking when he sees two humans locking lips.

    I'm not sure how far back into pre-history the kiss goes, but I don't recall seeing it in any of the "bicameral" art and sculpture that I've looked at. And I looked through a bunch. I recall seeing a figurine of a Sumerian couple sitting side by side, with one or both putting their arm around the other, but I don't remember seeing any kissing. That seems like more of a Classical Greek-era thing.

    "I can't imagine that children, even girl children of those tribes, have clitorises that respond differently to mine or to those of non-hunter gatherers. It's a pretty simply mechanism to the touch, is it not?"

    I think they just don't have the self-awareness of their own drives and urges, like "Woah, this feels pretty nice, think I'll do it some more." Or maybe they'd see it as spoiling their appetite, as it were.

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  9. "I don't buy the "main concern is with making new children" thing for a second"

    Their stated reasons have to do mostly with procreation, whereas our stated reasons have more to do with pleasure, mental health, etc. So, the ideology or mythology or whatever circulating in the culture is one piece of a larger set of differences between them and us.

    I'm sure the guys feel pleasure doing it, just like other animals do, but they're not so self-aware of it that they offer it as a main reason for sex. And they're quite open in their discussions with the authors, so they're not just trying to maintain propriety.

    And in fact, the "urge to release" is not powerful in hunter-gatherer people. I communicated with anti-PC professor Henry Harpending, who's had extensive contact with Bushmen, and asked if they refer to their sex drive consciously, express yearning from pent-up desire, etc.

    No, they did not. Nothing like "Damn I'm so horny" or "I could really go for a piece of ass right about now." Self-awareness of your own libido, and the keen feeling that pressure is building up and needs to be released before you explode, is entirely restricted to post-bicameral people, and then mostly within the more advanced kinds of societies.

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  10. I don't see any possible way to fashion healthy attitudes toward sex because of porn on the net.

    Reseach shows that 8-10 year olds are viewing it. At the age of 8, they aren't searching for it as much as being shown it by older kids/siblings who simply shove a smart phone in front of the youngster's face.

    They see whips, chains, masks, everything they can't reconcile with reality because they've as yet no reality...so for many sick sex will become reality.

    We'll see more deviance in sexual practices (we already have with girls consenting to first, oral sex, then anal sex as "not sex" in order to land a boyfriend and not get pregnant) and we'll continue to see this occur at earlier ages.

    Not having dads in the home is a huge problem as well. Fewer and few kids live with a loving yet firm paternal guide in the home, no fathers to make sure the girl knows he gives a damn about her sexual coming-of-age and no dad to make sure any boy who comes near her is given warning. Thank you, feminism. You have succeeded in both freeing men and emasculating them as well. grrrr.

    Sexual practices among heteros are already looking very homo-like.




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  11. So, Ag, if you're right about their lack of "self-awareness," it must be a cognitive trait and these groups with their low IQ, don't have it?

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  12. "Also, after diddling yourself, you could transfer germs from the surface of your junk, as well as from inside the urinary tract / within the load itself, to any other part of your body that you touched afterward."

    Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, even the transfer of sperm to the digestive tract, a place it shouldn't be.

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  13. I had also heard masturbation is common among chimps, and it would seem odd if the behavior went away with hunter-gatherers, only to reappear after farming. Which, incidentally, is the story sometimes told about war. Bonobos are famously kinky, but scientists are increasingly questioning the relevance of what we've learned from a tiny sample of a mostly captive population.

    We can assume rats have even less self-consciousness, but they will still press levers stimulating their reward center until they die.

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  14. About kissing---wonder when it did develop and where, among what population first, and now you have me thinking that it's probably some pathogen's way of manipulating us into spreading it--more likely the manipulation of more than one pathogen.

    It would be interesting to test the nerve endings in the lips that exist in the primitive groups you mention with those of Western man--see if their different.

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  15. "It would be interesting to test the nerve endings in the lips that exist in the primitive groups you mention with those of Western man--see if their different."

    Whoops : "see if they're different."

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  16. TGGP: I had also heard masturbation is common among chimps, and it would seem odd if the behavior went away with hunter-gatherers, only to reappear after farming.

    http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/KO.HTM - "!Ko parents try to enlarge the boy’s penis by pulling and sucking it (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972:p59, 63; p58, ill.).

    A boy may be punished in this way (Sbrzesny, [1975] 1976:p237)[2]. "
    so there isn't exactly a mouth-genitals taboo (as I have heard reported amongst the ancient Romans and Greeks), which would make such a taboo a bad explanation of a lack of oral sex.

    When the boy infant touches his member himself, he is prevented to do so (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, p153; 158, ill.). " seems to suggest suppression of masturbation like activity in children although of course there is no evidence whether this is as a sexual taboo or "no, that's unhygienic" (or some non-"OCD cleanness taboo" hg facsimile thereof).

    http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/KUNG.HTM - "For adults, sexual activity was considered essential for mental health, and !Kung sometimes referred to mentally ill people (for example, a woman who ate grass) as deranged because of sexual deprivation." (“If a girl grows upwithout learning to enjoy sex, she had told me, her mind doesn’t develop normally and she goes around eating grass, like a crazy Herero (pastoralist) woman who lived in the area”) Be interesting if they really thought that - i.e. sex is good for mental health and you need to have it to be sane, separate from reproductive function, or if that was a translation garble!

    Again repeats - "A boy’s penis may be kissed by his mother"

    ...

    From a big page of anthropological sexologist comparisons here http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/INDEXATLAS.HTM

    I wasn't too interested in trawling it, but I checked out the above and the Australian Abo hunter-gatherers, who have some bizarre penis subincision related "homosexual" type behaviours (which surely are not of White settler inspiration?).

    Of course, there is some reason to be skeptical with these. Not all anthropologists are Harpending.

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  17. Anonymous at 1:41p.m.

    You're a liar. None of those things happened to you and you're probably a man.
    I recognize your voice; you've posted here before. I thought, then, you were the absolute nerdiest chick I'd ever come across, but no, you're a liar.

    Nice try with the Paul Ewald reference to sound like me or what women are interested in. Research a little more next time because it was a fail.

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  18. The thing about h-g and bicamerals, is that bicamerals are supposed to be hearing voices, vivid, real voices in their heads all the time. That's why they're not conscious, i.e. they behave as dictated by voices coming out their right hemispheres.

    AFAIK h-g are not known for hearing voices routinely though. They might have a shaman who does drugs and hears voices, or normal people might hear voices after a trance induced by communal dance.

    On sex in particular, oral and anal were not really prevalent even in most farming societies until recently. Masturbation might have been, but nothing resembling modern prevalences.
    Romans, Greeks and Middle Easterners were known as ephebophilic, but my guess is most farmers were pretty conservative in their sexuality, like the Medievals or East Asian farmers.

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  19. Agnostic,

    I found that Gregory Cochran, while he thought primitive man's mind was quite different, he didn't quite buy into bicameralism.
    I have a hard time believing that religion arose due to a a theory that proposes that those people heard voices within their heads. I am a religious person and do not believe it is a construct, but that we were made for God and need Him.

    I am convinced we are much more self-aware.

    So, what do you believe? Embrace wholeheartedly? Caveats?

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  20. Agnostic:"Even your house cat, let alone a wild beast, doesn't masturbate,"

    Well, I've had male cats who were not fixed, and they would lick their genitals until they ejaculated.

    syon

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  21. Dahlia, I was just over at Steve Sailer's reading posts and got to one from you. I did a double take because you said you were at Ag's blog earlier and you seemed to suggest it was time for you to get off the net because you got mad at someone there.

    I thought, "Huh, I posted a few comments at Agnostic's on his most recent thread about primitive people's lack of sexual hang ups and I don't recall any post over there that was caustic. I recalled no arguments.

    So, over here I came. I found your post, read it, scrolled back up, and lo and behold, I am the Anonymous at 1:41 that you referred to!

    I am, shall we say, totally in the dark as to what you are suggesting. I come here at times, don't usually say much, if anything, but I have a few posts up on this thread.

    My 1:41 post tells the story of how one little girl, me, discovered that part of her body brought pleasurable sensations. It's a true story. The only people I've ever shared it with are with two good girlfriends, years ago, when we had had a few Margaritas too many. I've never even told it to my husband.

    I don't understand what you find is the problem? Can you explain your post?

    As for Ewald. I've read one of his books and I google him now and then to see an occasional lecture from him put up on Youtube. I also stop by West Hunter.

    I'm lost.

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  22. "I found that Gregory Cochran, while he thought primitive man's mind was quite different, he didn't quite buy into bicameralism."

    I don't really know what to make of the auditory hallucination business in the book. Mostly what I took away was that mankind used to not be self-aware or capable of introspection, then in short fashion they were (in some places).

    That really does change your psychology in all kinds of ways, and that's more what I'm interested in. I'd have to read a lot more neuroscience to say anything about the bicameral / hallucination ideas.

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  23. "On sex in particular, oral and anal were not really prevalent even in most farming societies until recently. Masturbation might have been, but nothing resembling modern prevalences."

    Right, that's what's so hard to ignore about Jaynes' ideas -- there was a massive shift in human psychology during the time period and place that he points to, and it was well after agriculture was adopted. Before then, they even had sedentism, large cities, hierarchy, economic surplus, literacy, numeracy, codified laws, etc.

    Yet they weren't self-aware, more like coasting along and paying attention to their surroundings and others rather than to their inner states.

    So, he's hit on another one of those major phase transitions in human history.

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  24. "if you're right about their lack of "self-awareness," it must be a cognitive trait and these groups with their low IQ, don't have it?"

    It doesn't look that way. It looks more like a personality trait than cognitive skill. You aren't reasoning any better than before, just turning the direction of your reasoning inward rather than outward.

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  25. "I had also heard masturbation is common among chimps"

    Nah, that's the standard brand of grasping at straws and equivocation that is common among people studying or talking about primate behavior. Bug behavior -- well, big deal. But primates are like us, and hence whatever you think about them has Larger Implications.

    Search YouTube for masturbation chimpanzee or whatever. And you see something like this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHxRqL0QJ8

    He doesn't go at it continually, let alone until ejaculation, let alone in lieu of going after the real thing. He just kind of strokes himself a few times as some kind of social signal -- looks like a signal of peace, benign intent, or wanting food, since he's trying to get the guy to throw him some bananas.

    You wouldn't call that "masturbation," without twisting the common understanding of that word. Chimp "sexual" behavior in general is like that -- more of a social ritual than naive human beings would think.

    We also have to be careful because wild vs. captive life can be very different. For example, this monkey obviously learned how to jerk off (not to ejaculation, though) from the third world pair of yuk-yukkers showing him how to from outside the cage:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYVwVvCn2Zs

    You can see the monkey looking intently at whatever the guys are doing, and jerking off empty space with his other hand in imitation.

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  26. "Bonobos are famously kinky, but scientists are increasingly questioning the relevance of what we've learned from a tiny sample of a mostly captive population."

    Right, not just captive but spoiled by prosperity, unlike the common chimps who have to work harder to earn a living.

    The more important question to ask is: Is bonobo behavior spreading, making them more successful, helping them displace rival groups within their species or competing species? If anything they seem to be far less successful at taking over land than the common chimps, who also have from 3 to 10 times the population size as bonobos.

    Probably we're just observing an evolutionary dead-end, in a declining phase before it goes away for good. Bonobos as hippies.

    "We can assume rats have even less self-consciousness, but they will still press levers stimulating their reward center until they die."

    Well that's addiction, not kinky / non-procreative sexuality. Hunter-gatherers can easily get addicted to drugs and alcohol. Easier than moderns can, because we're the outcome of selection against weakness to addictive substances.

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  27. Your first video linked to this compilation, which does feature a number of monkeys going to completion, but they are monkeys rather than chimps.

    Good point about hunter-gatherers and addiction.

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  28. They're all captive, many locked in not very wide-open cages. Two look like they're on a more open reservation type thing instead of a crowded zoo. (You can tell because there's nothing else around, not even another of their species.)

    Chalk them up to warped captive behavior.

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  29. Whenever I hear about primative peoples not having any idea about homosexuality I always think of the Two Spirit people among Native Americans. What's the latest though on those? I'm not saying there isn't a good answer, only that I haven't heard it, after reading an awful lot of HBD blogs.

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  30. I don't know too much about them either, but my impression is that it's not preferential homosexuality.

    "Primitive" here means closer to hunting and gathering, and most of those folks think you're lying or joking when you tell them about homos.

    Native Americans in the past 1000 or so years haven't been hunter-gatherers for the most part. They relied on large-scale agriculture, or smaller slash-and-burn farming. The city of Cahokia was one of the largest cities for any continent.

    So except for the Eskimo, I'd say most of the groups that the Two Spirit people came from are more like groups you'd find in Mexico, where you find other sick and weird practices like human sacrifice.

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  31. Sugar gliders (a species of Australian possum) regularly masturbate and perform autofellatio, at least in captivity.

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  32. There are Two Spirit individuals everywhere in North America, including among plains and northern peoples, who were hunter/gatherers in their later years at least. But apparently at least some plains cultures had originally been agricultural and then switched to bison hunting after the introduction of the horse.

    This book looks interesting, but I haven't got time to read it.
    http://www.amazon.com/Spirit-Flesh-Diversity-American-Culture/dp/0807046159

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  33. I am not sure that the Bible even mentions oral or anal sex. It merely mentions wickedness and "lying with man as with woman". If I am not mistaken, it was a later interpretation that what was going on in Sodom and Gomarrah was such perversions. Now, this does not hurt your hypothesis here, in fact, it dates the beginning of perversions a bit later.

    I suspect that one of the reasons masturbation might not exist in a traditional society is that men and women get together at a younger age, when they are first becoming fertile. They are getting "married" and jumping right into it. With regular sex, there is no need for masturbation.

    There are a lot of assumptions here. Kissing makes people squeamish? So does sex. Kissing also feels sexually good. How do you explain that? Sex motions are natural and instinctive. I cant answer yes or no to that because I adapted the motions from friends in pre-teens when they would "hump" objects. Not to mention it appears in some movies. How can I know that what I am doing is instinctive or learned? How do we know that other animals didnt learn it from their parents and siblings? Perhaps it is instinctive in humans, but gets reinforced. Just too many assumptions here.

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