Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis - Hardcover

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Emily Willingham is a journalist and science writer who earned a PhD in biology and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in urology, both after taking a bachelor's degree in English literature. She is coauthor of The Informed Parent: A Science-Based Resource for Your Child's First Four Years, and her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Aeon, Undark, San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. She is a regular contributor to Scientific American.

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The fallacy sold to many of us is that the penis signals dominance and power. But this wry and penetrating book reveals that in fact nature did not shape the penis--or the human attached to it--to have the upper...hand.

Phallacy looks closely at some of nature's more remarkable examples of penises and the many lessons to learn from them. In tracing how we ended up positioning our nondescript penis as a pulsing, awe-inspiring shaft of all masculinity and human dominance, Phallacy also shows what can we do to put that penis back where it belongs.

Emphasizing our human capacities for impulse control, Phallacy ultimately challenges the toxic message that the penis makes the man and the man can't control himself. With instructive illustrations of unusual genitalia and tales of animal mating rituals that will make you particularly happy you are not a bedbug, Phallacy shows where humans fit on the continuum from fun to fatal phalli and why the human penis is an implement for intimacy, not intimidation.

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1

Centering the Penis: The Bad Boys

and Bad Studies of Evolutionary Psychology

When it comes to human sexuality, scientific studies can be heavily skewed toward questions men want addressed, answered in ways that men want them answered. In a field called evolutionary psychology, that has often meant that answers to questions about sexuality favor what the overrepresented sex (men) in this field want. One of the many problems is that people use this androcentric nonsense to justify being brutal, angry, aggressive, or degrading to others in the name of some vague "authenticity" that evolution baked into them. As you'll see in this chapter, studies of human sexuality as it relates to evolution versus culture follow this pattern in the field of evolutionary psychology. As the chapters that follow illustrate, the tendency is pervasive across all fields that purport to evaluate sex-based features. Even when it comes to nonhuman animals, the male-centered bias-and its centering of the penis-always seems to overshadow everything else.

"Survival of the fittest." With apologies to Inigo Montoya, people keep using that phrase, even though it does not mean what they think it means. This refrain seems to imply that only the strong survive nature's death traps. But "fitness" has nothing to do with strength or even evading death. "Fitness" is tied to successful reproduction, helped to the goal line by specific features that sustain life and facilitate the transmission of DNA. You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction. The phrase might communicate the idea better if it were "survival of the best adapted" or "survival of the best fitting."

These adaptive attributes can vary enormously from population to population, from place to place, and, depending on how unstable an environment is, from moment to moment. These advantageous characteristics can be behavioral (lobsters and their shoulders, maybe), chemical (lobsters and their pee?), sensory (ditto), or physical (being a big lobster), and collectively, their advantages and disadvantages will sum to "success" or "no success."

As long as the adaptive feature generally gives a survival and reproductive boost to the animals that have it, more members of the population with that feature will pass along the DNA underlying it. If the associated DNA becomes more common in a population, that population has evolved. The frequency of that gene variant has changed over time in that population, which happens to be the pedantic, semantic, not-at-all romantic definition of evolution itself.

Why am I talking about survival of the fittest and how badly people misunderstand it? Because this idea that "fittest" means "having most power" or "having most strength" has taken weedy root in some byways of evolution research that emphasize "winning" a lot more than "fitting." A field of study called evolutionary psychology mixes the manifestations of the unique and widely variable human brain with the tenets of evolution to serve up an often toxic brew that we, as a society, pay for dearly.

As the New Yorker contributor and academic Louis Menand put it in 2002, the result of this focus on "winning" as an interpretation of evolutionary fitness means that evolutionary psychology itself becomes a "philosophy for winners: it can be used to justify every outcome." And somehow, every outcome justifies what those "winners" want or believe.

The "what" that these winners want to believe can be everything from "racial" supremacy to the intellectual dominance of one sex over the other. Evolutionary psychology, when taken with a false doctrine that evolution is about "winning," offers a perfect cover for these aspirants and a perfect tool to perpetuate themselves as the "winners." When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?

Where Did My Ovulation Go?

Many primate females signal that they're able to conceive through visual and olfactory cues. These cues can include genital swelling and color changes, and they signal, in the dry words of one primatologist, a "heightened female sexual motivation." The length of this period is as short as a couple of days in gorillas to a couple of weeks in chimpanzees. Copulatory sex is off-limits unless the swellings say otherwise. In this way, the signals of ovulation say that penis use is a "go."

Humans, on the other hand, do not have these unmistakable visual signals. Obviously, then, Science says, the one who ovulates is hiding something. Because this process typically involves females, ovulation is being hidden for nefarious reasons. Even though dozens of other primate species and who knows how many nonprimate species do it-I mean, we are talking about internal fertilization here-in humans, the act of popping an egg into a fallopian tube is "cryptic" or hidden because it's a "lady" thing.

This secrecy keeps potential mates guessing, confused and confusticated and desperate to be the one to fuse a sperm with that egg when the ovary frees it. So, the idea continues, these potential mates stick around on their own behalf throughout a reproductive cycle. With this bevy of beaus lined up at the door or cave opening or whatever, the ovulator gets to have a slew of "extra-pair" partners waiting, like a conveyor belt of cuckolds. The inevitable conclusion is that ovulation is a sexual trap, the egg always being released but not being released, like Schršdinger's gamete, keeping potential partners guessing and engaged.

Yet "concealment" isn't a defensible premise for suspecting ovulators of cuckolding their partners or a rationale for others to expect sex anytime, anywhere. In fact, research suggests about a 1 percent overall rate of children being born from "extra-pair" liaisons, but social factors-not genetics-are tied to this rate. Living in an urban area or having a low socioeconomic status is linked to higher rates of "extra-pair" paternity, emphasizing the power of sociocultural influences on behaviors taken to be "evolutionary," including an assumption that monogamy is a human norm.

The "Stripper Study"

That real-world finding did not stop one research group, of whom more anon, from taking on the "hidden ovulation" question and publishing what has come to be known as the "stripper study." For this study, they recruited a group of women working at a strip club-because what better way to evaluate ovulation than in a place where conception is the last thing on anyone's mind?-and tried to track how the women's ovulatory status affected the tips they earned.

These authors concluded that the money women make when performing lap dances varies with their cycles. The work involved only eighteen anonymous women self-reporting online about their earnings, hours, mood, and other factors. The researchers argued that their results mean that everyone needs to know when women are near ovulation for economic reasons. Why? Because when women are ovulating, see, they can make more money if they are also giving lap dances. There's no word on how women accrue economic benefit by "ovulating while serving as a trial judge" or "ovulating while cooking dinner."

The rationale for the study was based on a passing and potentially interesting observation: the women in a strip club were getting tampons from the guy who also tallied up their tips, and the fellow (an author on the study with two other men) noticed that the women getting tampons averaged lower tips (so, you see, humans can detect these rhythms from indirect cues even if...