There've been several interesting articles of late on observations in the burgeoning field of "animal personality research". Of course, many of us feel like we're experts in the field already.  Discoveries in everything from genetic research to animal behaviorism seem to confirm daily that it is only our false modesty and talent for hypocrisy that separates us from chimpanzees, monkeys, barnacle geese, farm minks, blue tits and greattits, bighorn sheep, dumpling squid, pumpkinseed sunfish, zebra finches,spotted hyenas, even spiders and water striders.


One recent article in the Times seems to capture my current living situation hauntingly:

“There are low information processors who don’t attend much to their environment and bulldoze through life,” said David Sloan Wilson of the State University of New York at Binghamton. “Then there are the sensitive ones who are always taking things in, which can be good because information is valuable, but it can also be overwhelming.”

Overwhelming indeed.  I see it everywhere, myself.  From sports, where we display our animal tendencies in slightly — and not so slightly (hang on till the end for the NSFW bits) — sublimated ways, to cyberspace, where bullies reinforce the social hierarchy by chasing the weak ones away. From the garden, where my new next door neighbor Skip is now dealing with a squatter who leaves him a steaming deuce every day to the steam sauna in the gym locker room, where boys will be bonobos.

I had my first little tête-à-tête at my new gym the other day. It was not sordid in the least.  All very animal, which is to say very innocent.  Just the sort of generous display and mutual admiration we take for homosexuality these days, even though it's simply a fact of homosociality.  Men in society are hardwired to wave their dicks around —-figuratively, of course.  But then, all the sudden, when they're waving their actual dicks around it's gay.

Well, whatever.  I'll take it.

Truth is, much of homosexual sex is neither homosexual nor sex.  But because sex is, for better or worse, ground zero in our species' desperate and often poignant struggle to give human life special significance, to acknowledge that what we refer to as sex is sometimes just a friendly gesture —- the kind of thing, like holding the elevator or saying please and thank you, that just makes the world a nicer place, is a kind of heresy. 

Luckily, our sentimentality about sex lends an extra element of transgression to a gym sauna stroke-off that would just be a testosterone trip otherwise.

Again, I'll take it.

Society of course dictates what we're supposed to be ashamed of — that's part of society's job.  But, take a genuine sociopath like Tiger Woods (watch him talk about his bad boy behavior — he seems less contrite than self-satisfied he is finally giving the "right" answers — and his new Nike ad, where he's literally acting contrite, could be a training video for philanderers), and, really, his behavior shouldn't seem all that surprising — any more than the sputtering reproach of commentators should. 

Part of the pathologizing of so-called "sex addiction" is to reinforce the idea that sex without romantic love is a sickness.  But it's obvious even from his titillating texts that Tiger Woods was into sexual athletics.  Harder, deeper, faster.  There was no pretense of romantic love.  Thus: rehab.

Don't get me wrong: romantic love is a great reason to shag.  But presently, it's the sole socially sanctioned one.  Probably at least in part because of women's social ascendancy.  There are necessary limits to sexual appetite, of course, that are put in place for good reason.  We are, as a species, obsessively renegotiating the nexus of sex and status, sex and play, sex and violence, in light of new and recurring factors in our environment. When limits protect the vulnerable, when they favor mutual consent over coercion I believe we're going in the right direction. 

It's always the aspect of sexuality that involves power, both how it is exercised between people and in groups, that is the most nettlesome to negotiate. But sex is a social lubricant.  While it can reinforce social hierarchy it can also break it down.  When Evolutionary Biologists (or more likely those who report in the news about their findings) go into head-scratching mode over the "advantages" of non-procreative sex, they are betraying not only their sexual inexperience, but the social bias that always plagues the scientific quest for truth, and which it is the job of the scientific method itself, in its rigor, to overcome.

The idea that homosexuality can't peacefully coexist with heterosexuality, or that acts we would deem sexual between members of the same-sex are not in fact a perfectly natural facet of homosocial interaction, betrays a social bias.  Statements about Darwin's theory — "any genetic traits and behaviors that outfit an animal with an advantage — that help the animal make lots of offspring — will remain in a species, while ones that don’t will vanish" — actually urge us to ask what advantage homosexual activity confers.

Still, some scientists just don't get it.  A recent article in the Times Sunday Magazine that asks "can animals be gay?" contains the following absurdity from Yale Ornithologist Richard Plum:

Our field is a lot like economics: we have a core of theory, like free-market theory, where we have the invisible hand of the market creating order — all commodities attain exactly the price they’re worth. Homosexuality is a tough case, because it appears to violate that central tenet, that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction. The question is, why would anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn’t reproductive?

Not only is the claim that economics is a cut-and-dry discipline downright comical, given the current mess, which apparently no one knows how we got into, but the question "why would anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn’t reproductive?" is one only an ornithologist could ask.  Gee, doc, it's a real conundrum.

You know, I think maybe evolutionary biologists should be forced to have sex at some point, like, as a condition of getting their PhD, so that they'll have some idea as to why people do it.  I know they masturbate, though, so it's not totally beyond their grasp, so to speak.  Why do people (including scientists) masturbate?  Because we want to make babies?

I mean, HELLO.  Why wouldn't anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn't reproductive? For most people, procreative sex is sex of last resort.  Even heterosexual men know that once procreative sex pays off they're the ones who are screwed.  Look at how contraception has freed men and women to pursue nonprocreative pastimes, leading to the rise of a relatively new category of hetero relationship: the fuckbuddy.  And when you think about the cost of raising a kid — over a quarter of a million bucks per for the typical middle class family — you don't a need a PhD to get it.

This isn't the first time evolutionary biologists have had to put on their thinking caps to overcome entrenched cultural bias about human behavior.  Think of the riddle of altruism.  Even modern evolutionary psychologists, stuck in the Social Darwinist '80s, could not for the life of them figure out why anyone would be altruistic.  Until they came up with the theory of "reciprocal altruism" — which is the social equivalent of sexual 69ing.

It is only our social bias that keeps us from seeing that for men, there is not that big a difference between a handshake and a handjob, something monkeys, who (not incidentally) don't wear trousers, have known all along.