Infotainment

Belle Waring:

Oi, this is so dumb and irritating that I pretty seriously considered not writing about it at all, in part because I worry the comments thread will develop a fetor of glib ev-psych nonsense. Uplift the human race, people, and surprise me with your intelligent thoughtfulness and concern for the feelings of other commenters. Who, I would like you to note, are actual human beings. Ya Rly!

Moving on, Slate has proffered for your attention an article by one Mark Regnerus, if that is his name. It is entitled thusly: “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I’m actually concerned that the stupid is going to burn my screen, and that readers of the article should perhaps be provided with an old-timey screensaver to avoid this.

She then goes on to destroy said article in an entertaining way. Naturally there follows glib ev-psych nonsense of positively Jenniferian horror in comments:

First, we’re going to import the concept of a “gift” into some bit of spider-behavior. Does this make any sense? Who knows! But why stop to think?

OK —stop to think—of course it makes sense. The food ‘gift’ (or resource, or whatever the hell you want to call it) has value (or rather the female expects it to). It is costly for the male to provide (he has to find it and wrap it and can’t eat it himself). The female—if she discovers she’s been tricked and there’s no food in the package—sends the male packing. If this is not an exchange of food-for-sex, then just what the hell would you call it?

Then, we’re going to reapply what we seem to have already established as spidery “gift-giving behavior” to “explain resource-exchanges!” in human sexual relations

No, we’re not. What we’re saying is that males accumulating resources of some sort (food, territory, a finely constructed nest) to attract females is seen in various species. We cannot extrapolate this to humans in any simpleminded way (humans are too complex and too weird in assorted ways for that), but this is the most common pattern, and it is one that’s not exactly unheard of in humans, isn’t it?

That obviously doesn’t imply that resources-for-sex all there is to human mating (and that if you understand spider sex then you understand human sex), but the idea that it’s purely coincidental that ‘males providing resources to females they hope to mate with’ is the most common pattern both across species and human cultures seems…pretty far-fetched, no?

How could he have forgotten about Spider-Man?

All of the foregoing, entertaining as it is, I reproduce in order to heap praise on this by Jenna Moran:

Another example from the natural world is trees and the wind. Often when a tree wants to mate with the wind it will expend considerable biological resources to generate a dead leaf “gift” which it detaches to swirl in the wind. (The opportunity cost is mostly genetic, since a single modern tree has very limited control over how fast its leaves die, but over time their mating behavior with the wind has selected more for leaves that die more quickly than they otherwise would. Note that those leaves, if they did not fall off to allow the wind to blow them around, would have helped the tree consume energy from its secondary polygamous association with the sun; blowing dead leaves around, which doesn’t actually add much directly to the wind’s survival prospects, can be looked at as a signaling behavior where the wind requires the tree to make a biological commitment to it—-”if you liked it you should have put dead leaves on it,” as it were—-in order to secure a relationship and demonstrate a certain baseline health and strength.) Afterwards, the wind or the wind’s descendants will carry the tree’s pollen or seeds this way and that—-it’s like those male spiders that will carry around the female spiders’ offspring on their back to impress potential future mates, or like a woman carrying around a hunter’s credit card on the savannah. Interestingly, though, when trees are not looking you will often see the wind carrying around the gifts of dozens of trees, blowing them about in a circle to decide which trees to have further pollen-wind-sex with in the spring. I think you can probably extrapolate this basic behavior to polygamous and monogamous relationships throughout the animal, vegetable, and elemental kingdoms.

There is a follow-up post entitled "Dear Guys Who Would Like to Make Stuff up About Sexual Relations a priori on the Basis of, Like, Spiders or Something" which is of course worth reading.

By all means explore the hot car-on-spider hentai possibilities below:



ORAL-SEX-ENABLING UPDATE!