The last of our great curmudgeonly essayists - Gore Vidal, the art critic Robert Hughes and the historian and social critic Paul Fussell - died this year. The most profound tectonic shift in our literary culture in 2012 was one that, by and large, no one noticed. Academic Press, London.(Mostly about sexuality/sex, rather than language.)įrom the NYT Magazine “The Lives They Lived” section of 12/30/12, on Paul Fussell (born 1924), by Dwight Garner: (ed.) Advances in the Study of Behavior, Vol. Sexual Selection and Its Component Parts, Somatic and Genital Selection, as Illustrated by Man and the Great Apes. ![]() Sexual selection and genital anatomy of male primates. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Primate Sexuality: Comparative Studies of the Prosimians, Monkeys, Apes, and Human Beings. To preserve and perhaps one day enhance the state of our penises it is necessary that we stand up to “Nazis” that would prevent a women’s right to choose the penis of her liking, lest we devolve into muscly penisless idiots.ĭixon, A. Then let this be cautionary tale for men. In our system females are still able to exercise some choice over their mates, and hence choose a more stimulating penis to keep them sexually satisfied. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but an irrefutable fact: Females, through sexual selection, have ultimately determined the shape and size of our human penis (Short 1979). We humans, because of different ecological and phylogenic conditions, evolved a mating system that is more monogamous than polygamous. No longer a necessity to attract females, a dangly appendage becomes a liability for the male gorilla, and selective pressure reduces it to a characterless nub. Rather, female gorillas end up mating with the male gorillas best able to defend their harem, which favors the selection of bigger, more aggressive males. Such a system effectively eliminates the females ability to choose their mates based on, for instance, the size and stimulating ability of the male’s penis. So how is it that we humans won the “Battle of the Bulge”, so to speak, whereas gorillas did not? It is difficult to tease out the causal relationships between the different factors, but the difference in penis size is likely due to our different mating systems and whether they allow sexual selection by female choice (Short 1979, Harcourt and Gardiner 1994).įactors such as distribution of food and the small amount males invest in raising offspring made it so that gorillas were able to sustain a polygamous mating system, wherein one male monopolizes and mates with a harem of females. Perfunctory gorilla sex in the dorsal-ventral position. Had humans evolved along the same lines as gorilla, we might imagine this nightmare scenario: ![]() Then you might ask: Which penis corresponds to a dystopian alternate history, the one where the Axis powers win, the West falls to communism, and vampires take over Parliament? This would certainly have to be the gorilla penis. I’ve already touched on this idea a little in my post on the barbed penis, where I examined a study claiming proto-humans used to have magnificent barbed penises like many other primates. You might say the barbed penis is like a utopian alternative history, one where the Axis powers lose, but the States and the USSR nuke each other into oblivion, and Canada rises to supremacy, their scientists ruling the land like philosopher kings. We only have to examine the penises of our closest living evolutionary relatives, the primates, because in a sense each primate penis is an alternate history of the human penis, a window into What Could Have Been. But instead of asking, “What if the Nazi’s had won,” I ask, “What if our penises had evolved differently?”įortunately one doesn’t need to be a Dick to imagine the outcome such scenarios. ![]() Maybe my love of Dick has spilled over into my research, because I often find myself wondering, “What if…?” like in Dick’s classic alternate history novel “The Man in the High Castle”. dick | 3 Commentsĭear reader, there is something you should know about me: I am a huge Dick fan, and I have been ever since my early twenties. | Filed under: Animal Penises | Tags: alternate history, body building, gorilla, man in the high castle, penis, penis size, philip k. The Man with the Small Castle: The Gorilla Penis Posted: Ap| Author: Dr.
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