Today, a little Evo Psych Pop Quiz for you all!
5 of the following 6 statements are actual quotes from a 2007 article in the open access peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology. Can you spot the quote that isn’t from the article?
- “The section on intra-vaginal anti-cuckoldry tactics focuses on sperm competition, providing fascinating descriptions of the semen-displacement hypothesis (Gallup Jr. and Burch) and the psychobiology of semen (Burch and Gallup Jr.).”
- “[I]ntra-vaginal battles demand men to become aroused to situations that are actually unpleasant for them, for instance the suspicion of their partner’s infidelity.”
- “This section also includes discussions of the interesting notions that … women should not be motivated to have sex with their main partner right after an extra-pair copulation because of the possibility of sperm displacement (the penis appears to be shaped to do just that), [and] that a man may manipulate a woman’s mood via semen content (Rice, 1996, has experimentally shown something similar in fruit flies) … .”
- “One of the mating strategies examined as an early prevention method is violence against women within partnered relationships.”
- “Despite this scrutiny, a man can still gain from deliberately ejaculating in front of his partner from time to time. Choosing each occasion carefully so as to display a good ejaculation can be a powerful way to advertise his continuing good health.”
- “Affirmative feedback did not increase men’s likelihood to allocate resources to self-morphed images, but men were significantly less likely to allocate resources to self morphed images when told the morphed image did not resemble them … . “
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Answer: Number 5 is the ringer! But, lacking confidence in my own ability to come up with something as convincingly batty as the quotes from the real article, I cheated a little here, borrowing this quote from a real Evo Psych book — Sperm Wars, by Robin Baker, a popular title from a major publisher recommended on countless Pickup Artist and “Red Pill” reading lists. It’s a truly bizarre and often quite disturbing read. (If you have a bit of Google-fu you should be able to locate a pdf of it online with no trouble.)
And speaking of pdfs, if you want tp read the article in Evo Psych I got most of these quotes from, a book review by Kelly D. Suschinsky and Martin L. Lalumière titled The View From the Cuckold, you can find a pdf of it here. See, I really didn’t just make it up!
I’ll stop criticizing evo-psych when I see something come out of it that is more substantial than a hypothesis :). Psychology tries to study human behaviour in a modern context (with mixed results; there is a lot of overgeneralizing from young, White, western, middle-class convenience samples). Evo-psych, in my opinion, does nothing more than look at those findings and say “well… that’s probably because our ancestors did X!” which may or may not be true but certainly isn’t supported by anything.
Yeah, the Recent Comments preview is buggy. I’ve been noticing this on a few blogs lately.
There’s also the “we’ve found that this is true in fruit flies so it’s probably true for people too” problem.
Anyone who can get an ISSN thinks they can call themselves an open access, peer-reviewed journal these days. It looks more like a blog.
:: snooty librarian snoots off to a meeting ::
Yes, lets use insects as an example. What? No, compare us to bonobos if anything.
Are we 100% sure men and women aren’t meant to be penis fencing? I mean, obviously our morphology differs somewhat from that of flatworms, but in science, we must sometimes extrapolate.
@Viscaria: That’s the exact same standard used to gauge physical adaptations – we look at a certain trait, then try to figure out how it served the organism in a state of nature. Do you also dismiss evolutionary biology out of hand?
@Andrew Johnston, no, I don’t. Evolutionary biology draws from physical evidence, including (but by no means limited to) the fossil record, and observable adaptations developing in populations of organisms right now.
Do we really need to have a conversation about why biology and psychology aren’t the same thing and don’t work the same way as sciences?
Curse you, adorably kitty ninja.
I’m also not exactly dismissing it out-of-hand. I don’t believe it will always be impossible for evo-psych to be a rigorous field of study — though perhaps it is right now. I just haven’t yet seen anything that was more than WAG.
The thing is, we just don’t have any way to get accurate enough information about the psychology of early humans to be useful for scientific purposes. What we have is speculation, and so the principle of garbage in = garbage out applies to any conclusions drawn based on that speculation.
Okay, can we not do the whole “OMG psychology isn’t science” thing? Evopsych: Definitely not science. Psychology as a whole: Increasingly scientific. I may be a liiiiittle tetchy about the whole thing given that I did my undergrad with all my (engineer) friends doing the “LOL but it’s not a reeeaaaaal science!” thing, and despite the fact that I’ve got my B.S., it still continues.
Anyways, more on-topic, I think I’ll just sit here and laugh and laugh and laugh at the idea of mind-control sperms or whatever. I simply can’t fathom the stupid.
Was anybody saying psychology isn’t a science? >.> I certainly didn’t mean to.
The evo-psych we see seems to come down to a desperate attempt to prove that women don’t have minds and personalities at all, and that men can just rely on their dicks and fists to get what they want from us, thus not having to use their minds (or alleged minds in the case of MRAs) at all.
And yeah, WTF wordpress, I want my Recent Comments back!
What? Psychology is a science. This does not mean that it’s possible to study the psychology of people who’ve been dead for 200,000 years and who didn’t leave any written records of their lives with any degree of scientific accuracy.
Also, I’d love to read some theories about why so many men are obsessed with how OMFG amazing and powerful and full of mind-control powers sperm is. It’s not just an evo-psych thing, there are lots of guys who seem to be constantly in awe of their own spunk and I’d love to know why just because…seriously, why?
(I’m not just picking on the guys here, any worship of bodily fluids always strikes me as a bit puzzling. Also, why only the sexualized body fluids? Or is there a group of people somewhere who think that snot is the most amazing thing ever and has semi-mystical powers?)
Even if evolutionary psychology was the most rigorous science going, the problem is the way the conclusions are used. So what if the penis was designed as a hypergamy-seeker-outer-and-destroyer back on the savannah. We don’t live on the savannah any more and we’ve evolved different cultural meanings around it. The Manosphere act as though evolution means ‘frozen for all time’.
HELLO all feminists who’re full of awe over menstrual blood…
I’m not in the “ew all bodily fluids are gross” camp either, I just don’t understand the desire to imbue them with mystical powers. How is spunk and/or menstrual blood any different from snot, or earwax? Our bodies produce lots of fluids and other, um, excretions? We’re sort of leaky, really. Why is the stuff that comes from us super awesome and special just because it comes out of our bodies?
Expanding on bodycrimes’ post, the difference between evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology (seems to me) to be that evolutionary biologists don’t walk around shouting at women “OMG, MY RESEARCH SAYS THAT YOUR HIPS WERE MADE WIDE FOR CHILDBIRTHING HOW DARE YOU NOT HAVE WIDE HIPS/USE YOUR HIPS FOR OTHER PURPOSES”.
I mean, unless they’re Richard Dawkins.
The first time my blockquotes have borked.
I feel like I’ve levelled up in MBZ-topia.
@Cassandra: Yeah, regarding menstrual blood there’s certainly the idea that it’s gross, and that idea is wrong, but it puzzles me when people go to the other end of the spectrum and regard it as super-awesome instead. I don’t remember if it was on this blog or on my Swedish feminist forum that some pagan feminist talked about how the onset of menstruation marks the passage from child to maiden, and then you go from… uh… something I don’t remember to chrone when you reach your menopause. And, well, to each their own and all that, but it strikes me as pretty problematic to be that hung up on menstruation? What about trans women? What about cis women who for some reason or other never menstruates? Can’t it just be blood that comes from the body and is no more gross nor no more special than snot or whatever?
Sorry, I’m hopelessly off topic today because I can’t keep up.
TRIGGER WARNING:
In case you were wondering whether MRAs wanted to stop rape, or just keep reducing the likelihood that rapists can ever be prosecuted (is anyone still wondering that?), I give you this little “how to get away with rape” guide posted on r/mr last night in response to someone afraid to date women because of false rape accusations:
(Emphasis mine.) Currently upvoted by 7 MRAs! What a great human rights movement they’ve got there.
My approach to all of this is basically “our bodies leak various substances at various times – deal”. Which applies to both the “wow it’s so amazing and mystical” people and the “ew that’s disgusting” people. Leaking various substances is part of inhabiting a human body – deal.