This is a post about stimuli. It’s about all the things that turn you on and all the many more things that don’t.
I’ve mentioned before that men prefer the novel within a limited range of stimuli while women prefer the familiar, but can learn to adapt to a vast range of stimuli.
You’ll notice I’m NOT saying, “Men like X and women like Z.” That’s only partly because I avoid gender dichotemies when I can. Mostly it’s because there is no such thing as “what men like” and “what women like.” In the most technical sense, there are no innate stimuli.
Oh. So what the fuck does that mean, Em?
I’ll tell you.
Studies of non-human animals (like rats) show that animals need to learn what’s sexually relevant. Even a receptive female rat is not innately appetitive to a male rat; he needs to grow up around receptive females in order to learn that receptive females are sexy.
(There is one possible exception in humans: it’s possible (but by no means certain) that the sight of women’s genitals is innately appetitive for heterosexual men. Technically, this could be tested, but I wouldn’t want to be the one trying to convince a human subjects ethics committee that it’s a good and important idea to attach a strain gauge to the penises of newborn infants and then show them pictures of vulvas.)
No innate stimuli, okay. And now we’re at the so-what stage.
Why is it important that sexual appetitiveness is LEARNED rather than inborn? And what, Emily, what about all that stuff you said before about waist-to-hip ratio and other cues of fertility and health? Huh? What about THOSE?
Well, that’s the weird thing. There are reliable things that we (and other animals, within species) consider appetitive once we get to be adults. Rats wouldn’t get far, as a species, if the males didn’t reliably come to find receptive females sexy. So what’s the deal?
Things get very technical at this point – more technical than I can explain or even fully understand – but the short, superficial version of the story is this:
Traits like, say, preference for .7 WHR, aren’t selected for, per se. Instead, what gets selected for is the developmental process that gives rise to that preference within the environment in which an individual develops. (Or, if you’re Richard Dawkins, what gets selected for is the gene or set of genes that represents that developmental process that gives rise etc etc.)
Hardly any rat that survives to adulthood grows up without seeing (and, more importantly, smelling) a receptive female. So why bother evolving a mechanism that knows that receptive females are sexy when you can instead evolve a mechanism that is cheaper, faster, and more adaptable to other functions, like a mechanism that can LEARN that receptive females are sexy? Dig?
It’s only when we humans separate rats from their environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) that we discover the mechanism doesn’t work without that environment.
Christ only knows (and I use that phrase only in the loosest, most speculative and literary way) what’s happening with the sexual preferences of humans living so far removed from our EEA that we have sex toys, pornography, and angst. It seems that some things are functioning fairly reliably, like the WHR stuff, the cues of health, that stuff. What seems to be messier and less reliable are cues to social status and constructed images of nubile women – women who don’t exist but who APPEAR to exist and meet and exceed every standard of attractiveness.
A problem for another day. Also a problem for another day: sexual orientation. It’s a different and TERRIBLY complicated issue.
What I want you to remember here is that the “sexually relevant stimuli” to which SES responds are not “hardwired” in the sense that they’re there spontaneously in an organism regardless of where it grows up. If sexually relevant stimuli are in any way hardwired (and I’m convinced that some of them are, in this other, special way), it’s insofar as they result from the developmental process of a human growing in an environment in which those stimuli are learned – and learned EARLY. In the case of boys, who have a more stereotyped set of sexually relevant stimuli, these stimuli seem to be established by the time the boy gets through the initial phases of puberty.
Needless to say, it’s different for girls. Females have more plastic, adaptable responses; nearly anything can become sexually relevant through experience.
(And it interests me strangely, Jeeves, how this works for trans folks, pre- and post-hormones. I’d guess that FTM folks experience a stereotyping of cues for desire, though not to the extent of biological men, as they get more and more T, but that MTF folks KEEP their stereotyped cues for desire. Of course there’s like NO research on that. One of you go do that research and let me know, okay?)
So neat, eh? No innate sexually relevant stimuli!
I can’t think of any practical implications for this bit of knowledge, other than as yet another one of those tidbits to share at parties. Just be careful, as talking about sex at parties can apparently lead the listener to think you’re open to the idea of sex with them.
I was reading an NYT Magazine article about a recent uproar over a skillfully performed, sexed-out dance routine to “Single Ladies” by 8-year-old girls. I might be completely out on a limb here but it was the first thing that came to mind after reading your post.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13fob-wwln-t.html
The author’s perspective, which I found interesting, was that perhaps “the” problem with “sexualizing” these little girls is that “Those bootylicious grade-schoolers in the dance troupe presumably don’t understand the meaning of their motions (and thank goodness for it), but, precisely because of that, they don’t connect — and may never learn to connect — sexy attitude to erotic feelings.”
She goes on to cite another author whose book is about teenage girls’ sexuality: “the girls I talk to respond to questions about how their bodies feel — questions about sexuality or desire — by talking about how their bodies look.”
So…what might these little girls learn from going through sexual motions in a non-sexual (though related) environment? Might they simply learn that dancing to Single Ladies is sexy, and sex manifests through visuals, not sensations? Or might they be feeling erotic desire along with the other dance-related feelings (confidence, energy, excitement…all good things?) Or is the dance simply adding more complication to the “body-mind” dissonance we see in female desire; does placing the sexual in a non-sexual context in childhood create more dissonance?
Or have I tangented way out of the reach of this post?
It’s is about 99% tangent – an interesting tangent that no doubt I’ll end up writing about, but a tangent. Actually it’s, like, 3 tangents – sexualization of children, internalized objectification of women, and the interaction between non-concordance and sexual development.
Short response: little kids don’t separate sexual pleasure from other forms of pleasure. For them, sexually relevant stimuli are their body sensations – their sexuality is essentially about THEMSELVES; only at puberty does it really transition to others/external stimuli. It’s incredibly difficult to know what effect a “single ladies” type experience might have the development of a girl’s sexuality because we just don’t have much in the way of science about it; it’s virtually impossible to do research on children’s sexuality because of the ethical issues involved. And it’s virtually impossible for most people even to THINK about children’s sexuality in a rational way because our culture’s fear of childhood sexuality is such that it simply shuts down any rational discourse we might hope to have.
Someone asked a related question in email. I’ll do a post.
5 stars for a The Magnetic Fields reference! This is part of why I love your blog so much…
Being the grad-humanities-in-the-90s anti-essentialist that I am, I’m always on board with anything that says, “Quality X is not innate.”
One use for this, for the few (or perhaps only me) who would be interested in such a subject, is that like the discovery of the SES/SIS research, it further allows one to de-innatize one’s sexual business and see it in what the Marxists would call “material” (and thus alterable) terms.
Not that one can drastically alter trained/learned preferences, but it’s easier to understand all of this as a set of constructions/learnings than experiencing one’s sexuality as this hardwired “force from without” that sits somehow magically at the center of one’s being and can be neither understood nor accessed, but only obeyed.
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