April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and Child Abuse Awareness Month
Well, I thought that the story about the Nevada judge who said that it’s normal and natural for men to want to have sex with 1 year old infant girls was bad…
Oh wait, did I say girls? I meant 1 year old women… Or as Judge Bill Maddox put it so eloquently,
“I mean women from the time they’re 1 all the way up until they’re 100.”
So, I thought that was going to be the most outrageous thing I read today. But that was before I read David Brin’s article, Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution: A Paleo-Anthropological Speculation on the Origins of Secondary-Sexual Traits, Male Nurturing and the Child as a Sexual Image that gives “evolutionary” reasons for child molestation and the exploitation of women. We look at elephant seals. We look at lemurs. We look at … oh you really have to read it for the full wtf-ery. I liked this part:
Human females began competing for mates because they needed the kind of competent, collaborative devotion received by female birds — but which only a fraction of human males seem inclined or capable of delivering.
That explains.. why women love to rape birds? No wait… It has something to do with hairiness and size… the smaller and unhairier the person/receptacle, the more likely to be “sexually selected”? Soooo this explains, wait a minute, how does this explain guys who have sex with sheep? Maybe it’s post-shearing season. Anyway, there’s a bunch in the middle attempting to explain why adult women have been sexually selected by evolution to “appear juvenile”. This “external juvenilization of women” causes feelings of love and tenderness in men. Or something. Which also means they’ll be tender and loving to their children. WTF again. Then there’s some storks, and reindeer, and lessons which wise old men will teach to young teenage women on how to choose their mates wisely, which I suspect means they will choose wise old men, who feel tenderly towards, um, the external juvenilization of women, perhaps? Quick! We need a program to teach young girls how to make wise choices!
Remind me never to wax my mustache if I get one. Maybe hairiness will keep off the lunatics!
Anyway, I know Brin’s silly, and no one I know pays attention to him anymore, but coming right on top of the judge in Nevada, well, just wow. It’s a whole other level of outrageous – it’s the same thing in pseudo-scientific garb. As far as I’m concerned he might as well be the Time Cube guy.
I had no idea David Brin was one of the crazies. That makes me sad, because I love his books.
I remember being at a talk by Bruce Sterling. Chairman Sterling took questions from the audience. Someone asked him what he thought about some elaborate idea that Brin had presented somewhere.
Sterling said, “Brin is a crank. I love his fiction, and he’s a good guy, but he has a lot of ideas that just plain whacko.”
OK, I’ve gone back and read Brin’s essay more carefully.
His thesis is unconvincing, but not nearly so silly or pseudoscientific as you make it sound. He argues that evolution has favoured male humans who have nurturing impulses toward children, which is hardly a strange claim. His examples from other species are in large part in service of observing that the males of some species do not have that impulse, while others do. He argues that this selection for child nurturance has been a process of sexual selection, through female humans’ choice of mates. That’s pretty straightforward, and I find it plausible enough.
He then goes on to argue that this has creates selection pressure on female humans to exhibit some neotenous (childlike) features, like relative hairlessness, in order to test whether or not males demonstrate this child-nurturing impulse. He claims that this may be an explanation for the importance of females’ secondary sexual characteristics to triggering attraction in human males, arguing that this trigger acts as a counterweight to neoteny. Pædophilia, suggests Brin, is a disorder that happens when a breakdown in the system omits the secondary sexual characteristics trigger, leaving only the neoteny trigger.
While there’s a whole bunch of reasons to find this an unconvincing thesis, it’s hardly the incoherent, pseudoscientific argument you suggest. Brin’s idea is weak, but it’s not crazy.
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