Does penetration = presumption of power/control?

[skrumle]

Was chatting with my H last night and mentioned the Romeo and Juliet law in Ireland that's been discussed on here a few times. Anyway, when I asked if he thought it was reasonable his immediate answer was "no". I then asked him: if our son was gay, and started a conversation about a sexual experience that he was unhappy/uncomfortable about would he be more likely to feel that our son had been forced/co-erced if he was the one penetrated rather than penetrating and got a in reply...

I have to be honest, when I read the original thread on here my automatic view was that to protect girls over boys like this was to deny the fact that girls enjoy sex too, almost like taking a step back. When I read the thread fully though and thought about the implications for girls I probably did start to think that girls should have more protection than boys.

So, should there be a presumption that penetration equals a greater degree of control? So two heterosexual 15yos - greater responsibility lies with the boy to ensure that this is what both of them want?

No, I'm not saying that at all.....although the odds are high!! I am saying that part of the whole story of PIV and why it's so 'important' in the human race is that we produce and so it seems highly likely that it's human biology as, at least, part of it. It is not just behaviour.

Also hunter gatherers have the issue of lactation and that being an effective contraception....afterall they would have fed babies for longer.

Ok, I'm lost.

I think it is human biology too.

That doesn't make it natural for everyone though, does it? I can curl my tongue, but that doesn't make people who can't 'unnatural'.

Yes, but I am basing the average of 9 months of not being able to conceive on hunter gatherer data. Women are usually able to conceive while breastfeeding beyond that 9 months. For biological reasons, there is a cross cultural weight (of the child) at which mothers start to introduce additional food items, so that babies are both breastfed and fed other food. This means the energy demands on the woman's body is reduced and she is able to conceive.

Then we agree. [wipes brow]

And we know that this was the case in the past. You can identify the time at which additional food was introduced to a child's diet from the chemistry of the adult human dentition, part of which is formed in the jaw during infancy.

Milly....how do you/we know about conception if they haven't had babies? [genuine question] Kung hunter gatherers[sp?] or older anthropological studies and even then how do we really know?

x posts.

Could it be the mother had baby strapped to her the whole time and was so dependent that she never had a moment? (not saying the h/g didn't have adventurous sex.....god I hope they did, you know a bit of a break in a very hard life!!) Sorry have been high glossing the house!!

I'm not sure we do agree. I think we're drawing different conclusions - I think the fact that PIV is still so central in society is not a good thing for women, at all. I would be perfectly content if society called me an odd woman for preferring it - it should be a bit of an anomaly these days, when the vast majority of the time we don't have sex in order to reproduce, when pregnancy is still a big risk for many women (physically and socially), and when it's not ideal pleasure-wise for many women.

Well, when I say conceive, I actually mean the indicator of the ability to conceive - menstruation. I just couldn't be bothered to look up the spelling of amenorrhea to put it in a sentence.

I'm not sure it's the most pleasurable for men either.....

Posie, there might be a hundred and one reasons why a woman avoided getting pregnant for years. How they did this is not really the point.

The point is that it was being argued that it was 'natural' (so biologically advantageous) for women to have the urge to want to have PIV sex all the time. But rationally, it isn't advantageous.

That doesn't mean you can't enjoy doing it. There isn't any evolutionary benefit to me coming on MN, but I'm doing it anyway.

lenin - as I say, I do not want to put this forward as evidence since it's just anecdotes I've not looked into much. But I study rich men and women who, yes, often lived apart. It's also clear that until fairly recently, husbands and wives who were rich didn't share beds; they had their own rooms. I've not studied how you research about sex and I know it's difficult so I don't want to draw conclusions. But I wonder if maybe the idea that a lot of society has, that PIV is totally natural and has always been 'the' definition of sex might be one of those myths like 'women in the past stayed at home with the kids' - ie., something that we've decided to see as normal because that version of the past makes our current gender stereotyping seem better.

I have to say, I am not really following your posts either posie, I am finding them confusing.

Milly - thank you for your posts, they are super interesting.

Can I ask if there is any way of ascertaining whether people back in those days were actually in general monogamous?

Also, in response to what you say Milly about it not necessarily being advantageous for women to want PIV all the time - does this mean lesser sex drives generally make biological sense, or does it mean female sexual urges are proven to be related to orgasm rather than penetration?

E.g a lot of people are saying on here that if a woman wants sex, it may not be PIV sex. Wouldn't it make more sense evolutionally (not entirely sure that's a word but hey ho) for the female sex drive to match her ability and desire to be impregnated, ie not that frequently unless in the right circs?

But I think sex is also an important natural urge for reasons not to do with procreation, right? In the animal kingdom, animals have sex when they can't get/make another animal get pregnant. It's about bonding and all sorts of important things.

I head that orgasms actually produce a chemical in women's brains that makes them want to bond with their partner and feel protective of him/her.

I think orgasms as an evolutionary mechanism to make us procreate would be totally OTT - we don't really need that much pleasure that often, just to remind us that making babies is a good thing.

Whether or not our ancestors were monogamous is always going to be a lot more speculative than questions about say, breast feeding.

Basically, monogamy is not very common in mammals. Mammalian species that are monogamous tend to be more sexually dimorphic than those that are not. In other words, where males are much larger than females (chickens, for example - although they're domesticated so perhaps not a good example), the male tends to have lots of sexual partners. When males and females are similar is size, monogamy is much more common.

Humans have low sexual dimorphism. There isn't a large difference between the size of males and females. The size difference is smaller in anatomically modern humans than it was in earlier hominid species. The size difference in our species now is smaller than it was in the earliest anatomically modern humans.

So it would follow that our ancestral species were polygamous and we are more likely to be monogamous. But, of course, we are human, and we have replaced biological speciation with cultural adaptations; that allows us to live almost anywhere on earth without needing to evolve into a different species, so our behaviour becomes much more about our cultural learning than our biological drives. So how much the behaviour of other species can be compared to ours is arguable, because we have more cultural behaviour than other species do. Of course lots of our cultural behaviour just exists; it is neither positive nor negative in terms of evolutionary adaptation.

Yes, I agree with LRD. Some species use a range of sexual behaviour as a way of socially bonding.

Also chickens are not a good example because they are not mammals! Perhaps I'd better stop discussing things badly and go to bed.