[Marxism] Clitoris, orgasm and Darwinism

[Brian James <bajames@xxxxxxx>]

Ken Ranney wrote:

> Females enjoy sex even without orgasm, which is for both sexes simply icing
> on the cake, and has the look of a gift from nature or??? rather than an
> essential part of reproduction.  Arguably females need not enjoy sex and
> many conceive without enjoyment

So?....

The female orgasm may be a consequence of the accumulation of other
material features that condition the enjoyment of sex, which is selected
for. Furthermore, and getting back to your original issue, the structure
of the human clitoris probably has something to do with the birthing of
big-headed infants. The idea that every feature has to be directly
selected for survival is bad darwinism.

>> I somehow don't think the
>> simple in-out in-out, just here to read the meter, wham bam thank you
>> mam, would have been satisfactory for our intelligent ancestors any more
>> than it is for (most) modern humans.

> "Satisfactory" has no place in survival.

Exactly. And survivalism has a very limited role in human behaviour.

> What counts, as in capitalism,
(amazing the correlation between capitalism and survival a la Darwin, as
Jeremy Rifkin loves to point out!)

Rifkin, who is first and foremost an activist, is a poor guide to
science. How a theory was derived does not undermine its validity if it
stands the test of scientific observation and debate, which Darwin's
theory clearly does (after 150 years!). It may not be a perfect
explanation of our existence, but it's certainly the best one available.
Darwinism is no more explained by capitalism than it is an explanation
of capitalism.

> is outdoing the competition, in this
> instance in the number of progeny produced.  If Darwin was right, the
> wham-bam man would have had more time for the arduous business of survival
> and should have produced more off-spring than the man who took time,
> provided that he could ejaculate frequently.

So the rapist, according to your simplistic reading of Darwin, would
have had a greater evolutionary advantage. You forget the social aspect
of human nature.

> Such men do exist.  We are
> informed by Kinsey that "a scholarly and skilled lawyer has averaged over
> 30 [ejaculations] per week for thirty years".  The combination of wham-bam
> and prodigious sexual ability would have demanded polygamy to increase the
> genes of our hero, and this is exactly what should have occurred.

Again, this leaves out the social dimension. There is no reason to
assume that macho lawyer types won the war of sexual selection in the
past any more than they do today. The lawyer you refer to probably
jerked off alot.

> With polygamy, the relative scarcity of women would inevitably produce
> competition, another feature of Darwinism, among the men.  The result of
> the competition would be to improve the features of men which are desirable
> to women.  If women, as is commonly alleged, (usually by male writers of
> television comedies)1 like large penises, then competition among men should
> have developed men with humongous penises eons ago rather than the
> relatively small penises observed in Greek statues.  What is alleged to be
> a woman's greatest disappointment on the wedding night would no longer
> (though no doubt it would be longer) be disappointing.  Similarly with
> handsome faces, tallness, muscular bodies, etc.  The less successful would
> leave far fewer children to carry on their genes, so would be eliminated
> from the world.  Competition among men for wives would be fierce..  Only
> the men most attractive to women, probably even charismatic, and the
> physically strongest, would be successful.  Darwin has anticipated this
> with his statement:

> With animals having separated sexes there will in most cases be a struggle
> between the males for possession of the females. The most vigorous
> individuals, or those which have most successfully struggled with their
> conditions of life, will generally leave most progeny. But success will
> often depend on having special weapons or means of defence, or on the
> charms of the males; and the slightest advantage will lead to victory.

How does "charms of the males" equate with bigger penises? You reduce
the entire field of sexual psychology to a vulgar myth.

>Human intelligence after all
>co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years with all sort of complex
>behaviours that don't directly represent a survival or strictly
>procreational instinct. May as well argue that the human drive to
>produce art and religion is anti-darwinian!

> "The human drive to produce art [not religion] is [indeed]
> anti-darwinian!  You might have included mathematics, humour and music in
> your statement, for there is no Darwinian explanation for these either.

Or romantic love, or homosexuality, or masturbation, or pornography,
or........ . Darwinism explains the evolution of higher intelligence,
but does not account for the specific products of it. This is something
that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology try to do, and those are
rejected by the mainstream of Darwinism.

> Religion is quite different.  As far as I can tell, all religions have
> their basis in the state, though the Jesus was an anarchist, and it took
> several centuries before the perversion of his ideas into what we call
> Christianity today.

No, religion is not different. The impulse towards religion, like art,
is evident in prehistoric humans and even proto-humans. It is not a
product of the state, but a consequence of higher intelligence, a
capacity for abstract thought. What you're really questioning is the
darwinian explanation of higher consciousness, which takes us back to
square one.

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