appreciation for men’s sexuality in Hildegard’s Causae et curae

Hildgard of Bingen's universal man

In Causes and Cures {Causae et curae}, the twelfth-century scholar and woman religious Hildegard of Bingen described four types of men. A subsequent scribe apparently labeled these types by well-established humoral temperaments: choleric, sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic.[1] Characterizations of men, like discussion of man, historically have tended to be asexual. Hildegard, however, didn’t describe types of men conventionally. Using natural metaphors, she characterized four types of men by their sexual desire and sexual behavior. Unlike earlier writers, who were almost all men, Hildegard of Bingen recognized fundamental importance and diversity in men’s sexuality.[2]

The types of men labeled melancholic and phlegmatic Hildegard placed at extremes of a brute / culture continuum. She described melancholic men as heterosexually “without restraint like asses.” Such men are “like animals and vipers.” They behave sexually like “ravaging wolves”; “in their hearts they are as violent as lions and they behave in the manner of bears.” In sexual intercourse, a melancholic man’s erect penis “twists vehemently like a viper.”[3] He performs sexually as if he would like to kill the woman. Melancholic men, like brutes, lack the human capacity to have sex as an expression of love.

Phlegmatic men, in contrast, are womanly and cultured. Phlegmatic men lack male characteristics. They have no beard or only a sparse one. Hildegard described the color of their faces as womanly, and their flesh, “soft like woman’s.” These men have difficulty achieving an erection; “they fail now and then in the act of procreation.” They have difficulty holding an erection to ejaculate at “the right moment.”[4] Phlegmatic men, however, are witty and verbal:

in their thoughts and delivery of speech they are daring and quick, like a fire whose flame rises suddenly and falls as rapidly. Likewise, they show some daring in their deportment but not in their deeds. In closer contact they reveal that for them it is more a matter of intention than deed.

Delivery of speech, deportment, and intention are aspects of human behavior that are highly elaborated culturally.  Melancholic men are associated with the nature of brutes. Phlegmatic men are men associated with women and culture.

Like melancholic men, choleric and sanguine men need sex with women. Hildegard declared of choleric men:

Whenever they have {sexual} intercourse with a woman they are healthy and happy. If deprived of it they dry up in themselves and walk about as if moribund unless they can force out the foam of their semen in lustful dreams or thoughts or in some other perverse act. They feel such lustful ardor that they will, on occasion, also have contact with some insentient and lifeless object and torment themselves with it so that, exhausted, in defense against and as a relief from this ardor, so to speak, they will ejaculate the foam of their semen with lust and in the torment of this ardent passion that is in them. For continence is difficult for these men.

Sanguine men in the absence of women are better able to alleviate lust:

They free themselves more easily than others from the ardent heat of lust, be it spontaneously or by other means.

Nonetheless, intercourse with women is also essential for sanguine men:

If they are without women, the males mentioned above remain as inglorious as a day without sun. As fruit is prevented from drying on such a day and throughout a day without sun, so these men will be in a moderately calm mood when they remain without a woman. Yet around women they are as delightful as a day with bright sun.

For all men but phlegmatic men, frequent sexual intercourse with women is necessary for their good health and happiness.

Hildegard contrasted choleric and sanguine men with natural metaphors for sexual desire. In late European medieval literature, Cupid shot arrows into persons’ eyes to make them love-struck.[5] Although Hildegard undoubtedly knew stories of Cupid, she described choleric men’s sexual desire with arrows used in a naturalistic simile along with other naturalistic similes:

Their blood burns with great ardor when they have seen or heard a woman or brought her to mind in their thoughts, because upon seeing a woman, their eyes are directed like arrows toward the love of woman and, upon hearing a woman, their speech is like a powerful windstorm and their thoughts are like a hurricane that cannot be restrained from descending upon the earth.[6]

Hildegard contrasted sanguine men with choleric men using Aristotelian metaphors of harmony and nobility:

They {sanguine men} can live with women in honesty and fertility, practice abstinence too, and look with beautiful and sober eyes at women. Whereas the eyes of other men {choleric men} are directed like arrows toward women, theirs {sanguine men’s} are honorably in harmony with women. Whereas the speech of other men acts like a powerful storm toward women, theirs has the sound of a cithara. Whereas the thoughts of other men are like a hurricane, these men are called thoughtful lovers full of honorableness.[7]

Hildegard further described sanguine men with abstract, philosophical language:

they are referred to as the golden edifice in proper embrace because in them rationality senses why this is so. Therefore these men will act with self-control and show a human attitude.

The odd phrase “golden edifice in proper embrace,” which is associated with rationality, seems to be a refashioning of the Aristotelian idea of the golden mean. Hildegard, with appreciation for men’s real experience of their humanity, touchingly added:

On the other hand, they often endure much pain when {sexually} controlling themselves as much as possible.

Both choleric and sanguine men have strong, natural sexuality without the moral coloring of brutishness. Sanguine men characteristically transform their strong, natural sexual desire with self-control and rationally seek honor and harmony. Choleric men, however, are also capable of acting “rightly and in a well-balanced manner in the ardor of embrace.” In Hildegard’s thought, types of men are tendencies that allow within themselves differences in behavior.

Men by virtue of their human dignity are intrinsically entitled to be healthy and happy. As Hildegard of Bingen perceptively recognized and courageously expounded, most types of men need frequent sexual intercourse with women to be healthy and happy.[8] A well-ordered society seeks to fulfill men’s sexual entitlement just as it seeks health and happiness for all its members.

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Notes:

[1] Causes and Cures {Causae et curae} has survived mainly in one thirteenth-century manuscript. The temperament labels, along with other labels, are inserted in a different hand from the writing of the rest of the text. Cadden (1984) pp. 165-6. On authorship and modern editions of Causae et curae, see note [1] in earlier post on Hildegard and men’s sexuality.  Hildegard also provided a textually and conceptually independent four-fold characterization of women. Dronke (1984), pp. 180-183, focuses on the four-fold characterization of women.

[2] While I use the traditional humoral temperament labels for convenience, Hildegard’s descriptions of types of men are unprecedented in important ways:

Hildegard tries to work out the implications for personality of the four humoral temperaments, with a vividness and richness of detail unparalleled in earlier medical or physiognomic tradition. What is particularly new and startling in her procedure is that she interprets the four humours fundamentally in terms of sexual behavior, and that she gives a separate detailed account for four temperaments of women as well as for those of men

Dronke (1984) p. 180.

[3] Causae et curae, 54b-55a, from Latin trans. Berger (1999) pp. 60-61.  All subsequent quotes are from id. 51b-56a, pp. 57-62, unless otherwise noted. While sexual behavior predominates in Hildegard’s characterization of men, she also includes some typical elements of physiognomy.

[4] The “right moment” is connected in Causae et curae to women’s pleasure, the subject of the immediate next sentence in that text.

[5] Stewart (2003), intro. The mid-thirteenth-century masterpiece Romance of the Rose narrates:

The God of Love {Cupid} … took an arrow and, when the string was in the nock, drew the bow — a wondrously strong one — up to his ear and shot at me in such a way that with great force he sent the point through the eye and into my heart.

Le Roman de la Rose, v. 2, ll. 1681-95, from Old French trans. Dahlberg (1971) p. 54.

[6] Plato and Galen understood vision as a process of extramission: the eye actively projects out pneuma to see. The Platonic understanding of vision, described most fully in Plato’s Timaeus, was dominant in twelfth-century Europe. Aristotle, in contrast, is associated with understanding vision as intromission: the eye sees through passively receiving beams from the viewed object. Albert the Great vigorously promoted Aristotelian visual understanding in the mid-thirteenth century. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Aristotelian intromission had become the dominant understanding of vision in Europe. Id. pp. 13-18. Hildegard’s arrow simile is aligned with understanding vision as extramission. Hildegard referred to Plato in Causae et curae. A Latin version of Timaeus was known in Europe in her time. Dronke stated:

As for Plato, it is not certain what traditions Hildegard knew. (I have found no clear indication, for instance, that she had read the Latin Timaeus.)

Dronke (1984) p. 183. Hildegard probably did know, perhaps indirectly, the Platonic understanding of vision as extramission. Hildegard’s simile of the arrow is in parallel with similes using windstorms and hurricanes. Her simile of the arrow is neither spiritual nor theoretical. It concerns the natural flight (straight, undeviating from its specific target) of an arrow.

[7] A cithara was an ancient Greek musical instrument in the form of a large lyre.

[8] In her Book of the Rewards of Life (Liber Vitae Meritorum), Hildegard addressed the issue of men fornicating with cattle.  Part 3, Chs. 71, 81, 82, from Latin trans. Hozeski (1994) pp. 164, 167. That concern indicates both men’s sexual ardor and the prevailing failure in humanely encompassing it.

[image] The Universal Man (Humanity and the Macrocosmos), illumination in thirteenth-century text of Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber Divinorum Operum, sec. I.2, completed in 1165. MS 1942, Biblioteca Statale, Lucca (Italy). Thanks to Wikicommons. Here’s some scholarly discussion of the image.

References:

Berger, Margret. 1999. Hildegard of Bingen: on natural philosophy and medicine: selections from Cause et cure. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Cadden, Joan. 1984. “It takes all kinds: sexuality and gender differences in Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘Book of Compound Medicine.'” Traditio. 40: 149-174.

Dahlberg, Charles. 1971. Jean Guillaume de Lorris. The Romance of the Rose. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Dronke, Peter. 1984. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: a critical study of texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hozeski, Bruce, trans. 1994. Hildegard of Bingen. The book of the rewards of life = Liber vitae meritorum. New York: Garland Publishing.

Kaiser, Paul, ed. 1903. Hildegard of Bingen. Hildergardis Causae et curae. Lipsiae: in aedibus B.G. Teubneri.

Stewart, Dana E. 2003. The Arrow of Love: optics, gender, and subjectivity in medieval love poetry. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.

Grazida Lizier & Reservoir Tip on mutually joyful love-making

In an important book that Cambridge University Press published in 1984, a leading medieval man writer discerned the “lines of thought and integrity of thought” of Grazida Lizier.[1] His study of Grazida’s thought revealed themes of eroticism, skepticism, and myth-making. He treated these themes narrowly, tendentiously, and without sensitivity to men’s different social positions. Reading history from below shows that eroticism, skepticism, and myth-making are also central to ordinary men’s thinking about mutually joyful love-making.[2]

white knight imagines love

Grazida Lizier is a relatively neglected figure in medieval scholarship. She was born in 1297 in the small, southern French village of Montaillou. Grazida’s mother, who was born of an unwed mother, was separated from her husband and worked as a tavern-keeper. When Grazida was about fourteen and living in her mother’s house, she began a sexual relationship with the leading local church official, Pierre Clergue.[3] Pierre at that time was probably in his late thirties. Grazida explained:

Because it gave me joy and him also when we made love, I did not think that with him I was sinning.[4]

For the next six months or so, Grazida and Pierre frequently had sex in her mother’s house, with her mother’s approval, mostly in the daytime. Then Pierre Clergue arranged to have Grazida marry Pierre Lizier.

Grazida continued to have sex with her first Pierre while married to her second. She explained:

he still often lay with me, in the four years that my husband was alive; my husband knew about it, and did not put up resistance. When he asked me about our love-making, I said yes, it was true, and he told me to take care it should be with no other man. But Pierre and I never made love when he was at home, only when he was out. …

At the time we made love, both before I was married and after, as our love-making in all that time gave joy to us both, I did not think I sinned, nor does it seem so to me now.

The husband’s concern to limit his wife to just the other Pierre suggests that he valued her more than as a live-in prostitute. He may have also believed that his wife having a child by a wealthy local church official wouldn’t significantly conflict with his over-all interests as a man and a potential father. Grazida showed some complex appreciation for her husband:

When I was married and made love with the priest Pierre, it did seem more proper to make love with my husband — all the same it seemed to me, and I still believe, it was as little sin with Pierre as with my husband. Did I have any qualms at the time, or think that such deeds might displease God? No I had none, and did not think my lying with Pierre should displease any living being, since it gave joy to us both.

If my husband had forbidden it? Supposing he had — even though he never did — I still would not have thought it a sin, because of the shared joy. … Does it displease God more when the partners are married than when they are not? I think it displeases him more when they are unmarried lovers.[5]

While capacity to rationalize increases with higher education, rationalization is an innate faculty of the human mind. Grazida adroitly distinguished between displeasing God and sinning. The latter was more clearly condemned within the letter of Church law. Her focus on that abstract, conceptual distinction obscured the question of whether she would cuckold her husband without his consent. The modern information economy for paternity knowledge works similarly.

The modern man writer sharply and moralistically distinguished between Grazida Lizier and Pierre Clergue in their mutually joyful love-making. Grazida is deeply feeling, unswerving idealistic, and without guile in her statements. Pierre is a coarse, shallow libertine, a hypocritical sensualist, and slippery like a serpent.[6] The man scholar, mounting a chivalrous knight’s horse without appreciation for its literary history, declared:

it is important not to blur the distinction between his promiscuous attitude and her unswervingly idealistic conviction. For Grazida it is uniquely the quality of shared joy between two lovers which frees love-making from all taint. The only possible external impediment to love that she can see is consanguinity (this is clearly a vestige, that she still acknowledges, of her orthodox upbringing). Such an outlook, and the assumptions underlying it, are so different from those of Pierre Clergue, that nothing in Grazida’s second avowal prevents us from fully accepting her statement in the first: “No one taught me these ideas except myself.” If at the beginning of their affair Pierre relaxed her traditional beliefs, he was too shallow ever to arrive at Grazida’s own.

He looks at love-making from the coarse standpoint of the conquering male who “pleasures” a woman (“no sin as long as it gives her pleasure”); she is concerned with tenderness, with the mutual giving of joy.[7]

The modern man writer recognized myth-making of only a primitive sort. Grazida, thinking deeply, declared:

I believe God made those things that are helpful to man, and useful too for the created world … But I don’t think God made wolves, flies, mosquitoes, and such things as are harmful to man

Tracing this line of thought, the scholar pondered the creation of wolves, flies, and mosquitoes, and asked, “Who then made these?” He missed the mythic answer obvious to him, “Those other, evil men made them.” That answer isn’t unparalleled. It’s common, in more or less explicit forms, throughout all times and places.

Men writers at the margins of public discourse have privileged, as did Grazida, mutually joyful love-making. In the plain language of men writing outside of authoritative structures, Reservoir Tip recently wrote:

Last night, I ended up in a little bit of a dilemma. I had two girls scheduled to come over at the same time, mainly because I was expecting one of them to flake. To my surprise, she didn’t.

I thought about bringing them both in and trying for the threesome, but decided against it. As girl one walks into my place, girl two texts me saying she’s arrived. I text girl two back and tell her that “the shit hit the fan” and that I can’t join her tonight. She’s pissed, and rightly so, really. What I pulled was pretty low, and definitely rude.[8]

Just as the orthodox condemnation of incest retained hold on Grazida, Reservoir’s orthodox upbringing apparently prompted him to reject trying for a threesome. While he expected one of the women, without respect for his position, to change her mind about meeting (“flake”), he understood similar actions on his part to be “pretty low, and definitely rude.” Reservoir’s desire for mutually joyful love-making caused him to end his meeting with the first woman:

I’m sitting around with girl one, doing a simple movie at my place, but she ends up being kind of a bitch, and we split after about an hour and a make out.

Reservoir’s subsequent actions shows the depth of his concern for mutually joyful love-making:

I text girl two back, “hey come over now.”
She comes right over and i boink her.

Notice the adverbial use of “right.” That diction subtly acknowledges and validates women’s strong desire for mutually joyful love-making. The word “boink” for sexual intercourse is somewhat unusual. More typical words for sexual intercourse in this genre of writing tend to emphasize the explosive physical vigor of the activity (“fuck”, “bang”). The choice of “boink” is playful, with a sense of childish innocence. Like a traditional fable, Reservoir’s story ends with an epimythium:

If your value is high enough, and the girl is horny enough, she’ll do anything, apparently.

A high priest of seduction, writing on behalf of free souls, ironically appended five “asshole dicktums” to Reservoir’s story.[9] Structures of authoritative morality always exist in human society. Within that reality, Reservoir’s story is a moving expression of mutually seeking sexual joy.

Against seemingly impossible odds, the spirit of such men has not been crushed. However savagely scholastic authorities try to suppress them, their beliefs live on irresistibly — Reservoir Tip’s, indeed, only through a site likely to attract censors, if not prosecutors. Today such testimonies remain as a wonder and a question of expiration.[10]

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Notes:

[1] Dronke (1984) p. 203.

[2] Robert Darnton, Lucien Febvre, Carlos Ginzberg, and E.P. Thompson have been leading proponents of history from below and expansive interpretations of marginal texts. Somewhat under-appreciated has been the extraordinarily sensitive and insightful reading of Ellen Hootton, a ten-year-old factory worker in Wigan in 1833. See Galbi (1996).

[3] Pierre Clergue was rector of the church in Montauillou. The Clergue family was the leading family in Montaillou. Le Roy Ladurie (1978) Ch. III.

[4] Testimony of Grazida, widow of Pierre Lizier of Montaillou, to Jacques Fournier, the Bishop of Pamiers, on August 19, 1320, from Latin trans. Dronke (1984) p. 204. All subsequent quotations from Grazida’s testimony are from id. pp. 204-5. Id. pp. 265-9 provides the Latin source. Dronke’s translation is free. He noted:

The translations {of Grazida’s testimony and that of others from Montaillou} … are in a sense “free”: in order to evoke as accurately as possible the Provençal words that the women themselves will have used in their testimonies, it is necessary not only to turn the Latin into direct speech but also to infer, from legalistic and condemnatory expressions in the official record, the “unloaded” expressions that might lie behind these.

Dronke (1984) p. 316, n. 8. For analysis of such a translating strategy, Arnold (2001). Here’s a much more literal English translation of Grazida’s testimony.

[5] The logical structure of the question, “Does it displease God more when the partners are married than when they are not?” is contra-normative. That structure suggests light sarcasm toward Grazida’s claims.

[6] All these descriptive words, except for the simile, are from Dronke (1984) pp. 204-6. The phrase “like a serpent” is my interpretation of the medieval-biblical allegory implicit in “slippery.” After being imprisoned for about seven weeks, Grazida testified, “I once {aliquando} told him that I’d learnt that my mother Fabrisse was his cousin by blood.” That statement directly contradicts her earlier statement. Moreover, aliquando could also be translated as “sometimes.” Grazida claimed that Pierre Clergue “taught me these errors about sexual sin.” That statement also directly contradicts her earlier statement. The judicial officials recorded her hearsay claim:

She also said she was afraid that if I told the truth about the rector and his brothers, they would kill me or otherwise maltreat me.

The phrase “kill me or otherwise maltreat me” is sensationally pointed. Grazida in earlier testimony indicated only her joy in having sex with the rector (Pierre Clergue). Pre-trial detention is common in criminal justice systems today and doesn’t excuse perjury.  Cf. id. p. 205. In just courts, hearsay testimony isn’t presumed to be true. All testimony in just courts is subject to doubt and questioning. Dronke sternly reprimanded Duvernoy for suggesting that Grazida was behaving shrewdly:

It is disappointing that Duvernoy in his translation of Le register (1 303), says in a footnote to Grazida’s testimony: “elle est consciemment insolente, bien que le procèsverbal ait l’apparence de la naïeté.” This judgement, by the scholar who through his detailed work should have been in the best position to comprehend Grazida’s thoughts, is inappropriately hostile and condescending.

Dronke (1984), pp. 316-7, n. 15. U.S. universities today conduct rape inquisitions with less procedural protections and more hostility to the accused than did medieval heresy inquisitions. Vigorously criticizing those proceedings would show better moral judgement.

On March 8, 1321, the Inquisition sentenced Grazida Lizier to life imprisonment. About four months later her sentence was commuted and she was set free. She was required to wear the Cathar yellow cross on her clothes to signal others to beware of her.

[7] The idea that sex is unobjectionable if both parties enjoy it surely has been a common view in practice among ordinary persons. Pierre Vidal, who lived in the nearby village of Ax-Les-Thermes in Grazida’s time, testified to the Inquisition that the sexual act was innocent if it pleased both parties and the man paid the women for sex. Le Roy Ladurie (1978) pp. 150-1. The latter condition reflects  devaluation of men’s sexuality prevalent in practice throughout history.  Pierre Clergue was the “womanizer per excellence of the Clergue family.” Apparently drawing inspiration from the great teacher of love Ovid, Pierre declared that he wanted all women. Id. p. 154. Testimony to the Inquisition indicated that he had sex with at least twelve women living in Montaillou or nearby Ax-Les-Thermes. Much documentary evidence indicates sex with Pierre was mutually joyful. Pierre, although short of stature, was highly confident, socially adroit, and verbally skillful. Id. Ch. IX, passim. Le Roy Ladurie attributed Pierre’s engaging in mutually joyful love-making with a large number of women to his “power and wealth.”  Id. p. 156. That view, like Dronke’s view, is superficial and condescending. It reflects anti-men animosity and ignorance of the modern applied science of seduction.

[8] Reservoir Tip wrote his story on January 18, 2015. The amount of critical attention it will attract from literary scholars remains to be seen. Grazida Lizier’s testimony has been anthologized in leading works such as Davis et al. (1992). It has also been the basis for a national best-seller, Charmaine Craig’s The Good Men: A Novel of Heresy (2002). Craig studied medieval literature as an undergraduate at Harvard. Here’s a review of her book in the Harvard Crimson. Craig’s success underscores the value of exposing students to a wide range of writing, even writing powerful authorities might find repugnant.

[9] The Latinate ending of “dicktum” suggests the plural form “dickti.” But the final syllable -tum is better interpreted as a popular, contracted variant of “them.”

[10] Cf. Dronke (1984) p. 228.

[image] Modern knight on white charger imagines receiving women’s love. Photo thanks to PublicDomainPictures on pixabay.

References:

Arnold, John. 2001. Inquisition and power: catharism and the confessing subject in medieval Languedoc. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Davis, Natalie Zemon, Georges Duby, Arlette Farge, G. Mouillaud-Fraisse, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Michelle Perrot, Pauline Schmitt Pantel, and Françoise Thébaud. 1992. A history of women in the West. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Dronke, Peter. 1984. Women writers of the Middle Ages: a critical study of texts from Perpetua († 203) to Marguerite Porete († 1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Galbi, Douglas A. 1996. “Through Eyes in the Storm: Aspects of the Personal History of Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution.” Social History. 21 (2): 142-159.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, from French trans. Barbara Bray. 1978. Montaillou: the promised land of error {Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (1975)}. New York: G. Braziller.

primatology, vegetarianism & criminalization of male animals

In 2009, Harvard University Press published a edited collection of scholarly papers entitled Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans. That title is inapt. Primates include humans. Book-marketing interests probably drove adding “and humans” to primates in the title.[1] The book’s subtitle, An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females, displays more publicly significant interests.  Among humans, about equal numbers of men and women report suffering sexual coercion. Aggression isn’t equivalent to sexual coercion. Men are much more likely than women to be subject to serious physical aggression. The book’s conceptual confusions and anti-men biases underscore primate gynocentrism. Primatology in this book unintentionally helps to explain highly disproportionate criminalization of men through sex-biased social concern.

male orangutan pondering humans' views of sexual coercion

In recent decades, primatology has recognized that male and female sexual interests differ. Sex differences are real. Female primates typically have greater direct parental investment than do male primates. Male primates typically are more eager to have sex. Female primates live longer, are less likely to be killed, and are more socially valued. These facts are reasonably associated in an evolutionary perspective. They imply conflict between females and males within the fundamental, universal evolutionary interest in reproduction.

In Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans, primatologists conceptually criminalized non-human primate males physically forcing females to have sex. Non-human primates commonly fight physically with each other over food, social rank, physical position, and other interests. Some non-human primates kill and eat other animals. Implicitly assuming non-physical sexual decision-making to be normative in non-human primates is as silly as assuming vegetarianism to be normative for non-human primates. The underlying logic isn’t reasoned human ethics applied to non-human primates. The underlying logic is gynocentrism imposed on non-human primates to serve human symbolic interests.

While the primatologists conceptually criminalized male non-human primates physically pursuing their sexual interests, primatologists favor such criminalization only with words. Most primatologists support minimizing disruptive intrusions on non-human primates living in the wild. Primatologists have done nothing to organize policing and punishment of wild male non-human primates engaging in what they have labeled sexual coercion. In high-income countries, hunters, who are predominately men, tend to prefer to kill male animals.[2] Primatologists haven’t advocated increasing hunting to lessen male sexual coercion of female non-human primates. In actual practice, conceptually criminalizing male non-human primates serves to strengthen women’s social dominance and highly disproportionate criminalization of men in human societies.

Influential, fallacious claims about evolutionary psychology and human violence have supported highly disproportionate criminalization of men. Women and men roughly equally victimize each other physically in domestic relations. Men’s assaults against their wives don’t have any general implications for evolutionary psychology.[3]  Absurdly false claims about men’s violence against women have persisted in public discourse. That reality is significant for understanding evolutionary psychology. Widespread belief in false claims about violence against women has deep roots in the evolved psychology of men and women. Primatology should bring that human insight to study of non-human primates.

Men, like women, have sexual interests. Men have an evolutionary interest in fathering biological offspring that in turn produce biological offspring. That interest is misrepresented as men’s “proprietary view of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity.”[4] That’s gynocentric rhetoric no better than conceptually criminalizing non-human primates physically pursing their sexual interests.  Sexuality and reproductive capacity aren’t the property of women or men. Sexuality and reproductive capacity flourish in a network of social relations encompassing men and women and reasonably accommodating their differing interests.

Men, for good evolutionary reasons, are interested in knowing their biological offspring. Men have always recognize their risk of being cuckolded. They have naturally and not completely successfully sought to limit their cuckoldry risk. Today, cuckolding men is institutionalized in grotesquely unjust legal procedures for establishing paternity. In addition, dominant political interests have greatly constrained men’s ability to acquire highly reliable paternity information through modern DNA testing. Mothers’ interests in men’s financial resources have overwhelmingly dominated men’s interest in ascertaining biological paternity. Men are now imprisoned, without the benefit of counsel, for being too poor to pay state-mandated financial child-support obligations. Men’s sexual and reproductive interests receive remarkably little weight in modern human societies.

In addition to supporting social injustice, misandristic misrepresentations of men’s interests foster fundamental evolutionary misunderstandings. Influential contributors to Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans declared in their contribution, “human male fitness is and always has been limited primarily by access to the reproductive efforts of fertile women.”[5] In addition to being conceptually silly, that’s quantitatively wrong by roughly a factor of twelve over the past millennium. From about 2000 years ago to 1000 years ago, world human population was about 250 million persons. World population is now about 6 billion persons.[6] What changed in the last millennium wasn’t that women decided to increase their reproductive efforts. Inventions that almost exclusively men made allowed massive human population growth to occur.

With its gynocentric conceptual framework, Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans fails to provide insight into fundamental issues. Most sexual activity in non-human primates doesn’t involve males physically forcing females to have sex.[7] That reality suggests that non-human primates have evolved means to limit physical confrontations over sexual activity. Plausible mechanisms are stress, pleasure, and trust. Physical confrontations create stress and physical risks, including to the prevailing animal. From an evolutionary perspective, physical confrontations hurting the fitness of one’s sexual partner is disadvantageous. Animals, including humans, have biological mechanisms that associate sex with pleasure. Those mechanisms are less operative in hostile sexual encounters. Hostile sexual encounters are also likely to undermine trust between animals. Reducing trust limits opportunities for further interaction and lessens stability of the larger social group. Biological mechanisms common across primates probably reduce hostile sexual encounters and encourage mutually desired ones much more than do human practices of demonizing, criminalizing, and incarcerating men.

Primatology can provide a valuable critical perspective on human behavior. Humans show relatively little concern about violence against men.[8] Humans are highly reluctant to acknowledge that roughly equal numbers of men and women are victims of sexual coercion.[9] Hugely disparate imprisonment of men generates little social concern even in societies where gender equality is a major concern in public discussion. These fundamental, troubling facts should be recognized in intellectually serious, ethically engaged primatology that serves to make human societies more humane.

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Notes:

[1] The editors obviously knew that primates include humans. They specifically displayed that elementary knowledge in the last words of the introductory chapter: “in both humans and nonhuman primates.” Muller, Kahlenberg & Wrangham (2009) p. 18. The editors also displayed that elementary knowledge in the title of their concluding chapter, in the first paragraph of that chapter, and in the last sentence of that chapter. Wrangham & Muller (2009) pp. 451, 466.

[2] The explanation isn’t just devaluation of men’s lives projected onto other animals. Hunters in part prefer to kill male animals because male animals tend to be larger and to have distinctive ornaments.

[3] Wilson & Daly (2009) promotes misandristic misunderstanding of domestic violence. Apparently presuming reader ignorance, id., p. 272, declared in the context of wife beating:

In an oft-repeated phrase, Strauss (1980) maintained that “a marriage license is a hitting license.”

For nearly three decades, Murray Strauss and other family violence researchers have been presenting data showing gender symmetry in physical aggression among intimate partners.

[4] Wilson & Daly (2009) pp. 274-80. Wilson and Daly have been peddling this idea at least since Wilson & Daly (1992). The 2009 publication repeats nearly verbatim a widely disseminated claim from the 1992 publication:

In proposing that men take a proprietary view of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity, we mean that men are motivated to lay claim to particular women as songbirds lay claim to territories, as leopards lay claim to a kill, or as people of both sexes lay claim to valuables.

Wilson & Daly (2009) p. 275. Cf. Wilson & Daly (1992) p. 289. Beyond its misandristic rhetoric, this claim means not much more than that men, like other organisms, have an interest in reproducing biologically.  One could with equal reason declare:

In proposing that women take a proprietary view of men’s sexuality and productive capacity, we mean that women are motivated to lay claim to particular men as songbirds lay claim to territories, as leopards lay claim to a kill, or as people of both sexes lay claim to valuables.

Current laws imposing child-support on men for doing nothing more than having consensual sex underscore current state support for proprietary claims on men based on nothing more than their sexual activity.

[5] Wilson & Daly (2009) p. 275.

[6] For estimates of world population across the past two millennium, Maddison (2001) pp. 231, 241.

[7] Across primates, males physically forcing females to have sex seems to be most common among orangutans. The share of forced copulations varies widely by local population and male type (flanged vs. unflanged). A rough median figure is 50%. Knott (2009) p.86, Fig. 4.2. Although copulations are physically forced, “the degree of physical wounding is extremely low”; “severe wounding of females has never been reported.” Id. p. 82. Forced copulations are a very small share of total copulations for other primates, including humans.

[8] Relatively little concern about violence against men has a chimpanzee parallel in Muller, Kahlengerg & Wrangham’s chapter, entitled “Male Aggression against Females and Sexual Coercion in Chimpanzees” (Ch. 8). It declares:

There are few published data on the rates of intersexual aggression in chimpanzees, but in our own site of Kanyawara, in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, females are as likely as males to be victims of male aggression.

Id. p. 184. The prevalence of false claims about domestic violence against women shows that manipulating data on aggression against females is relative easy. Manipulating data on deaths is more difficult. Among chimpanzees, four times as many males die from aggression as do females. Muller, Kahlengerg & Wrangham’s chapter obscures that large sex disparity in chimpanzee victimization from lethal aggression.

[9] Like much scholarship, Muller & Wrangham (2009) shows no concern for sexual coercion of males. In Ch. 14, p. 355, Melissa Emery Thompson defines rape to exclude men being raped. In Ch. 16, Tommaso Paoli described a survey he administered about bonobos. The survey asked only about male bonobos coercing females to have sex. No such cases were reported. Several respondents on their own initiative reported cases of females sexually coercing males. Reporting on the bonobo colony at Columbus Zoo, Monique Fortunato stated:

I have seen some ‘sexual coercion’ by females to males — not in the strictest sense, in which there are beatings and/or forced copulation, but there is one female in particular that makes very strong advances to males for oral or manual stimulation.

Amy Pollick reported many cases of female sexual coercion of a male bonobo:

I saw plenty of sexual coercion in the San Diego Zoo bonobos — mostly just one female (Lolita) towards one male (Junior). Lolita (second-ranking female) must have done it 40 times in 114 hours of observation, wheras the third-ranking female just 3 times.

Id. p. 414.  In humans, female sexual coercion of males attracts little interest. Voluminous, well-funded work addresses exclusively male sexual coercion of females.

[image] Male breeding orangutan. Thanks to TheBusyBrain and flickr.

References:

Knott, Cheryl D. 2009. “Orangutans: Sexual Coercion with Sexual Violence.” Ch. 4, pp. 81-111, in Muller & Wrangham (2009).

Maddison, Angus. 2001. The world economy: a millennial perspective. Paris, France: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Muller, Martin N., Sonya M. Kahlenberg, and Richard W. Wrangham. 2009. “Male Aggression and Sexual Coercion of Females in Primates.” Ch. 1, pp. 3-22, in Muller and Wrangham (2009).

Muller, Martin N., and Richard W. Wrangham. 2009. Sexual coercion in primates and humans: an evolutionary perspective on male aggression against females. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Wilson, Margo and Martin Daly. 1992. “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel.” Ch. 7, pp. 289-322, in J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, J. Tooby, eds. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press. New York.

Wilson, Margo and Martin Daly. 2009. “Coercive Violence by Human Males against Their Female Partners.” Ch. 11, pp. 271-291, in Muller and Wrangham (2009).

Wrangham, Richard W. and Martin N. Muller. 2009. “Sexual Coercion in Humans and Other Primates: The Road Ahead.” Ch. 18, pp. 451-468, in Muller and Wrangham (2009).