 Hi, and welcome to episode number seven of What Sex Got to Do with It, with my favorite 84-year-old great-grandmother first time, well, it's actually not first time author, right? No, this is, I've written a lot more books than I've had published, but this is the third book I've had published by a traditional publisher. Right, right, right, right, right, right. And now I'm kind of recalling a little bit that we talked about that in one of the earlier episodes, so you have to go back and see that conversation, folks, but this was called Sex on the Brain. Why? Well, because it's a species, we certainly do have sex on the brain. I mean, in part, that's because of our continuous sexual receptivity. That's one of the things that sets us apart from other species. I mean, but seriously, do we have to know, I mean, I know, I've heard descriptions when Donald Trump was president of his penis. I mean, really, do we have to have that kind of information? I'm also puzzled why various political figures have to be identified by their sexual orientation. Oh, this is our first openly gay whatever. Right. Absolutely fascinated with other people's sex lives in ways that sometimes seem to me inappropriate. I mean, I really would rather not have read a description of Donald Trump's penis. I wish I'd never, never gone there. So we are a species that is very, we have a lot of non-reproductive sex. So, the woman who's written a book with the word sex in the title is protesting our obsession with sex. I mean, what can I say? But it is, the older I get, then, I begin to feel alienated from my own species. Sometimes I look at us as if I'm a species from another planet. And I think, who are, what is this species, Homo sapiens? And there was an author that I really like, Adam Rutherford, who wrote a book called, it was first published in the UK, I forget what the UK title was, but when it was published in the United States, they changed the title to Humanimal, which I don't think is a very good title. He's the one who made the point of how much sexual activity there is that does not result in babies. So we're much, much, much better at having sex without having children than we are at having sex and producing offspring. So there's a lot of sexual behavior that's unrelated to reproduction in humans. Well, that's interesting. So do you think that is a function of birth control? No. Oh, interesting. No, not at all. But we would have more babies if there wasn't birth control, all right? I'm not sure. The women I interviewed introduced birth control use when they met a man with whom they wanted to have children. It's like that was the moment when they suddenly could picture themselves pregnant when they first began to think babies and then they initiated birth control use. So then were they not having sex then before? Oh, they were having sex. But then how would you avoid having kids if they weren't having sex? Well, that's, you know, for me, my explanation, the highest self-esteem that accompanies ovulation. But I don't really know. I mean, that's really a wild speculation on my part. So I shouldn't even talk about it. But no, that's the continuous sexual receptivity that came along with the mutation that created concealed ovulation. And it's a very good pair bonding mechanism. I mean, it's a very good pair bonding mechanism. So it definitely has its advantages. But we are, as a species, we have a lot of sexual activity, totally disconnected from reproduction, except that if it creates, helps create pair bonds, then it contributes to the successful rearing of the children that you have. So, you know, there's just certain words I can't put together in a sentence, you know. And I didn't imagine the conversation going here at all. Sorry about that, Les. So I'm going to ask it away without putting together a certain sequence of words, but you'll know when I'm talking about it. Well, this is embracing myself over here. So why is it you felt compelled to read a description of a certain ex-president's genitals? Because if I saw that, it's like, there's no way I'm reading that. I'm just not going to read it. I'm a compulsive reader. I subscribe to the Atlantic, to Harper's, to The New Yorker. I subscribe to three national newspapers. I skim through them quickly every day. So I just get exposed to a lot of information, and that whole stormy Daniel saga. That's, you know, she's the one that came out with the description. I wasn't reading to get that description. It just happened. It just happened. Yeah, before you do it. Before you do the words. I got you. I got you. Before you do it, that paragraph is in front of you. I know. And I am always curious about things. I mean, in all those magazines, newspapers, et cetera, that I scan and read every day. I get it. I'm very interested always in anything related to courtship reproduction. So I get exposed, you know, because I'm just interested in that stuff. I think if I were reading a story and I wasn't expecting that, but then that was the next paragraph, I wouldn't be able to skip it, you know, and then I have an image in my mind that I'm stuck with, and I guess I need some kind of a drug to that way. Okay, now I'm going to tell a story that I'm glad my son will not be watching this. And you're going to talk about always my interest in courtship and reproduction and genetics. When I was teaching school and my son was a toddler, he was not yet in school. I'm glad a friend of mine was the one who babysat him while I was off teaching. So he was out playing with the other kids in front of the house and there was a ditch along the road. There was a road with no traffic. This was the way it looked outside of Kansas City. We were in Missouri. And someone had thrown a pornographic magazine into the ditch. And my friend Vera, who was the babysitter, she came out and saw the kids with that magazine. She said, oh my goodness, give that to me. I'll throw it away. And Craig, my son, said, oh no, you can't throw it away. You have to save it for my mother. She's really interested in stuff like that. So there we have it. So how old was he then? Oh, preschool. He wasn't yet in school. Save it for my mother. She's really interested in stuff like that. I'm so, so glad it was a friend because anyone else would not have relayed that story back to me. Vera and I found it hysterically funny. But that's just an indication even my kids picked up on the fact, I don't know, I was interested in courtship in all species, really. I always was. Yeah, no, I got you, and so, so, yeah, I mean, like I said, I get the contact to meet a few. And I think finally, I've met someone who I think has more curiosity than I do, yeah. Or the wrong kind of curiosity for her. Oh, no, it's wrong. There's nothing wrong about it at all. So it's more of my, well, yeah, we'll just leave the rationale behind. So, to the beginning of the chapter, you know, you say that most of them say that while women should have the same opportunities as men to work or participate in politics, they should do more homemaking and child-wearing, and that leads me to ask you, what kind of homes do you think we would have? And how would children be different if the roles were reversed, if men did the homemaking and child-wearing? Well, and of course, increasingly, I mean, there are men, described as what, house husbands, if that's what they call themselves, you know, we're moving toward that, and my, I would actually like to see more shared domestic labor between the male and female parent, or even, you know, I don't know how it is in gay couples, whether the division of labor is as acute as it is in heterosexual couples. But I think that we really need more economic equality before that's ever going to happen. And I think it would be great. You know, go back, you don't even know, you know, when we were an agrarian, more an agrarian economy, there was more shared labor between men and women then. And like women would be out in the fields that children would come to. So women, I think, had more power in a way in those kinds of communities. Now where we work away from home, and we'll see after this, you know, the quarantine and the pandemic and people working from home, I think that general consensus is, though, that that has been much harder on women than it has on men. Yeah. Makes me wonder if there are any studies, you know, on gay couples, you know, and the vision of labor and the household. There have been, but I'm not, I mean, I've, again, in reading all these things I skim through, I'm not confident enough to describe the results. Yeah, generally I find relationships mean that people do the role in the relationship that they are good at or that they prefer, I mean, and so the vision of labor generally isn't equal. I mean, if you really say, oh, well, you know, you put this amount of time into effort, also like time multiplied by effort, I mean, for all the things that are done in relationship aren't going to end up being equal. They're not going to be completely equal. But not even close. So I'm not even saying that it's not equal, you know, but I'm thinking it's probably not even close, you know, so that one is just going to be good at certain kinds of tasks that have either, either require greater effort, you know, or more time, or both, you know. So that's just my hypothesis, you know. Well, and of course, to get back to the biology of it all, once sexual selection evolved as opposed to asexual selection, that's the original division of labor right there. And the sociobiologists used to have an expression, which, you know, again, these expressions give an overview, but I'm not recommending them, but they do explain something. And that is sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. And so the female has the scarce resource, which is the egg. You know, she's born with all the eggs she'll ever produce in her lifetime. Men produce gazillions of sperm once they reach sexual maturity on a regular basis. So they can sort of squander sperm and not worry. A woman, once she gets pregnant, she already has a much larger investment in this little embryo. From the moment she becomes pregnant, her investment is so much larger than the man's investment. And so the person who's invested more in something becomes invested in taking care of that. And so I think that, you know, the cost of pregnancy is very, very high for women. It changes our bodies, you know, it's dangerous to our health. We tend to overlook the physiological impact of a pregnancy on a woman. And then when the baby is born, now if she's breastfeeding, and certainly the recent formula shortage is making, I think more women think about the wisdom of breastfeeding. So you have that under your control. Women are more inclined to keep investing because they already have a disproportionately heavy investment in the birth of that child. I mean, once a woman, I think I say in the book even, once a woman is pregnant, her reproductive machinery is essentially frozen. Certainly until the baby's born, if she's breastfeeding, breastfeeding often inhibits ovulation. So until she weans that baby, she's not going to be able to get pregnant again, where, you know, theoretically, a man could impregnate a gazillion women in that same period of time, a gazillion women in that situation. So there's a physiological basis for that gets carried over. That doesn't mean I'm recommending it, as I hope anyone who reads my book realizes, I argue that there's an awful lot of our behavior that has a genetic or biological component that I think we need to learn to rise above. And that mismatch of investment is one of the behaviors. But I think it'll happen only when there's economic equity, which we do not yet have. Gotcha, gotcha, you know, so where do I go next? I mean, I have a couple ideas here. I did not check your footnotes on this, so I can very well answer this question myself, but just for the sake of conversation, you end one section, one paragraph by saying why do men need women? And say perhaps they need them as much for conversation as they do for sex. Was there any research behind that? No, I was quoting one of the women that I interviewed actually, who felt that that long quote was actually taken from my dissertation, is what that was taken from, was one of the women I interviewed, who, she and her husband had a very tight bond. They were both pretty sexually adventurous, but she felt the thing that kept her husband bonded to her was the fact that he could talk to her and be vulnerable in a way that he could not with anyone else. And she felt that conversation was a more compelling bond than even sex in her case. They had a pretty lively sexual relationship. So, but yeah, I remember that woman, she was just perfectly convinced of that, that her husband remained faithful to her. She did not worry about him wandering because she knew that he loved to talk to her and that she was able to hear him and not judge him. And yeah, I remember earlier you had alluded to different conversational styles between men and women. And so this sort of, when I was skimming through this chapter before coming up here today, I thought, oh, that kind of harkens back to the question that that that Len raised before about whether they're different sort of language conversational styles between men and women. That woman certainly felt that there were. You know, I'm just going to go for it because this chapter is all about sex on the brain. And so you can't just say, you know, they had kind of lively adventures. What was the nature of it? I'm not going there because we don't know who they are, you know, so I'm like, I'm still not going there. That's this one. I, you know, the woman who was outraged that she knows what a certain ex-president's penis looks like. I'm not going into detail on that particular couple. OK. So, you know, so you tried, Len. That's fine. No, no, no, so I'm fine. I'm fine with that, you know, so. So now I need to change my gears a little bit, you know. That's 84 year old great-grandmother, surprised as she does have her limits. I have the occasional boundary. My grandkids would not necessarily agree, my one little grand daughter used to say, oh, bamboo, you're so inappropriate. That's totally fine, you know. And actually, I mean, I just trying to pick out me from. So we actually kind of discussed this a little bit earlier, you know, you you talked about how the species should try. Well, we have to, as you say, if we come so clever, we figure out how to outsmart this evolutionary push. We have effectively guaranteed our own extinction, reproduce or die, you know. So if we never have children, if we completely rise above that push to have children, then, you know, the species will end if they're. And I'm not saying that you have to reproduce. I hope people don't misunderstand me on that. I think people have lots of value. I mean, maybe a special value if they don't have their own immediate children that they're investing in, they can contribute to the community. You know, they invest in nieces and nephews, other children. They make the world a better place for everybody. You don't have to reproduce to contribute mightily to who we are as a species. In fact, maybe people are so intent on investing just in their own children. That's just investing in their own genes. That's a kind of selfishness, you know. The selfish gene, Richard, is that his first name, Dawkins? The selfish gene hypothesis. So I'm not saying that reproduction is the greatest thing, but bottom line, if nobody reproduced, that would be the end of the line for the species. But you don't have to have children to make wonderful contributions to the health of the species, the immediate health of the species. I totally get where you're coming from with that. Yeah, and much like when, yeah, I get it. And yeah, because there was another conversation where the race could have been, it could have been implied as part of what you were saying. Oh, yeah, oh, right, right, yeah. And that wasn't at all, so I totally get that here. And you know, I was more so thinking about in more advanced, for lack of a better word, societies it seems that the birth rate is below the replacement rate. And that's because humans, this one of our, to me, our primary reproductive and economic innovation is that we control resources symbolically. And because of language, we create deeds, et cetera. And all other species control their access to resources by defending the resources they need with their own bodies. And since they're pretty much uniform in size and shape, there's an equitable distribution of resources in humans. That's not true. We control our access to resources symbolically. And we'll be talking about that later. Once you are able to guarantee that the children you have give enough resources to make sure that they will mature and to reproductive age on their own. Then you have very excellent reproductive success by having fewer children. In fact, I say that Darwinian's flaw, that one of Charles Darwin's major flaws was what I call his Malthusian bias. And so this idea that reproductive success is measured by large numbers of children, I just don't buy that at all. Right. You know, I think he, in fact, maybe it's in a different chapter. So I shouldn't jump ahead. One of my favorite lines is that, confused, I'm not going to remember it. Confusing wealth with genetic superiority is a mistake made most often by those with great fortunes. And Charles Darwin, of course, was part of the landed gentry. So, no, humans, you know, once we have control, once we feel secure in our control of resources, we have fewer children. Right. But the issue, I think, that I'm raising, though, is that we have fewer than we need to replace, right? And that's, we're already eight billion or close to. So I'm not particularly concerned if those of us who are doing the most consuming, which is in terms of climate, that's a problem. If those who are doing the most consuming are not achieving replacement level, I think, you know what, that might not be such a bad thing. Yeah, I hear you. I understand. And I was thinking that, too. But I'm just wondering if a certain level, if there's like a threshold of economic prosperity, that then gets the species to a point where it's not replacing. And, you know, its birth rate is lower than it's. Well, in order for that to happen, and I wish that that would happen, actually, we have to have. Economic equity spread across the population of the world. Yeah, or at least a threshold of. Just mean it's more, it isn't that we have to. Well, I mean, equity is a good word because equity doesn't mean that it's equal. It just means that everyone is above the threshold where they can thrive instead of desperately try to survive. And I guess my question is if you get to that threshold where you can thrive, I mean, does that make the species vulnerable to not reproducing enough to replace it to keep itself going? Given that we're starting at this point with a figure approaching eight billion. You know, that's a lot of people. And so I would be, I would actually be very glad if we fell below replacement level and over the generations, the number of people inhabiting the planet dropped. So you think eight billion is above the carrying capacity of the earth? I mean, currently, I mean, with the way that we're using the resources of the planet. Well, you know, I'm I'm unusual in that most people, particularly people who are secure enough economically that they've already reduced the number of children they have, most people feel that the population is the greatest threat to our environment. I don't feel that, but I don't think we need to have eight billion of us. Gotcha. So I'd be very I, you know, I what's wrong with five or six billion is that the end of the world, it wouldn't be the end of the species. Yeah, I was just wondering. I don't really know what the carrying capacity of the earth is. And I do feel, though, that we right now, everything is really based on increasing growth in just in general economics, at least in capitalistic societies is like me, you are compounding your growth. I mean, and compounding just doesn't work any time you start compounding eventually going to be on our resources because you're just growing too fast me. So to a certain extent, you want to transition from a compounding growth rate to a linear growth rate. But even that gets you in the trouble. So at some point, you're going to need to just flat line. You got to say, this is the limit that we can handle. Some of the younger environmentalists are challenging this notion of growth economies. Why do we assume that we need a growth economy? And I'm I'm I'm kind of with them on that. Yeah. And so I'm kind of with them on that. It's of me. I like to know what we think is the carrying capacity, you know, and then and then work from there. And when you're talking about carrying capacity, as far as I'm concerned, you don't just talk about humans. It's also our impact on other species. Yes. So, you know, when we reach a certain level of numbers of people, we really are negatively impacting on other species. And we need those other species more than they need us. I agree. We need the honeybee a lot more than the honeybee needs us. That's true. That's very true. Yeah, definitely true. Yeah. And we need the the fish, you know, and yeah, I totally agree with that. So so what I've been doing is teasing people as to what the next chapter we're going to cover is going to be called, you know, and it's going to be chapter eight, first words, the evolution of language, my favorite. You kind of hinted at it, you know, and we're we're about to take off in terms of the where the plot of this book has been leading and so yeah, I love that chapter. I loved obviously somebody who talks as much as I do. I love to discuss the evolution of language. Yeah, yeah. And on that, folks, we come back before episode number nine. Thanks for watching. I hope they're all having as much fun as you and I are. Well, I think you didn't meet her, Cheryl.