There is a popular idea out there that the clitoris is the only organ of the human body whose sole function is pleasure:
“orgasm has persisted as a pleasurable evolutionary legacy, without the reproductive association.”
It’s a sexy idea, isn’t it?
That women’s bodies are special, containing a little button that exists purely to enhance our pleasure…
This idea is widely shared in sexology, feminism, science, and popular media.
Ok. I’ve recently published a paper with my mentor and colleagues about the ‘extreme female brain’ hypothesis of mental illness. Basically, the paper makes the case that sex differences in evolutionary pressures predispose females and males toward different prevalence rates and manifestations of mental illness. For example, more males than females are diagnosed with autism and more females than males are diagnosed with depression.
There are a few things to be clear on first:
Even though the title of the hypothesis has the word ‘brain’ in it, the study does not involve direct studies of brains. We extended this hypothesis from a large body of work done by Simon Baron-Cohen, who has made a strong case for autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) as an extreme manifestation of male-typical psychology (1).
Read MoreBabies are designed to extract more resources than mothers prefer to give (this is of course on a non-conscious levels - I’m primarily talking about physiological processes here). As the fetus grows inside your body, it causes the expansion of maternal arteries as well as an increase in blood pressure in order to extract more nutrients from the mother’s blood.
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If females can manage their fertility with precision using environmentally-available means and learned methods (herbal abortions, charting, etc), what impact does this have on our understanding of human evolution?
Will ‘life-force-energy’ be accurately, usefully, and explicitly integrated into scientific discourse?
Note:
I don’t know if people have answered these questions already. Please comment.
***Blog art by unknown artist; found on Tumblr***