I was about thirteen years old and I cycled home. Suddenly a man jumped in front of my bike and opened his jacket, showed his member, and asked me: “Do you want to suck?” I immediately jumped in the shower, I felt so dirty. And small. Taking a picture of your genitals and sending it to a woman, the so-called dickpic, is pencil vents2.0. For many people, making and sending such photos is incomprehensible. But can this behavior be explained evolutionarily?
People are unique, I often hear. Unique in its intelligence, emotional complexity and moral awareness. Forcing your genitals on women, is that uniquely human? The answer is ‘no’. Just as man is not the only intelligent, sensitive and moral creature on earth, our closest relatives, the great apes, also like to show off their genitals. Bonobo or chimpanzee males bring the females in the mood by showing their penis. In a movie from Congo we see a bono male in a tree, his pink penis contrasting sharply against the dark body hair. The cock swings merrily during the bonobo’s airborne fuck movements, his gaze resting on a female sitting opposite him. The female agrees.
Great ape men are aware of their masculinity. Frans de Waal described how a young chimpanzee male showed his erection to a female. As the alpha man passed, he held his hand in front of his raised member, knowing he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. If you live in a group, you have to adhere to the social rules.
In great apes and early, but often also modern humans, women invest more in their offspring than men. Pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding eat up energy and after that, too, the care often rests on the woman. From an evolutionary perspective, it is beneficial for the male to try to produce offspring from as many different females as possible (our genes do not take into account overpopulation and all the consequences that entails).
As a result, men tend to overestimate their own chances in women, the sexual overperception bias is called this. recently confirmed my two PhD students, Iliana Samara and Tom Roth, did this in a blind date experiment that we conducted in Leiden just before the corona pandemic. We found that this overestimation was especially true if the man was interested in the woman. From another study turns out that men who send a dick pic expect women to send something back. Also a form of overestimation.
Comparing human behavior with that of great apes can help us understand the origins of behavior. Natural selection saddles us with behaviors that make us unhappy. But if behavior comes from an ‘instinct’, that doesn’t mean we have to accept it. Humans may not be the only moral being on earth, but we do have the brainpower to catch ourselves in time on our primal urges. Let us mainly use that capacity to deal with this evolutionary legacy.
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