Prehistoric Masturbation
Postapocalyptic Air
Apparently, there is a group of parents in my home state of New Jersey who don’t want kids to learn about climate change in school. They are not happy that we recently became the first state in the country to adopt K-12 learning standards on the subject. This debate got far less attention than the controversy over the state’s sex education standards, but a group of opponents flocked to a public meeting in early May to tell two members of the State Board of Education what they thought.
A number of those testifying were part of Team Protect Your Children, a state-based organization that one member described as having been formed to fight “the unsuitable normalization and glorification of abortion and the homosexual lifestyle in public schools.”
One of the Team PYC speakers argued that climate change is based on weak science and cited all the research she’d done on the interwebs including a documentary on YouTube that backed her up. She then added, “This global warming theory is very scary for little children.”
Another speaker explained that schools weren’t for activism and the topic of climate change is very divisive. Another worried that kids would be “indoctrinated,” but then went on to suggest teachers should be allowed to teach creationism, which apparently wouldn’t count as indoctrination.
I don’t know the outcome of this meeting, but I can tell you that last week all New Jersey school kids learned about climate change firsthand.
On Wednesday, the air outside schools across the state was thick with smoke from the wildfires burning in Canada. Everything took on an orange-tinge like one of those tourist-trap saloon pictures that it is developed in sepia tones to look old. The air smelled like a campfire and burned your eyes instantly.
Believe me kids noticed.
My older one texted to say that the halls of her high school—parts of which date back to the 1890s—were filling with smoke, kids were coughing, and she was starting to feel dizzy. I got a call from the middle schooler who wanted reassurance that everything was okay despite the fact that the scene outside her classroom looked like the backdrop of a dystopian young adult novel. She also wanted to make sure that I was picking her up (which, to be clear, I do every day) because middle schoolers love drama and Wednesday’s drama was all about how dangerous it would be for anyone to walk home in that smog.
We adults noticed too.
I spent the day having flashbacks to the beginning of the pandemic when we were being forced to learn new things (then viral epidemiology, this time air quality indices), trying to understand how to stay safe (we had N-95s left over, but maybe we needed expensive air purifiers as well), and wondering how long this would all last. I was upset for the people in Canada who will have to deal with this fire-filled air for far longer than we will. I also felt that I owed my friends on the West Coast—who’ve lived through many more smokey days than we have—an apology for not checking in more often during their wildfires.
I joked with my family that this was not the night to watch Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, a Miyazaki movie about a teenage princess trying to save her people in a post-nuclear world where the air is unsafe to breath. We agreed it was also not the night to read The Lorax as we were all Swommi-Swans choking on smogulous smoke.
If Team PYC really wanted to protect the children, they would not just teach them about climate change, they would vote for policies that could help ensure today’s elementary school kids will still be able to take a deep breath when they’re 30.
But alas, the anti-woke attacks—whether focused on sex education, sexual orientation, gender identity, or creationism—are not about keeping kids safe, they’re about keeping kids ignorant because those who think critically about issues don’t fear progress, they make it happen.
Prehistoric Masturbation
(I’m going to try to make it through this article without mentioning spanking the monkey, because frankly such an obvious pun is beneath me.)
A new paper released just a few days after Masturbation May ended argues that primates have been jerking off for millennia and offers some theories as to the benefits of a little monkey self-lovin. For the paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, evolutionary biologist Matilda Brindle and her colleagues at the University of London, reviewed decades of literature on animal masturbation and surveyed others who research this behavior.
There’s not as much data as the researchers would have liked, so they couldn’t determine whether the earliest primate species liked to wiggle their willies. But starting around 40 million years ago there is evidence that the ancestors of all monkeys and apes would beat their meat from time to time.
Brindle then set about questioning why early apes would masturbate. The Bible had not yet been written so no one was explicitly telling them not to spill their seed but from an evolutionary perspective it does seem somewhat counteractive to cum into a Kleenex or a sock (right, they didn’t have those either) instead of partner who might carry on your genes. Brindle had two theories about the early days of male masturbation both of which were supported by the research.
The first theory is that male monkeys masturbate to keep the plumbing working so that if they are competing for the attention of a female, they could get in and get out quickly while still leaving high quality sperm behind. This theory is supported by the fact that masturbation was more common in species in which females mate with multiple males. In contrast, the art of masturbation was sometimes lost in species with monogamous partners. While it’s not quite clear how masturbating gives one ape a leg up on others in the paternity department (though that one-leg-up position might help), the researchers theorized that it could improve ejaculation quality and expel “stale” sperm.
Brindle other theory had to do with monkey STDs. She hypothesized that primates might use masturbation as a way to clear germs from their reproductive tracts after sex. This was also supported by research when she found that primates in areas or species with higher prevalence of pathogens were more likely to masturbate than those facing lower prevalence. She also noted that masturbation was observed more in large apes who weren’t bendy enough to clean their penis with their mouths (sure, that’s what the small flexible apes are doing, just “cleaning” it).
These sound like some pretty smart monkeys. I’m not knocking these findings at all, but what about “just for the fun of it” as a reason to bop the bologna. Flash forward several million years and look at a human baby with a penis. Take off his diaper and where does his hand go instantly? It feels good to touch your penis. I have to wonder if at least part of the answer to why apes choke the chicken (I only promised to avoid monkey puns) is that simple. They find their penis as a fuzzy baby ape, touch it, it feels good, so they keep touching it whenever they get a chance.
Not surprisingly, the researchers found very little evidence that would allow them to draw conclusions about female monkeys masturbating. This may say more about man as the observer, however. As Brindle pointed out, the research world has long seen women—human or not—as “the passive recipients of men’s sexual behavior.” Of course, there’s another possible answer for why we have more data on males and masturbation throughout the animal kingdom; an erect monkey dick in the hand is far easier to observe/identify from a far than a simian clitoris gliding rhythmically across a rock. This could explain why the data shows 75% of females in captivity masturbate but only 35% in the wild.
Brindle believes that the stigma around studying masturbation is slowly going away and that we will have research on more species soon. Am I allowed to say “spanking the monkey” when I’m reporting on llamas, cows, or blue-tongued skinks? Please
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