The Panopticon Network targets sex (Clara B. Jones)

The Panopticon Network Targets Sex

Advocates of the “adaptationist program” to determine the fitness consequences of behavior and to explain its evolution may find themselves in danger of applying the paradigm to situations without restraint, what Steven J. Gould has called “evolutionary fundamentalism.” I recall a moment of lovemaking when—at the peak of passion—my partner, a non-immigrant African-American, bit my neck in a stereotyped, painless posture whose duration lasted only a few moments—perhaps, an ancient posture reminiscent of a Hamadryas male baboon’s response to errant females of his harem. Suddenly, for me, the bedroom became a laboratory inhabited by a relative of Papio hamadryas, or any of many other mammals using this response (see discussion in my Springer Brief, 2012). My emotions were overwhelmed by thoughts of other women experiencing the same phenomenon and by empirical research that might be conducted to demonstrate the ancestral origin of the primate/mammalian, “neck bite posture.” I even considered writing to the Swiss primatologist* who first described this motor pattern in Hamadryas in order to solicit interest in and support for my project. I speculated about what funding agency might provide a grant for my research and whether I could publish the results in a refereed journal**.

These questions and others (e.g., Was the behavior exclusive to non-immigrant African-American men?) consumed my thoughts and feelings much more than my physical partner at that moment who had become an experimental subject, a case study that I am only now reporting, an object to be observed and described and fixed as a pinned butterfly in an insect drawer. My relationship with this man was irreversibly changed, for I was now the scientist, my methods were a sexual assay, my goal to test my hypothesis with evidence sought each time we engaged in sex. Unfortunately, the “neck bite” never occurred again, and my inhibitions prevented me from conducting a survey of other women to evaluate the frequency of this response in a representative sample of the population. I reflect that the personal and the professional become blurred, but the subjective is often overwhelmed by the clarity of the formal, academic voice.

*Hans Kruuk

**In point of fact, a couple of years after this event, I did prepare a technical paper and submitted the case study to the journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The reviewers were horrified by the ethical implications such a paper would have and the paper was rejected.