if she has one. A female primate does not have to be capable of becoming pregnant in order to partake of sex. She can have sex every day, and if she's a bonobo, she will have sex more than once a day, or once an hour. A female primate has been unshackled from the tyranny of hormones. In an almost literal sense, the key to her door has been taken away from her ovaries and placed in her hands.
|
Yet she still cycles. Her blood bears estrogen from place to place, including to the portions of the brain where desire and emotion and libido dwell, in the limbic system, the hypothalamus, the amygdala. The female primate has been freed from the rigidity of hormonal control. Now she can take the sex steroid and apply it subtly, to integrate, modulate, and interpret a wealth of sensory and psychological cues. For rats, hormones are thumpish, unmistakable, the world in black and white; for primates, they act like a box of crayons, the sixty-four pack, with a color for every occasion and at least three names for every color. Do you want it in pink, blush, or fuschia?
|
"In primates, all the effects of hormones on sexual behavior have become focused on psychological mechanisms, not physical ones," Kim Wallen, of Emory University, says to me. "The decoupling of physical from psychological allows primates to use sex in different contexts, for economic reasons or political reasons." Or emotional reasons, or to keep from getting bored. As Wallen speaks, we watch a group of five rhesus monkeys at the Yerkes Primate Research Center chase two other rhesus monkeys around and around in their enclosure, all seven swearing back and forth at each other in rhesusese, as you can tell because the more they scream, the faster everybody runs. In a primate, Wallen continues, hormone pulses may not make the female bow down in lordosis, but they clearly influence her sexual motivation. He points at the group of rhesus monkeys. The seven samurai are still screaming and running. Several other monkeys look on with rapt anxiety, like bettors at a racetrack. One large, scruffy male ignores everything and picks his teeth. None is doing anything remotely sexual. Rhesus monkeys are Calvinists, Wallen says, prudish and autocratic in matters of sex. When a female rhesus is alone with a familiar male and no other monkeys are there to spy on her, she will mate with the male regardless of where she is in her breeding cycle. But a female under the constraints of the social group does not have the luxury of freewheeling carnality. If
|
|
