Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

472 I HOW THE MIND WORKSbit-mapped cathode-ray-tube displays. He takes pleasure in this mistakenidentity, supporting a worldwide pornography industry which inthe United States alone grosses ten billion dollars a year, almost as muchas spectator sports and the movies combined. In foraging cultures, youngmen make charcoal drawings of breasts and vulvas on rock overhangs,carve them on tree trunks, and scratch them in the sand. Pornography issimilar the world over and was much the same a century ago as it istoday. It depicts in graphic physical detail a succession of anonymousnude females eager for casual, impersonal sex.It would make no sense for a woman to be easily aroused by the sightof a nude male. A fertile woman never has a shortage of willing sexualpartners, and in that buyer's market she can seek the best husband available,the best genes, or other returns on her sexual favors. If she could bearoused by the sight of a naked man, men could induce her to have sexby exposing themselves and her bargaining position would be compromised.The reactions of the sexes to nudity are quite different: men seenude women as a kind of invitation, women see nude men as a kind ofthreat. In 1992 a Berkeley student known around campus as the NakedGuy chose to jog, attend class, and eat in the dining halls in the nude asa protest against the repressive sexual traditions of Western society. Hewas expelled when some female students protested that his behaviorshould be classified as sexual harassment.Women do not seek the sight of naked male strangers or enactmentsof anonymous sex, and there is virtually no female market for pornography.(Playgirl, the supposed counterexample, is clearly for gay men. Ithas no ads for any product a woman would buy, and when a woman getsa subscription as a gag gift she finds herself on mailing lists for gay malepornography and sex toys.) In the laboratory, some early experimentsclaimed that men and women showed identical physiological arousal to apornographic passage. The men, however, showed a bigger response tothe neutral passage in the control condition than the women showed tothe pornography. The so-called neutral passage, which had been chosenby the female investigators, described a man and a woman chattingabout the relative merits of an anthropology major over pre-med. Themen found it highly erotic! Women can sometimes be aroused when theyhave agreed to watch portrayals of intercourse, but they do not seekthem out. (Symons points out that women are more choosy than men inconsenting to sex, but once they have consented, there is no reason tobelieve they are any less responsive to sexual stimulation.) The closest