Letters

‘Leonardo,Vol. 6,pp. 187-192. PergamonPress 1973. Printedin Great Britain Readers’ commentsare welcomed on textspublished in Leonardo. The Editors reserve the right to shortenlettersfor reasons of space. Letters should be written in English or in French. ON HUMAN LOOKING AND SHOWING BEHAVIOR L. Blank’s article in Leonardo 6, 23 (1973), which proposes a Darwinian explanation for human looking and showing behavior, comes at a time whennewlight is being thrown on the evolutionary steps of man’s origin. It now appears that our ancestors diverged from the monkey lineage very much earlierthan was previously thought, over 2+ million years ago, according to the latest findings. Therefore, behavior attributed to a survival from man’s ancestorscan be seriouslyquestioned. The one example the author uses to establish his point ofdepartureisthatthefemalemonkey’s‘extensive areas of the skin colored bright red, usually aroundthegenitalia,whichundergocyclicalchanges incolorandtumescenceintheoestrouscycle’account forthe originofthelookingbehaviorofthemaleand theexhibitingbehaviorofthefemale. My objections donot meana refutationofevolutionaryprobability but I questionthe survival of behavioral factors of remote common ancestors when structural and functional characteristicsdid not survive. Homo erectus, a hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens, walked in an upright posture. The new posture, accompanied by structural changes including the genitalia, need not have stimulated desirefor the maleto look moreatthe female,asthe author suggests, because of the uncertainty of the location of her genitalia. The structural and postural changescould more logically have led to a shiftfrom a more automatic response (the skin area changesasa signalto consort)to a lessautomatic or more complex behavioral situation between man and woman in which their readiness for a sexual relationshipdependsupon their desiresrather than upon their bodily changes. The second difficulty arises from Blank’s unexplained and unelaborated thesis of the presumed quasi-biobehavioralexpressionoftheneeds. Howdo men and women gain their separate satisfactions through conventional means such as fashions, art, cinema and theater that the author mentions7 The range of potential behavioral response to them, it seems to me, would overlap for men and women, andwould be fartoo complexto permit isolation of differentlooking and showingbehavior for the two sexes. Blank recognizes that ‘sex differences.. .,in part, are influencedby culturalfactors’. In the sectionon pornography he says, for example,that the effect or interpretation of pornography ‘maydepend on sex, age or the person in question’. One of his own unpublished studies shows that ‘females have a lesser distorted notion of their bodies’. But he restated this to rule out sex difference when he says that ‘bodyinterestis intenseand a distorted body image ispervasiveinoursociety’. Questionscouldbeposed about the author’s unpublished study of small girls who show less curiositythan boys of the same age. But,leavingasidetheproblemofsuchselectivedata, the point is that even in this area the author recognizes that modern Freudians regard curiosity ‘as at least partially adaptivebehavior’. In fact, curiosity isdescribedas ‘amorebroad adaptivefunctionthan solely psychosexual behavior’. In other words, in spite of the fact that the author recognizes the role of cultural factors, he makes the statementthat ‘if the male looks, the female must exhibit’, which to my mind is not a causeand effect relationshipbut a nonsequitur. I frequentlyfound myself at a loss to understand unexplained ideas and the stress put on the male point of view. The exclusion of the comparative material for the female in the Mother-Whore Fantasy and Dream Research sections does not prove that females are free from neurotic perversions , such as voyeurism, and that they do not experience sexual nocturnal episodes. There is an extensiveliterature on these subjects. The Fisher study in the Dream Research section (which I assumerefers to the work of C. Fisherand Edwin Kahn ofthe Mt. SinaiHospitalin NewYork City) was an experiment to correlate dream memories with erectionsof men during rapid eye movements at differentages from young to old. Clearly, it is easierto record penis erection than comparable sexual reactions of the female. The evidence from the male experimentdoesnot provethat femalesdo not have visual images connected with nocturnal sexual experiences. ‘Women’s Liberation’ writers in America have extensively documented sexual experiencesof the female. Claire Davidson 5 rue de la Manutention 75016-Paris, France 187 188 Letters ON ENTROPY AND ART Instead of decreasing the entropy in the china shop of our concern with my book Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order, I seem to have increased it...