Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?
So asks Time’s Krista Mahr. I think both the article and the research paper on which it’s based seems to be really stretching to analogize this to human prostitution:
According to the paper, “Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market,” published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number of minutes that males spent grooming hinged on the number of females available at the time: The better a male’s odds of getting lucky, the less nit-picking time the females received.
If you think about human society, “paying for sex” denotes a pretty specific kind of social practice—prostitution—and isn’t a catchall phrase to cover every mutually beneficial relationship that involves sex. You could probably do a study of married human couples that would show that sex is more likely after a husband is nice to his wife than after he’s been a jerk; I don’t think you’d call that a study about “paying for sex” among married couples.
61 Responses to “Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?”
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June 20th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Apparently the researchers are unfamiliar with the concept of foreplay.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Actually, I think Matt is just taking an artificially restrictive view on how much humans do in fact pay for sex– which does, by the way, make prostitution less of an outlier behavior than some people would want you to believe.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Wait until Matthew marries Sara. Then he’ll get the idea.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
sigh. hate to tread in here. but that grooming seems a better analogy to foreplay than payment.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Matt,
“Paying for sex” only equals prostitution if you take the strict interpretation of “Payment = Money”. Under a “Time Spent = Money Spent” formulation, courtship rituals, dating, household chores such as mowing lawns, etc all can equal “paying for sex”.
As the esteemed philosophers of “Married with Children” put it: God played a cruel trick on men. He gave them a need but women got the only way to satisfy it.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I think Matt slightly missed the point in his last comment.
Sex articles in the mainstream press not explicitly about how to do it usually are about reinforcing social roles. There are a lot of assholes who think they know something about sex and write bad articles about what they know to be true. So you get lots of awful evolutionary psychology and sociology, like the article you are referencing here.
In general, there is a pronounced desire for these losers to see sex as an exhange (sex for protection, sex for money) in which women are in a naturally subordinate role with occasional circumstances in which a women is “allowed” to choose her spouse, for appearance’s sake.
Never, ever, ever take any article from Time, NYTimes, WP, or any other mainstream press about sex seriously. The vast majority of the time, it’s for brainwashing people into confusing barbaric practices with modernity.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
> Wait until Matthew marries Sara. Then he’ll
> get the idea.
More precisely, I would say that Matt should get back to us after 9 years of marriage.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Grooming is only foreplay if its purpose is to sexually arouse the female monkeys. If it is instead something they like for non-sexual reasons, it is more equivalent to dinner-and-a-show.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I think you all are missing the point here.
3.5 times an hour.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
You’re all missing the point–
June 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I don’t think you’d call that a study about “paying for sex” among married couples.
You are obviously not married.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
“Grooming is only foreplay if its purpose is to sexually arouse the female monkeys. If it is instead something they like for non-sexual reasons, it is more equivalent to dinner-and-a-show.”
Indeed, which is still categorically different than prostitution.
Prostitution requires money, and humans are the only animals who’ve invented money.
“Payment” is a word that is indeed must be stretched way too far to describe non-human sexual behavior.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Umm, ‘grooming’ sounds more like foreplay than it does prostitution. Am I ‘paying’ a chick if I make out with her for a half hour first?
Petey, maybe. But you’re buying dinner and a movie in the hopes of sex. In fact, if a woman repeatedly dates men for free food and never sleeps with them, she’s generally considered to be using those men and called a ‘dinner whore’. The only men I know who will take a woman on more than three dates without sex are generally losers. Everyone else understands that they are being taken for a ride.
I think the ‘difference’ is a social nicety. It doesn’t really exist, but if we stopped pretending a difference existed it would likely lead to a significant amount of hostility between the genders.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Matt’s point about spouses reminds me of the definition of “prostitution” in the Colorado Revised Statutes (emphasis added):
Colo. Rev. Stat. § 18-7-201: Prostitution prohibited
(1) Any person who performs or offers or agrees to perform any act of sexual intercourse, fellatio, cunnilingus, masturbation, or anal intercourse with any person not his spouse in exchange for money or other thing of value commits prostitution.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Actually, I think Matt is just taking an artificially restrictive view on how much humans do in fact pay for sex– which does, by the way, make prostitution less of an outlier behavior than some people would want you to believe.
True, humans are always exchanging stuff, including sex. But money is potentially a universal mode of exchange, which is why Matt has the right idea in his post.
Economists tend to think that money’s universality simply makes the world more efficient, while virtually everyone else thinks that we want limits on the power of money.
June 20th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Actually, this is the opposite of prostitution. One pays money to a prostitute precisely because he doesn’t want to do all that grooming that would’ve been necessary otherwise.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Prostitution requires money, and humans are the only animals who’ve invented money.
This is bad legal advice, because you can be convicted for prostitution-related offenses when the exchange takes the form of barter (probably the most common being an exchange of drugs for sex). Of course this has to be the case, because otherwise it would be extremely easy to evade prostitution statutes just by exchanging highly liquid goods instead of cash.
And yes, once again this means the line between what we consider prostitution and a lot of other human behavior is much blurrier than a lot of people would like you to believe.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
“Economists tend to think that money’s universality simply makes the world more efficient, while virtually everyone else thinks that we want limits on the power of money.”
Money is good.
Limits on the power of money are also good.
Both Smith and Marx are useful social philosophers for humans.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
To supplement my last post, note the Colorado statute quoted above applies to sex in “exchange for money or other thing of value.” Again, it has to be this way, or otherwise it would be far too easy to evade the statute.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
True, humans are always exchanging stuff, including sex. But money is potentially a universal mode of exchange, which is why Matt has the right idea in his post.
Whatever one thinks of money, I will bet you dollars to donuts (pun intended) that the prostitution rate in barter economies is not one bit lower.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
The crux isn’t around what “value” or “money” mean, but what “offer” means.
What does “offer” mean to the following pairs on a 4th date:
16 y.o. woman and 16 y.o. boyfriend
19 y.o. woman and 19 y.o. boyfriend
28 y.o. woman and 28 y.o. boyfriend
28 y.o. woman and 48 y.o. boyfriend
28 y.o. woman in low SES bracket and 48 y.o. boyfriend in high SES bracket
28 y.o. single woman in low SES bracket and 48 y.o. married boyfriend in high SES bracket
and then a similar set of questions concerning married couples and their various stages of relationship.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Previous observations have shown a more obvious connection. More in the “here’s some bananas, want to have sex?” realm. But monkeys are quite smart. They are easily trained as pickpockets in India and Cambodia. And that’s actually fairly common, so watch out for monkeys there. In India, some monkeys have freelanced. They’ll steal wallets on their own and trade them for fruit.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Petey, maybe. But you’re buying dinner and a movie in the hopes of sex. In fact, if a woman repeatedly dates men for free food and never sleeps with them, she’s generally considered to be using those men and called a ‘dinner whore’. The only men I know who will take a woman on more than three dates without sex are generally losers. Everyone else understands that they are being taken for a ride.
What? I repeat: WHAT?! I was under the impression that was called “dating.” So, to get this clear: because I don’t believe in having sex outside of marriage, I can’t go out with a guy without being a whore. Even though the term “whore” denotes, definitionally, having sex. That’s quite a paradox.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Katherine, don’t forget that the man can’t take you out without being a loser.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
In chimp troops, lovers groom each other, siblings groom each other, parents groom children (and children parents), and so on.
Does it still sound like foreplay? Grooming is a behavior they do for social capital. Other studies have seen grooming exchanged for food, for reciprocal grooming, for other things. Time spent grooming is the closest thing chimps have to money. That females are willing to accept grooming for sex is interesting. What’s their advantage in doing so? Do more suitable mates have more “grooming currency” to spend, maybe? It’s interesting.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Ok. “Foreplay” wasn’t precisely right. Grooming is equivalent to a backrub.
Backrubs don’t necessarily lead to sex, or sexual arousal.
But given two people who *could* have sex, the odds of it happening go up substantially if one of them gives the other a backrub. Unless one of them is GWB and the other Angel Merkel.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
It does seem the article does seem to miss the point it’s trying to make, as Matt notes, but it does provide an opportunity to invoke this article, though not directly on point, from the Onion.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Katherine,
Welcome to the world of Yglesian cosmopolite hipsterdom, which would like to re-enact the sexual free-for-all of Old Rome under Caligula.
Personally, I think you should not feel bad for choosing not to have sex, and neither should the guys you date.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Having legalized prostitution is evidence, to me, that Macaques have thrown off counter productive puritanical mores and have achieved a superior social contract.
On the other hand, all the mutual grooming within the troop indicates that Macaques are probably communists.
I need to ponder this paradox.
June 20th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I guess you all forgot the Freakonomics article about monkeys actually paying with coin for sex from 2005.
A summary with more detail then the original NYT article:
http://news.cnet.com/Freakonomics-writer-talks-monkey-business/2100-1026-6177655.html
June 20th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Another example of how the human interpretation of other ape behavior reveals more about the human than about the other apes.
June 20th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
“Whatever one thinks of money, I will bet you dollars to donuts (pun intended) that the prostitution rate in barter economies is not one bit lower.”
The correct thought experiment here is to try to imagine the prostitution rate in hunter/gatherer societies – which is where the bulk of human existence has been spent.
I’d venture that the prostitution rate in hunter/gatherer societies approaches zero.
Highly commoditized barter societies are essentially dealing with proto-money, which is something monkey societies in the wild never deal with.
June 20th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
I absolutely agree with you. Grooming is not like paying cash. More like offering a back rub and hoping it develops into uhm front to front activities.
Grooming as seducing (or foreplay) is about as far from prostitution as I can imagine.
Makes you wonder about the sex lives of the authors of the study doesn’t it ?
June 20th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
I think most of the posters here live in a culture where premarital sex is the norm, and so are posting from that standpoint. They probably know a few to plenty of people who choose not to have sex before marriage–they just aren’t interested in dating them because they don’t want to have to go a year or more without sex between starting to date and marrying. Katharine, I agree with you and Hector in that deciding not to have sex before marriage is a perfectly valid decision and should be respected. But people you date should be let known about this by maybe the third or so date, otherwise, they’ll justifiably feel strung along if they are not willing to wait until marriage, and you two don’t have a future together anyway.
June 20th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Sheesh, there’s a wide spectrum between “not willing to engage in any physical contact with a romantic partner until marriage” and “ready to rip the clothes off on the third date.” I think the third date is extremely early to have sex. I don’t think people really have sufficient emotional intimacy until at least a couple months have gone by.
Plus, someone who chooses not to “go all the way” before marriage can still cuddle or hook up or whatever with a regular boyfriend/girlfriend.
I agree with Hector on this one (I think).
June 20th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
As usual, Matt extrapolates without evidence.
The article says NOTHING about “prostitution”. In fact, it explicitly says this:
No, but Matt wants to draw conclusions.
The article and/or study is also wrong when it says this is the first time primates have been observed trading something for sex. I believe I’ve read elsewhere that primates have been seen exchanging food for sex directly – and THAT you can certainly directly extrapolate to the usual “dinner date”.
Fostert: “Previous observations have shown a more obvious connection. More in the “here’s some bananas, want to have sex?” realm.”
Exactly. I’ve seen that reported, too.
“They are easily trained as pickpockets in India and Cambodia. And that’s actually fairly common, so watch out for monkeys there. In India, some monkeys have freelanced. They’ll steal wallets on their own and trade them for fruit.”
Actually, it’s worse than that. Andrea Corr was doing a movie up in the Himalayas, where there are tons of monkeys. She said they could sneak into your hotel room and steal your computer!
June 20th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Right, foreplay if you have a girlfriend, not so much foreplay if you attend a brothel.
I’ll accept the research as soon as the researcher finds a brothel which trades grooming for sex.
June 20th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
The correct thought experiment here is to try to imagine the prostitution rate in hunter/gatherer societies – which is where the bulk of human existence has been spent.
First, as an aside, it is true that the greatest amount of time that humans have been around they have been in hunter/gatherer societies. It is very much not true that the greatest amount of humans have lived in hunter/gatherer societies.
Second, the total number of other people a given human could interact with is way lower in hunter/gatherer societies. Accordingly, even if it were true that the rate of prostitution was lower in such societies (and I’m not at all sure that is true–a small band just needs one prostitute and you could be right back to the same rate), it would tell you nothing in particular about the relevance of money to prostitution.
In other words, you need to control for other variables, even in thought experiments.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Primitive societies had a variety of social arrangements. From what I read, such arrangements differ quite a bit between the native tribes of Amazon basin.
In some tribes, men basically rape women, or dominate with force, and thus it is hard to have something resembling prostitution. In other, women can decide what they want to do. However, “trade” or “barter” in a primitive society is never simply about “maximizing the utility”, but quite a bit about establishing reciprocal obligations. You may have a competitive exchange of gifts in which each side tries to out-do another. You may have customary gifts for some situations, including sex.
What is quite amazing is the number of different sexual arrangements descibed in the Bible, including “offering the daughter to neighbors” which is described twice (in both cases, the father was a man of virtue, and wickedness of neighbors was partially revealed by REJECTING the offer).
June 20th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
It seems more to me like a “scratch my back, I ll let you fuck me arrangement!”
June 21st, 2009 at 12:13 am
it all sounds like a cheezy Eric Clapton song (wonderful tonight, that sort of thing)
June 21st, 2009 at 12:18 am
Also, I assume there aren’t any examples of sex being offered up front by a female in exchange for a good grooming afterwards? incentive incompatible, probably.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:38 am
I hope you realize that that macaque picture you posted is of a juvenile macaque. Are you a pedophile? Sure, juvenile macaques are prettier but that’s what all the pedophiles say.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:07 am
NBT,
I also don’t object to all premarital sex, but I think after three dates is too early. You should be in a serious relationship, and have been going out for a while. Of course, try convincing a Yglesian hipster of that fact.
Just why is its Katharine’s responsibility to inform the guys ahead of time?
June 21st, 2009 at 9:23 am
“First, as an aside, it is true that the greatest amount of time that humans have been around they have been in hunter/gatherer societies. It is very much not true that the greatest amount of humans have lived in hunter/gatherer societies.”
I concur.
“Second, the total number of other people a given human could interact with is way lower in hunter/gatherer societies. Accordingly, even if it were true that the rate of prostitution was lower in such societies (and I’m not at all sure that is true–a small band just needs one prostitute and you could be right back to the same rate), it would tell you nothing in particular about the relevance of money to prostitution.”
I’m averring that a small band will have zero prostitutes, not one.
And further, I’m averring that money (or proto-money) is a necessary pre-condition to prostitution. Without wages of some form, prostitution doesn’t exist.
Prostitution is often referred to as “the oldest profession”, but this isn’t true. It can only be the second oldest profession because farming is the oldest profession. Before farming, professions don’t exist, since wages don’t exist.
Again, the key red herring word in the article is “payment”. There are many forms of social exchange in non-human animal societies, but there is no “payment” in non-human animal societies.
June 21st, 2009 at 9:36 am
“However, “trade” or “barter” in a primitive society is never simply about “maximizing the utility”, but quite a bit about establishing reciprocal obligations. You may have a competitive exchange of gifts in which each side tries to out-do another. You may have customary gifts for some situations, including sex.”
Indeed.
Gifting is a deeply different concept than paying.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Um, Katherine? It behooves you to explain why it is that on your dates, food is always “free”, i.e., that you never pay for the date or pay for your share of the date.
If you can’t explain, I suggest you board your time travel machine and and return to the last midcentury where you belong.
I’m a woman, and I find your conduct apalling.
June 21st, 2009 at 2:44 pm
my spelling is even more appalling
June 21st, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Re: Um, Katherine? It behooves you to explain why it is that on your dates, food is always “free”, i.e., that you never pay for the date or pay for your share of the date.
Because decent men, unlike Yglesian feminist hipsters, realise that the man should at least offer to pay for the woman’s meal, regardless of whether or not she chooses to get physically intimate with him. That is what the traditional chivalric code dictates, which you feminist yahoos are so willing to throw out.
I think you should jump into a time machine back to the sexual free-for-all of Old Rome, as it seems like you were happier then.
June 21st, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Hector, you are one of those people in whom extreme verbal brilliance coexists with brute stupidity.
Please point out to me where I suggested she should pay for her meal or entertainment with physical intimacy. No, I didn’t think you could.
Of course, we could locate ourselves, as you apparently do, in a polar universe in which traditional chivalric code is necessary as an antidote to libertine sensuality.
But then we would be silly, wouldn’t we?
Rather, I think we can toss traditional chivalric code out with the poodle skirt and assume, as decent and fairminded people do, that ladies can pay for their entertainment, and still live in a world in which people live sexually disciplined lives.
But why am I arguing with Hector about mores? Our about women’s right not to be patronized?
Useless.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Has anyone ever done a study to determine what men will do to not have sex with their wives? It’s just that my wife is ten years younger than me, and she’s right at the old peak, and I’m over the hill. Picture it: I’m fluttering like a wounded bird in her boudoir, while she fixes me with her glittering kohl rimmed eyes. “H-h-h-0w-ow-hows about a nice back-rub?” I stammer. “You know what I want, and right now, baby!” she hisses in reply. Don’t ever believe you can’t “hiss” words which don’t have an “s” in them. As she grasps me, only a merciful syncope releases me from witnessing my fall from purity.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Just to be clear – I have dated a grand total of one guy, in my entire life. I didn’t pay for my own meals, despite sometimes wanting to (I was in a better financial position than him) because doing so would hurt his pride more than paying hurt his pocketbook. I think there are plenty of guys who feel that way, and I’m not inclined to judge whether it’s old-fashioned or just the way guys’ brains work; and I don’t mind an old-fashioned chivalric sense.
Dating should not simply be regarded as a preliminary to sex, and if a guy thinks he’s taking you out just in the hopes that you’ll sleep with him – well, it’s at least as much his business to make that clear than it is a woman’s business to make it clear she doesn’t intend to do so. Because there are plenty of people out there who don’t consider it the norm to sleep with someone you’ve only met a few times, and it probably wouldn’t occur to them that they would need to make that fact explicit very early on in a relationship or be considered as leading a guy on.
Even for those who don’t have moral objections to extramarital sex as such, people often date to get to know someone and have no idea if this is someone they want to be sleeping with until they’ve been a the relationship for a good while. If some guys think paying for dinner is just a way of getting women to sleep with them, they’re better off hiring hookers and not trying to pussyfoot around that fact.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:13 am
Katherine,
You go ahead and do what you feel like, and don’t let the yellowlivered Yglesian yahoos keep you down.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:52 am
@Katherine
I don’t quite understand your problem. You’re free to do as you please, but IF you happen to live somewhere where sex after the third date is the norm and you break with that, you don’t get to complain about getting a reputation as a “dinner whore”. Similarly, depending on the standard in your community, the onus is in fact on you to make it clear, that you’re not going to follow a specific standrad. Who does what doesn’t enter into it.
If you’re going to France, it’s up to you to make it clear that you don’t do greeting/farewell kisses, even though you could make a rational argument, that the inherent intrusion requires the other party to justify itself first. But that’s not how norms work, as the name already implies.
Finally, the whole problem is easily avoided by paying for your own meals (and the guy’s): it both sends a signal you’re not going to follow the usual custom and frees you of any suspicion of trying to freeride on the customary three free dinners.
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:21 am
Markus,
What if Katherine is interested in having a long term relationship with a guy, that doesn’t include sex after three dates? Paying for her own meals is a sign to the guy that she just wants to be friends. But what if she doesn’t?
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I’d be happy not to nit pick
It’s worth pointing out that it’s quite literally a willingness to pick nits that’s getting these macaques more sex.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Hector,
same as with anything else: talk about it. Shouldn’t be too hard. Especially given that not being the kind of person who’s willing to have sex after the third date, and having the values that usually go with that, is likely to be an important part of who she is as a person.
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Mr. Nagler,
Just why should Miss Katherine have to be the one to broach a rather intimate and awkward topic? Most people do not initiate a first date with, “I love your scarf, and by the way I don’t believe in sex before marriage.”
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Time definitely is the culprit here – the author uses “payment” to also acknowledge services given for child-care. It’s not correct, he’s one of those guys trying to apply economics to everything.
http://www.hssapps.ntu.edu.sg/search/psychology_staff_details.asp?userid=gumert
June 23rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
1) Count me with those who see grooming as more in the backrub/foreplay category than in the pay-for-sex category.
2) Where exactly are these places where it’s totally the social norm that you have to have sex by the third date? I read about that kind of thing online, but I’ve never encountered it in real life, and I’d have expected, since I’ve always lived on one or the other coast, that I wouldn’t be in a super sexually conservative set. (Not saying that having sex by the third date is something no one in my acquaintance ever does, but it’s not something the people I know in real life actively stigmatize you for not doing. Even a lot of people who are fine with sex outside of marriage prefer more time to get to know each other first.)
3) Given how much variance there is in sexual values, in the US, it’s often a good idea to talk about them early in a dating relationship, to see whether you’re really in sync. But the onus for initiating that conversation, to my mind, is pretty much equally on the Katherines and the Markuses; it’s not more Katherine’s job to bring it up than Markus’s. (There are also ways of doing this that are more in the way of general conversation than stuff about how fast you personally are willing to do what, if it’s easier to break the ice by speaking more generally.)
4) Alternating who pays can be a good way to let a guy know that you want to share expenses without signalling “just friends.”
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
When I was single, I’d sleep with a guy on the first date if I liked him, but I’d never in a million years touch a man who used a phrase like “dinner whore.” The macaques sound like much better dates.