A naked ape

Editor’s note: One more word about my post last Wednesday, ‘On Beth’s cute tits’. I just reviewed Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape after decades of not reading it. Below I quote the passages that so impressed me when I was much younger. If you don’t want to read it watch at least this very brief interview of old Morris.

It is an extremely important subject because the ideology that’s killing whites is Christianity’s view of Man, which permeates even secular humanism: for example, the egalitarianism spawned after the creation of the United States, and the French Revolution. Paraphrasing Robert Morgan recently I tweeted: The racial inclusiveness of Christianity is caused by the same reason for accepting homo/trans people: all are seen to have souls. ‘Souls’ have no body, while race and sex are properties of the body, not the soul. In the Christian worldview, only the latter is important.

The only way to cure ourselves of this Christian and neochristian pathology is to see ourselves for what we really are: not immortal souls but naked apes. Desmond Morris wrote:
 

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The enlarged female breasts are usually thought of primarily as maternal rather than sexual developments, but there seems to be little evidence for this. Other species of primates provide an abundant milk supply for their offspring and yet they fail to develop clearly defined hemispherical breast swellings. The female of our species is unique amongst primates in this respect. The evolution of protruding breasts of a characteristic shape appears to be yet another example of sexual signalling. This would be made possible and encouraged by the evolution of the naked skin. Swollen breast-patches in a shaggy-coated female would be far less conspicuous as signalling devices, but once the hair has vanished they would stand out clearly. In addition to their own conspicuous shape, they also serve to concentrate visual attention on to the nipples and to make the nipple erection that accompanies sexual arousal more conspicuous. The pigmented area of skin around the nipple, that deepens in colour during sexual arousal, also helps in the same way…

Recent German research has revealed that certain species have started to mimic themselves. The most dramatic examples of this are the mandrill and the gelada baboon. The male mandrill has a bright red penis with blue scrotal patches on either side of it. This colour arrangement is repeated on its face, its nose being bright red and its swollen, naked cheeks an intense blue. It is as if the animal’s face is mimicking its genital region by giving the same set of visual signals. When the male mandrill approaches another animal, its genital display tends to be concealed by its body posture, but it can still apparently transmit the vital messages by using its phallic face. The female gelada indulges in a similar self copying device. Around her genitals there is a bright red skin patch, bordered with white papillae. The lips of the vulva in the centre of this area are a deeper, richer red. This visual pattern is repeated on her chest region, where again there is a patch of naked red skin surrounded by the same kind of white papillae. In the centre of this chest patch the deep red nipples have come to lie so close together that they are strongly reminiscent of the lips of the vulva. (They are indeed so close to one another that the infant sucks from both teats at the same time.) Like the true genital patch, the chest patch varies in intensity of colour during the different stages of the monthly sexual cycle. The inescapable conclusion is that the mandrill and the gelada have brought their genital signals forward to a frontal position for some reason. We know too little about the life of mandrills in the wild to be able to speculate as to the reasons for this strange occurrence in this particular species, but we do know that wild geladas spend a great deal more of their time in an upright sitting posture than most other similar monkey species. If this is a more typical posture for them, then it follows that by having signals on their chests they can more readily transmit these signals to other members of the group than if the markings only existed on their rear ends. Many species of primates have brightly coloured genitals, but these frontal mimics are rare.

Our own species has made a radical change in its typical body posture. Like geladas, we spend a great deal of time sitting up vertically. We also stand erect and face one another during social contacts. Could it be, then, that we, too, have indulged in something similar in the way of self-mimicry? Could our vertical posture have influenced our sexual signals?…

Given this situation, one might very well expect to find some sort of frontal self- mimicry of the type seen in the gelada baboon. Can we, if we look at the frontal regions of the females of our species, see any structures that might possibly be mimics of the ancient genital display of hemispherical buttocks and red labia? The answer stands out as dearly as the female bosom itself. The protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female must surely be copies of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around the mouth must be copies of the red labia. (You may recall that, during intense sexual arousal, both the lips of the mouth and the genital labia become swollen and deeper in colour, so that they not only look alike, but to change in the same way in sexual excitement.) If the male of our species was already primed to respond sexually to these signals when they emanated posteriorly from the genital region, then he would have a built-in susceptibility to them if they could be reproduced in that form on the front of the female’s body. And this, it would seem, is precisely what has happened, with the females carrying a duplicate set of buttocks and labia on their chests and mouths respectively. The use of lipsticks and brassieres immediately springs to mind, but these must be left until later, when we are dealing with the special sexual techniques of modern civilisation…

With varying cultural conditions, the spread of the anti-sexual garments has varied, sometimes extending to other secondary sexual signals (breast coverings, lip-veils), sometimes not… The female covers her breasts, and then proceeds to redefine their shape with a brassiere. This sexual signalling device may be padded or inflatable, so that it not only reinstates the concealed shape, but also enlarges it, imitating in this way the breast-swelling that occurs during sexual arousal…

The act of suckling is more of a problem for females of our species than for other primates. The infant is so helpless that the mother has to take a much more active part in the process, holding the baby to the breast and guiding its actions. Some mothers have difficulty in persuading their offspring to suck efficiently. The usual cause of this trouble is that the nipple is not protruding far enough into the baby’s mouth. It is not enough for the infant’s lips to close on the nipple, it must be inserted deeper into its mouth, so that the front part of the nipple is in contact with the palate and the upper surface of the tongue. Only this stimulus will release the jaw, tongue and cheek action of intense sucking. To achieve this juxtaposition, the region of breast immediately behind the nipple must be pliable and yielding. It is the length of ‘hold’ that the baby can manage on this yielding tissue which is critical. It is essential that suckling should be fully operative within four or five days of birth, if the breast-feeding process is to be successfully developed. If repeated failure occurs during the first week, the infant will never give the full response. It will have become fixated on the more rewarding (bottle) alternative offered.

Another suckling difficulty is the so-called ‘fighting at the breast’ response of certain infants. This often gives the mother the impression that the baby does not want to suck, but in reality it means that, despite desperate attempts to do so, it is failing because it is being suffocated. A slightly maladjusted posture of the baby’s head at the breast will block the nose and, with the mouth full, there is no way for it to breathe. It is fighting, not to avoid sucking, but for air. There are, of course, many such problems that face the new mother, but I have selected these two because they seem to add supporting evidence for the idea of the female breast as predominantly a sexual signalling device, rather than an expanded milk machine. It is the solid, rounded shape that causes both these problems. One has only to look at the design of the teats on babies’ bottles to see the kind of shape that works best. It is much longer and does not swell out into the great rounded hemisphere that causes so much difficulty for the baby’s mouth and nose. It is much closer in design to the feeding apparatus of the female chimpanzee. She develops slightly swollen breasts, but even in full lactation she is flat-chested when compared with the average female of our own species. Her nipples, on the other hand, are much more elongated and protrusive and the infant has little or no difficulty in initiating the sucking activity.

Because our females have rather a heavy suckling burden and because the breasts are so obviously a part of the feeding apparatus, we have automatically assumed that their protruding, rounded shape must also be part and parcel of the same parental activity. But it now looks as though this assumption has been wrong and that, for our species, breast design is primarily sexual rather than maternal in function.