Episode 89 - The Biology of Passion, Love, Lust, and Orgasm (Part One) with Joe Quirk, Best-Sellling Author

Transcript

Dr. Patti Taylor: Welcome to the expanded love making show, I’m your host Dr. Patti Taylor of expandedlovemaking.com and I teach how to make exclusive love. This is part one of a two part series. Have you ever wondered if men an women are different? Biology would certainly imply as much. So lets go along with biology for a moment. The biology theory. Say they are different. Well, what are the implications of these differences on sex, mating, genitals, and even orgasms. Well, here to talk about these really interesting questions is our guest today, Joe Quirk. So, hi Joe and welcome to the show.

Joe Quirk: Hi Patti, thanks for inviting me.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Its my pleasure. Let me tell you a little bit about Joe. Joe Quirk is a T.V. talk show darling and he’s famous for his hilarious, non-fiction book “Its Not You, Its Biology, The Science of Love, Sex, and Relationships.” So he takes a layman’s look at the way scientific research that explains biology of human courtship. This book has been translated into seventeen languages. He also writes “I Catch and Copy” and he’s a keynotes speaker. He has two other books coming out shortly. One entitled “Tools Are for Men, Talk is From Women- Why Your Partner’s Brain is Wierd.” So I think we are already getting excited about this program. So anyway, today we will be talking about the biology of sex, love, passion, body parts, orgasms, all of the good stuff, you know jealousy, lust, and even how to win with the opposite sex. So lets get started. I think the obvious beginning place might well just be sperm and the egg. Is there a problem here?

Joe Quirk: There is a big problem here and its that every guy listening to this podcast is thinking the thing and its that sex feels good. Especially when its with somebody else. So why don’t women just give it away indiscriminately to every guy that hits on them. And guys, women have a question for you. And if committed love is the deepest human need, why are men so terrified of it? Well it turns out, its not the way we’re raised, its biology. Sperm spreaders and egg protectors have inherited different emotions from evolution. So millions of years of competition to pass on your genes by getting pregnant or by getting somebody else pregnant has lead to the evolution of two different systems of emotions in all animals where it matters. So to the extent that men and women need each other to pass on their, their emotions evolve to be in harmony. Falling in love, being aroused, ect. To the extent men and women have two different ways of passing on their genes, those emotions evolve to be in conflict.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, can you just give us a little example of how this might play out.

Joe Quirk: Well if you think about the sperm and egg problem. Men waste up to three-million sperm per ejaculation. Nobody cares about a sperm. We have plenty to spare. We might as spray them everywhere we can. Now think about the investments a cave-woman makes in a heterosexual boink. If a sperm gets near her egg, she may have to give birth to a human head, which requires a level of athleticism equivalent to pushing a grapefruit through, out your nostril. So raising the bret to being a teenager is even more painful. So an egg protector severely limits her reproductive potential when she chooses to have sex. If she gets pregnant and abandoned in the cave-man-days, her chances of raising a baby to a breeding age are not optimal. Now if a sperm-spreader, he severely limits his reproductive potential when he chooses to commit to one women and help raise her babies. If somebody else’s sperm gets into her womb, he may raise kids who aren’t his and in every culture, male paranoia about paternity assurance is installed into the roots of the culture. So once, all my relationships involved arguing. I didn’t understand women, they didn’t understand me. And there’s all these books out there that pretend to help: “Mars,” “Venus,” “He’s Just Not That In To You.” All of these other authors that make a lot more money than me. And meanwhile, there is an actual science of human desire and emotion out there and I’m a science nerd and I got addicted to reading all these studies. And I was telling my writer friends about it. I was a fiction writer at the time and I was like, “Did you know that women are more likely to cheat when they ovulate? Did you know team use team work? Did you know if men drink enough alcohol, they lactate?” My friends were all like, “Man, you’re done with your novel. You should write about this.” So it turns out that all the questions you see on the front cover of “Cosmo” and “Men’s Health Magazine” are answered by evolutionary biology. The problem is, its all written in scientific “gobbldegook” and its stuck over in the science section of the bookstore. And I wrote this book to get the science of relationships out of the science aisle and over into the relationships aisle of the bookstore.

Dr. Patti Taylor: That’s good and onto the expanded love making show, where people can use this information, right?

Joe Quirk: Absolutely.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Now how would you use this information?

Joe Quirk: Well to think about why you’re attracted to different kinds of people. For instance, if you think about the female orgasm, it turns the female orgasm is like a sperm filing system. Ladies, your orgasm puts the sperm of some men over to the side to be used in case of emergency and it sends the sperm of other men straight to the ovaries, priority delivery, and it all depends on how you time it. So if a woman orgasms one minute before male ejaculation, her orgasm will block his sperm. And if she orgasms just before the male ejaculates, she’s sucking sperm towards her ovaries. And guess what? Women don’t have that much control over when they orgasm. Some can train themselves to, but when you’re young and trying to for the first time, there’s this wierd divergence in what women are interested in. And when you look at the studies that show married women are more likely to cheat when they ovulate, they’re more likely to have simultaneous orgasms when they cheat, than when they’re having sex with their husbands. And there adultery sex retains three times more sperm than married sex. You realize that this and other evidence shows that women have their own version of the “Madonna-whore complex” and its the nice-guy-hot-bad-boy torment. In all animals where pair bonds are required to raise a baby to breeding age, females have this dual agenda in their emotions. They need really good genes and they need a really good nest. And the problem is, the best nest might come from your husband and the best genes might come from somebody else’s husband. And its hard to get both in the same guy, so women have this dual agenda, they want to feel hot genes and they also want a committed nurturing guy to help raise the babies. And these are separable instincts.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well that’s really interesting. We’re going to come back to that because, don’t we evolve past, we have biology, but we’re not raising kids our whole life, right?

Joe Quirk: Right!

Dr. Patti Taylor: So there are work-a-rounds, aren’t there?

Joe Quirk: There certainly are. We just inherit a suite of emotions that we’re not consciously trying to send our genes into the next generation, but we inherit a set of emotions and proclivities, that attend us towards certain emotions and desires and things. You know, we care about what our neighbors think, we’re attracted to certain types of people, and a lot of time we don’t really know why we feel the things we do.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay good. So I’d like to learn as much as I can about the biology and I think I’d like to focus some of the show what are some of the work-a-rounds so we we feel empowered to work around these situations.

Joe Quirk: Yes

Dr. Patti Taylor: Because that would be nice to think that we could actually have what we want out of all of this, which is actually what your book does do. So lets go on and keep talking about the anatomy here. Lets talk about how we have selected then our partner in humans. How have we women selected our men, just from an evolutionary point of view.

Joe Quirk: Well, women to a large extent, have selected men who are nurturing and who are interested in acting like mothers, that is, they want to bond with children and raise them. If you look at most mammals, males are most interested in spreading their sperm and females are mostly interested in choosing the best sperm and then parenting the result. So males and females of most species can agree on one thing and thats, that they’re not interested in a relationship. However, you get certain species that are much more romantic and I usually list them for people. There are penguins, there’s parrots, sea horses, coyotes, gibbons, bald eagles. And humans, they all try to work out a relationship and they move in together and they get jealous. And what do all these species have in common? Long childhoods. And biologists drew out a graph, I call it the “love graph” and show that among mammals, the longer it takes offspring to grow up, the more males evolve to commit to one female and help raise the “young’ns” and the more the females care who the male is “boinking.” So who has the longest child in the animal kingdom? Its humans and that’s why we fall so passionately in love and have an instinct to stay together for a long time.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay good. So how would that... Thats very interesting, parrots, penguins. Ducks too, right?

Joe Quirk: Some ducks.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Uh-huh.

Joe Quirk: It depends on the duck. Ducks are particularly interesting.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Uh-huh, okay. So, interesting set of animals there. Seahorses, you just never think about that. So how would that influence the characteristics biologically of the person, the male, let’s say there physical body part.

Joe Quirk: Oh! Are you interested in hearing about the penis or the balls.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Well yeah actually, although you know I think we ought to take a break and then we’ll come back and get to that, so at this very good juncture, this is Dr. Patti Taylor and we are here with Joe Quirk and you can find out more about him at his website, joequirk.com j-o-e-q-u-i-r-k-dot-com and he’s the author of the best-selling book, “Its Not You, Its Biology.” And we will be right back. 

[Commercial Break]

Dr. Patti Taylor: We’re back and we’re talking about biology. The biology of passion, love, lust, and orgasms and we were just talking about the biology of men, so please continue.

Joe Quirk: Well a lot of women don’t realize that the human penis was designed by female choice. We have and unusual penis. The fully erect penis on the gorilla is one and a quarter inches and the fully erect penis on urangatan is about one and a half inches. Compared to most apes, even the most portally-endowed human male is super hung. 

Dr. Patti Taylor: I am gonna stop complaining, you know that?

Joe Quirk: Yes! Would you rather have sex with a urangatan?

Dr. Patti Taylor: No more urangatans for me. I’ll tell ya, you know? Anyways, go on.

So evolutionary biologists proposed that the human penis was enlarged by females sexual choice. I’ll explain. Imagine you’re a peahen and if you think peacocks big tails are sexy, you’re gonna keep having sex with peacocks with big tails. That means big tails will be continually favored in the population and tails will get bigger over the generations and what ever females find attractive in another, in the other sex, they artificially basically artificially select for that characteristic to get larger. Females are basically breeding the males. So if you think creative brains are sexy and you keep having sex with creative, compassionate males. Over a hundred-thousand generations, you are participating in the sexual selection of creative, compassionate brains. And this is what evolutionary biologists propose is the reason for why our brains evolved to be so big and why evolved to be so empathetic and cooperative because our brains are basically like the big peacock’s tail. They’re a courtship device and when we go on a date, you know, we don’t just dance around and wiggle our tail feathers, we talk, we display how deep we are and creative and clever our brains are.

Dr. Patti Taylor: As a guy?

Joe Quirk: As a guy and a female. We choose each other based on our mental capacities.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right and this all goes back to also because you need to stay together to raise the kid.

Joe Quirk: Yes

Dr. Patti Taylor: Who, in a circle, is now, because they have a big brain, taking longer to be born because their head gets pushed out and has too... doesn’t that take longer to raise, because their brain is so big?

Joe Quirk: Yes, we actually give birth to young much earlier than other primates. I think our young are born much more helpless than other mammals, because the brains are so big, that we have to pop them out early.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right.

Joe Quirk: So we have extra vulnerable offspring.

Dr. Patti Taylor: We’re compounding the problem here. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Joe Quirk: Yes and they take fifteen years to become breeders themselves, so its hugely difficult for a female to have this really helpless young. You think about a wildebeest gives birth. The baby can run and fend for itself in a few minutes. With us, our babies are completely helpless. And so basically to evolve big brains, we need help from the male.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, so why are we women selecting men with the large cocks. That seems like an obvious question, but I thought I’d let you answer it anyway.

Joe Quirk: Well it seems like there is something random that goes on and what females choose to be initially attracted to way back in primal times. On the peacock it was the tail. The females just find the tail attractive and the more they choose it, the bigger it gets, until the male has a giant, splendiferous tale. And whenever you see anything in nature that is pointless, except to impress, that serves no practical purpose, its a sure sign that it evolved through sexual selection. And in the media, we hear a lot about natural selection, which is species competing viciously with each other for food, but a much more powerful force at evolution is sexual selection, which is animals competing with each other for mates. So you can tell a trait that evolves through sexual selection by how unnecessarily large it is and if you compare our penis to the penises of other primates, you realize ours are just ridiculously and unnecessarily huge. They don’t need to be that big.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right and even a man who thinks he’s got a small one, has got an enormous one relative to all other species, you know, like you know, in our branch.

Joe Quirk: Yes and if you’re self conscious about you penis, go to the zoo and stand next to a gorilla.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay, well lets go onto testicles

Joe Quirk: Yes! Testicles are very interesting, because, incredibly, in any mammal, the more the female cheats, in any semi-monogamous or monogamous mammal, the more the female sneaks nookie on the side, the larger the male’s testicles. Why its... Its all about sperm competition inside the female, so say a female chimp buffs two males in the same day, the sperm of those rival males has to fight it out inside her to win the approval of the egg. The more sperm you can produce, the better your chances of overwhelming the other guy’s troops. The bigger your testicles, the more sperm you can produce. Biologists can literally measure the promiscuity of any monogamous female primate by weighing the males balls. So for instance, gorillas. Teeny, tiny, little testicles. And thats because the female gorilla is faithful to the alpha male. Chimps on the other hand have testicles literally the size of grapefruits. And if you ever see them at the zoo, its really true, they’re huge and that is because the scandalous “chimpette,” sneak extra nookie on the side every time the alpha male’s back is turned. And it turns out, that if you draw out all these testicles on a graph, among primates and mammals, the human ball to body ratio falls exactly between the chimp and the gorilla

Dr. Patti Taylor: Wow!

Joe Quirk: So my training as an amateur biologist, would allow me to inspect any man’s testicles and conclude that the female of the species are mostly monogamous, but sometimes sleep with more than one man in the same day. 

Dr. Patti Taylor: Just like any good girlfriend would tell you, right?

Joe Quirk: Yes, next time your woman says she’s chased, then say “Oh yeah, then how come my balls are so big.”

Dr. Patti Taylor: Uh huh. Right. Okay. Well this now brings us to one of my favorite topics, which is “clit” size. Why then, are clitorises so gosh-darn hard to find.

Joe Quirk: It is a funny thing, isn’t it? I say in the book that no man ever visited a sex therapist complaining, “I’ve never had an orgasm and I don’t know where my penis is.” And after much debate among evolutionary biologists the idea is that the function of the hidden clitoris is to judge how good a lover the male is. We can get into lots of stuff about “why women have orgasms?” and “Why there’s a clitoris at all?” but if you think about it from the female genes’ perspective. If the clitoris was kinda stuck out penis style, it would be easily located and stimulated and like a penis, it would be more prone to make its owner pursue promiscuous intercourse. The idea of evolutionary biology is that females are designed, body and soul, to be more choosey. They have a limited number of eggs and they want to choose the best males possible. Female pleasure is something to be earned. So the idea is, by making the clitoris hard to find, mother-nature assures females choose the most seductive, caring men who know how to have a killer instinct at the right moment

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right we just can’t go out and have pleasure with anybody, right?

Joe Quirk: Right.

Dr. Patti Taylor: That would be highly counter-productive.

Joe Quirk: Right, because you could just get pregnant with any old “shlump.” You want choose the really good one.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right. Well I’m going to talk more about this as an owner of a clitoris, so, but we do have to take a break, so please stay with us, I am Dr. Patti Taylor here with Joe Quirk. And you can find out more about him at his website joequirk.com j-o-e-q-u-i-r-k-dot-com and he’s the author of the best-selling book, “Its Not You, Its Biology.” We’ll be right back. 

[Commercial]

Dr. Patti Taylor: We’re back and we’re talking about he biology of passion, love, lust, and orgasms. So the clitoris is kind of what? Is it like a training ground for possible mate selection or what?

Joe Quirk: Right so we have a lot of foreplay. Much more than other animals, i mean, biologists actually counted up the amount of time we spend courting and engaging in foreplay before we actually go straight to the intercourse and it turns out its about a hundred times more spent on seducing the female. So as I remember very well from college, females like to spend a lot of time sort of testing you at. I mean they want to make out on the couch, they want to have a little foreplay here and sometimes they’ll change their mind at the last minute. The “choosiness,”  when you have to get pregnant for nine months, breast feed for two-and-a-half years, and then raise a baby, you know, to fifteen years until they can breed themselves. It just doesn’t do you any good to get pregnant with just anybody. You want a male that, hopefully, will invest in the child and you also want the best possible genes to make sure that child survives and you also want your future sons to be seductive, to pass on more of your genes in the future.

Dr. Patti Taylor: And now the thing is, is that women will act like this, even though there past child-bearing age.

Joe Quirk: Yes, there’s very interesting stuff about the evolution of menopause, which is actually not in the book. I mean we could talk about this on the show.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay

Joe Quirk: Because menopause was a big mystery among evolutionary biologists, because its not just a function of age, its actually like a revers puberty. It kicks in about the time that pregnancy would become too unsafe for the female and the body goes through this huge hormonal shutdown. Its almost as if mother-nature is saying “Okay giving birth is too dangerous, so we’re gonna preserve your life to make sure you live far beyond your breeding years.” And this was a challenge to evolutionary biologists for a while because most animals, after they finish being young and fertile, drop dead. Our species is unique in that the females live far beyond their child-bearing years. And this menopause only exists in a few animals. It exists in whales. It exists in another one I can’t remember. But the point is, it exists in females that pass information, it exists in amongst species that pass information thats non-genetic onto grandchildren. So somebody showed that among the hazda of New Guinea, that who live very difficult hunter-gatherer lives, much like our ancestors. That children who have maternal grandparents that are still alive, survive at much higher rates than children that don’t have maternal grandparents. And for a while, it was thought that, its because the older grandmothers are much better gatherers. They have more experience with how to survive and they provide more calories for the children, but they show this even applied, the better survival rates even applied when the grandmothers are so old, they live in a hut and they can’t contribute to anything. So what is the mystery? What are grandmothers giving children that allow them to survive at a better rate? Well it turns out that elders among hunter-gatherers, even though they’re toothless and blind, people go to them as if they’re almost god like and they bring them offerings of food and they say “Oh great grandmother, what did we do fifty summers ago when there was a drought like this?” Hunter-gatherers, they don’t the internet, they don’t have encyclopedias. The brains of their elders are their encyclopedias. So the idea is that the grandmothers accumulate this wisdom over so much time, and they pass it on to their grandchildren and kids who have their grandmothers, that are still alive, survive at better rates. So the idea is that any genes that caused the women to live beyond their reproductive years, even to the extent of shutting down their reproductive capacity, would survive in the population if it cause a grandchildren to survive at higher rates. How is that for a long, acidemic, explanation.

Dr. Patti Taylor: That’s very long and I have another question. So even if I’m having sex now and I’m, ya know or lets just say any woman is having sex and I’m not planning on having a kid, I still may be just as choosey as a woman who is having an egg or anyone who’s using a condom or using birth control, right?

Joe Quirk: Right!

Dr. Patti Taylor: Or past menopause, or you know, this evolutionary biology, I mean it started out as a sperm and an egg problem, right? But it applies to all women, even though they’re not necessarily defending their egg anymore.

Joe Quirk: Absolutely. Almost all the sex humans have do not create children

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right.

There’s sex after menopause, sex when you’re not ovulating, sex with yourself.

Dr. Patti Taylor: But its in your brain right?

Joe Quirk: Its in your brain and the point of sex is not to make babies. The point of sex, in our species is really to bond people together.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Uh huh.

Joe Quirk: We have sex all month long. We don’t just have it when we’re ovulating. So human beings have sex to not to procreate, but to bond. So if you think of the ultimate purpose of human sexuality is to lure homosapiens into a kind of family unit, a sort of secondary womb, where babies can be raised and children can be taught and grandchildren can be taught. Much like the bonobo, humans bond for a lifetime through sexual play. So mammals that don’t have these long pair bonds, they have sex basically to procreate. Humans and bonobos have sex to stay together, so biologically, the primary function of human sex is to bond people together and raise children.

Dr. Patti Taylor: But we’re gonna get more into in the second show. What to do about jealousy and lust and passion. I want to go back a little bit longer to the clitoris. I really like what you say, that the clitoris is really a training ground for women to sort out “Is this guy the one for me or not, cause’ if he doesn’t know how to ring my doorbell, he’s not coming in.”

Joe Quirk: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I think. Its one of the theories that’s disputed, but I buy it.

Dr. Patti Taylor: People are saying what is the function of the clitoris and I actually think this is the test, the ultimate test. So go ahead

Joe Quirk: Yes I think it is the test. Women want to choose the most seductive, most caring men, most interested men and also there is an odd thing that goes along with the female orgasm that I tried to describe before and thats sometimes it blocks the sperm and sometimes it sucks the sperm deeper inside. So it sounds like female sexuality has two different functions, one is to bond a male to her and another one is to get pregnant. And most of the sex the female has, if she orgasms, the orgasm is actually blocking the sperm from getting to her ovaries depending on when she times it. So a large part of female sexuality, again this is not conscious, these are just the desires we inherit from our ancestors, have to do with bonding a male to herselft, without getting pregnant.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Uh-huh. Yes, because in a sense its a little microcosm of the macrocosm, isn’t it? When you’re negotiating how to touch a woman on her clitoris, thats pretty intimate. If you don’t know how to get that right.

Joe Quirk: It took me forever to learn it and also every woman is different, which is another fascinating thing.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Right. Well we’re gonna go into a lot more of this in the second show: money, wealth, status, sex, passion, love, lust, but we’re gonna close out this show for now, we have a lot more to talk about and this has been a great foundation. Before we do, I’d love to ask you for our listeners that want to just have an inspiring thought for the day, do you have any, just little short thoughts that we can close the show out on.

Joe Quirk: Well its that beauty will get you attention, it will not get you love. Maybe I can explain that next time.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay great. How about, does beauty come from within? Does that help?

Joe Quirk: It sure does.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Okay.

Joe Quirk: And there’s a biological reason for that.

Dr. Patti Taylor: Oh okay beautiful. Well thank you very much. We have been talking with Joe Quirk and I can’t wait for the second show now, you’ve got me on the edge of my seat. We have been talking about the biology of passion, love, lust, and orgasms with Joe Quirk, who you can find out more as a copyrighter by the way now, I can find out why. I can have him do whatever, I’m hiring him. Anyway, Joe Quirk the biology of love, passion, love, lust is our show and his book is “... Not You, Its Biology,” which is his amazing book. I need your help, please take our survey. Go to survey.personallifemedia.com and help our sponsors find out who we are. Thank you for listening to our show, please email me, Patti, at personallifemedia.com for any questions, for texts and transcripts, you can go to personallifemedia.com and of course my website expandedlovemaking.com for my mailing list, products, services, and events. This is Dr. Patti Taylor and that’s all for now. I remain yours in ever expanded love making and I’ll see you next week.