This is Improbable Too Page 19
The following year, Tanner and Rosenbloom together sent a letter about this to the journal Pediatrics, with the headline ‘Misuse of Tanner Puberty Stages to Estimate Chronologic Age’. In response, other doctors wrote angry letters, each praising his own use of the Tanner Scale and denouncing Tanner.
Rosenbloom, Arlan L., Henry J. Rohrs, Michael J. Haller and Toree H. Malasanos (2012). ‘Tanner Stage 4 Breast Development in Adults: Forensic Implications’. Pediatrics 130 (4): e978–81.
Marshall, W.A., and James M. Tanner (1969). ‘Variations in Pattern of Pubertal Changes in Girls’. Archives of Disease of Childhood 44: 291–303.
Cattaneo, Cristina, Stefanie Ritz-Timme, Peter Gabriel, Daniele Gibelli, Elena Giudici, Pasquale Poppa, Doerte Nohrden, Sabine Assmann, Roland Schmitt and Marco Grandi (2009). ‘The Difficult Issue of Age Assessment on Pedo-pornographic Material’. Forensic Science International 183 (1): e21–4.
Hefner, Hugh M., David Hickey, et al. (2008). Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Rosenbloom, Arlan L. (2013). ‘Inaccuracy of Age Assessment from Images of Postpubescent Subjects in Cases of Alleged Child Pornography’. International Journal of Legal Medicine 127 (2): 467–71.
Tanner, James M., and Arlan L. Rosenbloom (1998). ‘Letter to the Editor: Misuse of Tanner Puberty Stages to Estimate Chronologic Age’. Pediatrics 102 (6): 1494.
Research spotlight
‘Sex Differences in Response to Relationship Threats in England and Romania’
by Gary L. Brase, Dan V. Caprar, and Martin Voracek (published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2004)
Islands of interest
Sex clearly drives Britain and Argentina as they vie to dominate islands of interest. The two great nations are rivals in producing academic studies of whether and how people stare at women’s breasts or buttocks.
Britain fired the first shot in this war. In 2007, Adrian Furnham and Viren Swami of University College London published a report called ‘Perception of Female Buttocks and Breast Size in Profile’, in the journal Social Behaviour and Personality.
Professor Furnham is, by his own reckoning, one of the most productive academics alive, publishing many hundreds of papers in dozens of far-flung fields. Professor Swami, at the University of Westminster since 2007 and an adjunct reader in psychology at HELP University College in Kuala Lumpur, also beavers relentlessly, both in Britain and abroad. He has launched treatises in topics from the physical attractiveness of women and men in London’s boroughs (see page 297) to the opinions of Austrian students as to the personalities of butchers and hunters.
The Furnham/Swami breast/buttocks paper gathers together many facts known only to a small number of specialists. Here’s one. Furnham and Swami write: ‘It is widely recognised, for example, that the African Hottentot (Caboid) tribe and certain tribes in the Andaman Islands show a preference for large fat deposits on the buttocks, a condition known as steatopygia. It has been suggested that such fat deposits on the buttocks and thighs may signal resource accrual…’
Furnham and Swami studied the reactions of 114 British undergraduates – men and women. They write: ‘The stimuli consisted of nine nude female silhouettes, prepared … in such a manner that the size of breasts and buttocks could be varied systematically.’ Their conclusion: ‘The participants in this study showed a preference for small breast size, although buttocks size did not appear to alter ratings of attractiveness. It would be useful for future research to include a larger range of breast sizes and shapes … to investigate the possibility that optimal breast size … varies across individuals’.
Argentina took five years to respond to this provocation.
Mariano Sigman, director of the Laboratory for Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Buenos Aires, and two collaborators concentrated their analytical firepower on male undergraduates. Their study called ‘Eye Fixations Indicate Men’s Preference for Female Breasts or Buttocks’ was published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour in 2012.
The Sigman team reports that:
‘Argentinian males tended to define themselves as favouring breasts or buttocks’;
‘the distribution was biased towards buttocks’; and
individuals who say they prefer to gaze at one of those body parts behave as if they do.
The British and Argentinian projects both exhibit indomitable focus. The authors and test subjects apparently refuse to let anything seriously distract them from what they want to study.
Furnham, Adrian, and Viren Swami (2007). ‘Perception of Female Buttocks and Breast Size in Profile’. Social Behavior and Personality 35 (1): 1–8.
Dagnino, Bruno, Joaquín Navajas and Mariano Sigman (2012). ‘Eye Fixations Indicate Men’s Preference for Female Breasts or Buttocks’. Archives of Sexual Behavior 41 (4): 929–37.
In brief
‘Effect of Different Types of Textiles on Male Sexual Activity’
by A. Shafik (published in Archives of Andrology, 1996)
The author explains: ‘Each of the 4 test groups were dressed in one type of textile underpants made of either 100% polyester, 50/50% polyester/cotton mix, 100% cotton, or 100% wool. Sexual behavior was assessed before and after 6 and 12 months of wearing the pants, and 6 months after their removal … [and] … polyester underpants could have an injurious effect on human sexual activity.’
May we recommend
‘Real Men Wear Kilts: The Anecdotal Evidence that Wearing a Scottish Kilt Has Influence on Reproductive Potential – How Much Is True?’
by Erwin J.O. Kompanje (published in the Scottish Medical Journal, 2013)
A history of wordplay
Words, words, words are the bread, butter, salt, pepper, meat and potatoes of a small, US-based magazine called Word Ways that has been coming out four times a year since 1968. Dmitri Borgmann, the founding editor, described it as ‘the journal of recreational linguistics’. Its essence, in a word: wordplay.
Borgmann’s obituary, in a 1985 issue of Word Ways, says his greatest achievement was to ‘demonstrate that wordplay is an intellectual discipline in its own right’. Borgmann’s reputation was already such, says the obituary, that Standard Oil of New Jersey had hired him to devise a replacement for its antiquated brand name. ’Twas Borgmann, they say, who spiffed and twisted old-fashioned ‘Esso’ into modern ‘Exxon’. (Later issues of Word Ways say that the Esso-into-Exxon story may be rather more complicated.)
The first issue of Word Ways included Borgmann’s ‘The Longest Word’, in which he traipses along the length of ‘the 27-letter honorjficajhlitudinitatibus’, ‘the 28-letter antidisestablishmentarianism’, ‘the 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis’, and on eventually to a chemical name that is 1,913 letters long. The first two hundred of those letters, by the way, are
metrionylglutaminylarginyltyrosylglutamylserylleucylphenylalanylalanylglutaminylleucyllysylglutamylarginyllysylglutamylglycylalanylphenylalanylvalylprolylphenylalanylvalylthreonylleucyl glycylaspartyl
A 1986 article called ‘Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo’ by Lawrence Levine begins: ‘The long voyage between my first tentative effort at constructing a short palindrome of some 40 letters, and the eventual completion of a palindromic novel numbering 31,594 words (or approximately 104,000 letters) some 20 years later, was an unrelenting lesson in many disciplines. There were lessons in trial and error …’ Levine carefully states his creed as a creator of these bidirectional hunks of text: ‘One must not cheat by inventing words or coining new spellings.’
In 1995, a pseudonymous author wrote a short survey of ‘alphabet poems’ – poems in which each line is keyed to a letter of the alphabet. Many were intended, directly or indirectly (being read aloud) for young children. The article presents one, with authorship attributed to Rod Campbell in 1988, which it calls ‘uninspired’, and which begins:
a is for apple ready to eat
b is for boots to put on your feet …
At th
e other reach of complexity comes a poem written in the late 1800s, authorship uncertain, about the Crimean war. It begins:
An Austrian army, awfully arrayed
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade …
In 1991, Darryl Francis of Mitcham, Surrey, took an earthy look at his native land, in an essay called ‘Naughty Words in British Placenames’. Francis claimed to be restraining himself by giving only sixty-nine examples, though he was rather unrestrained in his view of the boundaries of Britain. Here are six of Francis’s finds, with his own distinctive capitalization and description:
ARSEnal: an area of the London borough of Islington, and also the name of a railway station in the area
BREAST: an island in County Wexford, Ireland
BUMble hole: a locality in Worscestershire
prettyBUSH: a locality in County Wicklow, Ireland
CRAPstone: a hamlet in Devon
PEninNIS: a pile of rocks in the Scilly Isles
PRATt’s Bottom: a hamlet in Kent
SHITlington: a parish in West Yorkshire
dURINEmast: a loch in Argyllshire
WILLY: a parish in Northamptonshire
n.a. (1985). ‘Dmitri Borgmann, Father of Logology’. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 18 (1): 3–5.
n.a. (2012). ‘Colloquy’. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 24 (3): 151–3.
Borgmann, Dmitri (1968). ‘The Longest Word’. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 1 (1): 33–5.
Levine, Lawrence (2011). ‘Dr. Awkward and Olson in Oslo’. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 19 (3): 140–5.
Indicator, Nyr (2012). ‘Alphabet Poems: A Brief History’. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 28 (3): 131–5.
Francis, Darryl (1991). ‘Naughty Words in British Placenames’. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 24 (2): 84–6.
May we recommend
‘Position Paper: Management of Men Complaining of a Small Penis Despite an Actually Normal Size’
by Hussein Ghanem, Sidney Glina, Pierre Assalian and Jacques Buvat (published in Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2013)
Monkeying around
The authors of a study called ‘High Frequency of Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimpanzees’ do not beat about the bush. ‘We report on postcoital penis cleaning in chimpanzees’, they write. ‘In penis cleaning, leaves are employed as “napkins” to wipe clean the penis after sex. Alternatively, the same cleaning motion can be done without leaves, simply using the fingers. Not all chimpanzee communities studied across Africa clean their penes and, where documented, the behaviour is rare. By contrast, we identify postcoital penis cleaning in Budongo Forest, Uganda, as customary.’
Sean O’Hara, a Durham University anthropologist (who has since moved to the University of Salford), and Phyllis Lee, a psychology professor at the University of Stirling, published their monograph in the journal Folia Primatologica in 2006. The British team lists the few instances in which humans had documented the practice. Jane Goodall ‘mentions it in the Gombe chimpanzees, Tanzania, and leaf napkin use in Kibale forest, Uganda, is known … and in 25 years of observation at Taï Forest, Côte d’Ivoire, ‘leaf-wipe’ has been recorded just once’.
O’Hara and a field assistant named Monday Gideon did the Budongo detecting ‘between January and September 2003 and were able to verify “cleaning” or “not cleaning” for 116 copulations. Penis cleaning occurred in 34.5% of copulations (9.5% with leaf napkins and 25% without use of a tool)’. The team expresses wonder that this particular form of tool use varies so starkly in popularity. ‘For penis wiping to be common in some locations while rare or absent elsewhere presents a puzzle’, they say.
They point out that many kinds of animals use one or another type of tool. They cite reports about New Caledonian crows, bottlenose dolphins, parasitoid wasps, capuchin monkeys, and other species. O’Hara and Lee explain that most of these tool-using practices are ‘cultural behaviors’ – that is, learned from fellow dolphins, wasps, monkeys, or whatever. What’s especially notable here, they say, is that ‘few material cultural behaviours are conducted in asocial contexts … Postcoital penis cleaning is one such activity. Although the copulatory act is, by definition, a social event encompassing more than one individual, the penis wiping that follows is solitary and self-directed’.
They note the existence of hypotheses that the cleaning serves some important, particular function. The males do it to check for signs of sexually transmitted disease [STD], perhaps, or maybe to monitor some reproductive aspect of the females with whom they consort.
But O’Hara and Lee keep a disciplined focus on the main question: culture. ‘Whatever the motivation or function’, they write, ‘Budongo males appear more fastidious in penis hygiene than elsewhere. We found no proclivity for the use of specific leaf types; leaves appeared to be plucked non-systematically … While the functional or STD context remains unclear, we suggest that using leaf napkins is a cultural trait in chimpanzees.’
O’Hara, Sean J., and Phyllis C. Lee (2006). ‘High Frequency of Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimpanzees’. Folia Primatologica 77 (5): 353–8.
Having the time of your month
The ‘Menstrual Joy Questionnaire’ was developed in 1987. It entered the world as part of a book called The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, written by Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton and Emily Toth. They were distressed at the existence and influence of the ‘Menstrual Distress Questionnaire’, a dour piece of work created nineteen years earlier by Rudolf H. Moos at Stanford University.
Moos was a psychiatrist. He delved, professionally, into many kinds of distress, among them: depression, problem drinking, work-induced stress and the social atmospheres of psychiatric wards. Though few held it against him, Moos had little first-person experience of menstrual emotions. His was a rigorous academic understanding.
The three menstrual joy scholars were a cheerier lot. They were literary folk. Delaney was director of a prestigious fiction-writing award given by the Folger Library in Washington DC. Lupton and Toth were English professors: Lupton at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Toth at Pennsylvania State University. Their menstrual savvy came from personal experience supplemented by a vast knowledge of literature.
The Menstrual Joy Questionnaire is short and simple, inquiring into ten joyful menstrual matters, specifically: (1) high spirits; (2) increased sexual desire; (3) vibrant activity; (4) revolutionary zeal; (5) intense concentration; (6) feelings of affection; (7) self-confidence; (8) feelings of euphoria; (9) creativity; and (10) feelings of power.
Seven years after Delaney, Lupton and Toth launched their admittedly whimsical questionnaire, a team of researchers tried to gauge its impact. Joan Chrisler, Ingrid Johnston, Nicole Champagne and Kathleen Preston of Connecticut College published a study, called ‘Menstrual Joy: The Construct and Its Consequences’, in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly. Their purpose, they stated, was ‘to examine participants’ reactions to the concept of menstrual joy … We found it too difficult to resist the temptation to see what women would think of the construct.’
And so they gave the Menstrual Joy Questionnaire to forty women. Then they asked five questions:
a) What was your reaction to seeing a questionnaire entitled ‘Menstrual Joy’?
b) Have you previously regarded menstruation as a positive event in your life? If yes, describe the menstrual cycle’s positive aspects in your own words.
c) Did the Menstrual Joy Questionnaire encourage you to view menstruation in a different way? If yes, please explain.
d) Do you think you will be aware of or anticipate some of these positive aspects during your next menstrual cycle?
e) Do you discuss menstruation openly? If so, with whom?
Here, in the researchers’ own words, is what they learned: ‘The most common reactions to the questionnaire were incredulity or disbelief (27.5%), shock or surprise
(22.5%) or the belief that the title was sarcastic or ironic (25%). Other participants expressed initial interest (12.5%), amusement (12.5%), confusion (12.5%), irritation or annoyance (5%), appreciation (2.5%), or sadness (2.5%). Some participants expressed more than one reaction.’
‘The results of this study’, they concluded, ‘are interesting for several reasons.’
Several years later, two British psychologists, Aimee Aubeeluck at the University of Derby and Moira Maguire at the University of Luton, decided to replicate Chrisler et al’s experiment, but chose to remove the title of the questionnaire altogether, so as not to influence a woman’s reaction by hinting at either ‘joy’ or ‘distress’. They say that the wording of ‘Joy’ questions alone was enough to make women think more favourably about menstruation ‘as a natural event’.
Delaney, Janice, Mary Jane Lupton and Emily Toth (1987). The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Moos, Rudolf H. (1968). ‘The Development of a Menstrual Distress Questionnaire’. Psychosomatic Medicine 30: 853–67.
Chrisler, Joan C., Ingrid K. Johnston, Nicole M. Champagne and Kathleen E. Preston (1994). ‘Menstrual Joy: The Construct and Its Consequences’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 18 (3): 375–87.
Aubeeluck, Aimee, and Moira Maguire (2002). ‘The Menstrual Joy Questionnaire Items Alone Can Positively Prime Reporting of Menstrual Attitudes and Symptoms’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 26 (2): 160–2.