Ologies with Alie Ward - Biological Anthropology (APE SEX) with Lara Durgavich

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Sexy apes: you’re one of them. And Biological Anthropologist Dr. Lara Durgavich joins to chat about everything from monogamy to PMS, male birth control pills, freezers of orangutan urine, imposter syndrome and testosterone, how the Pope makes you buy more tampons, which species has better sex, pancakes vs. boners, and boobs as a life preserver. It’s wall to wall gonad gossip and just may change the way you see yourself, you hairy, horny beautiful beast. Follow Dr. Lara Durgavich at Twitter.com/tinkeringprim8 A donation went to pasa.org/ Sponsors of Ologies: alieward.com/ologies-sponsors More links and info at alieward.com/ologies/biologicalanthropology Neuroendocrinology episode with Dr. Daniel Pfau: alieward.com/ologies/neuroendocrinology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, what's up? It's your brain who refuses to do anything unless there's a water balloon's worth of dopamine dumped on it. Alley Ward, back with the hairiest sexy episode of oligies. What the hell does that mean? Well, trickology was about hair, sexology was about sex, but this, this one is the hairiest sexy episode because it's about apes getting it on. And hey, guess what? We're also apes. Oh yes. But hey, Ivan and Io, what if we thank the folks at patreon.com slash oligies for tossing 25 cents an episode at us, keeping this podcast possible. And also told you that if you need holiday gifts for phthalo oligites, there is some up at oligiesmerge.com. Also, if you rate and subscribe this show, it keeps oligies up in the charts and also reviewing

makes my day. What if I told you all that? Well, I already did. Maggie Mooger said it's the episodes I'm least excited about that become my favorites. Maggie is a nurse. Thank you for literally saving lives while I talk about crotches. Okay, as your dear wizard internet grandfather, I read every single review, they bring tears to my milky eyes. So thank you for doing that. And now let's get etymological on this. Okay, biological anthropology, it comes from the study of the life of people. And really, it means the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, of their extinct ancestors and related nonhuman primates. So think of this as how to sex ape style. So this oligist and I met via the internet and much to our mutual like, we had already covered primatology way early in

episode two, which is a great episode, by the way. But this scientist this week did her PhD dissertation on ovarian function and reproductive behaviors across the female orangutan lifestyle and has been a lecturer at Boston University. She's been a Harvard University fellow, a Ted speaker, whose talk on gene mutations has at present 1.6 million views. She's a current lecturer at Tufts and is also a biological anthropologist. Boom. So we recorded this months ago back when the lockdown first started actually, but I wanted to give it some space from the neuro endocrinology episode about sex and gender that was up in June. So I've been saving this as kind of a post companion piece to that, kind of like a special piece of Halloween candy you find in a

pocket. And it's all about primates getting it on. It's literally the thing that drives us every moment of every day. So just go look in the mirror and whisper you sexy ape and then get ready to hear about mating behaviors, ovaries, sperm counts, exotic dancers, biological clocks, presidential roosters, cramps, the pope, male birth control, hormones and moods and lots and lots of orangutan pee with biological anthropologist Dr. Lara Durgovitch. Hi. So you're here. I'm here. I'm so excited to be here. Let's go into your background. You were a college fellow in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. I was. I was. A lecturer at BU also, right? Yes. I bounce around

a lot in the Boston area. So I did five years at Harvard. And then last year, I was teaching at Tufts University. This year, I'm teaching at Boston University. Next year, I'm going back to Tufts University. So I am itinerant. I work as adjunct faculty because I decided while in grad school that I was not cut out for the tenure track lifestyle. And so I have been jumping around to where opportunities are available. And I've been very fortunate so far to be able to keep finding them. Okay. Confession from a non-academic, which would be me. I know that tenure is supposed to be like a good thing to attain. But I'll be honest, I don't really know what it means or how it works. But Dr. Durgovitch basically says that it means you work there permanently and you can only get

fired or lose your job if something egregious happens. And as much as permanent employment is great, she said she just knew that that path wasn't right for her. It's a pretty old system. And to get tenure, there's a lot of ranks climbing and sacrifices personally, she says. It is just not very friendly, especially to women because we often bear the brunt of child care labor. And so I just decided in grad school, I thought, you know what, I love teaching, but I'm just not cut out for the what is often called publisher-perish lifestyle. When you were thinking about having kids, did you think back to your research on like ovarian function in orangutans? Was that in your mind?

I guess it was in a sense because I actually got pregnant with my daughter when I was in grad school. So I was still doing my research when I was pregnant and then wrote up my dissertation after she was born. So it was certainly something I was spending a lot of time thinking about, but the focus of my research had a lot more to do with the relationship between age and hormones and then the relationship between hormones and behavior. It wasn't directly related to pregnancy, although as I say, I definitely was spending a lot of time both surrounded by orangutan urine and thinking about their ovaries during the whole period of my pregnancy. What got you there? What got you to research this? What were you like as a kid? Were

you an outdoor kid? I know that you mentioned that you wear glasses partly because your nose was in a book when you were a kid. That's true. Yes, less so today by just simply lack of time. But yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time reading definitely, but I also did love being outdoors. I had an exceptionally average suburban childhood. I think what ended up getting me where I was, I got to college. I had no idea what I wanted to do. They eventually said you need to declare a major and I said okay. And I picked anthropology because I was really at the time I was actually really interested in archaeology. I studied anthropology as an undergrad. I went to BU at Boston University and my initial plan had actually been to study stress hormones and look at the

relationship between stress hormones and captivity. I was really interested in how different forms of environmental enrichment in captivity could affect stress and behavior. And I had a whole project planned out and was ready to go with that. And then at the last minute, the rug got pulled out from under me. And one of the places that I had been planning to do the research said, I'm sorry, you can't come anymore. And then my advisor at the time ended up leaving university. And so I got thrown into a very sudden limbo. I'm in purgatory. And ended up having to go back to square one. And one of the professors who joined the department at that time, and this was back in, gosh, I can't think of now it would have been maybe 2007 ish, was a woman named Dr. Cheryl

Knot. And she is a primatologist as well, who has a research site on Borneo, where she studies wild orangutans. And so she came in at the time and I said, I don't know what I'm doing. And she helped me basically salvage my PhD, helped me figure out a new path that was was focused more on the reproductive hormones. And so that's how I ended up doing all the work that I did. And having access to all this urine that I had access to, which was so fun. That you have access to urine was I'm just picturing like a lock and closet full of jugs. It's not terribly far off. You've got you've got these large, big freezers that are full of boxes with test tubes. And so it's it's very, it's very clinical. It suited my purposes perfectly fine.

Like, had you met your husband by that point? I had. Yeah, we actually met in undergrad. Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah, because you were pregnant in grad school. So I was. Yeah, I got I didn't I didn't put my life on hold during grad school. I went ahead and got married and got pregnant and did I just kept doing stuff. One of the lenses that I was using when I wrote up my dissertation was how do the ovarian hormone levels that we see in captive orangutans differ from what we see in wild orangutans. And we know already that in general, they're going to have higher hormone levels in captivity, just because there are fewer energetic challenges, there are fewer immunological challenges. And so we we know from the field that is called reproductive ecology in

general, which studies the relationship between environment and reproductive function. We have studies from humans and number of different primate non human primate species now that show that there's a very clear link between environmental variability and ovarian function. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, no. As a person with inexplicably broken ovaries in my early 30s, I found this terrifying and exciting. So we know we knew going in or I knew going in that they're the apes hormone levels in captivity were going to be higher. But I was interested in asking questions about variability. And I was especially interested in looking at sort of different transitions in their life stages. So I was like, what's going on with their hormones at adolescence?

And does it look like what goes on with human hormones at adolescence? And then what's going on with their hormones when they get to be like 40 or 45 years old? And is there any sign of anything approximating menopause? And so I was looking at kind of both ends of the life cycle. And then for the individuals that were in the middle, I was looking at I had records of mating behaviors because in captivity, they can keep really detailed records of who's mating with whom, when and what kinds of behaviors are involved in that. And zookeepers are like TMZ. They're just out there. They are. They are. And I should maybe I'll take a picture and send you some of the data sheets so you can see what it looks like where they're like, you know, so and so approached

this orangutan and they, you know, orangutans are actually relative to species like chimpanzees and gorilla. They're actually fairly sexually adventurous. And so some of the records are quite interesting. Aside from the thrill of hot gossip, why would she elbow deep in spreadsheets about orangutans boning surrounded by freezers full of their urine? I was basically looking for those adult age individuals, whether there was any impact in what their hormone levels look like for the females in a given cycle and whether they were more attractive to the males or whether the females were more interested in mating if they had higher hormone levels. I was looking at a spectrum of different things. And we're closely more closely related to chimpanzees, correct?

We are. We are. Yeah, we share more of our DNA with chimpanzees. I think it's 90, 98 point something with chimpanzees. And then with orangutans, it's down to about 97%. But is that still so correlated? 97% is still so much. It's very high. And if you look at the reproductive hormones and the the cycles, they are all very similar. And actually, orangutans are more similar to humans than gorillas and chimpanzees in a lot of aspects having to do with reproductive cycles. So chimps and gorillas actually have slightly longer reproductive cycles. Chimpanzees have that very obvious, what is called sexual swelling during the midpoint of their cycle where they get this kind of big balloon of tissue in

their perennial region. And that is very attractive to males. And it's a very clear signal that a female is ovulating. Humans sadly don't have a horny bloom in onion of a taint. But we can signal to potential mates by posting TikToks of us dancing to Megan the Stallion, which I'm going to get real with you. And I had to Google some sexy TikTok trends to obtain that reference. And in doing so, I just learned that I need to get rid of my side part because it's not 2013. Anyway, having an inflated anal region sounds way easier than trying to flirt online. I love the idea of chimpanzees just doing makeup tutorials on like how to look like you have a bulbous taint and overlining. There's actually so that the sexual swelling is something that you

find in chimpanzees and bonobos. There's a very slight one in gorillas, but then a lot of different what are called old world monkeys, which basically just means that they are African or Asian. The macaques and other species have the sexual swelling as well. And there's great research that was done back in the day where they were trying to determine whether actually was a sexual stimulant for males and they would take females in captivity and they would take out their ovaries and then they would attach this plastic sexual swelling to their rumps and put them around males and the males would get excited even though the underlying hormone wasn't there. They would still get excited by this visual signal. So yeah, it's kind of fine.

Someone's out there just making prosthetic. Someone's out there taking prosthetic. Yeah, prosthetic swellings. I bet they're great at dinner parties. You know, I think that we all hear these things and I don't know if this is total flimflam, but like someone who is a professional dancer will make more in tips around like ovulation. Is that a flimflam or is that true? That is flimflam. It is. It is. Yeah. So I know the specific study that you're talking about that it made because it made a lot of headlines when it was published. Okay, quick aside. So this 2007 study is titled Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by

Lapdancers. Economic evidence for human estrus, question mark, and it was authored by three people who do not have ovaries or estrus, which is the period when you're not on your period and you can get knocked up. And I always feel like when a house is an escrow, it sounds way too much like estrus. Like it seems just ripe and eager and I'm just like vaguely inclined to avert eye contact. But yes, since this study is oft quoted, I'm just going to quote it directly, quote, 18 dancers recorded their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days on a study website. These results constitute the first direct economic evidence for the existence and importance of estrus in contemporary human females in a real world work setting.

They continue patting themselves on the back. And if you go back and look at the methodology of that study, there are some big problems in the way that it was executed. And so the idea that people can pick up on ovulatory status in human women, that idea is not entirely flimflam. There are studies that show that people can look at photographs of women who are ovulating versus non ovulating. And so there's a little bit of disagreement depending on what study you look at. But the particular idea that strippers or dancers are going to be making more in tips when they're ovulating that grew out of that study, that is flimflam. It's also not true that women who are living together cycle together, which a lot of people

think. That's not true. I think there's probably so many roommates that are quarantined right now that are waiting. That's true. And you know, it can happen because of just statistical likelihood, but there is nothing ceremonial or anything like that that causes women to start cycling together if they're living together. I have a friend who says that she gets her period when the moon is full. And she says that. And I was like, well, wouldn't that just be 28 days? And she's like, no, sometimes if like, it'll be off and then all of a sudden the moon is full and it's like a week early. Does that ever happen? Is it tied to the moon? Not to the best of my knowledge. I don't think I've ever seen anything that has empirically

established any kind of lunar cycle. It certainly is possible that that could happen anecdotally for her because we all have it in our heads that the human cycle is 28 days long. And the truth is that there's a ton of variability around that both from woman to woman or person to person. One person's average might be 26 days and another person's average might be 32 days, but also from cycle to cycle. So I could have a 28 day cycle one month and then my next cycle could be 33 days. And the cycle after that could be 27 days. So it's not like your body has some kind of very specific internal clock that it's keeping. There's a lot of variation.

And what about people who don't have ovaries? What about boys and people with testicles? Do they have anything cyclical or are they even Steven? Um, I mean, there are things that can affect testosterone production. It is not nearly as responsive to environmental variability as the ovaries are. And I don't know of anything cyclical in testosterone production other than the fact that testosterone production has a circadian rhythm. So testosterone levels are always higher in the morning than they are in the afternoon or evening. But I don't know of any kind of monthly variation in testosterone. Is that why dudes wake up with boners or is that just so they don't pee the bed?

That's a good question. I actually don't know the answer to that question. I mean, certainly testosterone is is necessary for erectile function. But I don't I actually don't know because most of my my scholarly work has been focused on females. I actually don't know for whether there's a direct link between high testosterone levels in the morning and waking up. Barners. Yeah. Okay, not sure. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go tippity tapping. Yeah, you'll have to you'll have to put that in the side. Okay, I looked it up and do morning boners have anything to do with testosterone? It's been long established. Heck yeah. So according to the 1990 study, testosterone replacement therapy and sleep related

erections in hypokinatal men, penis owners with an androgen deficiency can still have normal penile nocturnal tube essence as it's known by its clinical name. But sleep related erections increase in response to testosterone administration, it says. So yeah, you can still have sleep owners, but you'll definitely have sleep owners if you're on tea. Also, these swellings can happen even while in the womb, fetus can have a boner. And I have a friend who is not a morning person and does not appreciate being spooned with a little tap tap tap on her lower back. And she considers herself the founding champion of a movement called pancakes, not boners. But hey, before you think that penis havers have all the nocturnal tube essence fun, there is such a thing

as NCT where the P word is swapped with a C word, McClitt owners. So sex and hormones, we're in it and they're in us. And okay, so sex hormones, what exactly are sex hormones? Which ones are the ones in play? And obviously, some people might not know that women have testosterone and males have estrogen. Yeah, so sex hormones is kind of a broad umbrella that usually when somebody is referring to sex hormones, they are referring to estrogen or progesterone, which are hormones that are primarily produced by the ovaries in women, although men also have estrogen and progesterone. And then testosterone and other what are called androgen hormones, which is basically just the family of hormones that testosterone is in. And those are produced,

again, mostly by the testes in males, although women also produce testosterone. And they're all very closely related. So they're all actually derived from cholesterol. And yeah, and then the way that you get and I am not a molecular biologist, so I'm not going to be able to go into this in a ton of detail. But the way that you get from cholesterol to these different sex hormones is kind of small changes along the way you remove things along the way. And so you can turn cholesterol into testosterone and then you can turn testosterone into estrogen. They're all really closely related. And so everybody is making all of these hormones. There are no kind of male hormones and female hormones. There are differences in average concentrations

of those hormones between men and women. But yeah, everybody's making everything. What's the cast of characters? What do they tend to do? What does estrogen tend to affect? What does testosterone do? What does progesterone do? And is oxytocin a hormone? Oxytocin is a hormone, but it's not one of these steroid hormones. Oxytocin is actually a hormone that is produced by the pituitary gland. And so it has its own whole set of diverse functions. But there are times in which oxytocin has really important interacting effects with reproductive hormones. So oxytocin is actually really important during lactation because it is the hormone that results in milk letdown. And then oxytocin is important during sex. It's

released during orgasm. It's important during pregnancy and labor. So oxytocin is doing its own whole set of things. But in answer to your first question with estrogen and progesterone, they do other things, but at least in terms of reproductive function. Estrogen is basically what is being produced as eggs or follicles are maturing in a given cycle. There is an estrogen kind of build up across the first part of the cycle. And that's what triggers another hormone called luteinizing hormone, which is what causes ovulation to happen. So estrogen is really important during the first part of the ovulatory cycle, what's called the follicular phase of the ovulatory cycle. That's when the eggs are

the group of eggs that is kind of recruited in a given cycle because women are born with all the eggs we'll ever have. And so each month, roughly, there's a group that gets quote unquote recruited and those develop and those are producing estrogen. And then in the second half of the cycle, what's called the luteal phase of the cycle, that's when you get more progesterone production. And that's really important for building up the endometrial lining of the uterus so that if fertilization takes place, you have a uterus that's ready for implantation. And then they do all kinds of additional things during pregnancy and so forth. But that's the basics of what estrogen and progesterone are doing across the average

ovulatory cycle. And then testosterone would be a much longer answer. Because testosterone is important for sperm production. It is there is kind of a threshold level of testosterone that males need for libido. But then testosterone has all these other functions. It's an anabolic steroid, as I'm sure people are familiar with. There's a reason that when guys want to get jacked, they take testosterone. But it also has relationships to confidence and positive mood. It has a relationship to aggression that is really complicated. It is what is responsible for what we call secondary sexual characteristics in men. So testosterone is what is driving facial hair growth and changes in voice, for example. So

testosterone does a lot of different things. All my brothers and NBs on T right now, I wish your whiskers and your baritones the best. And we're going to talk more about this in a bit. Also, Dr. Durgovich says that its relationship to aggression is really complex, which we also heard in the neuroendocrinology episode with Dr. Fowl, who said that suddenly having changes in hormones could cause alterations in behavior. So hormones, real chin scratcher. Is it responsible for the random chin or mustache hairs women get? Probably, yeah. Really? Super annoying, right? Yeah, you just got that one bristle that you're like, God damn it, are you back? Yeah, yeah. There's also there's a great study that was published

anonymously. I want to say in the maybe around 1970 in Science Magazine, where there was a guy who was doing some kind of research alone on an island, and he would periodically go back to the mainland and visit his significant other. And he started noticing that when he was getting ready to go back to see this significant other, that his beard would start growing more quickly. So he actually started sharding, like he started shaving and measuring his beard growth and sharding it with what was going on with his calendar. And he was able to determine that the anticipation of of a sexual resurgence, what it was actually increasing his, or what he said was increasing his testosterone, which was driving additional beard growth. So there's some fun, there's some

fun stuff in the literature. Fun stuff, such as this nugget. Have you ever heard of the victory effect? No. What is that? So the victory effect is a thing where it was actually first demonstrated, I think by an undergraduate at Harvard as part of his senior thesis. And he was studying members of the wrestling team, and he would take testosterone measurements before and after wrestling matches, and he was able to show that testosterone, if you won, testosterone went up, and if you lost, testosterone went down. And that's a phenomenon that's been supported, and other people have found it in a variety of different settings now. And they've actually extended it. So it's like not only do in a competitive setting, not only do the winners

see testosterone increases and the losers see testosterone decreases, but fans will actually experience that. So there's like a vicarious effect that happens. And it doesn't have to be in a kind of sporting competitions that they've done it with chess players, and they found the same kind of thing. And so, so there's some really cool stuff out there about the way that testosterone is impacting an individual's confidence, but also then the way that it is responding to circumstance. So it's not unidirectional. Yeah, it's a very bi-directional, complicated thing going on. That might explain why in LA when our teams win, we like still set fire to stuff.

Like, come on, like, what are we doing here? Yeah, well, you know, I live in Boston, and so we've had quite a street, I don't follow sports at all, but we've had quite a streak here in the last 15 years or so. And people are still, it still go crazy. Yeah. Okay, side note, if you listen to the sports and performance psychology episode, you may remember that one of the worst sports upsets in the history of planet Earth occurred in the year 532. When 30,000 people died after, I don't know, maybe a wonky call in a chariot race, because you can't spell chariot without the word riot, which is the thing I just realized when I

used the command F function on the Wikipedia page for Turkey's ancient sports venue, the hippodrome. By the by, the hippodrome was also the location for lavish and days-long circumcision ceremonies to bring it all back to PP machines. Now, this next fact, by the way, will be one that you share over so many of your distance Thanksgiving Zoom feasts. And I'm sorry for that, you're welcome. When it comes to doing studies on these captive orangutans, though, you have all of these vials of frozen pee. I forgot to ask, how are they collecting this pee? Do orangutans use toilets? They don't, but they are very, very smart, as are all of the great apes, and they can easily be trained to pee in a cup, just like you would do at the doctor's office. Really? Yeah, I can send you

a video of that too, if you'd like. Yeah, I want to see that. Yeah, it's, you know, the zookeeper will hand the orangutan a cup, and the orangutan will pee in the cup, and it'll get some juice or some kind of little food reward, and it's very transactional. Dr. Dergovitch sent me this video on the condition that I didn't distribute it publicly, and yes, an orangutan hanging out in the crook of two branches calmly takes a Dixie cup from a zookeeper, positions it under her posterior, and passes it back as casually and professionally as someone handing back change at a register. She takes a treat, goes about her orangutani business. She was more graceful at this than I am, but to be fair, no one offers me like an empanada to pee somewhere specific, so.

Unbelievable, so you have all of these different, different orangutans. Yes. And different times of their cycle, and now this is, this is so interesting to me, because I think when we think of captive orangutans, we think higher stress levels, but it's different types of stress. Are they stressed out being in an enclosed environment, or they're less stressed because they're not being predated on? I don't have the empirical data to answer that question. There certainly have been a lot of studies published on the relationship that captivity has on stress in a whole variety of different animals, and there definitely is research that shows that captivity can be stressful for them, that the lack of extensive space can be stressful,

that the lack of options in terms of being able to remove yourself from a given situation, or simply the presence of zoo visitors can be stressful. So there are a lot of different things that have been shown to be stressful in general, but cortisol is possibly even a more complicated hormone to interpret than testosterone, and so it's, I think that individuality plays a really big role in that, and that was part of what I had originally wanted to look at with my first dissertation research project, and as I say, that didn't pan out, but I think that in general, the kinds of stress that are going to most strongly affect something like ovarian function, those things are reduced in captivity relative to the wild. That just has to do with

having a more consistent and reliable food source and high quality food source and fewer disease or pathogenic challenges, and so yes, there definitely is stress in captivity, but like you said, it's a different kind of stress. I wonder if it's akin to being in like a marriage for money, like marrying someone because they've got a lot of money, but you're not super happy, you know, one of its like, you got a nice house, you got a nice car, you got good health insurance, but you're like kind of trapped. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, on the flip side, they don't know anything else, so all the orangutans that we're looking at in captivity, they've been born into captivity, so it's not like they have this referential frame of the

Bornean rainforest that they're thinking back to, and so at that cognitive level, I don't know that you can necessarily draw that comparison, although I do kind of like the idea of an orangutan trophy wife. I mean, I'm intrigued by this. Okay, so the closest thing to the real orangutans of Borneo, Lara says, is orangutan jungle school or the animal planet show meet the orangutans. But Mungus is still traumatized from her clash with Nor, and not even food will persuade her to join the rest of the community. All that's missing here is high-end manicures, some white wine and PMS. Oh, actually, about that last one. And you said orangutans have cycles similar to humans, so what happens? Do they have period

panties? Like, what are they doing? So that is an area in which they are different from humans. Humans bleed a lot. We have very heavy menses. What the hell? I can't help it if I've got a heavy flow and a wide-set vagina. Relative to pretty much any other species. It sucks to be us, and it doesn't go away in quarantine either. I know. So we have really, really vascularized endometrial linings, which basically means that when our uterus builds up this lining to prepare for a possible implantation every month, our body is getting ready and being like, okay, if there's a pregnancy, we need to be ready to have the egg kind of burrow into this endometrial lining and get access to mom's nutrient supply and energy and so forth. And probably because

of how large our brains are, we have ended up with this really, really heavily vascularized system. And what that means is that if you don't get pregnant and you have to shed that endometrial lining, there's a lot more blood and tissue loss. But the amount of blood loss that a human woman has during the actual menstrual period is going to be significantly more than the amount of blood loss that any of the apes would have when they have her period. Oh, and they don't even have to wear pants. Yeah. So they don't really need the period panties. They are having relatively little blood loss compared to humans.

They're not out there with a diva cup being like, no, they really don't have to worry about it. That is really fascinating. And I read something that humans have blood loss of something like whatever, like three tablespoons over a week or something that sounds like nothing. Whilst during one's moon bleed, folks lose, as it turns out, six to eight tablespoons of blood, which is about 80 milliliters or one third of a cup. And I'm so sorry to anyone listening to this while cooking and trying to make gravy or something for a holiday meal 10 feet away from your in-laws on a freezing porch. PS, it's not only okay to cancel Thanksgiving this year,

it's scientifically and ethically smart and reasonable. So if you want to hop on the fam text right now and just let them know it's digital this year, it's for the best. Anyway, on the subject of stress. And does how does stress affect periods in general or affect these hormone cycles? Because I know people will say like, I'm so stressed out, I missed a period. Yeah, it definitely can. So stress can affect what's going on with this, what's called the hypothalamic pituitary ovarian axis, which is basically the physiological system that controls cycling menstrual cycling. So as I say, most people when they hear stress, if they're thinking

about a hormone related to stress, that's going to be cortisol. And that's not the only thing going on with stress, but it's certainly the most well known and probably well studied. And so because cortisol has all of these other effects besides stress, so cortisol has energetic impacts as well, it can end up interacting with reproductive hormones. And so you definitely can have situations where psychological stress can impact what's going on with cycling. I personally have not studied that well enough to say how much of that is purely psychological in nature and how much of it is a consequence of if you have increased cortisol because you're more psych stressed because of life circumstances or whatever, that cortisol may be having energetic impacts that

are in turn having impact on ovarian function. So while research shows that menstrual schedules don't correlate to increased cortisol, increased cortisol from stress can affect hormones, making periods show up late or early, not at all. Now, can increased stress make people go into early menopause? Ask the podcast host, not for the sake of herself, but for others, of course. Not that I know of. Menopause is super conserved as a feature. There's a lot of individual variability in terms of when women hit menopause. So one woman might hit menopause at 45, and another woman might not hit menopause until 55. But if you look across populations, there's a very consistent average age at 50 years old. And it seems very conserved because what drives

menopause is essentially running out of eggs. I mentioned before that women are born with all the eggs they ever have. And eventually, that egg reserve gets so low that it starts to affect what's going on hormonally, and that drives menopause. And that seems to be something that's pretty true across mammalian species, that most mammals aren't going to reach menopause because they don't live that long. But that in mammals that do live long enough, it seems like 50 years is about the shelf life limit of eggs. And is that true for orangutans, too? Are they like, leave me alone. Cranky old orangutans. So the research that I did did suggest that they are capable of having menopause if they do live long enough, but they don't have the same

pattern of gradual decline in reproductive hormones that we see in humans. So in humans, we start to see drop offs in estrogen and progesterone in women as starting around the age of 35, actually, which is why these days, if you get pregnant beyond the age of 35 and you go to the OBGYN, they will put a stamp on your folder that says advanced maternal age, which is not something you want to hear when you're 35. So I feel for women. But yeah, that's actually when hormone levels start declining, noticeably. And so there's a period starting in your mid-30s all the way up until you hit menopause that is known as perimenopause. And that's sort of this gradual decline of reproductive function. And that does not seem to happen in other ape species.

So if you look at what's going on with the hormones of chimps or orangutans, it appears that they continue to cycle at fairly consistent rates right up until they're not cycling anymore if they live long enough. So humans do seem to be kind of unusual in the rate of reproductive decline that we experience. What about PMS? Do orangutans get PMS? That would be a great question to ask zookeepers. And I don't actually know. That wasn't something that I was looking into at all. And so I never asked that question. But now I want to know. I will have to reach out to some zoo colleagues. I wonder if they're like, Janet threw shit at me again. Who knows? Yeah, but they might do that anyway. They might do that anyway. I have so many questions from

patrons. Can I lightning round you? Absolutely. I'm happy to take as much time as you'd like because I'm on my own right now, which is a rarity these days. Okay, good. Okay, so I wanted to confirm that orangutans get PMS because that's part of my job. And in so doing, I stumbled upon the factoid that we don't know what causes PMS in primates. Just a big straight up shrug. But again, we're thinking it's the changes in hormone levels. And since orangutans have periods, albeit lighter ones, it's totally plausible that they get sad or bitchy or uncomfortable because apes, they're just like us because they are us because we are walking, talking, car driving, nose piercing, internet surfing, space exploring primates. So before we get to

a bunch of sexy apes asking our sex apeologist some questions, each week we make a donation to a cause selected by a sexy ape. And this week, Laura chose the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance. It is an association of wildlife centers in Africa, which works to rescue orphaned apes and monkeys promoting the conservation of wild primates and educating the public and powering communities and working to stop the illegal trade in wildlife. So to learn more about them, you can check out PASA.org. There's a link to that in the show notes. And the donation was made possible by sponsors of the show about whom I shall now yammer for a moment, giving you some handy discounts and helping some baby apes. Okay, let's get steamy primates.

So many questions from Patreon. So I'm going to just lightning around. We're going to see how many we can get to. Okay. Let me see. Some of these, luckily we covered this. But several people, Megan C, Zoltan Zazi, Anna Valerie, kind of wanted to know why humans don't have seasonal periods or seasonal mating. Why are we doing this every month? Or orangutans too? Yeah, yeah. So there are some primates that are seasonal breeders, but a lot of primates live in actually fairly either tropical or subtropical climates, which means that there's not going to be a ton of resource variability seasonally. And so usually seasonal breeding is tied more so to resource variability temporarily. We just, in our evolutionary history by virtue of the

environments that we have lived in, we took a different pathway and we have ended up with non-seasonal breeding. There are some primates that are seasonal breeders, but it is not the predominant mating pattern in most primates. Gosh, okay. That makes so much more sense. George Ferrar and Danielle Garrett both had the similar questions. Danielle says, when you show up to a party, what is your favorite job-related jaw-dropping story that you tell a stranger? I'll give you my husbands, actually, because as the primatology adjacent individual, he's the one who likes, who does more of the like, oh my God, get a load of this. So when

much of the urine that I worked with for my dissertation came from some female orangutans out at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. And I went out there at one point to visit and went behind the scenes and met the orangutans and met the keepers and so forth. And my husband likes to tell the story that when we were there, at one point, one of the male orangutans very deliberately began mating with one of the female orangutans and just like dead staring my husband in the eyes, as if to say like, this one's mine. And so my husband really likes to relay that story about how he got sort of shut down by this very large flanged orang, you know, big cheek pads and impressive male orangutan who was just not having his presence in the area.

He's like, don't worry, I'm committed. You're committed. I respect that. Yeah, exactly. He was like, we're all good here. Is that is monogamy typical in orangutans or no? They are no, they're not monogamous. They are. So orangutans are kind of weird when it comes to their mating system because they they mate relatively infrequently. And that's largely because they have a very, very long period of offspring dependence. So if you look at the amount of time between when a female orangutan has a baby and the next time she has a baby, which is what's called the inner birth interval, orangutans have the longest inner birth interval of any mammal on the planet. And yeah, so they on average, a female orangutan is only giving birth

once every seven or eight years. Oh, wow. And so they're not available as mating partners all that often. So when they are, females will mate preferentially with the big males because orangutans are also weird in that adult males can actually take two different, what are called morphs or forms. There are what most people think of when they picture an adult male orangutan, which is males that are twice as big as the females, and they have those big old cheek pads, and they have a really big throat sac for giving out a long call to try to attract females. They're very viral looking. But then you can also have adult male orangutans that look much more similar to females. And so the females will preferentially mate with the big males,

but they will mate promiscuously. And that may have to do with confusing paternity. Andrew, you are not the heart. Oh, it's not a very common mating system, because they are orangutans by nature are semi solitary, they tend not to hang out with other individuals or in big groups. And so matings are kind of opportunistic and are going to be highly dependent on whether there are females around that are cycling. Really? Okay. Wow, I didn't realize that they were that solitary. Yeah. Back in the day, they were described as solitary and newer research, the terminology has kind of shifted to semi solitary because they will, females especially, will hang out with other

females if there is an abundance of food available. But yeah, relative to most primates, they are loners. Oh, I had no idea. Yeah. But I mean, they're so cute. I would hang out with them. I know. Maybe they're just like, let me do my thing. Yeah, no, they jungle. Yeah, they, they spend most of their time way up high in the treetops and they just do their thing. I'm a loner daddy. A rebel. There are a few people who asked about different attractions. Like butts and boobs. Thomas Wyndon wants to know, I always wanted to know, but I've never found an answer that really explains properly why boobs are so attractive. And someone else whose name I will put it aside. Nathan Faulkner, my friend asked, what's the deal with guys' attraction to butts?

Asked, why do you like butts? Why do? So this is funny. So I'm actually, we're rounding out the end of the semester here and I'm teaching a class right now about the behavioral biology of women. And the lecture that I'm going to be giving sometime this coming week is a lecture on, on fat breasts and body image. So really? Yeah. So one of the things I talk about in that lecture is why human women have these permanently enlarged breasts. Because in most mammal species, you get, you know, a little bit of breast tissue enlargement with pregnancy and during lactation, but it doesn't stay that way. And human women have these just kind of permanently enlarged boobs. Well, not all of us, but yeah. And there are a number of different hypotheses that have been

put forth about that. The crowd-pleasing favorite is often the person back in the day, and I don't have the name off the top of my tongue, but someone who once suggested that they evolved as flotation devices. Sure. Yeah. Okay, I look this up. And this by the by is the aquatic ape hypothesis. And it was laid out by Elaine Morgan. Who's that? Well, not an evolutionary biologist or a biological anthropologist, but an author who firmly believes that humans descended from some kind of swamp gorilla buoyed by knockers. And it's a sensual moist hypothesis. But most scientists swipe left on that. But mostly they the different theories for why breasts evolved have to do with attraction and advertising fertility or basically having high ovarian hormone

levels because breast tissue proliferates as a result of estrogen production. Although most of the difference in boobs size between women has less to do with hormones and more to do with just the amount of fat that's in the boobs. So yeah, the milk producing mechanism is pretty consistent across women and breast size is really more about how much fat gets deposited. It is not universal. I should note that boobs are considered attractive. If you look at anthropological cross-cultural kinds of studies, there are places in which boobs are not breast are not sexualized or not considered sexual, but in many places they are. And so there's ideas about a relationship between breast size and underlying hormone levels and that men have evolved to find larger breasts

attractive because they do advertise something about the potential reproductive quality of a given woman. Do you think it has anything to do with like, oh, this person could survive a winter or anything or no? Probably not so much with boobs size. I would think that that kind of fat storage is going to happen on other parts of the body. Oh, okay. But does that include butts? It might include butts. Yeah. So I don't know as much about butts as I do about boobs, which is not a sentence that I expected to say today. But yeah, I mean, butts are definitely a good place to store fat. Human butts are also weird. There's a lot of weird things about humans. We have big butts. If you look at chimps or antans, they have really

scrawny little butts. They don't have a lot of fat padding, and they don't have the same kind of musculature that we have in our butts. And that probably has to do more with bipedal walking and possibly endurance running than it does with fat storage. But yeah, but there definitely is some literature on butts out there if you want to dig into a little more. Oh, I'll dig into the butts for sure. Yeah, there you go. Actually, breaking news, as of this week, I have an ologist on deck to do a whole episode on boobs and butts in the near future. So round jigglies, come and act just soon. There's so many good questions. Okay. Jessica Fritz asked, how can eating soy or other estrogenic foods affect our hormones?

Yeah, so it can. And it probably doesn't a whole lot unless you're just like mainlining tofu all the time. But there is estrogen. So soy is a kind of estrogen-like compound. And so if you ingest a lot of soy, that can bind to estrogen receptors. So it's not necessarily actually increasing the amount of estrogen that you have, but it's acting on your body's estrogen receptors in ways that make your body potentially think that you have more estrogen. Oh, okay. There can be effects of diet. And actually, we know there are definitely effects of different aspects of nutrition and energy expenditure on ovarian function. But with soy specifically, that has to do with the chemical similarity to estrogen as a hormone. Unless you

are really consuming an excessive amount of soy, that should not be having a pronounced impact on your hormonal profile. Okay. Don't tell the oat milk industry that, though, because no one drinks soy milk anymore. Is that why? I think so. Oh, wow. Okay. I'm still a cow milk gal. It's funny because soy milk was always like the alternative milk option. And then I think people started getting worried about the estrogenic effects. And so then it was like, do you have an almond milk? And then almonds use too much water. So people like, do you have an oat milk? Oh, wow. I know. Who knows? They can make milk out of cockroaches. And that's a topic for another time. But that might be the next alternative milk. There you go. But what about overall horniness?

There is certainly variability in sexual behavior. So you will definitely find some individuals that seem a lot hornier and are just way more interested in mating than other individuals. I don't know whether you can apply the same kinds of, I don't want to say labels, but kind of terminology to of asexuality or anything like that. But you do definitely see variability in behavior at least. So asexual oligites, you are out there and you are fine. Some folks ask questions about being trans and hormone replacement like Dan and Catherine. We had some questions from listeners about hormone replacement therapy. Like Ronan, who is a first time question asker, says, this topic is extremely relevant to me as a trans man

who's two months on testosterone. How much do mood and other factors play a role in libido versus straight up hormones? And they say before testosterone, my libido was basically to zero and now it's shot up a lot. But I don't think I can put that just on the physical effects of testosterone, but also just having reduced dysphoria, just being happier because it's a life change. But yeah, how is libido affected by that? Yeah, so it goes back to what I was saying earlier about how testosterone has a lot of different effects. So some of it probably is the increase in testosterone levels. There is research from the late 1970s where they gave testosterone to men who had subnormal testosterone levels. And they found that up to a certain level,

testosterone actually does promote sexual behavior, the number of erections, for example. But that above that level, there doesn't seem to be a continued increase in libido. So if somebody has kind of subtypical testosterone levels, then simply increasing the amount of the hormone may have a measurable effect by itself. But there is also going to be an effect on the reduction of dysphoria and overall mood. I mean, I don't think you even need real strong empirical data to support that. Nobody wants to have sex when they're in a bad mood and feeling depressed. Exactly. Now, that's just regardless of what gender or sexual orientation you are, like if you're in a crummy mood and you're feeling shitty, you don't want to have sex.

My guess is that in this person's case, the testosterone actually did or may have had an effect, but that would certainly be compounded and probably magnified by the change in kind of psychological status. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah, I think it's interesting. Catherine Gilbert, a listener, also said, my husband is a trans man. And we noticed that since he started to get testosterone, he cries less, but gets angry more often. So yes, I did the neuroendocrinology episode around the same time. And that is a two parter. So I will link that in the show notes. It covers a lot of these questions. So there's some evidence that suggests that increased testosterone is associated with more aggression, but there's also some evidence that shows that

people who increase the amount of aggression end up with higher testosterone levels. Okay. That's interesting. A ton of people wanted to know about birth control. Okay. Naxi, Y, Christine Clemens, Imogen Armstrong, Ashley, Ashley E, Chelsea Kraft, Metal, Anderson, Annie C, Ashley E, and Anna Valerie all want to know, essentially. They worded it really good. Why does birth control or other medications kill libido? And then Annie C says, absolutely this, it seems like someone thought it would be funny if birth control made you not want to have sex at all. Well, I guess that's doing double duty. Yeah. So that's a really good question. And from the straight hormonal perspective,

it's a little bit of a tricky one to answer because what birth control pills are doing is artificially modulating your progesterone and estrogen levels to either to prevent ovulation from taking place or to prevent implantation from taking place, depending on the kind of birth control that you're using. And the research about the relationship between those ovarian hormones and libido isn't entirely clear-cut. So when it comes to both males and females, the clearest relationship that's been found about hormones and behavior, a reproductive or libido in particular is testosterone for both men and women. And so I don't have a good explanation necessarily for why a medication that alters ovarian hormones has in so many cases such a measurable effect on sexual

motivation. Oh, and side note, the medical community is still debating this, still. But many researchers think that taking hormones can alter the way your body produces other hormones, and many combined birth control pills have estrogen and progestin, which may lower testosterone in some people who are trying to get their ovaries to just please not with the X. Now question, can the sperm canons take the pills instead? It's 2020. A lot of you are just sick of this shit. And on that note, two people, Olaf Dotschke and Diane P, both asked about boy birth control. Olaf says, I have repeatedly heard about a breakthrough, air quotes, on hormonal contraception for men. What is hindering the final success? So a lot of that is cultural in nature. There are

yeah, yeah, men don't want birth control for men. Oh my God. Yeah, there have been a couple different avenues that people have tried in terms of ways to create male birth control. There is actually a gene called the cat spur gene that's been identified that affects the motility of sperm. And so there is, I don't know where the kind of standing of this is right now in terms of whether it's still being pursued or in clinical trials or anything like that. But I know that there was some talk at one point, some kind of genetic modification that they could do to kind of disable sperm. You're not going anywhere. But more often than not, male discussions of male birth control, that's going to involve reducing testosterone in some fashion,

because testosterone is what drives sperm production. And so oftentimes there is large resistance to that from men because they are very attached to their testosterone. And it is somewhat complicated, as I said, because testosterone does have all of these additional functions besides sperm production. But I think the big honestly, the biggest barrier to male birth control is men, kind of male attitudes. And I know there, a few years ago, there was a headline that I saw about some kind of trial that was being done with some form of male birth control. And they discontinued the trial early because the men were complaining of all different kinds of mood symptoms and, you know, basically stuff that women deal with

all the time. But the men were like, nope, not doing it. And so they just stopped. I mean, there are certain birth controls that can make the things that we put up with on birth control. Also, if you find that progesterone f's with your moods, you are not alone, I have to take a cocktail of different hormones since my ovaries just set sail and retired 15 years early. Bye now. And I didn't realize for the first year that the progesterone I was taking made me want to melt into the earth and be eaten by fungus. I was miserable. So ask your doctor about that, because for some of us, it can really suck gonads in the bad way. Dr. Durkovich also says, though, that most people on birth control aren't told that the placebo week is totally unnecessary.

It was invented by a scientist, John Rock, who was horny for the Pope's approval. So he was like, let's make these women have periods. So it's like the rhythm method, though not at all. And the Pope was like, I see through you. Excuse me. No, this is still a sin. So John Rock stopped being Catholic, but for decades, literally billions of humans have cramped and bled for no reason, for a beef between the Pope and John Rock. Lara says, Western women spend way more time cycling than is typical for women in more traditional foraging populations or would have been typical in our evolutionary history, which not only wastes a lot of crotch cotton, but has other ramifications, not to mention all the sets of sheets in the garbage.

And that's actually really significant because the fact that we have so many more menstrual cycles across our reproductive lifespan increases the risk for things like breast cancer and ovarian cancer and different kinds of reproductive cancers. So are you're better off doing like a seasonal or just skipping now? You actually might be. There's a population of hunter-gatherers called the Kung who live in Botswana in Southern Africa. And they've been the subject of a lot of anthropological research over the years. And when you look at the reproductive life history characteristics of say a Kung woman versus an American woman, a Kung woman might have like 150 menstrual cycles across her lifetime. Women in that population tend to not start menstruating

until a slightly later age. They get pregnant generally at a slightly earlier age. And then they have more pregnancies and longer periods of lactation. And generally when you're lactating, at least for the first six months or so, you're not ovulating and so you're not menstruating. And so across their lifespan, they're having maybe 150 menstrual cycles. And American women is probably having more like 450. Yeah. So it's like a 3x magnification. And because that exposes our bodies to so much more hormone over time, that actually does impact our health long-term. 400 is so amazing. Yeah, 450. It's a lot of cycles. Way too many. So many chinsits that we don't need to get. Exactly.

I mean, acne is hormonally related as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Moana La Memoyva. I hope I said that right. I know. I wanted to know about mating relationships. And why are they so different in humans and primates? And they say so many questions, and they're an anthropologist. And Jam Cruise wants to know what's the most elaborate mating ritual in the ape world. So yeah, mating rituals, hormones? I wouldn't necessarily say that there are any mating rituals in most non-human primates. There are definitely some species that have way more diverse sexual behaviors than other species. So I mentioned before that orangutans, when they do have matings, which are relatively rare, they tend to go on for a pretty long

period of time. So you can have a sexual encounter between a male and female orangutan go on for like 30 or 60 minutes. Why don't we take a five-minute break? And when you compare that to the average chimpanzee sexual encounter, which is, I think, seven seconds, you definitely get a difference there. Yeah. Chimpanzees are wham-bam. Thank you, ma'am. There is no foreplay. There is no snuggling. It is very efficient. That's one way to put it. Yeah. So orangutans will have particularly prolonged mating encounters. Bonobos, you may or may not know, have an incredibly diverse array of sexual behaviors. So they're basically, everybody is having sex with everybody else all the time,

whether it's for mating purposes or not. And so with bonobos, you can get what is called gg-rubbing among females where they have those pronounced sexual swellings during their window around ovulation, and they'll rub those together for pleasure. Males will actually engage in a behavior sometimes called penis fencing. So that's a thing. So there are a lot of diversity in sexual behavior, but I wouldn't say that any non-human primates that I know of have mating rituals. What about, Will Plimo wants to know, do they have biological clocks? In the sense of like, I got to have kids? Yeah, like, let's do this. I would say that, I don't think I'd phrase it as them having a biological clock, but I generally

what you find is that females reach reproductive maturity. There's often a period of what's called adolescent subficundity, which basically means that they have started cycling, but they're not having fully mature reproductive cycles yet. So maybe they're having cycles where they are seeing endometrial development. And so they'll have menstrual bleeding, but there wasn't actually ovulation that cycle, or maybe the quality of the endometrial lining is lower. And so there's no implantation. So there can be a period where they kind of are reproductively active and not getting pregnant that may be driven by continued hormonal maturation. But once they reach full maturity, they tend to get pregnant pretty quickly. So I don't know that I would call it

a biological clock, but they're there tend not to waste time. Okay. Some great questions from Laura Stacy, Erica and Megan Walker. Erica says, do non human primates get angry, sad, snacky, or sleepy as part of their reproductive cycle? And Megan has, what advantage could there possibly be to becoming emotionally unhinged during various days of menstrual cycle? Okay. So I'll start with the non human primates one. Do they get emotional, snacky, or angry? That's another one where I don't think we have that data from wild animals. And I think a zookeeper would probably be the best person to ask for the captive animals here. I mean, in terms of the underlying hormones, what's going on is the same. And so if there is a relationship

between that hormonal fluctuation and the kind of mood swings that human women often report, or, you know, changes in appetite, then the hormonal underpinnings aren't the same. So theoretically, they should be exposed to the same fluctuation. But I don't know that there that anyone has actually looked at whether there is an equivalent behavioral change in any non human primates. I believe that anybody who has looked has seen has concluded that there's no evidence of a PMS like syndrome in any non human primates. But in terms of specific behavioral changes having to do with appetite or mood, I don't know of any research on it. A few people asked about pheromones. B. Wilson wanted to know what is up with pheromone candles

and lube, and Carolyn Armitage and Nicholas Weiser-Johnson wanted to know also, like, how do we detect pheromones? What's up with that? So to the best of my understanding, humans actually aren't using a lot of pheromonal communication. If you look at rodents and you look at other kinds of species, there might be more pheromone communication going on. But most of human mating behavior is probably not strongly affected by pheromones. So if you've got like pheromone candles or something like that, I would doubt the veracity of any claims that those might make. Other than placebo, I'm sure. Yeah, no, which is a real thing. No, placebo effect is totally a real thing. So from that sense, you know, go for it. But from the empirical sense of any

claims having to do with pheromones, I would be doubtful. First time question asker, Ava Hausova, last Patreon question, wants to know, why am I so horny all the time? And I think they're talking about themselves and not me. It's not me reading. Not why Allie is horny. Wow. I don't know how to answer that question. Does this person give an age, perhaps? That's all the details we have. Is it, does your estrogen make you hornier? Does testosterone and do they both? Well, so as I was saying before, testosterone is the hormone that has the best evidence for a relationship to libido. And that's true in both men and women. That said, I would not be,

despite the fact that I did not actually find a lot of supporting evidence for a relationship between either estrogen or progesterone and mating motivation in the female orangutans that I looked at for my dissertation. And again, I haven't looked at this in humans. I've only looked at it in orangutans. I would not be surprised if at some point we discovered that there is some kind of mechanistic interaction between some of these different hormones that does measurably impact mating behavior. Is it simply how high is your testosterone? Is it how high is your estrogen? How high is your progesterone? Or does it have to do with what are the ratios of those different hormones? And again, I'm not a biochemist. And so I hesitate to theorize too much on that. But

the short answer that I can give right now is that we don't yet have good evidence that estrogen is having a strong impact or that progesterone is having a strong impact on mating motivation, testosterone more so. But why an individual is so horny all of the time might have less to do with the underlying hormones and more to do with other things in the environment or other kinds of personality factors. Maybe, I mean, maybe it's quarantine. It could be. It could be. I'm actually really, really interested to see down the line whether there's a baby bump as a result of this or whether everybody, as I was saying before, is in such a bad mood all the time that nobody's having sex. Yeah, that was, I mean, I know I said that was our last patron, patron question. Yeah,

no, go ahead. Kathy Ho and Carrie Lee wanted to know if it's possible to become less horny for a person over time. Like, is there a mental block that makes you feel like, huh, or is that part of a role of pair bonding? And I wonder if that's happening to couples who are together too much. No, there it totally is. There's actually something called the Coolidge effect that you should that you should look up if you're not familiar with it. Essentially, novel mates or videos of them say spike dopamine, which means that not novel mates might not have the same stimulating effect reduced motivation to mate with the same individual over time. And the reason it's called the Coolidge effect, if I'm not mistaken, has to do with Calvin Coolidge

and something about something about his marriage and possible deviations from marriage. Really? Okay, I look this up and yes, it's from an old anecdote about Mrs. Coolidge seeing a rooster just boning nonstop and a hen pen and telling the farmers, hey, mentioned this to Mr. Coolidge. And the farmer later did and the president asked, was it the same hen or different hens? And the farmer was like, no, sir, many, many different hens. And then Coolidge said, well, tell them that the first lady. So when scientists observed animals who were exhausted from getting it on, but suddenly were alert and Randy, when a new partner entered the scene, they were like, we have just the presidential

homage for that, the Coolidge effect. That absolutely is a phenomenon that occurs that individuals, when people talk about the honeymoon period and stuff like that, that's a real thing that people's attraction can wane over time to the same individual. Well, maybe we can hack that if we just buy some cheap wigs on it. I think there are ways to hack that. And again, this gets more into the realm of kind of psychology and relationship counseling than my area of expertise. But I think that probably if you do a little internet digging, you will be able to find people discussing the phenomenon and suggesting ways to try to ameliorate it.

Prosthetic butts, anyone? You go and you buy the plastic sexual swelling that they used on the macaque and then you surprise your partner. And that's a fun Friday night for everyone. That's so fun. You get it delivered. And you know I always ask this, what's the worst thing about your job? What was the worst thing about doing your research or the most frustrating thing about it? I think the most frustrating thing for me, both while I was doing my research and continuing today, and I think it's partially related to the adjunct lifestyle I've chosen,

is kind of an ongoing struggle with imposter syndrome. And especially because the work that I did for my dissertation was entirely lab based, I didn't go out and do any kind of behavioral observation in the wild. I was working exclusively with the hormones and spreadsheets and numbers. And I constantly struggled with feeling like I wasn't qualified or doing it right or that I second guessed myself a lot. And I think that by virtue of the fact that I now have this itinerant lifestyle where I kind of go where teaching opportunities are available but have no stable employment from year to year guaranteed, that I sort of still continue to struggle with that imposter syndrome. So I think that's really tough. I know it's not

unique to me, but I think that that's one of the hardest or suckiest things about where I've ended up. Yeah, and so common. Yeah. I mean, it's super common. I'm not unique by any stretch. But I mean, that should just let you know that hopefully that that is a signal not to listen to it. Yes. I try to suppress it.

Although I will say that I don't know that men have imposter syndrome as much. And I can only say that from watching my boyfriend try to bake bread where he just decided not to measure anything. He was like, oh, I'll wing it. I was like, that is literally the opposite of imposter. But I'm not okay. I can actually tie that back to hormones because, yeah, there are data that show or that seem to indicate that because men have higher circulating testosterone than women do, and because testosterone is associated with positive affect, that men are more likely to think that they are overqualified for something and women are

more likely to think that they are underqualified. Oh, my God. So do not listen to your ovaries telling you that you are. No, no, you got to ignore the ovaries. And what about your favorite thing about what you study or what you do? I love teaching, honestly. I mean, I really enjoy interacting with students. I really enjoy coming, trying to come up with novel ways to connect with them and let them explore material kind of in nontraditional ways. So I've started in some of my classes that I teach, I've started using an assignment called an on essay sometimes, which as a final project,

instead of writing a traditional research paper, I give the students an opportunity to figure out a way to do something with the material that's more meaningful to them personally. And that has resulted in some amazingly creative and awesome projects that students have done, including actually last semester, when I was teaching an introductory bioanthropoclasts, I got several podcasts that people did themselves. But, you know, like paintings and games and all different kinds of stuff. So I love that kind of thing. This semester, I actually took advantage of the 3D printer before the world shut down. I took advantage of the 3D printer at the university and found a file to 3D print clitorises. And so when I was teaching about the clitoris,

I was able to have some 3D models that I could pass around and blow people's minds by what the clitoris actually looks like and how big it is and how awesome it is. So I just, I really like being in the classroom. I really like getting students excited about the material as much as I can. Oh, that's amazing. Arrangements have glitz, right? Oh, yeah. Okay, good. I figured. I was like, oh, of course, I mean, of course they would. Yeah, no, they probably don't think about them as much as we do, but they haven't. Yeah. Well, as much as some humans think of them. Yeah, that's true. Don't think of them. That's probably true. That's amazing. So ask smart people shameless questions because the answers have been within your gonads the entire time. And you can follow

Dr. Drogivich on Twitter at tinkeringprimate.com with an eight. There's a link to that in the show notes. I'm going to have more links like to the organization we donated to and to Laura's huge TED Talk up at alleyward.com slash oligies slash biological anthropology. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at alleyward with one L on both. We just crossed over 100,000 followers on Instagram. And I just, I dig you all for being on this nerdy journey with me. It's just surreal. It's amazing. Ologies merch is available on my website and via a link in the show notes. And we have winter hats and masks now. Thank you, Shannon Felsen and Bonnie Dutch of the Comedy Podcast. You are that for managing that. You can become a patron of

oligies and submit questions for a dollar a month at patreon.com slash oligies. Come join the club. There's a Facebook group moderated by Erin Talbert. Thank you, Erin. Emily White leads the transcription team. I love them very much. Transcripts are available for free via a link in the show notes. They're on my website. Leaped episodes for kiddos are also available. Thank you, Caleb Patton for bleeping them. Noel Dilworth does all the interview scheduling and assistant editing was done by Master Baker, Jared Sleeper, who is wonderful. And thanks very much to lead primate editor Stephen Ray Morris, who hosts the Percasts, as well as C Jurassic Wright, two podcasts about kitties and dinosaurs. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music

for oligies and is in a very good band called Islands. And if you stick around till the end of the episode, I spill some beans for you to emotionally mop up during the closing theme song. And this week is that I skipped sex education in fifth grade because I was too nervous and I pretended that I had a stomach ache and I stayed in the nurse's office all day. And so I didn't know what a boner was until seventh grade in science class. And I was like, what? It changes a day. I'll never forget. All right, apes, be good to each other next week. A very, very important episode. I feel like you will listen to over and over and over again next week. Get ready. Also, honestly, cancel Thanksgiving, cancel Thanksgiving. It's okay. Do it on zoom. More people will be

alive next year for Thanksgiving. If you do that, it's okay. You can tell your relatives. I said it was okay. Okay. Okay. You're the best. Bye.