The Scrotal Sector

“The Evolutionary Logic of Premature Ejaculation”

By Jason Half-Pillow

This Week’s Las Vegas Herald Coffee Time Higher Ed Chat with New Mexico State University at Las Vegas Adjunct Biology Instructor, Steve Miner

Las Vegas Herald
Features and Sports Staff Writer

Premature ejaculation has long been an evolutionary mystery.  Like so many aspects of human life, evolutionists have evaded confronting it head on, dismissing it as yet another in a long line of wasteful excesses, one more in a long line of animal characteristics, suited well to the harsh world of the stone age Savannah, but now something entirely pointless, no longer serving any real purpose, having no home in the modern world, but living on somehow anyways, and even growing stronger and more dominant somehow, infecting more and more like some kind of Satanic virus, spinning off, and taking all of us down with it, uncaring and indifferent to what we may think or feel, pulling us haplessly into ever greater and greater perversity with each passing eon that our foot dragging,  genetic code persists,  in all its anachronistic, yet doggedly formative, existence.

In the end, premature ejaculation is no different than religion, war, stupid dating and courtship rituals, To 40 radio, everything, really – it’s just another sad, pathetic domineering force of human nature that we can try putting out of our consciousness with numbing gels and ointments, or try warding off by double layering our condoms,  but in the end, it just keeps coming back, again and again, each time more mighty, with even fuller force, bursting past and through those ointments and gels, past those  double layered condoms, rendering all of our pathetic efforts to innovate, to create, invent, to somehow make man triumph over nature – to make of all of these wasted efforts the pathetic joke we biologists have always known them to be.

Stephen Gould, from his paper, “Cambrian Quick Comers and the Premature Ejaculators of the Early Stone Age – A Comparative Study” delivered to guests of Harvard’s Annual Darwin Dinner, which recognizes greatness in the field of premature ejaculation research.

I spoke with New Mexico State at Las Vegas Anthropology Adjunct Steve Miner about premature ejaculation and other related matters over coffee for this weeks’ “What’s New In Higher Ed” feature.   Unlike Stephen Gould,  Adjunct Miner bursts with enthusiasm and believes his positive and cheery disposition will shove evolutionary premature ejaculation guru Stephen Gould to the side and garner for him the notoriety that is his rightful due.

“It is my destiny,” he said in Darth Vader type voice.

We met at an off campus Starbucks.  I asked him why he chose such an inconvenient location.

“You’ll thank me, “ he said.  “I have a booming voice that I really can’t modulate well.” He then told me that the last time he spoke with a reporter at the Campus Starbucks about his premature ejaculation findings, he and the reporter were almost arrested.

“Free speech is dead,” he said.

We sat far from the register after he asked the barista to turn the music up louder. The initial parts of our conversation were shouted over some kind of frenetically paced Samba track but then there was a series of “unplugged”, acoustic songs that allowed us to whisper.  The place seemed to cater mostly to truckers, whose distorted orders we could hear from the drive in speaker.  The girl working the window had a stepladder and spent most of the interview ascending and descending it to give crazed looking truckers grande coffees with double espresso shots.

Adjunct Miner began with how evolution built us for nature, not civilization, what he called “evolution’s most elemental principle,” though he did say some might disagree.

“Think of murder,” he said.  “In a world of just short of subsistence level hunters and gathers, nothing could be more rational, more justifiable, more sensible than to kill someone over the smallest.  That’s what you do when every calorie ingested could be the difference between life or death.”

I asked if he was saying “murder” was one of evolution’s most elemental principles and he reprimanded for “just not getting it.”

“But we’ve only been talking for fifty seconds,” I protested.

“My watch says 10 minutes, but that’s neither here nor there,” he said.  “Now will you shut up and let me talk?”

He continued,

“While murder may be a perfectly legitimate response to theft of a scrap of hard won Mastodon meat, it makes little sense in our modern world of plenty. Tragically, though, we are encoded to kill over next to nothing, the smallest slight triggering in us a chain of hostile chemical reactions that push us to the biochemical brink of one of our top three taboos, murder.”

“Like the McNugget Murders last week,” I said.

“Exactly! Last week’s shooting at the 5^th street McDonalds over a mere McNugget may seem insane to the layman,” he noted.

“I thought it was Burger King,” I said.

“No, you idiot, it was McDonalds,” he said.  “Burger King doesn’t put a “Mick” before their food items.”

“At the drive through yesterday some chick handed me my order and said here’s your McWhopper sir…”

“Well, she was obviously an idiot. Now, can I make my point, or are you going to keep interrupting with all these stupid comments and questions?”

I told him to go ahead.

“But, to an evolutionary anthropologist, the McNugget Murders make perfect sense.”

I asked why such killings, though publicized widely, were actually rare.  People are always stealing small items from other people – it happens a million times every day, but there aren’t a million murders a day.

“If it’s so evolutionary and all, then how come its so rare?”

I girded myself for him telling me that everyone who didn’t kill over petty theft had some kind of random mutation, but, to my surprise, he gave a more nuanced reply.

“ In our modern environment we are brainwashed by socializing agents, like schools and churches, to turn our ‘murder the bastard’ chemicals inwards and get depressed or develop ulcers and prostate conditions. “

I asked what about women, and he asked if I’d noticed the breast cancer epidemic. Why did I think all the football receivers were wearing pink gloves all the time.

“Some kind of outbreak of homosexuality in the NFL after that openly gay guy got drafted,” was my weak reply.

“You really are a layman,” he said with a pshaw.

Whether its murder, premature ejaculation, or just the way girls play differently than boys, Miner says anything that doesn’t seem to make sense does if viewed through the lens of evolution.

“Wasn’t the same thing once said of Marxism?”

“Marxists didn’t watch football,” he replied.

His current research is focused on the role premature ejaculation played in making human procreation “survivable” in a hunting and gathering setting.

“Remember that old canard about nice guys finishing last?” he asked.  “Well they should have been saying guys who don’t finish as soon as they start are dead meat.”

“In the cavernous recesses of our long ago evolutionary past,  taking any time at all to do anything, from picking an apple to saying ‘what cheetah?”,  meant certain death.”

“Wow!” I said.

A bum came wandering through, and stopped to ask us for change.  We resumed after he sat down and told us about his experience in the war in Grenada and how the VA screwed up his high blood pressure medication and gave him a regimen of pills that made him suffer daily psychotic hallucinations.

“So, what is so ground breaking about your premature ejaculation research,” I asked.

He offered the following hypothetical anecdote to make his case “that we are all hard-wired premature ejaculators.”

“Imagine you’re at a watering whole on the Savannah. You’ve been wandering for days on end with the same old disgusting, half dead from dehydration, skanks from your little tribe, their breasts dried out prunes of hollowed skin…”

“Do I have to?” I asked.

“Stop interrupting,” he said and continued.

“You have spent the past month slumping behind these hags on your endless journey plucking scant vegetation as you follow some Wildebeest type creature on its seasonal migration…”

“Are those like cantaloupe?” I asked.

“You mean antelope,” he said.  “Can I continue?”

I apologized and urged him on.

“You trudge behind them, looking at their sunken, withered ass cheeks, feeling waves of lust mixed with nausea, sucking down what little water you can from some long ago picked Cactus leaf you hide desperately from the rest of your snarling band of desperados.  You’re parched and miserable.  The last thing you want to do is have sex.”

“Of any kind,” I said.

“Back then there was only one,” he explained. He went on.

“Then you get to the little tiny water hole. You fall to your knees and slurp up as many handfuls of water as you can, stupidly thinking that if you don’t, the rest of your band will slurp it all up and leave you with nothing…”

“Assholes….” I said

“Can you print that?” he asked.

“Well, not in the first paragraph,” I replied.

“ Anyway, after the fifth or sixth slurp, you feel your energy returning, your outlook improves, and before you know it, your juices are flowing again, so your mind turns once again to sex, and the age old question – who should I fuck?”

“Don’t you mean whom?”

“Shut up, please!  Just let me finish.”

“Please continue,” I said.

“Then comes another tribe, with different women, new and exotic, some of them walking almost upright.  You pop a major rod and approach one of the girls with it jutting and bouncing in front of you, resembling  a proudly trotting show horse….”

“Did they have those back then?”

“It was an allegory.  Now be quiet. “

He went on.

“You start making grunting noises, trying to get across to her what you propose doing.  She bends to drink and you take that as a sign that you’re both on the same page.”

“Were they literate back then?

“Will you just shut up please? Anyway: the watering whole is filled with dangerous, potentially charging hippos and angry water buffalo and all around you lurk also countless, carnivorous big cats, stalking your every move, each wanting nothing more than to sink their sharp teeth into your weary, emaciated flesh. “

“Holy shit, “ I said.  “Do you teach this shit to your students?”

“Yeah, but they don’t get it.”

“That’s too bad.”

“No doubt.  Anyway, with all that blood rushing from your neo-cortex and into your wang, you’re capacity for assessing and judging are basically nil.  So does this sound like the ideal setting for some kind of leisurely, drawn out fuck session?”

“Just the opposite,” I said.

“Exactly. If you are to survive, you’ve got to come as quickly as possible and get the blood out of that boner and back into your brain as soon as possible, so you can plot how you’re going to respond to all these dangers!”

“Why not just make it so the blood rushes from some other part of the body instead of the brain?” I asked. “You could have it rush up from the knees, for example.”

“Do you know anything at all about evolution?  It’s not like someone is up there choosing and can say to themselves – Hey, why not have the blood rush to the wang from their feet so they can still think clearly? Jesus!”

I asked why they couldn’t hump away from the watering hole, and he told me to stop being an idiot.  He quickly apologized, saying, this time, my misunderstanding was partially, though by no means entirely, his fault because he forgot to mention that at this point in evolution, we could not yet speak and thus didn’t have the power to make such complex proposals and were also most likely too stupid to even conceive of them.

“So think, who’s the perfect guy to screw a chick in that kind of precarious and hostile environment?”

And that brought us to premature ejaculation.

“And it wasn’t just the water buffalo,” he said. “There were other threats that made it evolutionarily beneficial to get sex over as quick as possible.”

“So originally it wasn’t only women that wanted to that…”

“You must be Jewish,” he said.  He continued,

“Think of the guys from the other tribe.  Would they just stand idly by, gulping down endless cupped palm fulls of watering hole water while you go on for minutes and minutes having relations with one of their women?”

“I’m a little lost,”  I said.  “We she be facing the waterhole and trying to drink at the same time? I ask because it seems there would be some risk of drowning, which means that though you might impregnate her, its offspring wouldn’t survive…”

“Can you please just shut up and let me finish?”

“Okay, but it seems like a valid point…” I mumbled.

“Anyway,  our ancestors were not so  different from you and I-  we wouldn’t just  stop at a drinking fountain with one of our sisters and let some total stranger do her from behind while she took a sip of water….”

“So she was facing the watering hole!” I said.

“Shut up!  Shut up! Now.  Stop Talking!!”

“Okay, okay…”

He continued.

“No,  they’d come after you right away, and that’s exactly what they did.”

“Were they in the water or something?”

“No! They’d be off to the side or behind you somewhere.”

“So how would they know it was their sister if they couldn’t see her face because she was drinking from the watering hole.”

“Okay.  We’ll change the scenario.  She bends over at a tree behind the watering hole.”

“Wouldn’t the tree hide her face from view?”

“Okay, it was a thin tree, a really thin tree, so they could see her face.  No, she just bends over, no tree.  Just drops something, like a berry she gathered earlier in the day, and she bends over to pick it up.”

“And then I enter her from behind…”

“ No, from the front you moron…”

He went on.

“So anyway, you could thrust twice maybe three times.  You just have enough time to do that and ejaculate before you have to start running away.”

I asked if that’s where track sprinters might come from too, and he congratulated me for being a quick study. He seemed a little moody, almost volitale.  It was exciting.

“Clearly,” he intoned, “in the context of such hostile environs, anyone with dickhead nerves dull enough to sustain more than ten, fifteen seconds of pumping would die.”

He said that any mutant mature ejaculator would either be beaten to death or eaten alive before he got the chance to impregnate a woman.

“Or trampled by a hippo.”

“Right.”

“Or a water buffalo.”

“Okay, okay.  We get the point.  Anyway, during our long incubation period as a migratory species, that was one genetic mutation sure to go nowhere.”

“What, getting trampled by a water buffalo?”

“No God damn it, having a dick head with nerves dull enough to sustain more than fifteen seconds of vaginal penetration!”

A cashier came over and told us to keep our voices down. He whispered, both us leaning in over the table,

“Until at least the development of agriculture, only those programmed to get in and out as quickly as possible had what it took to survive.“

“In other words, premature ejaculators,” I whispered back.

Miner whispered also that premature ejaculation was an important component of intra-tribal solidarity.

“We shouldn’t romanticize hunting and gathering tribal life and pretend that theft within the tribe wasn’t an issue,” he said into my cupped ear.

I suggested we sit outside.  We did.  He said the following in a normal voice, sometimes yelling when a truck revved its engine too loudly in the drive through.

“Any guy who spends ten, or fifteen minutes pumping would finish to find all of his personal possessions gone: no more spear, no more sack on a stick to carry nuts and twigs in, no more Cheetah skin loin cloth, no more nothing– all stolen and bartered to a rival tribe for a cool Sabertooth knife or a shiny rock or a handful of licorice root.”

I asked if other tribe members would steal stuff even if it were littered on the ground around him and his bent over partner.

“He would be so close, “ I said.  “And would witness the crime. Wouldn’t he call some kind of a tribal council or something to punish the wrong doer?”

“ Were you dropped on your head a lot as a baby? No one would heed a tribal council called by a naked man. He would be shunned, driven off to die nude in the icy cold.”

“On the Savannah?”

“Global cooling asshole! Will you just shut up, please?  Okay, no ice. But still alone and still dead. Bereft. With nothing but dirt. And most importantly for our purposes, he would have no one to hump, no one to carry his mature ejaculating gene into the generations to come.”

I asked if the guy wouldn’t realize the importance of having a loincloth and a sack on a stick and just pull out instead of pump to completion.

“Would you stop having sex if someone came by to steal your underwear from around one of your ankles? Or take your backpack? Or pinch your Egg McSandwich? If you were really into it with a chick and heard what you took to be someone breaking into your car outside, would you stop or convince yourself it was just squirrels playing around and keep going?”

I said I think I’d stop, and he asked what if it was with Pamela Anderson? And I admitted he had a point. I then said that even with her, I’d probably stop for a lion attack.

“Yeah,” he said. “But do you really think you’d even hear it coming?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Over all your groaning and saying ‘fuck yeah!’ to yourself over and over again?”

I admitted once more that he had a point, and he reminded me of how completely stupid our hunting and gathering ancestors probably were, and I conceded that they would definitely have kept going too, especially if they were doing Pamela Anderson.

“They have so little brain power in the first place, so just imagine how little they had during sex,” he pointed out. “I doubt very much they would have fully understood that their spear was even being stolen. His primitive superstitious beliefs probably told him that his gods would just send him another falling from the sky.”

I asked if it was likely that such theft was really that common – if our ancestors were really so lacking in basic decency.

He scoffed and just as quickly commented that the civilization we take for granted all around us is a precarious thing and under the slightest duress, we would all quickly resort to similar behavior.

“People get pretty twisted pretty quick, “ he said.  “Within two weeks of the Depression Era Dust Bowl in Arkansas, my grandparents had already eaten both of their dogs.”

“How many did they have?”

“Two!” he said.  “That’s what both means!”

I commented that anthropology was a bleak profession, and he agreed, saying it wasn’t for the weak. We resumed discussing his research.

“Then there is the sheer energy required to hump for even five minutes, energy needed to hunt down and spear Mastodons and ward off Dinosaur attacks. Premature ejaculation is evolution’s way of making sure you don’t waste much needed calories having sex.”

He said it correlated strongly with disinterest in courtship and talking and male insensitivity and callousness generally – all evolutionary traits that boded well for survival when our genetic code was being established so many hundreds of thousands, if not actually millions, of years ago.

“Conservation of everything, including energy,” he said.  “That was the name of the game.”

I commented on the irony that many think today that conservation is the name of the game too.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But you never hear politicians telling us to ejaculate prematurely.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “They tell us to drive electric cars instead.”

I suggested t premature ejaculation was probably one conservation effort that required no encouragement, that it could take care of itself.

I then asked about today’s mature ejaculator.

“They’re out there, aren’t they?”

“To be sure, but for most of human history, they were the most microscopically small segment of the human population. It is only recently in human history that we have lived in an environment in which ejaculation can be safely postponed until the female even has time to fake an orgasm – another thing unheard of on the Savannah” he said.

“To be sure, a few among our premature ejaculating ancestors obviously carried a recessive “go all night” gene. With the invention of castle walls and sturdy locks, these men had opportunity to actually inseminate women, and thus began man’s long evolutionary march towards a more mature ejaculatory time frame.

“Bit by bit, inch by inch, more and more mature ejaculators conceived progeny, who went on to hold off themselves during procreation, and through the very same process of selection, created a corresponding class of females who not only wanted to, but came to expect as perfectly reasonable, doing it for longer than the fifteen seconds it takes for a hippo to run the thirty yards to the shore and trample to death a hapless pair of hunting and gathering lovebirds in the throes of some kind pre-civilizational blindingly orgasmic passion made possible because the guy doing the humping had some mutated gene that made it so he could go on and on and on….”

He also pointed out that many primate species with huge balls ejaculate significantly more massive quantities than humans, do so in an alarmingly shorter period of time, and require a mere thrust and a half of stimulation before they do it.  I asked why he was telling me that, and he said he forgot and retraced our talk,

“Savannah, hippo. Cheetah skin jock strap, water buffalo trampling,, sagging, withered ass cheeks….”

“I think you said ‘loin garter’,” I said.

“Oh yeah!” He said.   I knew then  that we were in for a second act and would have to get some refills.  And when I came back with mine, he had plenty more to say.

“I wanted to point out that premature ejaculation is the norm in most primate species, except gorillas, who do everything slowly, but with the others, those with whom we share over 99.99 percent of our genetic make up, it’s the norm.”

Having re-grasped his train of thought he continued.

“Within such species, though, we sometimes find Alpha males with huge harems guarded by eunuchs whose dicks were ripped off by the Alpha male’s sisters, aunts, and female cousins, who all pretended they wanted to get nailed in order to lure the hapless low status males into exposing their erect wangs to such danger.”

“What?”

He explained more slowly that in primate species, kin and family often sacrifice their own personal reproductive success to assist their most powerful male relative, who shares their genes, into spreading his.

“Aha!” I said.

“In this way, they put the reproductive success of their strongest relative above their own, the logic being that within his seed lies some of their genetic make up too.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“During their love making guarded by these harems…”

“Who just moments earlier had their dicks ripped off…”

“Those were the eunuchs…no, you’re write.  During their love making with their harems guarded by eunuchs, the Alpha male uses a great many positions and has many techniques to delay ejaculation that allow him to go at it for hours on end, to the apparent delight of the enraptured ladies fortunate enough to be lured into his tall grass lair by promise of a Guava slice, the Bonobo equivalent of a diamond ring or a sports car.”

“A guava slice?”

Ignoring the question, he said that, for sure, more field research had to be done, and until it was completed, he would remain skeptical that this particular group of Bonobos had anything to teach us about human ejaculation.

“Are we to believe that men who don’t ejaculate prematurely today descend from Alpha-Males who spread their seed far and wide in endless one on twenty orgies near Savannah watering holes, surrounded by cordons of eunuchs presumably too weak to prevent having their dicks torn off by women but somehow strong enough to ward off Lion attacks?”

He called the idea “preposterous.”

“A thing straight from Hollywood or science fiction, “ he said.

“I raised the question at a recent conference and the author of this study speculated that huge concentric circles of these lower ranking men may have been formed and the Lions fed on the first few outer circles while their superior pumped away several layers deep in the protective confines accorded him by his cockless inferiors.”

“The whole notion is preposterous,” he said again.  “Sheer and utter nonsense!”

He went on to point out also that no matter how many women a guy does at a one on twenty orgies, it is very unlikely that he could ever impregnate more than one anyway.

“For all the fuss and fanfare of such an elaborate, prolonged sexcapade, still only one girl receives the full load of his primordial ejaculate in the end.”

“Primordial?” I asked.

Ignoring my interruption, he laughed off as ludicrous and contradictory to what we all know anecdotally about sex and male pleasure the idea of some mythic Alpha Male ancestor somehow pulling out to ejaculate in all twenty women at the orgy.

“Imaginary orgy…” I said.

“Yeah, right, imaginary, “ he said with a laugh.

“They were ruled by the pleasure principle as much as us,” he went on. “They didn’t even know how to send out smoke signals or light their own fires yet, let alone understand the role ejaculation played in reproduction.”

“Did they have any concept of time?” I asked and was ignored again.

He then asked if I would ever try ejaculating in more than one girl at an orgy, and I said no, of course not.

“Me neither,” he said.  “That really should go without saying, for all of us.  The question is preposterous and should never be posed. This is what shoddy research can do to a person.  What it can reduce him to.”

“A guy who asks stupid questions?” I asked.

“In the end, this theory is absurd,” he said, pointing out that the reproductive success of a one-on-twenty orgy, Alpha male would have been the same as a furtive, waterhole shore, early bird.  “Maybe less.  By the time the guy was finished with his orgy, the zeta male would have time to bone up for another shore side blast in some other chick and have finished the day impregnating two to his one.”

“Isn’t that roughly the modern ratio of premature to mature ejaculators?” I asked.

“Where did you get that information?”

“From Stephen Gould’s Hominus Ejaculatorius –The Logic of Premature Ejaculation.”

“Yeah, well, let’s just say that when my monograph comes out, Stephen Gould will be eating a plate of two of crow on that one there.”

Miner apologized at this point, saying he knew all of this sounded rather sick, but emphasized that was the point.

“For too long, the lives of other primates and the lives of our ancestors have been whitewashed as somehow lacking in the completely absurd pointlessness of our own; and for too long evolutionary theory has been used to prop up a myth that things somehow made sense in our deepest, ancestral past, and that the subsequent tens and thousands of years after that idyllic time have been awry simply because we build up civilizations where the natural, biological imperatives that rule over us no longer make sense. Well none of that is true.  Things were even weirder and more twisted back then.”

He pointed out that we have actually advanced considerably past our loathsome ancestors.

“Back in those days, a man wouldn’t think twice about coming too quickly in a girl in full view of a hippo while a band of lions and angry chimps were charging both of them from behind,” he said.

“Nowadays, only the most twisted minority of people would ever even consider such a thing. Now we are civilized enough to ejaculate prematurely in more private, and sometimes, even romantic settings. If any animals are witnesses, they are domesticated and frequently sent running from the room by tossed white tennis shoes and high heeled boots. And if that doesn’t work, you can usually at least throw a sheet or towel over their heads and by the time they work their way out from under it, you’re all done. “

Though our evolutionary impulses may push us towards premature ejaculation and killing over McNuggets, that doesn’t have to be our destiny.  He ended everything on a positive note.

“We are not prisoners of our genes.  We can learn not to steal McNuggets and to hold our fire if ours are stolen,” he said.  “We can, in a word, be civilized.”

He said also that there were plenty of numbing products on the market.

“We have brains.  When he don’t have boners they come up with the most ingenious things, like Ambesol, designed to numb sore gums and teeth but it works just as well on a penis.  So, just because evolution makes you come fast, doesn’t mean you have to. Just rub a tube of Ambesol on the thing and eons of evolutionary forces go down in defeat and your boner can rage at half mast for hours!”

Next week we’ll share a cup or two and check in with New Mexico State at Las Vegas Men’s Basketball Coach Burt Munsen who recently finished a trip to upper Mongolia and is excited to talk with us about some rugs he purchased there, as well as his team’s chances in the upcoming season.   Let’s hope Burt is as upbeat as Adjunct Miner!