Aside from the clever cover, this book was a little disappointing. Its main fault isn't a crime against writing like some of the books I've read, it's just that...I didn't laugh. But more on that later, because there are more objective issues to address first.

The main problem, which it can't overcome, is that it's pretty much just a collection of previously published articles. Even arranged and revised, it's tough to escape from the fact that each chapter was meant to be a standalone piece. The humor is concentrated and intense--when you've got a column's worth of space, you need to tell your story, present your evidence, make a point, and get a laugh, which is a tall order even in a full book. Bering definitely does it well one by one, but when you pile them all on top of each other, it's a bit of a mishmash.

The strangest thing about this mishmash is the mismatch of topics. From the front cover (admittedly the title is there to provoke) it sounds as though the essays will be mostly about the physical quirks of humanity. And there is a fair bit of that. The first two parts of the book focus specifically on the human body. Then we transition to sex and, eventually, sexuality. It's a bit of a wide range, but the thematic blu-tack holds things in place enough. But then we dive completely aside in Part 7, "For the Bible Tells Me So", and Part 8, "Into the Deep: Existential Lab Work." What are these sections doing here? The only chapter in here sort of related to the rest of the book is "God's Little Rabbits."

I think my issue is that many of the essays come down on just one side of Bering's specialty--evolutionary or psychology, with just a smattering of the other. Most of the book focuses on the evolutionary with a side of psychology, but these last two sections heavily favor the psychological over the evolutionary, and the transition is a bit abrupt.

At this point I should make a disclaimer: I started with Part 8. I was interested to read Bering's comments on whether suicide might be an adaptive trait, but I didn't want to end what looked like a funny book on a sour note. (Reading those chapters would have carried my mood through the next two, deliberately more lighthearted, chapters). I know I'm not actively editing at a trade level, but my instinct in this case would be to divide the chapters by mood, or to create a thematic gradient, rather than chopping the chapters up by topic. Or maybe even arrange them anatomically, from the feet to the head! You could have the chapters in the table of contents arranged around an anatomy drawing like labels--that'd be awesome!

I guess my feeling is that, if you're going to publish a collection of previously published material, even revised, you shouldn't try to bury the fact in topical organization that just draws attention to how disparate the topics are. Heck, you could even acknowledge the fact! Yeah, there will be some people who grouse about being sold repackaged material, but there will be more people who know and appreciate Bering, his profession, his personality, and his style. We're not all pack rats who cut out and hoard our favorite articles (ahem). Actually talking in the introduction about how he found themes emerging from some of the most popular pieces of his work and/or the pieces he liked most would be more up front but also show the evolution of the author's own thinking. (Admittedly, I'm not feeling inspired to reread the introduction right now. Sorry.) (Also admittedly, the author's thinking about the book’s structure could very well be heavily influenced by his editor's thinking.) As a writer, I would be more inspired to revise chapters in ways that allowed me to discuss the changes I was making, the new things I'd discovered since writing the original article, and how the revised pieces fit together. But it's impossible to know how much of the motivation for this book came from Bering versus his editor.

Okay, so aside from the structural issues, how was the book? To be honest, I barely laughed. Maybe this isn't a problem with the book but with my expectations: I thought I would be snickering like a stereotypical middle-school boy on every other page. And when you expect to laugh but don't, well, there are few more frustrating things. With that said, I did find the information in the book fascinating, if not completely engaging: I read quickly and with interest in most cases, and it was incredibly refreshing to have a scientific guide who wasn't your standard straight older male. If he'd written the book from scratch, I would have liked to see him be a bit more objective in the chapters on women rather than issuing his (witty, honest, and practically unique) disclaimer that his authority can only be limited, but I think that's entirely a symptom of the fact that the book is a collection of articles. Again, there's just not space to be all-inclusive in 500 words or fewer.

My advice, if you want an engaging, funny look at the science of sex that masterfully combines objectivity and the author's non-standard personality (not a man!): go read Mary Roach's [b:Bonk|2082136|Bonk The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex|Mary Roach|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348226205s/2082136.jpg|2398516]. But if Bering were to write a full popular science book, I would definitely be interested in reading it. [b:The Belief Instinct|8018107|The Belief Instinct The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life|Jesse Bering|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1335710024s/8018107.jpg|39938288] doesn't sound like my cup of tea, but I did enjoy Bering's engaging narrative voice, written non-standard personality (not straight!), and quirky approach to taboo topics. This is a good book to read while reading other books at the same time.

Quote Roundup

245) When compared with control groups, suicidal participants significantly overestimated the passage of experimentally controlled intervals of time by a large amount. Baumeister surmises, “Thus suicidal people resemble acutely bored people: The present seems endless and vaguely unpleasant, and whenever one checks the clock, one is surprised at how little time has actually elapsed.” Evidence also suggests that suicidal individuals have a difficult time thinking about the future … This temporal narrowing, Baumeister believes, is actually a defensive mechanism that helps the person to withdraw cognitively from thinking about past failures and the anxiety of an intolerable, hopeless future.
So often, when I read about things supposedly relevant to me, I don’t really see myself in them. This chapter on what it feels like to be suicidal, though, was pretty well aligned with my own experience last year. (Not really a surprise, since it sounds from the previous chapter like Bering’s been there himself.) Even though I felt like a zombie for about half the year while I was stuck in the temporal rut described above, I’m very fortunate that I never made it to the final step, disinhibition. I was too stuck in that apathetic state where I couldn’t think about the past or future, and while pretty much all of the rest of my symptoms are gone, I’m still having trouble getting that one back on track. Still, never thought I’d be a little grateful for that awful feeling of being an exhausted hamster on a rusty wheel.

91) If you’re like most, you’ve seen the impossibility of . . . masturbating successfully [to orgasm] without casting some erotic representational target in your mind’s eye. . . This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why I find it so hard to believe that self-proclaimed asexuals who admit to masturbating to orgasm are really and truly asexual. They must be picturing something, and whatever that something is gives away their sexuality.
I found this shockingly insensitive compared to most of the rest of the essays. It just seems odd that someone who takes seriously the idea that some people might be sexually attracted to animals, or objects, or even children (not that he condones or condemns any, just that he looks for the possible evolutionary origin of these orientations) should be so dismissive of people self-reporting something intensely personal. How is this much different from the people who might have learned he was gay and said, “You just haven’t found the right woman yet”? Strangely, the chapter specifically about asexuality wasn’t as bluntly dismissive as these two sentences were. Maybe doing the research for the full article gave him a bit more perspective--though that only works if it turns out that this chapter was written before “Asexuals Among Us.”

125-126) Okay, I take it back, because I forgot about this bit. “Asexuals Among Us” does still have one especially grotesque last word:
Unless psychological scientists ever gather a group of willing, self-identified asexuals and, systematically and under controlled conditions, expose them to an array of erotic stimuli while measuring their physical arousal (penile erection or vaginal lubrication), the truth of the matter will lie forever hidden away in the asexuals’ pants.
Is it really so impossible that someone who genuinely is one orientation might be physically aroused by something even if they’re not personally aroused by it? I guess I just figure arousal should relate, in humans, to mental readiness as well as--heck, more than! --physical readiness. Bering actually describes in another place how some men get partial erections when facing a phobia. Surely no one believes that they’re actually turned on by something that terrifies them! Maybe there’s just a disconnect here, maybe we (okay, I) need a bit more clarity about how Bering and the researchers he’s discussing define arousal. Our bodies do so many weird things we really, really don’t want them to do. Who’s to say physical arousal can’t be one of them?

167) The more we understand about the evolved pressures underlying our behaviors, the more we can get a grip on them and evaluate our own motives. One of my favorite thinkers, the feminist cultural constructivist Simone de Beauvoir, wrote famously that, “one isn’t born a woman, but becomes one.” While it’s true that culture exerts strong pressures shaping expressions of gender disparities, it also helps to know the biological mold that society must contend with.
This little aside put some ice on my bruised feminist heart. Bering reminds readers that we’re not all either evolution or psychology--science and society are mixed in self-reflective humans more intensely than they are for any other animal. We’re not doomed to remain at the mercy of our biology--understanding it doesn’t have to be the end point. Also, how does one become a feminist cultural constructivist? Because it sounds like a cool career. ( )

You don't hear enough about this. I once nearly broke my penis. I was happily banging away doggy style and slipped out on one thrust, causing me to clobber my cock into her right bumcheek on the next. I collapsed in a fucking heap in agony and panic. All she did was collapse in hysterics, she thought it was hilarious. Glad there are starting to be articles addressing this risk.

We're so cosseted and prudish these days that nudity has been consigned to naturist camps and on line pornography, where it is tarnished by association. We should still be able to celebrate the human body in all its wonder without sniggering like school boys.

I was brought up by my mum to respect women and feel sad that I can't go naked (on the beach or in my garden, for instance - I've no desire to be starkers everywhere) in the nice weather without immediately being branded as a pervert. I signed up to be a nudist this past summer. The first few days were the hardest.

This book is important and one must be careful when having an erection. For example, a few years ago my female neighbour tripped over my penis when she approached my lawn chair. I have learned from this painful experience to never recline sideways, always on my back with a warning flag attached so low flying aircraft will avoid it. My old schoolmaster used to frequently rail at these sorts of things and coined a rather remarkable term for it: "Toilet Literature". He couldn’t be more wrong. This is not just a cock and balls story!

NB: Perhaps we could be further enlightened by someone who has experience of slipping out and clobbering his cock on a left bumcheek. Just saying. ( )

Bering, Jesse (2012). Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2012. ISBN 9781429955102. Pagine 319. 8,78 €

Due critiche principali a questo libro:

Si tratta sostanzialmente di una raccolta di articoli già apparsi sulla rubrica che Jesse Bering (sì, afferma di essere un discendente del noto esploratore artico Vitus Jonassen Bering). Niente di male, naturalmente (anche se confesso di non amare questo tipo di raccolte: ma è una questione di gusto personale), a patto che tu abbia un buon editor. Questo prezioso aiuto a Bering è mancato, sicché il connettivo tra i capitoli è pressoché inesistente e alcuni sono decisamente meno riusciti di altri. In più, ho avuto la spiacevole impressione che la casa editrice avesse imposto una traguardo minimo in termini di numero di pagine e che questo abbia indotto a Bering a inserire capitoli che hanno ben poco a che fare con la tematica principale del libro (un’esplorazione della sessualità umana da una prospettiva di psicologia evoluzionistica). Per esempio, non ho proprio capito che c’azzecchi (per parafrasare Tonino Di Pietro) il capitolo Planting Roots with my Dead Mother, che – senza alcuna analisi scientifica – propone un nuovo tipo di cimitero alberato (proposta peraltro non particolarmente originale, come testimonia L’albero ed io, vecchia canzone di Francesco Guccini).

Quando il mio ultimo giorno verrà dopo il mio ultimo sguardo sul mondo,
non voglio pietra su questo mio corpo, perché pesante mi sembrerà. Cercate un albero giovane e forte, quello sarà il posto mio;
voglio tornare anche dopo la morte sotto quel cielo che chiaman di Dio.Ed in inverno nel lungo riposo, ancora vivo, alla pianta vicino,
come dormendo, starò fiducioso nel mio risveglio in un qualche mattino.
E a primavera, fra mille richiami, ancora vivi saremo di nuovo
e innalzerò le mie dita di rami verso quel cielo così misterioso.

Ed in estate, se il vento raccoglie l’invito fatto da ogni gemma fiorita,
sventoleremo bandiere di foglie e canteremo canzoni di vita.
E così, assieme, vivremo in eterno qua sulla terra, l’albero e io
sempre svettanti, in estate e in inverno contro quel cielo che dicon di Dio.
Il tono di Bering, che vuole essere scherzoso, a volte è un po’ irritante. Per sua sfortuna, proprio in questi giorni è dilagata (insomma, sto esagerando…) una polemica su Science writing: lite and wrong sul blog di Jerry Coyne e, qualche giorno prima con Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell and our thirst for non-threatening answers sul blog di Eric Garland. Coyne distingue, in bella sostanza, opere come The Better Angels of Our Nature, effettivi contribuiti alla comprensione pubblica della scienza, dai libri di “science-lite” che offrono analisi e soluzioni superficiali a problemi sociali o resoconti approssimativi di ricerche scientifiche. Forse Bering non è del tutto light, ma fatevi un’idea da soli:

Se volete leggere altre recensioni ho preparato una pagina su Storify.

* * *

Come al solito, le mie annotazioni, che non siete obbligati a leggere. Riferimenti numerici all’edizione Kindle.

According to a 2009 report in Medical Hypotheses by the anatomist Stany Lobo and his colleagues, each testicle continuously migrates in its own orbit as a way of maximizing the available scrotal surface area that is subjected to heat dissipation and cooling. Like ambient heat generated by individual solar panels, when it comes to spermatic temperatures, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With a keen enough eye, presumably one could master the art of “reading” testicle alignment, using the scrotum as a makeshift room thermometer. But that’s just me speculating. [163]

Evolution does not occur by design. The best way to think about most adaptations is in terms of cost/benefit ratios. I suspect that the foreskin provided protection of the glans and what you see is the result of a statistical compromise of sorts. [445]

[…] 76 percent of a sample of 235 female undergraduates from Australia reported having removed their pubic hair at some point in their lives. Sixty-one percent currently did so, and half of this sample said that they routinely removed all traces of their pubic hair. The current trend for men appears to be no different. [746]

Gerard David, a prolific religious iconographer based in Bruges, Belgium, was merely painting a scene of starvation cannibalism. [765]
Gerard David

oceansbridge.com

Better this evolutionary account than pimples by intelligent design, in any event. What a heartless God indeed that would wind up the clock so that our sebaceous glands might overindulge in sebum production precisely at the time in human development when we’d become most acutely aware of our appearance. [874]

[…] hindsight is twenty-twenty […] [2695]

In many courtrooms across the Western world, for instance, defendants and witnesses must place their hand on the Bible and volunteer to respond to the religious oath “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” And in the ancient Hebrew world, there was the similar “oath by the thigh”—where “thigh” was the polite term for one’s dangling bits—since touching the sex organs before giving testimony was said to invoke one’s family spirits (who had a vested interest in the seeds sprung from these particular loins) and ensured that the witness wouldn’t perjure himself. [2779]

“I love Humanity; but I hate people.” [2792: è una citazione di Edna St. Vincent Millay]

[…] there’s no such thing as a failed experiment—only data. [3290]

Vohs and Schooler write: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.”
Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. [3355]

The self is only a deluded creature that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member. [3372] ( )

A collection of Jesse Bering's essays, mostly about our sexual bits both physical and mental though there's additional ones on cannibalism, religiosity, and suicide. It's both entertaining and informative, with personal and historical anecdotes sprinkled throughout the science. ( )

And other reflections on being human