This is a war between two worldviews, which Skip explains nicely. Here’s the short summary.
| Wisdom | Ignorance | Biologists love boobies, beavers, and the weenus! | Creationists fear boobies, beavers, and the weenus. |
|---|
Which side would you rather be on?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Well, I’m not a biologist, but I do love boobies.
Yes, Dan, this is a subject that requires much in-depth research, but it is an area that one should be able to get their arms around, and grasp firmly with both hands.
Even computer nerds love some beaver.
I like boobies.
That’s great!
Heh heh, “weenus” makes me think of “Venus”! :D
I saw this yesterday and sent it to my mom who works with a creationist. I told her next time he starts with how the eye had to be designed, she should go into a detailed anatomical analysis of why the vagina is poorly designed. THAT should shut him up!
It is?
How ironic, considering what dic…, er, weenusheads those creationists can be.
Red-footed, blue-footed, or masked boobies?
idlemind, that depends on which function you’re talking about.
I think she’s referring to the fact that most women can’t reach orgasm via vaginal penetration alone; there’s gotta be some clitoral action, too. It’s a bit difficult to do both at once without resorting to odd positions and/or sex toys – both of which can be a little distracting. Not to mention uncomfortable.
Granted, humans have been truly inventive at engineering get-arounds, from frottage to frigging to the ever-popular muff dive.
(And you could make a good, if snarky, argument that women are perfectly designed for lesbian sex, so maybe that should be our default position.)
But I can’t help thinking how much easier it would be, and how many billions of dollars (in therapy, sex toys, how-to books, how-to movies, and so on) would be saved, and how much better sex would have been for women all through history, if the clit was positioned a bit more conveniently to the vagina.
OTOH, I’m just glad our species has clitorii at all. SFAIK, not very many other species do. Horses do. I don’t know who else – I don’t even know if the other apes have ’em. If anyone here has more information about that, do please chime in!
Ah, work avoidance. At least this one is anatomy-related.
Amusingly enough, when my comparative anatomy information system is fully populated, this will be exactly the kind of query you can run against it.
I haven’t investigated the clitoris data yet, but a quick PubMed search reveals confirmation in hyenas (of course), baboons, gibbons, chimpanzees, four species of Old World mole, cows, ewes, goats, mares, sows, guinea pigs, mice, hamsters, and fossa.
I’m sure that’s nowhere near all, and I bet most female mammals have them, but I haven’t actually collated that data yet, so I’m just extrapolating from the variety of species that do have them.
Smile, weenus loves you.
Weenus saves.
What would weenus do?
As for the vagina being poorly designed, from one of my friends:
“If god was a woman the Candida genus would have been smote a long time ago.” -Katryna Morgan
Forget the clitoris, there are more basic problems with vaginas:
— Large opening to the body cavity, entry “between the sewers”
— Frequently insufficient to its primary task of childbirth
IIRC, The first of these is universal to the mammals and then some, the second is nearly unique to humans. Both are dramatic examples of evolution’s operations and principles, representing the result of repeated minimal changes to a prior developmental pattern, subject to conflicting selection pressures.
Primary function? Count the number of times a baby comes out vs. the number of times a penis goes in. I think we could make a quantitative case for a different primary function.
I know I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t love the weenis.
Ignorance
Creationists fear boobies, beavers, and the weenus.
Yeah, that statement really is made from ignorance.
This is the worldview we’re up against. From tomorrow’s NYT Sunday Times, in a cover story about the ‘war’ on contraception. “I’m going to understand it my way”. Says it all about avoidance of reality, doesn’t it????
Ron Stephens is both a pharmacist and a Republican state legislator in Illinois, one of the states that are currently battlegrounds between pharmacists who claim the right to refuse to fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives and women’s and civil rights groups that argue that pharmacists must fill all prescriptions presented to them. Stephens not only supports the pharmacists’ right of refusal but he also refuses to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception himself. He does, however, fill prescriptions for the birth control pill. When I asked him recently to explain his thinking on the two drugs, he said: “It’s the difference between stopping a pregnancy from happening and ending a pregnancy. My understanding of the science is that the morning-after pill can end a pregnancy, whereas birth control pills will make a woman’s body believe she is already pregnant so that the egg will not be fertilized.” And what if studies show that, in fact, both drugs can prevent implantation? “Everyone has their natural prejudice,” Stephens replied. “I’m going to understand it my way, and the issue is that you should not be forced to do something you believe is immoral.”
I’m not sure this is precisely accurate; I think there’s an imagineable case, though I’m not sure it’s borne out in real life, in which a creationist believes in the weenus. This is because there’s an imagineable case in which someone is a creationist without being a Christian fundamentalist — e.g. they have more spiritual beliefs than scientific knowledge, and so they believe in design for the same reason people thought the earth was stationary (it’s an easy explanation and they didn’t know any better).
It’s the fundies who are staging the anti-weenus (and, importantly, anti-beaver) campaign, and while there’s a significant overlap with creationists, the problem is much broader. For instance, you don’t have to believe in the Young Earth to oppose the life-saving HPV vaccine on the platform that women who have sex deserve cervical cancer. You don’t have to misrepresent the fossil record to say that rape is only acceptable if the girl is a religious virgin who was “brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it.” These types of ignorance overlap, but I don’t think we want to limit the weenus-fear to creationists alone.
By the way, I think “b**b**s, b**v*rs, and the w**n*s” would have been sufficient (instead of the black censor-boxes), judging from the sites I’ve seen that rail against, for instance, “s*x education.” It’s apparently okay to talk about it as long as it doesn’t have vowels.
Sorry, that abortion is only acceptable under those circumstances. I suspect Bill Napoli supports rape under other circumstances, such as when the girl is not saving herself for marriage.