Guy walks into a department store and asks a girl clerk behind a counter “Are you stationery?”
Girl responds, "Well, I am right up until the last minute, and then I just go “ca-razyyy!”
Sorry, I’ll just slink away now.
Sex is just preforming on stage.
The more noise the audience makes, the better the job the performer thinks they are doing.
–Golf clap–
Forget slow evolution of the species. I’m mighty curious myself as to how vocal men and women were 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 300 years ago.
In the most intimate of acts ( besides sharing a Netflix account password- and we all know how complex that was 200 years ago ), how much of societal imprinting happened even back then? I would hope that once alone, the rigidly adhered to roles of social structure gave way to serious lurvin’.
But I don’t know.
I wonder if this and pain relief from swearing are somehow connected. They’re both cathartic. One can be silent during orgasm, or silent when you drop a hammer on your foot, but it feels better to vocalize. Some people grow up without a lot of privacy so they learned to masturbate in silence.
In 1559, Realdo Colombo claimed discovery of the clitoris, calling it the “seat of woman’s delight.” Andreas Vesalius disagreed, insisting that normal women didn’t have a clitoris and that Colombo was describing hermaphrodites with tiny penises.
Those poor medieval women…
More seriously, given how other primates will mutually masturbate each other I think the answer is a long time ago. There’s some just so stories about how women’s year round receptivity instead of an estrous cycle combined with concealed ovulation encourage sexual pair bonding and reciprocal pleasure. Which all sounds fine and dandy, but seems to me that historically most men were fairly clueless on this front. Another idea is that, like a man, after a woman is satisfied she won’t want to move around a lot, making sure the semen stays inside. Not sure how much evidence there is for that one. I know the graciously titled “upsuck” hypothesis (female orgasm sucks the semen further into the womb or makes conception more likely some other way) never passed muster.
I had a friend who female cat made such a horrible racket when she was in heat my friend let her out her apartment . I wish she had the cat fixed instead!
And dollars to donuts Mr. Colombo was getting more action than Mr. Vesalius. I have to believe that people have historically been enjoying sex for a long time. There have been some cultures and attitudes that discourage sexual pleasure, but also cultures and attitudes that celebrate it, and I have to believe in my heart of hearts that people throughout history were up to some freaky shit in their own bedrooms.
The best evolutionary explanation I’ve found for the clitoris is that it’s basically an accident… a very happy accident. Since people are female by default, and require special hormonal input to develop male sexual organs, the clitoris is, in a certain sense, a proto-penis.
I hate to get all warm and fuzzy about it, but maybe giving pleasure to another person just feels better than merely taking. Humans are very social creatures, and it’s hard to imagine a greater level of social intimacy than sex. Being able to provide insane amounts of pleasure to another person is a total headrush, and we can point to simple behavioral reinforcement for moaning (which basically means, ‘‘yes, more of that.’’)
Just guessing, but loud moaning during sex could be a more recent thing with the development of more private living conditions? Maybe back in the day when families and extended families all lived under one roof in close quarters, I would imagine loud and obnoxious fornication would be frowned-upon. Makes me wonder about social situations today where a community all lives in one building, such as the Longhouse.
I know there are dopers here who have lived-in or visited such communities - any statement on the nature of moaning in those living conditions? Not that you were trying to listen or anything.
I think it is a matter of reenforcement mainly from porn. I doubt 50 or 100 years ago people would vocalize much during sex. All these moans and groans, at least the exaggerated ones, seem too fake to me. I don’t know. Someone else might have in other opinion.
In nature though, most animals that vocalize a lot during mating are those who do not have so many predators, like carnivores and primates. Cats make more noisily than rabbits for example. Someone mentioned rabbits here, that the males squill and then fall over at the end of mating. That isn’t always true, they can also jump away and their noise isn’t so lowd, like for example the sound a rabbit makes when in danger. I have bred rabbits in the past.