The research was reported in Science and quickly popularized in a post by Brian Alexander. Please read this review of the tear research and a critique of Alexander’s post by Christie Wilcox. The idea that tears are a mechanism to avoid rape is mainly proffered in comments in various posts. Also, please have a look at this post by Mike the Mad, which is not about tears but about the evolution of rape avoidance mechanisms in general.

Here’s the idea. It appears that a steroid hormone found in human female tears reduces sexual arousal in human males when they are exposed to those tears. Is this a mechanism to stave off rapists?

Let’s start out by giving the idea the best chance we can. Rape matters. Female hominids in a semi-pair bonded or monogamous species who are raped will give birth to young that will not garner the normal level of male parental investment because the male parental unit is not the father. The female that would be raped is better off not being raped for this reason and thus we would expect adaptations to arise to avoid it. Any rap-avoidance mechanism would be strongly selected against. Bla bla bla.

OK, that’s about as good as I can do. Now, rather than making a cogent argument against this hypothesis (which I could do, honest) I’m simply going to list a number of questions I would ask about this idea before deciding anything.

1) Does this work with male tears? Do man-tears make heterosexual men less aroused? If so, then the steroid hormone is just something in tears.

2) Does this work on the females? Do woman-tears make the woman herself less aroused? Does this work with male tears for homosexuals? Do gay men have reduced arousal when their partner cries? This may not mean much, but would also indicate that this is not really an adaptation, because the production and delivery of a hormone is only part of the process. Receptors matter too. If the tears are working in any of these ways to reduce sexual arousal, then that means that the recipient of the putative signal is responding as the hypothesis predicts, inappropriately or non-specifically, and thus, both the hormone delivery and the reception of the hormones is incidental.

3) Do rapists have reduced sexual arousal when exposed to these hormones? I.e, does the adaptation work in this way? (See below.)

4) Does reduction in sexual arousal in rapists lead to a reduction in likelihood of rape? How does this vary across different kinds of rape?

5) Do rapists who get cried at become safer or more dangerous?

6) Does the presence of the hormone vary with who is getting signaled to?

7) Is the tear-born steroid hormone level in the same range across females, or is it tied to each female’s baseline? Hormone amount is not the factor that matters in their function; What matters is receptor site frequency and distribution and relative hormone amount. Hormone signaling within an individual works because hormone production levels and hormone receptor site frequency and distribution co-develop. This is one of the reasons why those who study endocrine systems establish individual baselines and measure hormone levels in relation to those baselines. Using steroid hormones set to internal baselines to signal between organisms would be difficult, though not impossible.

8) Yes, pheromones exist and work, and these limitations can be compensated for, but they remain two-way devices. A female animal may send out a scent to attract a male, and the male may get attracted, but both parties benefit from this communication and the communication serves a common interest. Why would male rapists have a mechanism for getting “turned off” as it were? If rape is of evolutionary significance, it would be trivial, I would think, for male rapists to avoid a “don’t rape me” pheromone interference mechanism (such as simply not developing the receptor sites for it).

9) Why does the effect happen even though the tears used in the study were not from frightened about to be raped women, but rather, women who were watching Bridget Jones’ Diary or something?

The Science study does show an effect. Perhaps something is going on here. The evidence that it is an anti-rape adaptation is very poor, and reason suggests that it is not. The idea that one facies of emotional state (sad/happy/etc) is linked to another (aroused/not aroused/etc) is reasonable, and we may be seeing that here.

One problem is that human tears are a unique human trait. And, human rape is probably unique as well, though forced copulation is not (human rape is so very much more, in a bad way, than that). This makes it difficult to do the sorts of comparative work that helps to parse out the adaptive from the incidental.

Christie, in her post, discusses a more nuanced hypothesis that does involve communication of emotional states in a way that is probably more reasonable given that tears occur in a much wider range of social settings than either the intercourse-related or the rape-related. In fact, to narrow down her idea a bit, tears in infants may be a powerful way of eliciting care-taking behavior. That alone could cause tears in adults to have similar effect for no particular adaptive reason, but rather, as a ride-along and incidental effect. (Christie discusses all of this).

Finally, while rape is important in human affairs, I’m not so sure how important it is in long term evolutionary history. Most tropical and subtropical foragers are relatively monomorphic in body size, and there is little evidence of rape being important. Rape is much more common in so-called “middle range societies” which a lot of modern evolutionary psychologists lump in with foraging societies. They are wrong to do this, and I find it very annoying. So annoying that I’ve started to write about it a few times but my keyboard burst into flames every time. Eventually, I’ll address that issue, but I may have to skin a few colleagues.

Gelstein, S., Yeshurun, Y., Rozenkrantz, L., Shushan, S., Frumin, I., Roth, Y., & Sobel, N. (2011). Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal Science, 331 (6014), 226-230 DOI: 10.1126/science.1198331

Assange and the Presumption of Innocence
Assange and the Victim Conspiracy

The issue is that of jealousy or resentment. Some Assange defenders, for some reason, seem to feel the need to point out suspicious or negative aspects of the women, their actions, reactions, decisions, etc. One of these issues is the idea that each of them agreed to at least some degree to have sex with Julian (though what happens after initial activity may have gone off track) and then only after learning of each other’s plight, pursued a complaint. Stephanie, in her post, goes into detail on this issue including questioning the legitimacy of the premise, but that’s not what I want to comment on. I want to comment, rather, on the idea that if they experienced jealousy or resentment that this is somehow to their detriment and indicates a weakness in their subsequent decisions, and perhaps even invalidates their complaints.

It does not.

I don’t want to go all Evolutionary Psychology on you but bear with me. Sexual jealousy is there for a reason. I’m pretty sure the extent, nature, and details of sexual jealousy in typical humans is culture-dependent, even if this behavior makes use of deep limbic emotions. I’m also pretty sure that sexual jealousy is shaped in some cultures to enhance certain behaviors (and allow them by others not directly involved but who know about them) that are abhorrent. The fact that there are societies in which women are routinely tortured or killed over issues of sexual access gives sexual jealousy a rather bad name. But that is humans, and human culture, making the worst of it as often happens. There is a good argument that a certain degree of sexual propriety and it’s concomitant emotional bells and whistles makes good sense for human beings in cultural contexts where these emotional tools can be used sensibly, which to me includes both egalitarian foraging societies and progressive middle class European subcultures (which are very similar to each other in many ways).

Consider a hypothetical case that is NOT what happened here in magnitude but may be what happened here qualitatively. Imagine yourself (as an unattached person) meeting someone and sleeping with them. Then two days later the next person you meet who knows that person mentions that they just slept with that person. Then a few days later, the next person you meet who knows this person mentions that they slept with that person. And so on and so forth.

As an aside, I’d like you to think about how this would play out, in terms of judgments we or others may make about people, if you are a heterosexual male and the person who seems to sleep with everyone you met is a heterosexual female. Then re-imagine this with the sex roles reversed. Then re-imagine this with you and the other person being gay men, then lesbians. If you like, throw in bisexuality but I recommend not because this is going to take forever as it is.

Well, that exercise is not the main point I want to make but in thinking this through you may have exposed a multi-standard (like a double standard but with more standards). Maybe not for you, for how you judge other people, because you would never misjudge anyone I’m sure, but how society might. The admirable stud vs. the whoring slut themes come to mind. A digression, but a worthy one.

Back to the point: If you did not know that your one time lover was about to sleep with every third person s/he met over the coming weeks, or just had over the previous weeks, you might be suddenly shocked or at least surprised. You will probably not have a purely intellectual response to this new knowledge. There will be shades of something that one might call jealousy even though you two never discussed or expected commitment, but it is called sexual jealousy only because that is the name we use for it, and it invokes questions of commitment only because our culture tends to make the link. What is really happening is that you are experiencing an evolved and generally useful off-putting emotional reaction designed by selection to do a number of things, including limit disease exposure and avoid potentially dangerous social situations. Also, you charge for your intimacy (we all do). Intimacy of any kind has costs and risks. You just found out that your one time partner is shopping at Good Will while you’re shopping at the Gap. If you were merely friends, that should not really matter. But if you are shopping together, that’s a conflict.

Of course these woman would experience sexual jealousy. If they were men, many who are pointing this out would not have seen that as something they were doing wrong. Of course men would be negative about the sluttish behavior of the chick they just bagged, right? But as women, their sexual jealousy is seen as unseemly or inappropriate or a poor reason to develop bad feelings, but in fact, such feelings are a prerequisite for narcing on someone. Their assessment of Julian Assange dropped, their estimate of their own cost and return from their relationship was quite properly re-calibrated, and their sense of risk was heightened. At face value, I’d say they acted in an entirely appropriate manner when they thought of making a case after finding out about each other, if that is in fact what happened. That’s what any reasonable person would do.

Hat tip feministing.