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This is what feminists mean when we say science isn't objective and "biological truths" are not indisputable (https://closet-keys.tumblr.com/post/186585194148/the-circular-logic-of-western-cishetero)
48

Yeah, there’s a ton of work from feminist biologists in the 80ies and 90ies critiqueing such “biological truths”. The paper I always recommend is Lloyd’s 1993 “Pre-theoretical Assumptions”, and my favorite example is the orgasm measuring device in monkeys known to engage in female-to-female clitoris stimulation resulting in orgasm.

Counting orgasms in monkeys certainly is a weird way to have a job, but hey, why not. The researcher built a device and it was activated by heavy vibrations… which famously happen in penis-in-vagina monkey sex but not by lesbian monkey sex.

When asked why the device would be designed as to not register female-on-female orgasms, the researcher said that they didn’t count.

It's been a general issue in human evolution and primatology. The reconstruction of human evolution, for instance, was premised on the single species hypothesis based on the principle of competitive exclusion, i.e. eventually one species would come to dominate a niche and humans' niche was culture. Therefore, evolution followed a more or less linear path from H. habilis to modern humans, fitting neatly into the concept of Progress and resulting in that infamous [Ascent of Man](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/KUxEGcteEB0/hqdefault.jpg) graphic. [Landau](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/264b/7de6ab144ae54f8c28e3502e9702da5e2076.pdf) and [Ruse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_to_Man) have documented the progressionist narrative impulse quite extensively. Incidentally, Lloyd was a student of Lewontin, whose [Biology as Ideology Massey lectures](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2B76CB4B38C42B92) are definitely worth checking out.
**Monad to Man** Monad to Man: the concept of progress in evolutionary biology is a 1996 book about the longstanding idea that evolution is progressive by the philosopher of biology Michael Ruse. It analyses the connection between ideas of progress in culture generally and its application in evolutionary biology. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
So their job was to count monkey orgasms and they weren't even good at it!?
Yep!
this whole thread is just kek
Has anything changed since her critique ?
Of course not! edit: but actually tho: https://twitter.com/hanmuli/status/763914867174674432

What did Harlow retort? I’m dying to know.

She was dead two years by the time of that interview

So uhh what’s the rest of the story? They forced them into unnatural arrangements and then what? Where’s the other part of the cisheteropatriarchial circle that the post talks about, their conclusion?

you could send an ask to the OP or try to find the book on libgen and similar sites but to me the fact that scientific studies have been constructed like this is instructive regardless of this particular study's conclusions
Yeah it would be absurd if what is implied is true but at the moment it seems kind of *too* absurd to not consider alternative explanations. Like they straight up didn't know that this wasn't natural? It seems to me they were trying to control for something and the context of her reply is just cut out. Don't get me wrong research can absolutely be biased, especially stuff like this, it's just that this particular case seems a bit...*extra.*