I believe there's more evidence supporting the theory that males had more selective power than females, and the relatively large human penis is a result of male selection, not female. I don't know how that mechanism worked. Perhaps proto-humans with larger penises were given a higher social status and allowed to mate more frequently with the females. Weirder things have certainly been observed by anthropologists studying native cultures. (Heck, when I took anthropology I learned that there's a native culture that believes that ingestion of sperm is necessary for boys to become men. I'd elaborate about how they expressed that belief, but I'm afraid I'd be banned for discussing icky topics.)
As I stated before, I feel like you can still see a lot of this kind of behavior in humans. What occurs here on LPSG often feels that. There sure are an awful lot of men who want to show off and compare and know who's the biggest here, aren't there? Males are also much more likely to enjoy seeing their own mates with another man, and especially with a man who has a larger penis, than women are likely to enjoy seeing their mate with another woman. Cuckolding as a fetish is extremely rare among women, but not very unusual among men.
We have big brains now. Evolving into humans involved many many physical changes, including becoming upright, developing the ability to run, and evolving big brains. And also larger penises.
Within our own written history, there have been few evolutionary advances. The changes we're discussing occurred much earlier than the written word. I only brought up things from our recent history to illustrate how women haven't had any power of choice until just the past few hundred years. But regarding that, you've lost me on the property argument. I don't understand how a woman who is passed from father to husband is choosing her own mate, thus selecting which traits from the male gender of the species will be passed on, which is what is meant by "power" under the concept of sexual selection in evolution. If a woman's father selected her mate, that's one man choosing another man and controlling whose genes hers is mixed with. That type of social behavior confers all the selective power to males.
I know men love to gangbang. What I doubt is that so many women were gangbanged with enough frequency that our evolution into humans was primarily a result of gangbanging. Other than the evidence that human males today enjoy gangbangs, I think there's no other evidence supporting the gangbanging theory. Me and several other posters have already demolished the logic that longer penises makes their sperm more competitive. One poster brought up that it doesn't matter if the semen of other males is pushed out of the vagina, by then the best swimmers have already entered the uterus and it's too late. Hhuck brought up the lack of evidence from convergent evolution, especially given how promiscuous certain species are, like the Bonobo. As I mentioned before, the Bonobo does not have a larger penis than the chimpanzee, even though it has the most sex of all the primates, and indiscriminantly, unlike humans, so if the theory in the OP worked, Bonobos should have the largest penises (relatively) out of all the primates. They don't.
I do believe that rape was common among our ancestors, but not primarily as a result of warfare (But again, once we were civilized enough to have wars, we're no longer talking about evolving into humans any more. We were human.) Rape is common among certain primates, certainly. Female orangutans avoid the males because the males' first impulse is to attempt to rape her, as I just learned this morning in that paper I mentioned earlier.
No, human females are the brightly colored long-tailed peacocks. If you're attacked by a predator, do you want to be the gender with all the big muscles who can run faster, or the gender without the big muscles who is slower? Big muscles are obviously a practical survival trait. Women have the less practical bodies for survival. We're less muscular, not as fast, we're not as talll, our small waists that represent fertility to males makes our torsos less strong. Before women have babies, our breasts serve no purpose other than to attract men, which is unique among mammals, most of whom do not grow enlarged mammary glans until after they bear young.
Exactly my point. Why do men feel the need to show off? Why do they enjoy it? I suspect it's related to how men arrange themselves socially on a hierarchy, like most social animals do, like primates who live in groups and wolves. And comparing penis size is part of that. Women don't feel the need or the desire to compare the size of their breasts to see who has the nicest ones, or the smallest waist. In fact, most women would feel very uncomfortable and negatively about doing something like that. They would hate it.
I'm afraid that you seem to have misunderstood what a cuckold is. A man who has a wife would be guaranteeing his sperm fertilizes her eggs if he does not let other men fuck her. Cuckolds are men who invite larger men to fuck their wives, which increases the chances this his own wife would bear the child of another man. He is literally giving his mate to man with a larger penis, which could result in his own wife bearing the offspring of a man with a larger penis. Cuckolds decrease their chances that their own smaller penis' genes would be passed on to his wife's offspring.
For the purpose of his discussion, all human penises that are not micropenises qualify as large, since this is a discussion about why human penises are so much relatively larger than primate penises.
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