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I am going to propose the opposite. Clothing evolved not from the desire to hide the genitals but from the much more plausible male evolutionary strategy of showing them off.

The primordial male impulse is to do anything possible to enhance the size and visibility of the penis. This has always included taking medicines and using enlargement strategies like stretching and pumping, and these strategies are ancient. However the penis enhancing sheath is among our oldest strategies. In societies where only one item of clothing is worn, it’s invariably this style, which boldly advertises the organ’s size and readiness . . .

However the penis enhancing sheath either evolved into or developed in parallel with what I will call the strategic uncertainty penis cover. Below we see a typical one of these, a coconut fiber tanna nanda of the Pacific Islands. It’s a loosely hanging penis sheath that is large enough to hint at a large organ underneath. Small penis? No problem. Get a large cover.

Note that the lack of an erection is easy to see if it happens because the hanging cover would rise along with an erect penis. No elevated cover means no erection right now. But this problem is solved, at some point by an inventor. Woven cloth, or woven fiber (or tanned leather in other cultures) is developed to allow a much more sophisticated genital display strategy. With woven cloth, a man can extend his hanging penis sheath and bring it up through the legs to be fastened in the back.

With this innovation, the lack of an erection is hidden from casual view. Any woman looking for a mating opportunity cannot immediately see whether a particular man is attracted to her. Her presumption has to be that a man wearing this “stealth” wraparound penis cover is “always ready” for sexual intercourse. This is a significant advantage for the man. Not immediately displaying an erection to an interested woman, maybe because you’re still in the refractory period from prior intercourse, or just because the woman saw you before you saw her, no longer forecloses the possibility of sex.

All this theorizing explains the basis for strategic genital sheathing by the man. But what about the woman?

The easy answer is that it’s not about the woman. It’s male sexual displays and attraction behaviors that drove this particular adaptation in animals and in human beings. It’s likely that women continued to be naked long after men invented their penis sheaths. The male peacock is the bird with the display. Our displays may be unique though, in implementing strategic hiding to maximize mating. Or maybe not. Darwin found some pretty amazing examples when he was out scouting.

But the deeper answer is that evolution already did for the woman what an inventor had to do for the man. Women’s genitals are already strategically mostly hidden inside her body. She attracts with her other body parts, and her internal workings—like whether she is ovulating—are hidden. The man attracts with clothes and also strategically hides under them.

Clothing, fundamentally, is simply human ingenuity in providing artificially for the man what evolution provided for the woman (and her predecessors) millions of years earlier.

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Admittedly it is a speculative scenario, but a very appealing one to me personally. Especially if it means early women still went around naked.

Posts: 7088 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004  |  IP: Logged |