Sexual dysfunctions -- an evolutionary perspective | Menelaos Apostolou | TEDxUniversityofNicosia

e can you hear me yes you can um so that's a nice morning uh full of uh sex yeah that's good that's how mornings should be um okay so I will talk about sexual dysfunctions uh today uh I will try to understand what's going on there what uh causes them and uh my starting point uh will be what is a sexual dysfunction uh a sexual dysfunction is a difficulty that an individual or a couple phases uh during any stage of normal sexual activity so if you're having sex uh and um uh you feel pain you

experience pain or you cannot experience orgasm that would classify as a sexual dysfunction uh the interesting thing the surprising thing with sexual dysfunctions is how common they are so if we take men approximately 30% of adult men uh suffer from have a manifested sexual dysfunction the most common one is premature ejaculation followed by erectile difficulties and lack of interest in sex um for woman things are a bit uh worse um approximately sorry 40% of women uh suffer from uh or have at least one manifested sexual dysfunction uh the most common one is lack of interest

in sex uh followed by uh difficulties experiencing orgasm uh and pain during intercourse um and I'm saying at least one because uh people who have a sexual one sexual dysfunction usually have another as well so if a woman uh has a low sexual desire it's quite likely that she also has uh difficulties experiencing orgasm or uh she has pain during intercourse okay so overall it seems that uh uh at least one in Three Men and almost half uh of woman uh have uh a sexual dysfunction that's a very high prevalence which leads to the question

why what causes this and uh um some good candidates would say is poor uh mental health and poor physical health so for in instance if you are if you suffer from depression you don't feel H like having sex obviously um and uh if you have some cardiovascular problems then um this might affect your erectile F functioning but uh most of the people who uh have uh a sexual dysfunction are mentally and physically healthy that is these factors do not really EXP explain um uh sexual dysfunctions um yes they have an effect but in most of

the cases they just don't explain this and this made me curious just try to figure out why what what really causes them why we have such a high prevalence of sexual dysfunctions and uh to answer this um I employed an evolutionary perspective now in The evolutionary perspective our body is a collection of mechanisms or adaptations um that enable us um to survive and reproduce that what what they do so in this uh perspective we have specific mechanisms which regulate sexual functioning which brings me to the question of why uh evolutionary forces have allowed considerable variation

in sexual functioning so if we take women for instance uh there are woman a lot of women who have low sexual desire and a woman who have high sexual desire the question is why um evolutionary forces have not saved a woman all woman to have low sexual desire or even better high sexual desire um and one answer one possible answer is that uh there have been weak selection pressures during uh human uh evolutionary time and I can demonstrate what I mean by that with a different example so um when uh lights go up uh uh

when this night session ends you will notice uh that people's noses are very different that is they vary in size and uh shape why why not everybody's nose is the same well one answer is part of the answer is that um during a human evolution um um there have been weak selection pressures on uh nose is size and shape that is to say uh an individual with a predisposition to have a small nose was not better off in terms of survival or reproductive success than an individual um who had a predisposition to have a moderate

Siz nose um as a consequence all predispositions remained in the population and what we have is this or what you will see when the lights go up so perh perhaps this was also the case um uh with sexual functioning that is in certain aspect in specific um uh areas of sexual functioning maybe in the past there had been weak selection pressures and as a consequence we have considerable variation now the bad news is that we cannot go back in time to see what was there yet we can get an idea and we can get an

idea uh using evidence from the anthropological record all right so what was happening is that in the past uh our ancestors used to live in small bands of people who based their subsistance on hunting and Gathering uh and later on in human evolutionary time on agropastoralism now there are modern societies today um which are pre-industrial and they base their subsistence on hunting and Gathering and uh on agropastoralism um an anthropologist went there and study them and produce a rich uh anthropological record by studying This Record we can sort of figure out what's happening in these

societies today and we can infer what was happening in the similar Societies in the past okay so what the anthropological record tell us it tell us that in this societies um made choices regulated that is individuals are not free to choose their own uh mates uh what happens for instance is that parents control uh M choice and choose uh spouses for their children so for instance if their uh daughter comes of age uh they would uh arrange a marriage with a man of her choice and um um would give ha to him uh and when

they would exercise Choice their primary concern was to arrange uh to establish an alliance with another family so this is the common pattern in modern pre-industrial societies and we can infer that this was also uh the uh the pattern in ancestral human societies and we don't even have to infer this because we have historical evidence uh for the later part of human uh Evolution um we have historical records that is we have records from ancient Greece Rome Byzantine Empire uh pre Victorian England and so on and these tell the the same story they agree that

is um in these societies uh M Choice was regulated individuals didn't have uh uh much uh uh Choice over their Partners okay so putting everything together uh the anthropological and historical records tell us the story we can we come from uh uh uh a society uh from ancestral societies where made Choice was regulated now this is important for understanding sexual functioning for the for understanding the variation of sexual functioning let me be more specific about this um let me examine um ejaculation latency time that is how um uh fast uh how soon a man ejaculates

after the initiation of sexual intercourse now in an ancestral pre-industrial context um a man who would ejaculate um uh uh soon after um uh the initiation of sexual intercourse um this is in seconds somewh here um allowing little time for the sexual satisfaction of his um uh partner uh wouldn't be better off or worse off than a man who would ejaculate uh later on uh allowing more time for the sexual satisfaction of his partner why because in a in ancestral pre-industrial societies woman didn't have any choice of mate so um uh the sexual satisfaction of

women was a secondary concern men didn't care about this too much and didn't matter much what happens then is that both predispositions would remain the population that is the predisposition to ejaculate soon after they initiation of sexual intercourse or the predisposition to in to ejaculate later on um both would remain the population and what we have today uh is this distribution this nice distribution of ejaculation latency time so you can see here this is in seconds um and uh uh indicates um uh how fast uh a man would ejaculate after the initiation of sexual intercourse

okay that is why we have this distribution due to two weak selection pressures what's the problem now uh in modern societies things are different uh made choice is no longer regulated uh woman have a choice they can choose with whom they will stay with and this means that uh a man has to provide some satisfaction to his uh partner uh to keep here and in turn yes has to be um and this means that men who are here and a lot of them uh may be in trouble because uh they ejaculate soon after the initiation

of sexual uh uh intercourse not allowing considerable uh time for the sexual satisfaction of their Partners so uh a lot of men then in a modern uh context have this problem and we because this is uh a problem we tend to label it uh premature ejaculation but this is is a label doesn't mean that those who are here are ill or there's something wrong with them it's just normal variation um which still however causes them problems they CA it causes them problems today 100 years ago if you are here no problem today problem yeah that's

laugh okay um uh sorry before I go to this um this is the story also this can this this can be applied to woman as well so for instance um uh most of us we have a mechanism which generate sexual desire um and the purpose of this mechanism is to motivate us to seek sexual uh intercourse now uh in a context where made choic is regulated what happens is that uh parents uh arrange the marriage the marriage of their daughters and they give her to a man of their choice and they Grant him uh the

right to have sex with her and he would exercise this uh uh right irrespectively of the will of uh uh of his wife this means that uh a woman with a predisposition to have a low sexual desire will not be better off or worse off in terms of reproductive success than a woman who uh has a higher sexual uh desire uh that is to say both women um will um uh have children will get married have children and will pass on their predispositions uh to Future Generations now today however uh things are different a man

needs the consent of um uh his uh partner uh in order to have sex with her and a woman with a low sexual desire um might be uh unwilling to give this concern or she might not be willing to give this concern as frequently as her partner would like so this would result in a situation where the man would like sex the woman wouldn't like they would have fights and eventually this would tend to uh classify low sexual desire as a dysfunction so we tend to label uh this as a dysfunction because uh this uh

creates friction uh between uh the couples um again woman who classify uh fall in this category that is approximately 40% of women um doesn't mean that they are real or anything that's a normal uh variation okay all right so that's uh the kind of uh labeling um uh we uh give okay so um to bring everything uh together in order to understand where we are uh uh today um uh we sort of need uh to figure out uh where uh we came from um and we came from uh an environment a context where M Choice

was uh regulated uh and as a consequence this um on certain aspects of sexual functioning there had been a weak selection uh pressures uh and uh uh this result in considerable variation in certain aspects of uh uh sexual uh functioning um now because the environment is different this this variation might need uh might cause people problems however this is a normal uh variation at least in most of the cases it is a normal uh variation so that's I guess the take-home message uh uh of today that uh most people that um uh experience these difficulties

uh they shouldn't think that okay that I'm me or there's something wrong with me or whatever this is a normal and common and very common thing but before I finish I wouldn't like people to think that's okay fine all right that's if I have this difficulty all right no problem it's normal I'm going home and that's it no uh perhaps people need to uh work on this if this is causes them problems so I mean to go back to my uh uh example with the noses uh let's say if I have uh a big nose

um well that's normal Vari ation okay um but perhaps this causes me some problems I don't like it it hurts my self-esteem aesthetically it's not what I want um so even if it is a normal variation if this is cause me trouble perhaps I may consider uh to have some uh plastic surgery now the same goes with the sexual dysfunctions in most of the cases um uh uh people people who face uh sexual dysfunction that's a normal variation however if you're not satisfied with uh your sexual functioning um my suggestion is try to do something

about it so to improve on this so that's all thank you very much for listening