Food for Sex

Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering.

The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 - the victims of multiple rape by militiamen - can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.

Testimony from girls and aid workers in the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp in Bunia, in the north-east corner of Congo, claims that every night teenage girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining UN compound to sell their bodies in exchange for food.

And don't even mention baboon behavior.

some err... facts ??

Female baboons have been known to engage in a primitive form of prostitution by stealing food during sex.

Power of knowledge
Clearly, the act of sex is not something that requires lessons. The consequences of sexual intercourse, however, do. If teens are uneducated about their bodies, are they going to be able to act more intelligently than the baboons?

The main goals in any evolutionary game are to eat, stay alive, and reproduce.

Consider the following insights, Thoughts on the Origins of Bipedality, about the relationships between male and female chimpanzees:
Two chimps, one male and one female, were fed food from a chute to see who ate first.

Over a 32 day test, the male was there first for 18 days while the female was there for 14. The results were that a 44% to 56% differential existed. Why was this so? One would expect that the male, who is larger in size, would be there 100% of the time.

Let us consider when the female ate first. When the female was at maximum genital swelling, when she was sexually receptive, she ate first on a regular basis. There are implications for this. If the period of sexual interest is, by implication, an extra-natural phase for women (for it makes them act dominant when they are really naturally subordinate or a male gives way because of the signals given off by the female), is there a lesson here? It does looks like female chimps spend about 14 days out of every 32 in toils to the male anyway where they got to the food first is almost a secondary part of the relationship during these 14 days. During estrus, the female advertises - call me sexually interested - for that period. Is there small consolation to getting food first during those 14 days? Unfortunately, we can not ask the chimps.

There is a second question to ask ourselves. Is the female simply hungrier during her period of sexual receptiveness and, therefore, wants the food more than the male? The female could gesture a sexual invitation and put the male in a place where he has to choose between food or sex. In this sense the male is exchanging sexual access for food, a form of prostitution. As we can see from other studies of chimpanzees may simply be enjoying life in the process of this exchange.

This is particularly the lesson of studies of Bonobo chimps who appear to trade sexual access for food. The Bonobos actually go beyond this to participate in sexual promiscuity as a means to develop bonds between members of a troop. They almost do away with the notion of dominance by doing this.