Erik Harper Klass
Friday, 8:07 p.m., Fireside Lounge
The sociobiological anthropologist is accustomed to danger. The sociobiological anthropologist immerses himself in the field of play. The sociobiological anthropologist feels the enveloping currents of the arena’s temptations, and yet the sociobiological anthropologist must somehow remain detached and aloof. The sociobiological anthropologist extends one hand to ward off, as it were, a little of his despair, but with the other he may jot down what he sees, for he sees “different and more things than the others” (Kafka 1949).
The Fireside Lounge is windowless, dim, lukecold, clattery. The sociobiological anthropologist sits alone at the end of the bar. Before him on the bar? An open notebook (the marbly kind), a mechanical pencil (0.7 mm), a pint of stout (very good). Human primates have already begun to enter, and they sit and stand and wamble around in a variety of arrangements that the sociobiological anthropologist inscribes in his notes as “spatio-kinetic intercorporeal positional valencies.”
Friday, 9:22 p.m., Fireside Lounge
There near a table for billiards, not far from where the sociobiological anthropologist sits imbibing already a second slow glass of stout, stands a female primate: auburn hair, green eyes, a light scattering of facial and brachial frecklings. She has turned her back to an advancing male primate and now bends (rather precipitously) over—her bending angle? approximately seventy-two degrees from vertical—to procure from the edge of the table for billiards mentioned supra a small, singly-dimpled hexahedron of brilliant blue chalk (which she slowly applies twistingly to the end of her billiards stick in a literal (and maybe polysemous) act of foreplay). Her bodily position? There can be no doubt, it is reminiscent of the dorsoventral copulatory stance (see attached sketch). Is said position submissive? Does said position suggest an invitation for somatic mountation and subsequent penovaginal introitus? Does it say, “I am your woman . . . I am your slave” (Lorenz 1967)?
But the careful sociobiological anthropologist must not jump (or mountate) to conclusions. The female primates’ bodily deployments may be ambiguous. Perhaps this turning away, this bending over, this concavation of her lower back, this protrusion of her bilobed fundament, all signifies a protective occlusion, a rebuffing of the solicitous male, a holding out for another.
The sociobiological anthropologist at present can only hazard hypotheses. This is the nature of sociobiological anthropology: sensory inputs succumbing to scholarly affectations, tinged with an amalgam of overwhelming incertitude and abject longing.
Friday, 10:41 p.m., Fireside Lounge
In any case, the sociobiological anthropologist determines to (ballsily?) hypothesize that what a female primate does with her body has sexual significance. A brief case study: The auburn-haired, green-eyed, freckled female, having lost (badly) at billiards, sits now on a red cushiony chair, looking disinterestedly (lugubriously?) at a rectangular portable phone, which illuminates her face like a saint’s areola. [The sociobiological anthropologist probably means “aureole.” —Eds.] She sits with her long, beautiful legs stretched out, held together with her ankles crossed (see attached sketch). She is wearing a short pink-and-green skirt displaying an impressionistic floral pattern of, the sociobiological anthropologist thinks, antirrhinum and myrrh. Genital exposure, the sociobiological anthropologist notes, is avoided. But then how, if possible, does the female primate present behavior of a sexually come-hithery nature? Perhaps a slight abduction of the thigh? An unintentional intentional elevation of the lower hem of the already short skirt? The slow scapular declension of the right strap of her black brassiere? The faint trace of a smile?
Sometimes the sociobiological anthropologist must momentarily turn away from his subject of inquiry and instead study the annular patterns of foam clinging like concentric tree rings to the inside surface of his glass of stout (his third? his fourth?) (see attached sketch).
(The glass of stout as chronometer?—a subject for future research, thinks the sociobiological anthropologist, notably notating a notable notation in his notes.)
Friday, 10:44 p.m., Fireside Lounge
The male primates? Unlike the female primates, the male primates—there are dozens of them now, swarming like tsetse flies to treacle—frequently sit with their legs spread, allowing maximum genital exposure (see attached sketch). The sociobiological anthropologist hypothesizes that the relationship between the angulatory degree of the males’ upper legs and the size of their genitals is directly proportional, but more research is needed. Mere conjecture at this point.
Friday, 11:11 p.m., Fireside Lounge
The female primates pluff around in small groups and bat their eyelashes and hold their glasses gently like pizzles and exchange verbosities with other primates and sway to the electronic music that the sociobiological anthropologist failed to mention supra (the music is there, has been there all along), while the male primates sometimes orient themselves in erect postures and enact something of a subtle dance, with pelves forward and hands locked behind heads, a performance Goodall might call “the bipedal swagger” (Goodall 1968). (Of course, the males’ penes are normally hidden and are apparent only during extreme turgescence, unless, of course—and the sociobiological anthropologist has his suspicions—the males have successfully, as the literature puts it, “stuffed their codpieces” (Spinks 2011).)
Another pint yes sure yes another pint thank you yes.
Saturday, 12:01 a.m., Fireside Lounge
It occurs to the sociobiological anthropologist that in regards a human primate’s genitalia, the female is limited in her ability to invite copulatory intertwinements, for, unlike certain nonhuman hominoids (e.g., baboons, chimpanzees, bonobos, macaques, mangabeys, colobines, guenons, piddlybinkers, et al.), she is incapable of such sexual signalations as, e.g., vulval tumescence or anogenital color modulations, which said absence of an organ of said sexual signalation logically leads the sociobiological anthropologist to wonder if, ipso facto, the female lacks both a natural mode of volitive copulatory expression and, a fortiori, sexual desire itself (analogous to how an organism lacking oculi cannot, ipso facto, experience (or even crave or contemplate) vision), in which case any feminary choice in these matters is illusionary, and the sociobiological anthropologist might hypothesize (in a daring (career defining?) conflation of soma and psyche (and not without hope, not without want)) that females are nothing more than passive “fonts of orgasmic pleasure for men” (Sheets-Johnstone 1998), that they enkindle male sexual desire “simply by existing” (Symons 1979).
Saturday, 12:45 a.m., Fireside Lounge
Another pint yes please, on the tab yes please, all of this will be written off, if you please, as I write all of this off.
Saturday, 12:47 a.m., Fireside Lounge
What else is on the bar upon which the sociobiological anthropologist keeps falling faltery forward, head in his hands? Square, white, unlogoed napkins (with coin-edge embossing), towered and spun (intentionally? accidentally?) into a helix shape (see attached sketch). Sogged, remnantal, logoed, multiform coasters—strewn. Blobbery, pale, puddlesome reflections in the faux wood from two ineffectual, pendulous, abovewise lights.
Saturday, 1:03 a.m., Fireside Lounge
But why why why why why is the sociobiological anthropologist’s (somewhat limited) past experiences with female human primates completely contradictorious to the one hypothesized sixty-two minutes prior? Why, if the hypothesis were true, mayn’t the sociobiological anthropologist simply put down his stout and rise stoutly from his stool and choose from among these various pluffing female primates a replacement for the one now absent?
Perhaps, contrariwise the ultimate hypothesis mentioned supra, the female primate, not the male, is the overarching determinant of the sexual act. It is the female that selects certain males in accordance to the latter’s apparent or actual superior qualities, e.g., more elaborate ornamentation, better arms (i.e., bigger bicepses), fancier cars, higher levels of education, larger paychecks, more publishing success in science (or literary) journals, etc. (Darwin 1871). This female selection—let us write: agency—strongly impugns the idea that the female is indifferent, passive, “continuously copulable” (Beach 1974), always “open for business” (Klass 2025). And so yes, if our counterhypothesis is true, it is the female primate who has the power (Foucault 1980), who may break the male primate’s heart, may crush it like a fragile-shelled, tree-felled egg, may flee like a bird flying south for the endless season of forever.
Saturday, 1:37 a.m., Fireside Lounge
Here at exactly 1:37 a.m. at the Fireside Lounge the sociobiological anthropologist observes the auburn-haired, green-eyed, freckled female mentioned supra depart with a tightly blazered, unbearded male primate, her hand in the crook of his arm (see attached sketch). She walks past the seated sociobiological anthropologist, with nary even a glance, leaving in her wake the scent of bergamot and linden blossoms and the wide and empty sea (yes, the sociobiological anthropologist leans nostrilly herward, breathes in the redolent ephemera of her molecular detrita).
Further research is planned, but it is late, the natives are all pairing up and departing, and it is time for the sociobiological anthropologist to push away his glass, to wave for his check, to enter the dark, rain-soaked streets, to return, step by stumbling step, to his quiet room, his books, his notes, his silences, his solitude.
Works Cited
Beach, Frank A. 1974. “Human Sexuality and Evolution.” Reproductive Behavior. Edited by William Montagna and William A. Sadler. Plenum Press.
Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vintage Books.
Goodall, Jane van Lawick. 1968. “The Behaviour of Free-Living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve,” Animal Behaviour Mongraphs 1/3:163.
Kafka, Franz. 1949. The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923. Edited by Max Brod. Translated by Martin Greenberg with Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books.
Klass, Erik Harper. 2025 (scriptum). “The Mating Rituals of Primates.” Pithead Chapel, 15, no. 4.
Lorenz, Konrad. 1967. On Aggression. Translated by Marjorie K. Wilson. Bantam Books.
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1998. “Corporeal Archetypes and Power: Preliminary Clarifications and Considerations of Sex.” Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Edited by Donnn Welton. Blackwell Publishers.
Spinks, Jennifer. 2011. “Codpieces and Potbellies in the Songes drolatiques: Satirizing Masculine Self-Control in Early Modern France and Germany.” Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others. Edited by Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent. Routledge.
Symons, Donald. 1979. The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Oxford University Press.
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Erik Harper Klass’s stories and essays have been published (or are forthcoming) in a variety of journals, including New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, The Baltimore Review, South Carolina Review, Yemassee (Cola Literary Review), Summerset Review, and many others. His novella Polish Poets in Beds with Girls is now available from Buttonhook Press. Erik writes in Los Angeles, CA.