Still, she noted, the idea that this particular pursuit might cause pain as well as pleasure could not be ruled out without further testing. Cenni said that she had never witnessed the monkeys making any sounds to suggest that they were in pain, as they sometimes do when they are bitten in a fight, for example. “The pleasure of masturbation is very hard to assess,” she noted.)Īlthough using a rock as a sex toy might sound unpleasant, Ms. “What they found is that, indeed, there was something sexual going on.” (Like any good scientist, she made sure to add the proper caveats. “The data are very convincing,” said Elisabetta Visalberghi, an expert on primate cognition at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies at Italy’s National Research Council, who was not involved in the research. Moreover, the behavior tended to precede physical signs of male sexual arousal, and it lasted longer when arousal occurred - patterns that did not hold true for other kinds of stone handling. They found that young males engaged in the genital tapping and rubbing more than adult males did, and were especially likely to engage it in during sexually charged situations, such as when they or another macaque nearby was soliciting a mate or showing signs of sexual arousal. Cenni and her colleagues analyzed the stone-handling actions of 173 monkeys.

To systematically investigate the hypothesis, Ms.

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