Since there’s been a lot of threads about women and sexism and feminism and dogs being churned out here lately, I thought I’d start one of my own. Now I could post this in my other thread: Feminism and Sexism where it really belongs, but I already posted to that today.
Here in this thread, I want to offer a re-interpretation of the biological roles/functions of men and women vis-a-vis the human species. They say that men are more promiscuous than women because men are biologically/genetically wired to try to reproduce as often as possible. These same people also say that women are less promiscuous, and more focused on exclusive relationships, because they are biologically/genetically wired to raise and care for the children (and it helps to have a man around to help with that).
Now, if we grant this, I have an interesting way of reinterpreting this: men are geared to reproduce once; women are geared to reproduce twice… that’s a terrible way of putting it, but I liked it because it’s succinct. The more wordy (and accurate) way to put it is: when it comes to the continuation of the species, one can focus on breadth at the expense of depth, or one can focus of depth at the expense of breadth. ← That is the better way of saying it, but it needs to be unpacked.
By “breadth” I mean a wide range of branchings of the genetic lineage on the level of only the next generation (more kids), and by “depth” I mean a more narrow range of branchings but a better guarantee that those branchings will survive into the second level, that is the second generation, or maybe even further (more grandkids). “Breadth” meaning more babies at a time, “depth” meaning more babies across time (across generations).
In other words, men are more promiscuous because they want more babies now. Women are more focused on exclusive relationships and children because that’s what it takes to maximize the chances that her children will have children of their own. Men want to reproduce once only in the sense that they want to reproduce one generation, whereas women want to reproduce twice in the sense that they want to reproduce at least two generations (of course, they go about reproducing the second generation by way of taking care of their children and raising them to adulthood in such a way that they can meet a nice partner and have children with them).
Granting that we accept the aforementioned theory about the biological roles/functions of the sexes, do you think this is a plausible re-interpretation?
Historically, I see this kind of distinction within social classes. Aristocrats and other clan-oriented groups (even today worldwide) worry more about the depth (setting up mates for their children within their own social class/group), while the rest of the population worry more about the breath (multiculturalism/diversity).
I don’t have much faith in anything, really. But there are theories about the psychology of the sexes that make a lot of sense out of my experiences. Plus, when I look inwards, I can see the impulse towards promiscuity within me, so it doesn’t surprise me when I hear about how guys are more promiscuous than women. The women I know don’t seem like they have sex on the mind all the time, at least not with a whole bunch of different guys.
Are you telling me you’ve never noticed that women tend to be a lot more child and family oriented than men (maybe I’m just old)?
At least until fairly recently women could not be as promiscuous because they would get pregnant and this interfered with having sex. Just on the physical level. (Yes, I am aware pregnant women can have sex, however they can’ while they are giving birth and they tend not to want to as much when they are waddling and while in post-natal care)
However there are some other factors.
Promiscuous women tended to be killed, beaten, raped. If they survive their reputation, they are likely to be punished economically and so are their families. This is still true and even in the west, though less formally and with many more exceptions. Women were seen as property - of their fathers, of their husbands - and sex was not what this property was supposed to be doing. It devalued the property and even the whole family. Single adult women - already suspicious or nto considered good property - were still the property of their fathers.
Now women don’t have to worry about being killed, beaten, or raped by big brother’s watchful eye. They can also choose when they want or not want to get pregnant with contraceptives also.
Would you say, then, that if it weren’t for all this social pressure on women to remain monogamous, they would be just as promiscuous as men?
Also, when it comes to evolution and the explanations we dig up for why we have trait X or why we engage in behavior Y, this need not mean there’s literally a physical mechanism within us hardwired to always bring about such phenotypes; it could be that it’s always been the result of social pressures and conditioning, and it’s just that the social pressures and conditionings tend not to change over the course of the lifespan of the species. Would you say it’s possible that the above social pressures you talked about may have always been there within human communities and tribes?
[quote="gib"I don’t think sex being difficult is the only down-side to being pregnant.[/quote]
I can only hope I didn’t argue that and I agree.
Probably even themselves and certainly not other women. My point was not that men were jerks for not putting up with infidelity, but more that her sex was controlled by men through her whole life and there was no room for promiscuous activity.
I think women are less likely to rush past their fears than men. So, no. Also you can’t just change one thing or do a good thought experiment doing so. If the pressures on women AND men changed in a range of connected areas, I think actually they would meet in the middle.
There are groups that have been much more open and loose about sex. So no, not really.
I don’t think so either, not in this case, but I do think there are some physical parameters in place that are different between men and women (maybe hormonal levels, neural wiring, etc.) that make women place more value on monogamous relationships than men.
I would say that a lot of women select for their own oppression. One example of this is a relationship I had for about 6 months on the weekends… was somewhat long distance. Anyways, the woman I was dating said she hooked up with some other guy. And I was like, “Ok… cool, you coming over this weekend?” She FLIPPED OUT!! She wanted me to be jealous and possessive of her sex, and BECAUSE I didn’t do this, she broke up with me. This is very common amongst women, they want men who treat them this way to a large extent, men who will yell at them for having multiple partners, men who will hit them or beat down the men they had sex with, which gets back to the point earlier about women being instigators of violence. This is how the man proves he “loves” her, if he doesn’t do these things, he doesn’t really “love” her. This is an extremely common psychology for women to have.
I think what you’re saying here is not incorrect, but I’m afraid you’re misunderstanding the motivations or maybe just don’t see the whole picture or something. I’ve known men who engaged in this same kind of behavior, feeling hurt that they cheated and weren’t punished for it. Generally when people really care about someone they’ll get upset if something comes along and messes up the relationship - cheating, drinking, drugs, what-have-you. This is a perfectly normal human reaction. If you don’t have that reaction, the majority of people are going to think you never cared to begin with. She didn’t break up with you because you didn’t flip out or beat her up, she broke up with you because you were indifferent to the situation, which translates to you being indifferent to her. Women like to be made to feel special, treasured even, by their men. You fell short of this, and it’s your own fault, not hers for acting like a person.
I don’t feel indifferent to women having sex with someone other than me, I KNOW for a fact that it’s the right thing to do… good for her, good for the guy. It’s not a fault of mine that women want acting out in order to feel special and they want the commodity of their sex to be horded in order to feel special. If I didn’t care for our time together I wouldn’t ask her to continue visiting me… I don’t spend time with people I dislike. The problem is, I’m not dysfunctional to this regard, and women seek dysfunctional men… even if they’ve never seen proof of it, women will look for the small cues that the man will become enraged if she has sex with someone besides him, a possessive man, and women want to be possessed, that’s how they define “love”. Perhaps men feel this as well, I’ve personally never met one: men don’t have the psychology as much as women, that possession of their all their sex means love, men already feel loved just from getting to have sex with a woman even one time, seeing them naked etc… men don’t need multiple sexual selections from the same woman to feel loved by a woman. The problem occurs when men who are more aggressive get this experience more than men are less so, which is something women do to men on a massive scale and men don’t do to women. The men who get to feel the most female ‘love’ in this regard are the men who get the most sexual variety, which are the men who are more aggressive. Men are more like: “friends with at least having had one benefit type people” and men pay very close attention to who’s getting the benefits and who isn’t, they may have primary partners, but men are more capable of spreading love between multiple partners and not having it cause psychological issues. The only problem men can encounter with polyamory, is that if the man is a good man, and the woman is a good woman, the woman will get ALOT more sex than the man, because kind men get the least sexual choice in the species and kind women get the most.
I find it interesting that you defend this by effectively calling me “not human” and then begin to describe how “humans” become sexually jealous. I have never experienced envy or jealousy a day in my life, I have only felt moral indignation, which is a completely different feeling. This knowledge about women is so common, that I just today ran into a guy who works at a coffee shop that I frequent, outside of work, and I happened upon a group of men having discussion about what would bring more peace the the world, very sweet guy, very nice friends, and I simply said, “If non bullying males got most the sex.” All 5 of the guys burst out laughing, and said… “yeah, wouldn’t that be something.” This is COMMON knowledge amongst men.
Man and women have one thing very much in common, they view sex as a reward system, the reason men get so angry about women is because the men getting the most rewarded are the assholes, as I’ve taken care to define/present elsewhere on this board, women don’t suffer these psychological issues because men give non-bullying women the most sexual choice, and it’s the irrationality of how women distribute the reward system that is causing so much suffering and psychosis in men relative to women, women don’t suffer as much because men distribute the reward system to them, rationally/ethically. It’s almost so much the case that men give the kindest women the most sexual choice that women simply take it for granted or hardly even notice. Men CERTAINLY notice, and as I highlighted in threads prior, although this one is specifically about an interpretation of mono-poly, if you just started walking down the street, I would suggest using a man for this, because the men will lie more to women, and asked men “Do male bullies get the most sexual choice or the least sexual choice, particularly during their sexual peaks?” almost every man in the world will say to you, “The assholes get the most sex.” Even the assholes will tell you that! Men know this, this debate really wouldn’t get very far if you had a council of everyone who ever existed in a room reviewing everyones lives and debating this… men who denied it and the women who are in massive denial about it would lose the argument. The main question is, “What are all these men seeing that causes them to conclude this?” One part is that all men know that the nice guys SHOULDN’T show attraction for or approach a woman, even the assholes know this, and every man on earth knows these guys get the least sex in the species.
So…I really wanted to take the time to write out a thoughtful response to the short story you just posted up there, but I’ve read through it a couple of times now and it must be said –
All I see are a bunch of cliches and excuses, as well as some misrepresentation of what I said to you. It’s like reading a rom-com script. You’ve completely bought into society’s bogus bullshit about how men and women act, haven’t you? So much so that when you look around you, you actually see it unfolding. You miss the intricacies that deepen and define our needs and desires, the stuff that adds meaning to our choices, because the easiest explanation is shoved in your face so blatantly and you haven’t thought to look deeper than that.
You’re certainly not the only one, but what bothers me most about this is that as more and more people, male and female alike, lose the desire or capacity to genuingly explore this subject beyond the usual pre-fabricated, expected social roles and rules, the more it all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that will eventually affect every aspect of our lives.
Cliché is defined as a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays lack of original thought : stereotype.
If someone is correct about something it may very well be a cliché but that doesn’t make it worthless or something to push off to the side. On the topic of monoamory vs. polyamory, it is a fact that men are more polyamorous than women, usually it is men dragging their wives to polyamorous communities and definitely not the reverse. What interesting about this, and Gib, sorry, I am really not trying to derail your thread, is that polyamory allows more sexual choice from highly desirable mates, which is decreasing the existential suicide rate of the gender that has more access in this form because the other gender is allowing it for them.
Someday women are going to have to acknowledge that men who do not ever approach them or show attraction for them are respecting female consent rules, because women, by a VERY large percentage, complain much more than men do about any type of approach or showing of attraction, and an astute male, which is about 1.5% of the population will abstract female consent and say to themselves “Women don’t consent to being approached… now I might think differently if men showed discomfort for being approached and then consent like women do, but they really don’t show discomfort at even some of the worst approaches women can muster, while women show vast amounts of discomfort at some of the more innocuous realms of attraction and approach from males until that male eventually turns that discomfort, that “no” into a “yes”.”. What this means in effect, is that the 1.5% who deserve the most sex by doing the correct thing to reduce the percent of rapes are the ones who get the least sex. Which is causing males to commit almost as many suicides as war, homicide and female suicide combined!!! This might be a cliché, but SERIOUSLY, don’t you care!!! Males know the bullies get the most sex, because it’s true… these man aren’t killing themselves because of some bogus CLICHE, they are killing themselves because of sexual neglect, which is something a woman will hardly be likely to experience relative to men, not only that, sexual neglect of the highest sexual merit of the gender, which is why you will find so many more men literally wishing they had never been born and wanting to be deleted from existence than you will ever find in the female population because males are giving them all the sex they want and with the correct ethical distribution. The leading cause of suicide in the world is sexual neglect, and to get back to the OP, part of the reason the female suicide rate is so low compared to men, is that men are more polyamorous, which gives women ample opportunity to achieve their sexual desires with basically any male on earth as long as they have non-bullying merit and raise their planet healing profile. To be a man to get this kind of choice… sigh. Perhaps as a woman you can’t understand.
I have made it exceptionally clear in a prior thread that female heaven, which is no violence or rape, the line where their suicide rates would be zero, is such a horrible condition to live in for men, not because they kill themselves because they can’t kill anyone, no man would do that, but because the bullies will still get the most sex, even in that environment, and perhaps a woman can’t understand the implications of that, but this is the WORST crime a human can commit. Until women can actually figure out that having sex with a bully over a non-bully is the worst human crime, we will not see progress on those male suicide rates… no matter how utopian our society seems. Of course in that society the women, being the sociopaths they are WON’T CARE about the male suicide rates, just like they don’t today, because they are more sociopathic than men. Try being depressed as a female and walking up to some man you like a bit someday and saying… “I’m fucking depressed and you seem nice, will you have a relationship with me?” in all the combinations of ways, subtle and not so subtle that a woman can muster, and you better believe the man will find some way to extend this kindness towards you, because men have CONSCIENCES and men know that the worst crime is sexually rejecting a non-bully, try that with a woman as a man… no fucking way! Not a chance. 0% Nothing. Done. Psychopathy. Done. Suicide. Women do not have sexual intimacy hearts like men do, and the thing that’s truly tragic about it, is that it is not adaptive!! There are only maladaptive reasons for this behavior… it doesn’t help the species at all, it doesn’t help women, it doesn’t help men. That’s the worst part.
If you actually investigate suicides to try to find their source… you ask this person and that person and that person, and then you ask secondary people why they acted that way etc… the source will always be sexual rejection of sexual merit, and most of it will come from women. That’s the truth, sorry if it’s too cliché for you.
Doesn’t it ever strike you as odd that the gender that commits the most suicide is the one that hardly gets raped, physically abused and has this highest social status? Well, if it didn’t, it probably should… it’s because only 20% of that gender are getting 80% of the female sexual variety and they are the bullies!! Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the gender that is most socially oppressed and is raped the most and physically abused the most has the lowest suicide rates? Well perhaps it should… that’s because almost every woman on earth got sex from who they wanted to get sex from!!
Don’t believe me? Look it up… total for all homicides and wars and female suicides combined is about 900,000 people a year, total male suicides each year are about 830,000… and the female suicide rate is MUCH lower than the rates for war and homicide.
