Forget "Romeo and Juliet" and its modern day clone "West Side Story". Forget "Sleepless in Seattle", "When Harry Met Sally", and all the rest of the commercial Hollywood tripe. If you want to see a real love story, rent a small budget film by the Montana Historical Commission called "Heartland".
Set in Montana (surprise!) around the turn of the last century, this beautiful little film shows mature love at its mundane but substantive best. There are no roses, Valentines, jewelry, or hankie waving declarations of love. There are simply two people who grow to respect, care for, and trust each other with their lives. Neither could hardly be farther from a Hollywood stereotype. No cover material for GQ or Cosmo here. Just people of substance and character who learn to depend on each other and support each other as they face the common challenges of survival.
The modern notions of "romance" and "romantic love", peddled in the forms of mindless mass market entertainment called romance novels and "chick flicks", have created such unrealistic and destructive expectations in the minds of so many people, mostly women but also a large number of men, that ordinary relationships which fall short of the simplistic perfection of idealized "love" are no longer considered satisfactory to most. There are never any stopped-up toilets, nor unpaid bills. Everything is "perfect", idyllic, utopian: the modern day version of the garden of eden myth. Gone is the concept of "for better or worse" which was the foundation that made marriage so successful historically.
When one can depend on someone year in and year out to be a partner and a support, to lend a helping hand when one falls, to nurse one through the occasional sickness or misfortune that is part of the real human condition; over time a deep respect and caring grows. This is real love. This is what will make a marriage work.
Romance is the most transitory and ephemeral thing in the world. One of the stupidest statements possible in the English language is "I still love you, but I'm not in love with you." We can be "in" a bathtub, or "in" deep shit, but we cannot be "in" love. Love is a verb, not a noun. One experiences love by loving, not by having love poured on them.
The emotions associated with romantic love are based entirely on the drive to reproduce which is built into the cells of every living thing. The thrills, the headiness, the euphoria, are all part of the mechanisms which serve the purpose of inducing us to take risks which may endanger ourselves in order to engage in the reproductive act. For most of their lives, human beings today are not active in reproduction. Basing relationships solely on reproductive mechanisms leaves them no foundation when reproduction is not the purpose of the relationship. This is why the vast majority of marriages are failing at the end of the 20th century.
Modern relationships tend to be like the old Greek myth of Procrustes, the robber who kept an inn to lure unwary travelers. He demanded that they fit perfectly into the only bed he had and chopped off parts which were too long or streched parts which were too short to fit. The ubiquitous nature of modern media has created "ideals" of what and how people "should" be which are so rigidly fixed in many people's minds that the first thing they do in a relationship is set out to transform the other person into the closest facsimile of the ideal which is possible given the nature of the raw material.
This is particularly true of women. Dozens of authors, women and men, have used the phrase "men are projects", i.e. remodeling projects. Folk wisdom on this issue abounds. "Women are always surprised when their husbands do not change after marriage. Men are always surprised when their wives do." Women who consider their mates projects instead of partners will always end up in a power struggle and control battle which, for the man, amounts to fighting for his life. The implicit message is "I have the right to, and intend to, destroy who you are so that I can make you into who I want you to be." Not surprisingly, this message does not thrill many men.
Mistaking the feelings which fuel the reproductive drive for love, and the false confusion of sex with intimacy and love, creates relationships which cannot be anything but short term and disappointing. In rural America, many a kitchen has a plaque on the wall that reads: "Kissin' don't last, cookin' do." This folk wisdom reflects the fact that a marriage is essentially a partnership formed for the purpose of helping the partners and their offspring survive. A natural division of labor based on the differing roles in the reproductive process made it wonderfully good sense for the male to spend proportionately more time in the outside world doing the work of feeding and clothing the family, while the female spent proportionately more time in the home using the produce of the male's work to create an environment which was conducive to survival for both of them and their children. Romance does not feed you when you are hungry, nor keep you from freezing to death when the temperature is below zero.
Only when all basic survival needs have been met, do people have the luxury of pursuing activities purely for pleasure, entertainment, recreation, or self-fulfillment. Technology, urbanization, and modern production/distribution systems have moved most life sustaining activities outside the bounds of the typical family today. Basic survival needs are seen as "entitlements", which is far different from conditions which prevailed in this country only a few decades ago, and which still prevail in most of the world. Survival is NOT an entitlement to most people. People who stand balanced on the precarious edge of survival understand this all too well. In such conditions, someone who shares their own resources to help another survive is commonly understood to be doing so because they are acting out of the emotion of love.
Therefor, a realistic definition of love is sharing one's resources to help another survive or even prosper. This is so central to men's intuitive understanding of what love really is, that when this is NOT seen as love, when it is rejected as love and they are told that love is objects given, they refuse to accept than definition and get confused and angry. They fall into the trap of believing that the more safe and comfortable they can make a woman feel, the more she will feel that he loves her. Modern men have been slow to realize that the sense of entitlement of the emotionally arrested adolescents, which modern women have become, makes them consider this to be the zero point. It is not the result of their labors, simply the minimum entrance requirements to get men to the starting line.
Comfort, safety, freedom from hunger, are all assumed by women today. And like the proverbial complaint of every generation about the next, they have no idea what it took to create it. They assume that they are entitled to it, and are wounded and oppressed if they do not have it given to them. Now that material expectations have escalated to the point where it takes years of 60+ hour weeks to accumulate enough experience and wealth (plus social connections and a lot of good luck) to be able to provide that, the vast majority of loving men are simply invisible to most women.
Today, the idea that a woman be a partner and expend a equal amount of effort to creating the comfortable environment they share has given way to the dogma of victimhood which asserts that a man who asks, or worse has the audacity to expect, that a woman make an equal contribution is considered guilty of oppression. Most women throw away more real love than most men get in their lifetimes.
Sadly, this fiction has been so well promoted and publicized that the majority of women have fallen for it: not just the extremists. Nothing is more indicative of the paradox of today's notions of love than the woman who complains bitterly about all the shortcomings of men, makes her hostility and contempt for them clear on a regular basis, dismisses their attempts to show love in the way that they know best, then cannot figure out why she cannot get one of these awful creatures to fall head over heels "in love" with her. Watching such a woman it is easy to take the equally hostile position that; even if the distorted claims of the feminists were true regarding how men consider women's mental capacity to be limited, they were apparently not without justification: women do not exhibit much intelligence when it comes to recognizing how their own behavior contributes directly to their circumumstances.
The most bewildering thing to men today, is how women expect them to take this outpouring of hostility and hatred and magically transform it into warm feelings for those women. Women seem to believe that they can bully men into loving them by hating us. It doesn't work that way. Hate breeds hate. LOVE breeds love, and any woman willing to love men, or one specific man, will find herself well loved in return. As long as she does not mistake jewelry and sport utility vehicles for love.
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Monday, May 02, 2005
Sunday, May 01, 2005
EOTM: Romantic Nonsense
There is no influence more destructive to contemporary male/female relationships than the modern fictions regarding romance and romantic love. Romantic fantasy is the female counterpart to heroic fantasy for males, to which it is closely related. Both are immature indulgences of fantasies of personal power and public recognition or confirmation of that power. In fact, the term romance itself derives from a form of medieval tale of heroic or marvelous achievements designed to appeal to the imagination and provide some pallative for the generally humdrum and burdensome lives of most people. Hm. Not much seems to have changed since 800 AD.
Romance as it is commmonly used today is nothing more than a pretty name for the mating dance among human beings. It is essentially sexual, but its sexual nature is hidden under some very erroneous conceptions about the nature of love. Due to the fact that sexuality is so repressed and negated in many cultures, while remaining an inherent ruling force in the lives of the citizens of those cultures, romance has developed as a sterilized form of sexual expression stripped of the "dirtiness" and shamefullness of being honest about what it really is.
The conflicting and impossible notions of romantic love are nowhere better illustrated than in the over 25 million romance novels consumed each month by American women. The heroines are always beautiful, never plain, and the men they entrance with this great beauty are always wealthy and powerful rogues. There are no dull accountants, greasy mechanics, or laborers with rough and calloused hands. These rogues walk the perfect fine line between just enough respect for the woman's wishes that they never force her beyond what she wants, while they always force her beyond what she says. If the "no means no" dictum were applied, virtually all these men are rapists, but noble ones: the kind of men that the heroines really want to ignore their symbolic protests. The perennial popularity of the old classic "Gone With the Wind" among women, while men generally regard it as stupid, shows the enduring nature of the Rhett Butler type of character in women's fantasies.
Romantic characters are always larger than life. This causes no serious problem for those who retain the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, but it wreaks havoc on the lives of those forget that the fantasy is essentially escapism and begin to regard it as a prescription for how life is or needs to be conducted. Characters in romantic fantasies bear no resemblance to real people. If they did, it would be history not romantic fantasy. Unfortunately many people today have lost touch with reality and have become as unrealistic in their notions of personality and personal conduct as they have become in their notions of physical beauty.
A woman aqaintance of mine recently made a profoundly disturbing statement. I had been listening to her for several months bashing men and making it clear that any man who was going to get access to her (presumably gold lined) panties was going to have to be prepared to support her in the manner to which she wanted to become accustomed. (ie. carry her around on a satin pillow.) She got quite a thrill out of the nickname "Princess" which she had acquired. One day I noticed her sitting by herself looking morose. I walked over, sat down beside her, and provided her a conversational opening to talk about it if she were so inclined.
She sighed and said, with tears in her eyes and in the best pitiful and breathy delivery I have heard since Olivia Hussey in Franco Ziffarelli's Romeo and Juliet, "My heart is sooo empty". Damn fool, I, took this as an honest statement from someone in emotional pain. After listening to her for several minutes recount the depth and intensity of her pain and all the circumstances in her life contributing to it, I tried to provide some gentle feedback on some of the things she was doing to make it unlikely that a man who might be able to fill some of that emptiness could find his way through the minefields and machine guns she had surrounding her heart, so he could lay his paycheck at her feet, or would be motivated to do so. Her response was most enlightening, and at the same time scary and disheartening.
After several minutes justifying her actions based on her past treatment by men, during which I kept saying that I wasn't questioning whether she was justified in her actions but rather simply pointing out that they didn't seem to be getting her what she wanted, she made the incredible statement that the best "relationship" she'd ever had happened entirely in her own mind and didn't require the participation of the male at all. This woman had completely lost the ability to distinguish the reality of relationship with a flesh and blood male from the fantasy she created in her own mind, and distinctly preferred the fantasy to any reality she had experienced.
Several years ago I might have followed that comment up with an argument trying to get her to see that the very term "relationship" kinda implied the presence and participation of another human being, but after thousands of hours of such argument I have learned the complete futility of it. "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it ANNOYS the pig!" (Robert Heinlein) I simply said "Oh" and walked away sadly reflecting on the fact that this attitude seems so prevalent in women these days.
Normally, when an adult so loses touch with reality that they have relationships with non-existent people we call it mental illness. We think it is "cute" for someone below the age of 10 to have imaginary playmates, but we worry about someone who can drive a car, vote, and own a gun who can't tell the difference between a flesh and blood person and one whom they've made up. I wonder what would have happened if this woman's imaginary lover had told her that in order for him to truly love her forever that she had to kill the president.
Of course I'm being facetious, but this is the perfect illustration of the source of so much of the breakdown of relationships between men and women which is being blamed on men's "oppression" of women. I suppose that, to someone who lives in a perfect world inside her own head, it is oppressive to demand that they face reality. However it is a form of oppression that I consider perfectly acceptable when making decisions about the people I want to play significant roles in my life, whether that be a mate, a friend, a public policy maker, or certainly a surgeon. How many people would lay down on a table and put a knife in the hands of someone who said "The most successful operation I ever performed was in my own head and didn't require a patient"?
It also illustrates precisely why men find it nearly impossible to take women seriously unless that woman has some form of power over them, as well as why men are not anxious to give women that power. Men are far from "perfect" beings and will never make "perfect" husbands, lovers, or whatever else it is that a woman is looking for a man to be; particularly not when the standard of "perfection" exists entirely within the head of someone who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. If I were "perfect", perhaps in 2000 years I would have a religion named after me. However, I'm completely aware that I'm not "perfect" and have no desire to be the next messiah for people to kill other people in my name. I have even less desire to allow people to kill, imprison, enslave, entrap, or dictate to me what my life "should" be based on what their imaginary playmates tell them.
Every man I know has a deep and sincere desire to love and please a woman (except those who have that desire toward a man). And supposedly that is what some women want as well. However, since neither I nor any other man has any chance of competing with a figment of someone's imagination, designed in every detail to be perfect and fulfill her every whim. I am no longer willing to tip-toe through the minefield and face the machine gun fire to lay my paycheck at her feet, so I can find my way into one of those empty hearts. I sit on the sidelines and watch women barricade themselves into their misery.
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Now is when the story really begins to get scary.
Some weeks later a mutual acquaintance told me that the woman had claimed I had been making a pass at her. What made this delusional, no hallucinatory, was the fact that the day we spoke was 4 weeks to the day after I had slid my motorcyle into a guard rail, breaking a collar bone and sustaining internal injuries. My bruised lung did not show up right away, but ended up sending me to the emergency room exactly one week before this conversation, with my Dr. afraid that I had a pulmonary embolism. Getting back on the bike and having another wreck was about the only thing I could have been less interested in than any between-the-sheets athletics. To this day I am not sure whether the woman lied intentionally about it, or whether this was just another relationship which happened entirely in her mind and didn't require my participation. I'm just damn glad that she hallucinated ( or lied ) that it was a pass and not a rape. Even trying to be friendly and kind to a woman seems to be becoming risky.
This interaction highlights so many of the issues which are ripping apart the ability of men and women to manage even the barest resemblance of peaceful coexistance. The acid tests of sense and reality have given way to the primacy of "how it feels": the subjective placement of self at the center of an island universe into which everything falls and nothing escapes. Women have social permission to be "black holes": to take everything and give back nothing; not even the understanding that sexuality is the last thing on the mind of a man whose body is broken.
But, more than broken bodies, men today are walking around with broken spirits. Faced with a world filled with women who are so indoctrinated in their entitlement to victimhood, men have been taught that they will be attacked for asking for anything; much less having the arrogance to expect something in return for caring about, giving to, and trying to love women. For many women the old principle of reciprocity, the "give and take" which allows groups of people to co-exist without slaughtering each other, is imposition, "oppression." The "modern woman's" version of "give and take" is "everyone else gives, I take."
Having fallen for the foul lies of "male power and privilege" and having been duped into believing in the ultimate and ubiquitous "bogeyman" of "THE Patriarchy", many women are trapped in a frenzy of theft and looting. In their fervor to "get" men, and "get" their fare share from men who they have been tricked into believing have it, women have blinded themselves to the ways in which they steal from and victimize other women.
A perfect example of this was provided recently by a high profile web feminist. Ever anxious to find evidence to further the fictions of universal victimhood and oppression for all women, she "deconstructed" a popular piece of media tripe, "My Best Friends Wedding", for insidious anti-female messages. According to Diane Glass, web feminist:
"Here are three main messages, hidden behind the movie's comic script:
Pretty serious stuff to be taking from nothing more than the fact that the character portrayed by Julia Roberts could not, in only 4 days, break up a wedding that had been in the works for some time and involved vast social networks of very powerful people. Ms Glass goes on to make 2 more points in her deconstruction that, themselves, would be impossible to prove without the unassailable axiom of universal victimhood of women:
"Choices for modern women are fraught with the harsh choice of platonic love, Broadway tunes and friendships with men that never journey to the heights of the devoted and pure love, this movie suggests, that traditional marriage offers."
and,
"The message is clear: Women sacrifice regardless; it is freedom for a price and compromise is the role of women, modern or traditional. "
While these are all compelling laments of victimhood, my "traditionalist" view is that there are certain social realities which make this characteristic of life in general: not just the lives of "Modern Women". Herein lies the fundamental conflict which drives gender politics. Absolutely central to this conflict lies the desire to "have it all", which seems to go with an unwillingness to pay any price for it whatsoever. This violates what I consider to be a fundamental principle of economics, as well as life: "There just ain't no such thing as a free lunch". In the end someone has to pick up the check.
My contention is that compromise is the role of anyone, male or female, who wants to live within a social structure. Implicit in the contract to receive the benefits of being able to live relatively free of anyone else's predatory desire to take from us something we have and they want, is the agreement to be bound by the same social constraints and NOT to steal from someone else something they have and we want. All of the body of law and social practice revolves around this one principle. Everyone is constantly faced with choices of whether to be a thief and a looter, or to act with integrity and work to gain what they desire through the mechanism of effort applied over time. The concept of "entitlement" is a compelling one to the person who feels entitled, but is far less attractive to those who must pick up the check.
The sense of entitlement to an experience which is completely fictionalized leads to the suspension of all social rules and constraints, while at the same time paradoxically locks the person into more of a prison than those constraints ever did. I wrote the author to point out a couple of implications that she had not mentioned. First: that the man was not a character at all, but rather a plot device, a prop in the competition between the two women for "the man prize". Second: that the primacy of marriage to a woman's happiness is just as present in this movie as it was 40 years ago, simply updated with new clothing and hairstyles. Characterizing the message as being "Women cannot have both careers and love, they must choose" obscures the real message, which is that career is only a fallback position, not even a consolation prize but a palliative for those who fall and skin themselves when they lunge for the brass ring of "romantic love." In this case, the woman who fails to win "the man prize" is definitely "the loser".
Her third point, that modern women end up with gay men, is actually the same as her first, that you cannot be friends with men AND their lovers. Aside from the fact that this attitude dangerously denigrates the value of friendship and foolishly dismisses the value of Agape, non-sexual love, as compared to Eros, sexual love; it promotes a self-centeredness when it comes to love that is antithetical to love. Once again, the fundamental principle of reciprocity is absent. In relationships with gay men, women do not enjoy the built in power differential which sexual politics within a "romantic" relationship gives them. They must treat gay men fundamentally as equals, because they have nothing the gay man wants and needs which they can withhold as a means of exercising power. Gay men are even safer as friends for straight women than other straight women, because they seldom compete for the same "man prize". Most men's sexual affiliation is "either/or", so gay men and straight women never end up competing for the same man. Straight men and women can be friends on the same basis, but once romantic politics enters the picture the friendship is often doomed because the heavy agenda of expectations that go with romance suddenly begin to lead to dissatisfaction with the person who was previously just fine the way he/she was.
The archetypal "chick flick", "When Harry met Sally", is a perfect illustration. Early in the movie, Harry and Sally discuss how difficult it is for men and women to be friends: "because the sex thing is always there." Years later, after supporting each other through ups and downs in their love lives and careers, she calls on him for comfort after learning that an old boyfriend is getting married. Someone else has "won" her "man prize." Her value as the ultimate achievement of woman, i.e. to be called "wife" by some man, has been called into question. Harry is unable to hold the line on the friendship, and falls into the trap of proving her sexual value to her by the only means at his disposal: he goes to bed with her. The next scene shows Harry with his eyes as big as saucers and the perfect "oh shit! What have I done?" look on his face. The friendship is now doomed by the baggage of expectations of romance that go with the sexual script. Far more than MBFW, WHMS shows clearly that two people of the opposite sex, indeed, CANNOT be friends AND lovers. Once they go to bed, the old basis of the friendship is destroyed and Sally has complete social sanction to be as hateful as she likes toward Harry for not living up to his part of the romantic script.
In the romantic script, Harry clearly OWES Sally something for the bit of emotional comfort he attempted to provide her. This is where most men balk, and one of the primary reasons why so many of them do not call the next day. At this juncture, men have their choice of two roles in the romantic script: the lapdog or the cad. (Actually "cad" has fallen out of general usage today: replaced by the general purpse, one-size-fits-all "jerk".) Canadian journalist Wendy Dennis (sic) puts it this way: "If a man puts his penis into a woman's vagina, he must call her the next day." "Guys would get this in a second if they had vaginas, but so far they don't -- that's why I have to rattle on here." In other words, possession of the magic vagina gives women the power to "make the rules."
It's not that men don't "get" it, as the cliched complaint of women goes, it is that they don't "BUY" it. The stupid nonsense about men fearing the "vagina dentata", the cunt with teeth, is one of the most persistent pieces of childish foolishness. Men know that the teeth are in the steel jawed trap of the fictionalized script of romantic love/sex/marriage. The vagina is simply the bait. This is the arena where the most fundamental issues of male versus female power get played out. When a woman presents herself as not being after a (THE) commitment, the man is justified in assuming that sex is an equal exchange. In any real scenario of equality, the man would be just as entitled to a reassuring call the next day as the woman is. And, given the highly charged and politicized atmosphere of "date rape", men are actually in more need of it today than women are: to reassure them that she had a good time and is not getting ready to press charges.
Men are fully aware that women frequently use sex to jump-start "romance". Prior to the expansion and blurring of concepts of rape, men had some chance of being avoiding being ensnared into a romantic fantasy by pointing out the contradictions between women's pre- and post-coital behavior and statements. Now that the subjective experience of women has become the standard of law, while men's experience is categorically denied and refuted, men are growing increasingly suspcious and distant.
Modern women really do have a raw deal right now, not because of any of the reasons mentioned by the web feminist, but because of the point of view she promotes. Women are just as bound by the "Feminine Mystique" as they were 40 years ago, and cannot be happy without experiencing "true love" which is totally fictionalized and doesn't exist, while they also have to live up to the old "Masculine Mystique" and experience "career success and satisfaction" which is equally fictionalized. The majority of men have never had careers, they had JOBS: stupid, meaningless, demeaning, boring, humiliating, JOBS! The statement that "men can have careers and love" is laughable to most men, as is " men do not have to make sacrifices of any kind." The very act of going to work each day; at a stupid, meaningless, demeaning, boring, humiliating, JOB! is regarded by most men as sacrifice enough in life to be able to ask for a bit of appreciation and peace and quiet in return. But in an environment of no reciprocity, that doesn't even pass minumum standards. Men must do this AND meet women's emotional needs as well, while men themselves are starving to death emotionally.
Men have been putting up with this for years, yet will seldom jump up to protect themselves and demand some reciprocity. They will, however, generally jump up to protect a woman who is being threatened and protect her interests. Thus they get to play the hero, and remain caught in the eternal drama.
Where they can generally do nothing however, is the case where a woman is being victimized by another woman. The credo of universal victimhood blinds women to they ways in which they prey upon other women, as well as the extent to which they are victimized by other women. In the movie, as soon as the competion for "the man prize" began, the male was set up to be the bad guy.
Had the "morally superior" "modern woman" in MBFW prevailed, there would simply have been another female victim. Only this time it would have been the stereotype of men rather than a traditional role of women which had victimized her. The jilted woman would have had far more right to claim victimhood, by being abandonded, than the "modern woman" has the right to claim victimhood by having to make a choice. The fiction that feminism has used to promote itself is freedom of choice for women, yet that freedom is now seen as a burden and source of victimization. Obviously, that freedom of choice should only apply to women who choose to be modern, and women who choose more traditional roles should be punished for that choice by the same loss of "love" which was the modern woman's punishment.
In other words, only women who make the "right" choice get to choose, in which case it is no choice at all, but simply a "new & improved" political orthodoxy to replace the "old & flawed" traditional one. Somehow the notion of equal rights has been twisted into the old familiar "but some are more equal than others". Obviously, those who are more equal are the ones who should "have it all" while the rest of us pick up the check. Sneering at the "traditional" woman's right to exercise her constitutional right to "the pursuit of happiness" by methods of her own choice, points out how patently elitist feminism really is.
The real reasons that "modern" and career women get left out in the cold when it comes to love are seen in the characterization of the dreaded "traditional" woman. The first 4 words used to describe this person were "gentle, loving, supportive", followed by "sacrificing". David Buss, in "Evolution of Desire" points out how these traits are universal across ALL cultures as the most significant traits influencing the choice of life mate, above physical beauty for men and material wealth for women. The credo of victimhood and the rejection of the dreaded "traditional" female role blind women to the fact that no one could possibly love someone who exhibited the opposite traits of being "harsh, un-loving, un-supportive, and selfish", yet these are the traits we see growing in women, and required of the "modern" woman.
There is no free lunch, and women now seem to resent the fact that they must pay for a man's love by loving him in return. The sense of entitlement to romantic love is the greatest factor in the world today which renders women unlovable.
Real men have no possible way to compete with, or even live up to the standards set by, "imaginary playmates". And I suppose that it really shouldn't surprise men that women would rather "have it all" entirely within their own heads than to have any of it in reality that they would have to pay for. Men have to take some of the responsibility for this. In being hooked by "hero" fantasies, picking up the check has a lot of power. Well, guys, our credit card has been revoked, our credit line maxed out. It's COD from here on out.
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Romance as it is commmonly used today is nothing more than a pretty name for the mating dance among human beings. It is essentially sexual, but its sexual nature is hidden under some very erroneous conceptions about the nature of love. Due to the fact that sexuality is so repressed and negated in many cultures, while remaining an inherent ruling force in the lives of the citizens of those cultures, romance has developed as a sterilized form of sexual expression stripped of the "dirtiness" and shamefullness of being honest about what it really is.
The conflicting and impossible notions of romantic love are nowhere better illustrated than in the over 25 million romance novels consumed each month by American women. The heroines are always beautiful, never plain, and the men they entrance with this great beauty are always wealthy and powerful rogues. There are no dull accountants, greasy mechanics, or laborers with rough and calloused hands. These rogues walk the perfect fine line between just enough respect for the woman's wishes that they never force her beyond what she wants, while they always force her beyond what she says. If the "no means no" dictum were applied, virtually all these men are rapists, but noble ones: the kind of men that the heroines really want to ignore their symbolic protests. The perennial popularity of the old classic "Gone With the Wind" among women, while men generally regard it as stupid, shows the enduring nature of the Rhett Butler type of character in women's fantasies.
Romantic characters are always larger than life. This causes no serious problem for those who retain the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, but it wreaks havoc on the lives of those forget that the fantasy is essentially escapism and begin to regard it as a prescription for how life is or needs to be conducted. Characters in romantic fantasies bear no resemblance to real people. If they did, it would be history not romantic fantasy. Unfortunately many people today have lost touch with reality and have become as unrealistic in their notions of personality and personal conduct as they have become in their notions of physical beauty.
A woman aqaintance of mine recently made a profoundly disturbing statement. I had been listening to her for several months bashing men and making it clear that any man who was going to get access to her (presumably gold lined) panties was going to have to be prepared to support her in the manner to which she wanted to become accustomed. (ie. carry her around on a satin pillow.) She got quite a thrill out of the nickname "Princess" which she had acquired. One day I noticed her sitting by herself looking morose. I walked over, sat down beside her, and provided her a conversational opening to talk about it if she were so inclined.
She sighed and said, with tears in her eyes and in the best pitiful and breathy delivery I have heard since Olivia Hussey in Franco Ziffarelli's Romeo and Juliet, "My heart is sooo empty". Damn fool, I, took this as an honest statement from someone in emotional pain. After listening to her for several minutes recount the depth and intensity of her pain and all the circumstances in her life contributing to it, I tried to provide some gentle feedback on some of the things she was doing to make it unlikely that a man who might be able to fill some of that emptiness could find his way through the minefields and machine guns she had surrounding her heart, so he could lay his paycheck at her feet, or would be motivated to do so. Her response was most enlightening, and at the same time scary and disheartening.
After several minutes justifying her actions based on her past treatment by men, during which I kept saying that I wasn't questioning whether she was justified in her actions but rather simply pointing out that they didn't seem to be getting her what she wanted, she made the incredible statement that the best "relationship" she'd ever had happened entirely in her own mind and didn't require the participation of the male at all. This woman had completely lost the ability to distinguish the reality of relationship with a flesh and blood male from the fantasy she created in her own mind, and distinctly preferred the fantasy to any reality she had experienced.
Several years ago I might have followed that comment up with an argument trying to get her to see that the very term "relationship" kinda implied the presence and participation of another human being, but after thousands of hours of such argument I have learned the complete futility of it. "Don't try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it ANNOYS the pig!" (Robert Heinlein) I simply said "Oh" and walked away sadly reflecting on the fact that this attitude seems so prevalent in women these days.
Normally, when an adult so loses touch with reality that they have relationships with non-existent people we call it mental illness. We think it is "cute" for someone below the age of 10 to have imaginary playmates, but we worry about someone who can drive a car, vote, and own a gun who can't tell the difference between a flesh and blood person and one whom they've made up. I wonder what would have happened if this woman's imaginary lover had told her that in order for him to truly love her forever that she had to kill the president.
Of course I'm being facetious, but this is the perfect illustration of the source of so much of the breakdown of relationships between men and women which is being blamed on men's "oppression" of women. I suppose that, to someone who lives in a perfect world inside her own head, it is oppressive to demand that they face reality. However it is a form of oppression that I consider perfectly acceptable when making decisions about the people I want to play significant roles in my life, whether that be a mate, a friend, a public policy maker, or certainly a surgeon. How many people would lay down on a table and put a knife in the hands of someone who said "The most successful operation I ever performed was in my own head and didn't require a patient"?
It also illustrates precisely why men find it nearly impossible to take women seriously unless that woman has some form of power over them, as well as why men are not anxious to give women that power. Men are far from "perfect" beings and will never make "perfect" husbands, lovers, or whatever else it is that a woman is looking for a man to be; particularly not when the standard of "perfection" exists entirely within the head of someone who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy. If I were "perfect", perhaps in 2000 years I would have a religion named after me. However, I'm completely aware that I'm not "perfect" and have no desire to be the next messiah for people to kill other people in my name. I have even less desire to allow people to kill, imprison, enslave, entrap, or dictate to me what my life "should" be based on what their imaginary playmates tell them.
Every man I know has a deep and sincere desire to love and please a woman (except those who have that desire toward a man). And supposedly that is what some women want as well. However, since neither I nor any other man has any chance of competing with a figment of someone's imagination, designed in every detail to be perfect and fulfill her every whim. I am no longer willing to tip-toe through the minefield and face the machine gun fire to lay my paycheck at her feet, so I can find my way into one of those empty hearts. I sit on the sidelines and watch women barricade themselves into their misery.
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Now is when the story really begins to get scary.
Some weeks later a mutual acquaintance told me that the woman had claimed I had been making a pass at her. What made this delusional, no hallucinatory, was the fact that the day we spoke was 4 weeks to the day after I had slid my motorcyle into a guard rail, breaking a collar bone and sustaining internal injuries. My bruised lung did not show up right away, but ended up sending me to the emergency room exactly one week before this conversation, with my Dr. afraid that I had a pulmonary embolism. Getting back on the bike and having another wreck was about the only thing I could have been less interested in than any between-the-sheets athletics. To this day I am not sure whether the woman lied intentionally about it, or whether this was just another relationship which happened entirely in her mind and didn't require my participation. I'm just damn glad that she hallucinated ( or lied ) that it was a pass and not a rape. Even trying to be friendly and kind to a woman seems to be becoming risky.
This interaction highlights so many of the issues which are ripping apart the ability of men and women to manage even the barest resemblance of peaceful coexistance. The acid tests of sense and reality have given way to the primacy of "how it feels": the subjective placement of self at the center of an island universe into which everything falls and nothing escapes. Women have social permission to be "black holes": to take everything and give back nothing; not even the understanding that sexuality is the last thing on the mind of a man whose body is broken.
But, more than broken bodies, men today are walking around with broken spirits. Faced with a world filled with women who are so indoctrinated in their entitlement to victimhood, men have been taught that they will be attacked for asking for anything; much less having the arrogance to expect something in return for caring about, giving to, and trying to love women. For many women the old principle of reciprocity, the "give and take" which allows groups of people to co-exist without slaughtering each other, is imposition, "oppression." The "modern woman's" version of "give and take" is "everyone else gives, I take."
Having fallen for the foul lies of "male power and privilege" and having been duped into believing in the ultimate and ubiquitous "bogeyman" of "THE Patriarchy", many women are trapped in a frenzy of theft and looting. In their fervor to "get" men, and "get" their fare share from men who they have been tricked into believing have it, women have blinded themselves to the ways in which they steal from and victimize other women.
A perfect example of this was provided recently by a high profile web feminist. Ever anxious to find evidence to further the fictions of universal victimhood and oppression for all women, she "deconstructed" a popular piece of media tripe, "My Best Friends Wedding", for insidious anti-female messages. According to Diane Glass, web feminist:
"Here are three main messages, hidden behind the movie's comic script:
- "You can't be friends with men AND their lovers.
- "Men can have careers and love. Women cannot have both-they have to choose between the two. Why? Because men can marry younger women and when they do, men do not have to make sacrifices of any kind. (this in itself is an interesting to ponder. It seems femininity is lost as a woman ages. Could it be that femininity is naivety and an immaturity that blindly follows?)
- Modern women end up with gay men.
Pretty serious stuff to be taking from nothing more than the fact that the character portrayed by Julia Roberts could not, in only 4 days, break up a wedding that had been in the works for some time and involved vast social networks of very powerful people. Ms Glass goes on to make 2 more points in her deconstruction that, themselves, would be impossible to prove without the unassailable axiom of universal victimhood of women:
"Choices for modern women are fraught with the harsh choice of platonic love, Broadway tunes and friendships with men that never journey to the heights of the devoted and pure love, this movie suggests, that traditional marriage offers."
and,
"The message is clear: Women sacrifice regardless; it is freedom for a price and compromise is the role of women, modern or traditional. "
While these are all compelling laments of victimhood, my "traditionalist" view is that there are certain social realities which make this characteristic of life in general: not just the lives of "Modern Women". Herein lies the fundamental conflict which drives gender politics. Absolutely central to this conflict lies the desire to "have it all", which seems to go with an unwillingness to pay any price for it whatsoever. This violates what I consider to be a fundamental principle of economics, as well as life: "There just ain't no such thing as a free lunch". In the end someone has to pick up the check.
My contention is that compromise is the role of anyone, male or female, who wants to live within a social structure. Implicit in the contract to receive the benefits of being able to live relatively free of anyone else's predatory desire to take from us something we have and they want, is the agreement to be bound by the same social constraints and NOT to steal from someone else something they have and we want. All of the body of law and social practice revolves around this one principle. Everyone is constantly faced with choices of whether to be a thief and a looter, or to act with integrity and work to gain what they desire through the mechanism of effort applied over time. The concept of "entitlement" is a compelling one to the person who feels entitled, but is far less attractive to those who must pick up the check.
The sense of entitlement to an experience which is completely fictionalized leads to the suspension of all social rules and constraints, while at the same time paradoxically locks the person into more of a prison than those constraints ever did. I wrote the author to point out a couple of implications that she had not mentioned. First: that the man was not a character at all, but rather a plot device, a prop in the competition between the two women for "the man prize". Second: that the primacy of marriage to a woman's happiness is just as present in this movie as it was 40 years ago, simply updated with new clothing and hairstyles. Characterizing the message as being "Women cannot have both careers and love, they must choose" obscures the real message, which is that career is only a fallback position, not even a consolation prize but a palliative for those who fall and skin themselves when they lunge for the brass ring of "romantic love." In this case, the woman who fails to win "the man prize" is definitely "the loser".
Her third point, that modern women end up with gay men, is actually the same as her first, that you cannot be friends with men AND their lovers. Aside from the fact that this attitude dangerously denigrates the value of friendship and foolishly dismisses the value of Agape, non-sexual love, as compared to Eros, sexual love; it promotes a self-centeredness when it comes to love that is antithetical to love. Once again, the fundamental principle of reciprocity is absent. In relationships with gay men, women do not enjoy the built in power differential which sexual politics within a "romantic" relationship gives them. They must treat gay men fundamentally as equals, because they have nothing the gay man wants and needs which they can withhold as a means of exercising power. Gay men are even safer as friends for straight women than other straight women, because they seldom compete for the same "man prize". Most men's sexual affiliation is "either/or", so gay men and straight women never end up competing for the same man. Straight men and women can be friends on the same basis, but once romantic politics enters the picture the friendship is often doomed because the heavy agenda of expectations that go with romance suddenly begin to lead to dissatisfaction with the person who was previously just fine the way he/she was.
The archetypal "chick flick", "When Harry met Sally", is a perfect illustration. Early in the movie, Harry and Sally discuss how difficult it is for men and women to be friends: "because the sex thing is always there." Years later, after supporting each other through ups and downs in their love lives and careers, she calls on him for comfort after learning that an old boyfriend is getting married. Someone else has "won" her "man prize." Her value as the ultimate achievement of woman, i.e. to be called "wife" by some man, has been called into question. Harry is unable to hold the line on the friendship, and falls into the trap of proving her sexual value to her by the only means at his disposal: he goes to bed with her. The next scene shows Harry with his eyes as big as saucers and the perfect "oh shit! What have I done?" look on his face. The friendship is now doomed by the baggage of expectations of romance that go with the sexual script. Far more than MBFW, WHMS shows clearly that two people of the opposite sex, indeed, CANNOT be friends AND lovers. Once they go to bed, the old basis of the friendship is destroyed and Sally has complete social sanction to be as hateful as she likes toward Harry for not living up to his part of the romantic script.
In the romantic script, Harry clearly OWES Sally something for the bit of emotional comfort he attempted to provide her. This is where most men balk, and one of the primary reasons why so many of them do not call the next day. At this juncture, men have their choice of two roles in the romantic script: the lapdog or the cad. (Actually "cad" has fallen out of general usage today: replaced by the general purpse, one-size-fits-all "jerk".) Canadian journalist Wendy Dennis (sic) puts it this way: "If a man puts his penis into a woman's vagina, he must call her the next day." "Guys would get this in a second if they had vaginas, but so far they don't -- that's why I have to rattle on here." In other words, possession of the magic vagina gives women the power to "make the rules."
It's not that men don't "get" it, as the cliched complaint of women goes, it is that they don't "BUY" it. The stupid nonsense about men fearing the "vagina dentata", the cunt with teeth, is one of the most persistent pieces of childish foolishness. Men know that the teeth are in the steel jawed trap of the fictionalized script of romantic love/sex/marriage. The vagina is simply the bait. This is the arena where the most fundamental issues of male versus female power get played out. When a woman presents herself as not being after a (THE) commitment, the man is justified in assuming that sex is an equal exchange. In any real scenario of equality, the man would be just as entitled to a reassuring call the next day as the woman is. And, given the highly charged and politicized atmosphere of "date rape", men are actually in more need of it today than women are: to reassure them that she had a good time and is not getting ready to press charges.
Men are fully aware that women frequently use sex to jump-start "romance". Prior to the expansion and blurring of concepts of rape, men had some chance of being avoiding being ensnared into a romantic fantasy by pointing out the contradictions between women's pre- and post-coital behavior and statements. Now that the subjective experience of women has become the standard of law, while men's experience is categorically denied and refuted, men are growing increasingly suspcious and distant.
Modern women really do have a raw deal right now, not because of any of the reasons mentioned by the web feminist, but because of the point of view she promotes. Women are just as bound by the "Feminine Mystique" as they were 40 years ago, and cannot be happy without experiencing "true love" which is totally fictionalized and doesn't exist, while they also have to live up to the old "Masculine Mystique" and experience "career success and satisfaction" which is equally fictionalized. The majority of men have never had careers, they had JOBS: stupid, meaningless, demeaning, boring, humiliating, JOBS! The statement that "men can have careers and love" is laughable to most men, as is " men do not have to make sacrifices of any kind." The very act of going to work each day; at a stupid, meaningless, demeaning, boring, humiliating, JOB! is regarded by most men as sacrifice enough in life to be able to ask for a bit of appreciation and peace and quiet in return. But in an environment of no reciprocity, that doesn't even pass minumum standards. Men must do this AND meet women's emotional needs as well, while men themselves are starving to death emotionally.
Men have been putting up with this for years, yet will seldom jump up to protect themselves and demand some reciprocity. They will, however, generally jump up to protect a woman who is being threatened and protect her interests. Thus they get to play the hero, and remain caught in the eternal drama.
Where they can generally do nothing however, is the case where a woman is being victimized by another woman. The credo of universal victimhood blinds women to they ways in which they prey upon other women, as well as the extent to which they are victimized by other women. In the movie, as soon as the competion for "the man prize" began, the male was set up to be the bad guy.
Had the "morally superior" "modern woman" in MBFW prevailed, there would simply have been another female victim. Only this time it would have been the stereotype of men rather than a traditional role of women which had victimized her. The jilted woman would have had far more right to claim victimhood, by being abandonded, than the "modern woman" has the right to claim victimhood by having to make a choice. The fiction that feminism has used to promote itself is freedom of choice for women, yet that freedom is now seen as a burden and source of victimization. Obviously, that freedom of choice should only apply to women who choose to be modern, and women who choose more traditional roles should be punished for that choice by the same loss of "love" which was the modern woman's punishment.
In other words, only women who make the "right" choice get to choose, in which case it is no choice at all, but simply a "new & improved" political orthodoxy to replace the "old & flawed" traditional one. Somehow the notion of equal rights has been twisted into the old familiar "but some are more equal than others". Obviously, those who are more equal are the ones who should "have it all" while the rest of us pick up the check. Sneering at the "traditional" woman's right to exercise her constitutional right to "the pursuit of happiness" by methods of her own choice, points out how patently elitist feminism really is.
The real reasons that "modern" and career women get left out in the cold when it comes to love are seen in the characterization of the dreaded "traditional" woman. The first 4 words used to describe this person were "gentle, loving, supportive", followed by "sacrificing". David Buss, in "Evolution of Desire" points out how these traits are universal across ALL cultures as the most significant traits influencing the choice of life mate, above physical beauty for men and material wealth for women. The credo of victimhood and the rejection of the dreaded "traditional" female role blind women to the fact that no one could possibly love someone who exhibited the opposite traits of being "harsh, un-loving, un-supportive, and selfish", yet these are the traits we see growing in women, and required of the "modern" woman.
There is no free lunch, and women now seem to resent the fact that they must pay for a man's love by loving him in return. The sense of entitlement to romantic love is the greatest factor in the world today which renders women unlovable.
Real men have no possible way to compete with, or even live up to the standards set by, "imaginary playmates". And I suppose that it really shouldn't surprise men that women would rather "have it all" entirely within their own heads than to have any of it in reality that they would have to pay for. Men have to take some of the responsibility for this. In being hooked by "hero" fantasies, picking up the check has a lot of power. Well, guys, our credit card has been revoked, our credit line maxed out. It's COD from here on out.
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Saturday, April 16, 2005
EOTM: Why Men Go For "The Look"
There are two separate and distinct aspects to "the look." But, they are inter-twined and inter-related: reproduction and status. Cast in terms of the silly old nature/nurture debate: sex is about reproduction and nature in its purest form, while mating and marriage are about nurture and status.
To understand men, you must understand maleness in its purest and simplest form. Every man alive shares the attribute of maleness with half of the life on this planet, as every woman shares the attribute of femaleness with the other half.
The time for the fern to unfurl itself is when IT is ready - there is no social calendar that concerns it. The time for the bees to pollinate the blooms that will turn into fruit is WHEN they are in bloom and ready to receive, not when some arbitrary social decision says the time is right. You can understand everything about men by looking at one corn plant in bloom. The silks and the ear are the female parts of the plant, the tassels and pollen are the male part. The male part must be ready WHEN the female part is ready, not before and most certainly not after. One grain of pollen must fall on each strand of silk in order for one new kernal of corn to start. In order for the female part of the corn to be as abundant as it has the potential to be, the male part must produce MILLIONS of times the sperm (pollen) that the female produces silks and potential seeds AND distribute those sperm widely and freely. Thus, the primary and over-riding characteristic of male sexuality is urgency: all of maleness is about being ready NOW so that when the female signals that the time is right, the male is ready to do his part.
If you look at the female genitals, you see that they are flowers. Nature constantly re-uses her forms over and over. And when the female petals open themselves in bloom, THEN is the time to fertilize, not later. Women's minds are at war with their bodies these days. They themselves try to deny the message of their bodies when their very cells cry out that the time is right. Women have been brainwashed into wanting to DECIDE when the time is "right" and have nature conform to their wishes rather than placing themselves in tune with nature. It will not work.
Sadly for men, we do "think with their penises" far more than we wish was the case. Survival is so basic that "thinking" really has nothing at all to do with it. Desire does not happen because of a thought process or because we get social sanction: it is primal and the only thing we can do with our social minds is to inhibit it. While we men certainly sometimes appear to "think with our dicks" it is impossible for us to "dick with our thinks." We desire what we desire, and no amount of social conditioning can ever really change that.
Since reproduction is survival of the species at its most basic level, those drives are buried in the part of our bodies that we share with every other animal that reproduces sexually: our brainstem - our vertebra. All sex happens in what is called the "old" brain or the "reptile" brain - the brainstem and spinal cord. You can actually take a cat and vacuum out its cerebral cortex and all mating behaviors remain intact. Social behaviors are destroyed, but the cat can still eat and mate. That is how primal and basic the behaviors we are talking about really are.
Our reactions are SO BASIC, so immune to conscious and voluntary control, that they are akin to a species of fish whose females' bellies turn red when they are gravid. Males of this species can be fooled into mating behavior by a block of wood with the underside painted the same red as a gravid female placed into the tank.
Like these fish, signals of female readiness and receptivity provoke a completely unconscious and involuntary reaction in us. We can't stop ourselves from reacting, all we can do is stop ourselves from acting on our reaction. What makes men so angry at women is how well women have learned our involuntary reactions and learned how to use them against us by faking receptivity and using our sense of urgency to extort from us what they want.
Makeup, low-cut dresses, even high heels, all mimic signals that a woman gives off when she is "ready." Men are constantly having their involuntary reflexes beaten on to respond to a woman who signals that she is "ready" when, in fact, she is not. Just about all the terrible miscommunications between men and women would go away if men would go back to sniffing women's butts.
The other half of "the look" is status. These are the ways that social messages have affected us. A man's status is enhanced in the presence of an attractive woman, just as a woman's status is enhanced by the presence of a successful man. This is the strictly "nurture" part of things. What we consider "beauty" at any given time is a matter of social consensus. In Africa, big butts on women are considered VERY attractive because they are a whole lot closer to the edge of survival and a skinny woman will likely not survive childbirth. There is no reason to "mate" with them. Even as recently as the 1960s, the hourglass figure, curviness, was a standard of female beauty.
What comes next is pretty subtle, so hang with me. The "look" now popular in westernized culture, which advertising defines, is the "look" of an infertile woman. Pregnancy takes a huge amount of calories and very thin women ususally cannot accomplish it. Here is where we have nature and nurture at war with each other. The drive to have sex and continue the species is as strong in all of is as it has ever been, but children are so expensive to have and raise to adulthood these days that men unconsciously are drawn to women who show signs of receptivity at the same time they show signs of infertility. Some "free" sex or "free love".
Women have complained for years about men who want to sleep with one kind of woman, but marry a different kind. That is because the urgency of responding to a woman's signals of readiness, RIGHT NOW, has absolutely no relationship to what it would be like spending the rest of his life with that woman. For women's benefit, our cultural values have demanded that men make their mating decisions on something other than sex. Under the old structure of marriage, a man wouldn't even find out what his wife was like sexually until AFTER they were joined for life. That is how little emphasis that culture placed on sex compared to how much it placed on mutual support and keeping commitments.
Just as women still expect to marry a man who makes more than they do, despite the fact that the economy has changed to make that impossible, men make their choice of lifelong mates based on how much status being mated to that woman will bring them. Having a woman with "the look" (whatever the fad of the moment is) will bring them status in the eyes of both men and women. Love conquering all is a compelling and attractive fantasy, but it is a fiction. Success in life often depends on resources and status, so the choice of a lifelong mate must take these into account.
Television and movies have turned us into a completely visual culture. Everything now has some variation of "the look." Clothes have an "in look", cars have it, even athletic shoes have it. We all are being constantly harassed by TV to want "the look."
Women are just as susceptible to "the look" of men as men are to "the look" of women. And it has nothing to do with how good a mate that person would be. It is a primal biological reaction to "good genes", to a set of characteristics that would give our offspring a better chance of survival than if they did not have them.
As we grow up, however, we learn to look beyond "the look", and learn to see. Men learn over time how to tell when a woman is faking it and to avoid such women. The more games a woman plays regarding her looks and attractiveness, the more men have learned to distrust her.
The quiet beauty of an untouched bloom, however, will always render a man mute in the awesome power of woman to create new life from her own body.
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Related: Zenpriest #27 - Ignoring Women
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
To understand men, you must understand maleness in its purest and simplest form. Every man alive shares the attribute of maleness with half of the life on this planet, as every woman shares the attribute of femaleness with the other half.
The time for the fern to unfurl itself is when IT is ready - there is no social calendar that concerns it. The time for the bees to pollinate the blooms that will turn into fruit is WHEN they are in bloom and ready to receive, not when some arbitrary social decision says the time is right. You can understand everything about men by looking at one corn plant in bloom. The silks and the ear are the female parts of the plant, the tassels and pollen are the male part. The male part must be ready WHEN the female part is ready, not before and most certainly not after. One grain of pollen must fall on each strand of silk in order for one new kernal of corn to start. In order for the female part of the corn to be as abundant as it has the potential to be, the male part must produce MILLIONS of times the sperm (pollen) that the female produces silks and potential seeds AND distribute those sperm widely and freely. Thus, the primary and over-riding characteristic of male sexuality is urgency: all of maleness is about being ready NOW so that when the female signals that the time is right, the male is ready to do his part.
If you look at the female genitals, you see that they are flowers. Nature constantly re-uses her forms over and over. And when the female petals open themselves in bloom, THEN is the time to fertilize, not later. Women's minds are at war with their bodies these days. They themselves try to deny the message of their bodies when their very cells cry out that the time is right. Women have been brainwashed into wanting to DECIDE when the time is "right" and have nature conform to their wishes rather than placing themselves in tune with nature. It will not work.
Sadly for men, we do "think with their penises" far more than we wish was the case. Survival is so basic that "thinking" really has nothing at all to do with it. Desire does not happen because of a thought process or because we get social sanction: it is primal and the only thing we can do with our social minds is to inhibit it. While we men certainly sometimes appear to "think with our dicks" it is impossible for us to "dick with our thinks." We desire what we desire, and no amount of social conditioning can ever really change that.
Since reproduction is survival of the species at its most basic level, those drives are buried in the part of our bodies that we share with every other animal that reproduces sexually: our brainstem - our vertebra. All sex happens in what is called the "old" brain or the "reptile" brain - the brainstem and spinal cord. You can actually take a cat and vacuum out its cerebral cortex and all mating behaviors remain intact. Social behaviors are destroyed, but the cat can still eat and mate. That is how primal and basic the behaviors we are talking about really are.
Our reactions are SO BASIC, so immune to conscious and voluntary control, that they are akin to a species of fish whose females' bellies turn red when they are gravid. Males of this species can be fooled into mating behavior by a block of wood with the underside painted the same red as a gravid female placed into the tank.
Like these fish, signals of female readiness and receptivity provoke a completely unconscious and involuntary reaction in us. We can't stop ourselves from reacting, all we can do is stop ourselves from acting on our reaction. What makes men so angry at women is how well women have learned our involuntary reactions and learned how to use them against us by faking receptivity and using our sense of urgency to extort from us what they want.
Makeup, low-cut dresses, even high heels, all mimic signals that a woman gives off when she is "ready." Men are constantly having their involuntary reflexes beaten on to respond to a woman who signals that she is "ready" when, in fact, she is not. Just about all the terrible miscommunications between men and women would go away if men would go back to sniffing women's butts.
The other half of "the look" is status. These are the ways that social messages have affected us. A man's status is enhanced in the presence of an attractive woman, just as a woman's status is enhanced by the presence of a successful man. This is the strictly "nurture" part of things. What we consider "beauty" at any given time is a matter of social consensus. In Africa, big butts on women are considered VERY attractive because they are a whole lot closer to the edge of survival and a skinny woman will likely not survive childbirth. There is no reason to "mate" with them. Even as recently as the 1960s, the hourglass figure, curviness, was a standard of female beauty.
What comes next is pretty subtle, so hang with me. The "look" now popular in westernized culture, which advertising defines, is the "look" of an infertile woman. Pregnancy takes a huge amount of calories and very thin women ususally cannot accomplish it. Here is where we have nature and nurture at war with each other. The drive to have sex and continue the species is as strong in all of is as it has ever been, but children are so expensive to have and raise to adulthood these days that men unconsciously are drawn to women who show signs of receptivity at the same time they show signs of infertility. Some "free" sex or "free love".
Women have complained for years about men who want to sleep with one kind of woman, but marry a different kind. That is because the urgency of responding to a woman's signals of readiness, RIGHT NOW, has absolutely no relationship to what it would be like spending the rest of his life with that woman. For women's benefit, our cultural values have demanded that men make their mating decisions on something other than sex. Under the old structure of marriage, a man wouldn't even find out what his wife was like sexually until AFTER they were joined for life. That is how little emphasis that culture placed on sex compared to how much it placed on mutual support and keeping commitments.
Just as women still expect to marry a man who makes more than they do, despite the fact that the economy has changed to make that impossible, men make their choice of lifelong mates based on how much status being mated to that woman will bring them. Having a woman with "the look" (whatever the fad of the moment is) will bring them status in the eyes of both men and women. Love conquering all is a compelling and attractive fantasy, but it is a fiction. Success in life often depends on resources and status, so the choice of a lifelong mate must take these into account.
Television and movies have turned us into a completely visual culture. Everything now has some variation of "the look." Clothes have an "in look", cars have it, even athletic shoes have it. We all are being constantly harassed by TV to want "the look."
Women are just as susceptible to "the look" of men as men are to "the look" of women. And it has nothing to do with how good a mate that person would be. It is a primal biological reaction to "good genes", to a set of characteristics that would give our offspring a better chance of survival than if they did not have them.
As we grow up, however, we learn to look beyond "the look", and learn to see. Men learn over time how to tell when a woman is faking it and to avoid such women. The more games a woman plays regarding her looks and attractiveness, the more men have learned to distrust her.
The quiet beauty of an untouched bloom, however, will always render a man mute in the awesome power of woman to create new life from her own body.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related: Zenpriest #27 - Ignoring Women
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Friday, April 15, 2005
EOTM: The Biological Context of Sexuality and Mating
We'll get the expostion out of the way in a hurry.
1) Nothing exists in the animal world without a purpose. All behavior is purposeful.
2) This purpose is to survive. Life LIVES. Survival of the individual first, and the species second is an imperative that drives all living things.
3) The biological purpose of sex is survival of the species. Reproduce (be fruitful and multiply) to assure that there is another generation of little whatevers to continue the species.
4) The mechanisms which control this are buried deep in the brain, in the section that is called the "old" or reptile brain. Lizards understand all they need to know about sex in order to make a new generation of lizards. This is the same part of the brain that governs hunger. Survival stuff.
5) Humans are among the distinct minority among animal species in several respects including:
6) There is a secondary purpose to coitus among mammals. It seems to be very bonding. Animals with a very low fertility, such as lions, tend to have a high frequency of coitus which serves the social purpose of strengthening the emotional ties within the social unit.
7) Behavioral or personality traits can be inherited in the same way as physical ones. The emerging field of evolutionary psychology shows how certain behavioral traits enhance the survival potential of the individual and the process of natural selection make it more likely that the genetics which contribute to that behavioral trait will be transmitted to future generations. Sexual behavior is more prone to this effect than any other because it directly affects the fertility rate. Selection has favored the most aggressive males because they are the ones who have dispersed the most genetic material, just as it has favored the least sexually active females because had they been out seeking new males to mate with they might not have invested sufficient time to make sure that the offspring survived.
8) Sexual interest is only useful to nature when sexual activity coincides with fertility in the female. Thus a very complex "notification" system has developed to notify the males that the female is fertile. In most animals this also means receptive, but human females have learned to fake the signs of receptivity in order to capture the attentions of males, and to capture the males themselves into a committed relationship.
9) gee, what if someone gave a horny and no one came? The cues of the notification system begin a complex set of reactions in the reptile brain of the male which excites him to seek gratification of his sexual hunger. There ain't no thinking involved. It's pure Stimulus -> Response of the type studied by Pavlov.
10) Next begins the "mating dance". This serves several purposes. First, it raises the overall level of arousal, which in turn stimulates the production of sperm and increases the chances that copulation will result in fertilization. Second, the female, having signalled her receptivity through a variety of cues: scent, sound, visual, and behavioral, lets her potential mates pursue her until the biggest, strongest, smartest (ie. most survival potential) prevails. A bunch of new little whatevers get started and the whole cycle begins again.
11) Generally males "signal" by pursuing. Sure they want to attract the female's attention as a potential mate, but they don't want to waste their biological resources pursuing a non-receptive mate.
12) We humans should take a clue.
13) As sex has moved away from its biological purpose and assumed more of a social significance, those receptivity cues have been co-opted. They are now practiced intentionally to gain attention and favors from men and no longer have anything to do with receptivity. This is where so much of the crap in gender relations comes from. Women signal receptivity when it doesn't exist, men respond at an instinctual level from the lizard brain without even knowing that they are responding or why, and everybody wonders "what the hell happened?".
14) Regardless of all this, there still ain't nothin' happening unless the female is receptive (except maybe a rape charge when the male reacts in the way nature intended to the cues which are being sent dishonestly).
15) All this adds up to the fact that the female controls the sexual interaction. Research done in singles bars and other meat markets has shown that "high" signalling females get approached 4 times as often as "low" signalling females even when they are significantly less "beautiful" than the low signalling females. Anyone whose knee has just jerked into believing that I'm saying "she asked for it" can hit the link below.
GOODBYE!
For those of you who stuck around to hear the rest of the story, it should begin to get really interesting. OK guys, grit your teeth. It's going to get hairy for a while. I'm gonna tell truths and name names. It'll hurt a bit, but we'll all feel better when it's over.
The often mouthed male bash cliche "Men think with their penises, not with their heads" is closer to the truth than men wish it was. In reality they are "thinking" with their brainstem, spinal cord, and limbic system (hormones, neural transmitters, and enzymes). They unfortunately have no conscious control over these responses, just as they have no conscious control over hunger, the fight/flight response, or muscular reflexes.
There are a large number of stimuli which function as "releasers" and pump into the male bloodstream all the neurochemicals which create sexual arousal. Female chimpanzees' genital areas will swell and become bright pink when in estrus (heat). Jane Goodall, the renowned antropologist who made a life work of studying chimps, described this phenomenon as being like "... a bright pink flower which could be seen by males all over the valley, who immediately set off in search of the female...". The human female rump has a similar effect on human males. Some of the lower animals who have little more than a brain stem, such as certain fishes, can be fooled into a mating frenzy by a block of wood painted the same color as a female full of unfertilized eggs.
Despite the many and huge variations between cultures in almost every aspect imaginable, there is a remarkable agreement on what constitutes female beauty, which has become a polite euphemism for sexual attractiveness. In a study of 1159 cultures, the physical characteristics deemed beautiful were more consistent than any other characteristic. And in all cultures these characteristics corresponded to the physical attributes of a woman in her peak child bearing years, 15 - 25. These are the women that men will respond to from a purely biological perspective.
This is not to say that men do not, will not, or cannot find an older woman attractive, they certainly do, but the attraction is based on other characteristics than pure sexual attraction, a point which very few women understand. Most women become addicted to the sexual power that adolescent women have over adolescent men and, like the dinosaurs, do not realize that enviromental conditions are changing and adapt to them before it's too late. The power of a woman to provoke a purely instinctive sexual response in men dimishes rapidly after the late 20s, both because women are no longer as effective a vehicle for transporting a man's genes to the future, and because males of that age have generally already done their reproductive duty and turned their attention to other matters, such as supporting and providing for the progeny they have already sired. Women who are arrested adolescents expect men to continue to respond in the same way that 15 - 25 year old males respond to 15 - 25 year old females. The frequency and intensity of this type of reaction progressively diminishes as a man matures and, when it is present, guess what? It tends to be toward a woman between the age of consent and the late 20s.
In addition, men are fully aware that women typically use sex as a means to jump-start a romantic fantasy which will be entirely to her benefit and at his expense. In addtion, women have learned that men are perfectly capable of controlling their sexual impulses when they realize that the woman is looking for something totally different than they are and that to proceed is going to get somebody hurt. If a man is not ready to dive headfirst into trying to build a long-term relationship with a particular woman, he is not likely to dive into bed with her either. Women's strategy to deal with this for the past several years has been to lie about their expectations and indicate that they are only interested in immediate sexual gratification and that the man need feel no obligation to pay for it with a committed relationship. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." It generally only takes one occurance of finding out that he has been lied to, and has just incurred an emotional debt he could spend the rest of his life paying off, for a man to learn that he cannot believe a woman who says this.
The normal reaction by these women is to escalate their cues and begin to beat on the neural responses of men to try to get a rise (literally) out of them. In other words, they DO sometimes ask for it. Some women are unaware that they are doing this, seeking only the attention of males and having successfully deluded themselves into thinking that the attention is based on something other than a purely instinctive response to sexual cues of receptivity. They are terribly surprised when they get an unexpected response out of a man. On the other hand, many are fully aware and are pissed as hell when they DON'T get the desired response out of a man and can get really ugly about it. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
Either way the man is the loser. If he responds and the woman decides he is not what she is looking for in a mate and shuts him down, he is confused, hurt and more than a little bit angry. Camile Paglia makes some very interesting statements about this aspect of male/female interactions. She says first that "Rape is male power fighting female power." Women, on the one hand, love the power they can exert over men to make them perform for love and affection; while on the other hand they fear, detest, and criminalize it getting beyond their control. She also said that what used to be called "unbridled passion" is now called "date rape". Men have come to bitterly resent being manipulated by using their sexual needs against them, a process that Barbara DeAngelis terms "pathetically easy". I know that many women will want to crucify me for this next statement. Many rapes are the result of a man experiencing just one too many times the anger and humilation of being led on, used, manipulated, and exploited based on the promise of having his sexual needs met, only to have the woman change her mind or raise the price at the last minute. In two celebrated rape trials of a few years ago, those of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith, both instances were rich and powerful men who invited beautiful young women to their quarters and provided them with expensive entertainment with the predictable expectation that they would be rewarded with sex. When they called the debt, the women cried "foul".
On the other hand, if the man does NOT respond, women often respond in an escalating pattern that begins with trying to argue the man into bed and often ends with vicious verbal abuse and sometimes even physical violence. Often men will avoid the issue by giving the expected responses to avoid the emotional violence, or will end up avoiding that woman.
A particularly distressing aspect of this occurs due to the mistaken notion that love and sex are the same thing. Many men have had the experience of having a friendship with a woman destroyed when she would not take no for an answer and persisted in trying to coerce him into a sexual/romantic relationship he did not want, based on the mistaken belief that if he cared for her he would express that sexually.
The futility of trying to argue a man into bed is driven home to them if they succeed in wearing down the man's resistance and he gives in. It is pretty much guaranteed that the experience will be miserably unsatisfying and humiliating to them both. Men may sometimes think with their dicks, but they sure as hell cannot dick with their think. If men could will their erections to come and go on command, both men and women would be a lot happier, but then they would cease to be men and become flesh and blood vibrators. Sadly it seems that is what women want men to be these days.
Men, for their part, do not think that much differently although they respond and act very differently. Men are often bewildered and upset by their own reactions and cannot understand why they are so at odds with the values they believe to hold. They buy into the romantic nonsense as much as women do and are often angry at themselves for not reacting the way they "should" according to society's script. Men are just as culturally indoctrinated as women and often just as unaware of the foundation mechanisms of their responses. They try to do what they "should" but, like the dinner guests served a dish they detest but gag down out of politeness and a desire to not offend the hostess, if their own needs are not being met the best they can do is to mechanically go through the motions.
Like driving, passion is a priviledge, NOT a right. Men respond passionately to women who are willing to understand, honor, and help them meet their real needs. Men respond mechanically, if at all, to women who demand that the man meet her needs while denying his and attempting to shame him into changing them to fit her bullshit notions of what he "should" be.
Both men and women need to understand that the sexual force of a mature man comes not from having a penis, but rather from that adventurous juncture of ego and courage which Norman Mailer talks about. To this I would add optimism. Deep within the heart of every man I know resides the persistent belief that sexual joy IS a great gift, that shared sexuality represents the union of the highest aspects of men and women, their finest moral products, the God and the Goddess, and the fervent hope than he will one day meet a woman who will regard it that way also. All the men I know are still waiting. Most of them are not very optimistic.
Women who have a sincere desire for a sexual relationship with a mature man had better start waking the fuck up and realizing that building his ego is going to get them somewhere, while continuing to indulge themselves in their infantile man-bashing tantrums and doing everything they can to destroy it is going to get them a lot of lonely nights. Feminism is murdering men's desire for women, and women are its willing, nay enthusiatic, accomplices. Contempt for men, denial and negation of their needs, and abdication of responsibility for their own actions is, for some unknown reason, very satisfying to women, but the only men who fall for it are the ones who are arrested in their own adolescence. I hope you bitches are having fun playing with these emotionally deformed children.
Sex is the most bonding activity between 2 human beings that there is. Certainly it is fraught with anxieties, confusion, and risk, but only the most pathological males can have even marginally satisfying sex with a woman and not experience deep warm and tender feelings toward her which will persist for the remainder of his life, unless the woman does something to destroy them, which all too many women do. Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D, in a book written 25 years ago put it this way regarding men's turn-ons: "he will love you more the more skillfully you sense and use it". A woman who understands a man's releasers and incorporates them into lovemaking with anything resembling subtlety will have the man eating out of her hand for life.
This relationship between sexual satisfaction and emotional bonding holds equally true in reverse. Unsatisfying sex will breed deep and subtle resentment. The worse the sex, the greater the resentment. There is only one thing more bewildering and upsetting to a man than a woman who thinks her part of sex is done when she shows up, and that he both owes her satisfaction from the experience and after the fact owes her for the opportunity to provide her satisfaction. This one thing is the woman who shows remarkable skill and subtlety in finding and using a man's turn-OFFS, offending and disgusting his every sensibility, then blames his lack of response on some defect within him. There is a special kind of hatred that men reserve for such women.
It is evidence of the power and persistence of the male sex drive that men will return to such women just to get their rocks off, and in fact this is less due to sexual desire than to an inability to believe that anyone could possibly be THAT stupid and insensitive. Many men are also so confused and conflicted about their own sexuality, and have so much shame tied up with it, that they do not realize how pathological the experience was. Men who are clearer about it simply never call back. Only now, in the 1990s, this has become a criminal act.
Male sexuality is extremely undervalued, just as female sexuality is extremely overvalued. In this culture men are conditioned to believe that their only source of intimacy and love is the woman who is their mate and the only means they have to get female sexuality, intimacy, and love is to purchase it with their performance and their economic assets. This impoverishes both men and woman because it destroys the trust and faith in each other that is essential to intimacy. Men need to reclaim the value of their sexuality, if necessary by refusing to have sex with any woman who does not value his as highly as he values hers and by making it an absolute condition that she respects and honors his needs, rather that telling him what they "should" be.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
1) Nothing exists in the animal world without a purpose. All behavior is purposeful.
2) This purpose is to survive. Life LIVES. Survival of the individual first, and the species second is an imperative that drives all living things.
3) The biological purpose of sex is survival of the species. Reproduce (be fruitful and multiply) to assure that there is another generation of little whatevers to continue the species.
4) The mechanisms which control this are buried deep in the brain, in the section that is called the "old" or reptile brain. Lizards understand all they need to know about sex in order to make a new generation of lizards. This is the same part of the brain that governs hunger. Survival stuff.
5) Humans are among the distinct minority among animal species in several respects including:
- a) They can be sexually active whether or not there is a possibility of conception. Most animals will not copulate unless the female is in her fertile phase.
- b) When we assumed the upright bipedal posture, from the four-legged stance used by most of our animal brethren, the entrance to the vagina was pulled up and forward. The only other animals which have sex face to face are the bonobo chimpanzees. All others use the rear entry position. That is why it is called "doggy-style". Face to face sex is more "social". This is where most of our relationship problems come from.
6) There is a secondary purpose to coitus among mammals. It seems to be very bonding. Animals with a very low fertility, such as lions, tend to have a high frequency of coitus which serves the social purpose of strengthening the emotional ties within the social unit.
7) Behavioral or personality traits can be inherited in the same way as physical ones. The emerging field of evolutionary psychology shows how certain behavioral traits enhance the survival potential of the individual and the process of natural selection make it more likely that the genetics which contribute to that behavioral trait will be transmitted to future generations. Sexual behavior is more prone to this effect than any other because it directly affects the fertility rate. Selection has favored the most aggressive males because they are the ones who have dispersed the most genetic material, just as it has favored the least sexually active females because had they been out seeking new males to mate with they might not have invested sufficient time to make sure that the offspring survived.
8) Sexual interest is only useful to nature when sexual activity coincides with fertility in the female. Thus a very complex "notification" system has developed to notify the males that the female is fertile. In most animals this also means receptive, but human females have learned to fake the signs of receptivity in order to capture the attentions of males, and to capture the males themselves into a committed relationship.
9) gee, what if someone gave a horny and no one came? The cues of the notification system begin a complex set of reactions in the reptile brain of the male which excites him to seek gratification of his sexual hunger. There ain't no thinking involved. It's pure Stimulus -> Response of the type studied by Pavlov.
10) Next begins the "mating dance". This serves several purposes. First, it raises the overall level of arousal, which in turn stimulates the production of sperm and increases the chances that copulation will result in fertilization. Second, the female, having signalled her receptivity through a variety of cues: scent, sound, visual, and behavioral, lets her potential mates pursue her until the biggest, strongest, smartest (ie. most survival potential) prevails. A bunch of new little whatevers get started and the whole cycle begins again.
11) Generally males "signal" by pursuing. Sure they want to attract the female's attention as a potential mate, but they don't want to waste their biological resources pursuing a non-receptive mate.
12) We humans should take a clue.
13) As sex has moved away from its biological purpose and assumed more of a social significance, those receptivity cues have been co-opted. They are now practiced intentionally to gain attention and favors from men and no longer have anything to do with receptivity. This is where so much of the crap in gender relations comes from. Women signal receptivity when it doesn't exist, men respond at an instinctual level from the lizard brain without even knowing that they are responding or why, and everybody wonders "what the hell happened?".
14) Regardless of all this, there still ain't nothin' happening unless the female is receptive (except maybe a rape charge when the male reacts in the way nature intended to the cues which are being sent dishonestly).
15) All this adds up to the fact that the female controls the sexual interaction. Research done in singles bars and other meat markets has shown that "high" signalling females get approached 4 times as often as "low" signalling females even when they are significantly less "beautiful" than the low signalling females. Anyone whose knee has just jerked into believing that I'm saying "she asked for it" can hit the link below.
GOODBYE!
For those of you who stuck around to hear the rest of the story, it should begin to get really interesting. OK guys, grit your teeth. It's going to get hairy for a while. I'm gonna tell truths and name names. It'll hurt a bit, but we'll all feel better when it's over.
The often mouthed male bash cliche "Men think with their penises, not with their heads" is closer to the truth than men wish it was. In reality they are "thinking" with their brainstem, spinal cord, and limbic system (hormones, neural transmitters, and enzymes). They unfortunately have no conscious control over these responses, just as they have no conscious control over hunger, the fight/flight response, or muscular reflexes.
There are a large number of stimuli which function as "releasers" and pump into the male bloodstream all the neurochemicals which create sexual arousal. Female chimpanzees' genital areas will swell and become bright pink when in estrus (heat). Jane Goodall, the renowned antropologist who made a life work of studying chimps, described this phenomenon as being like "... a bright pink flower which could be seen by males all over the valley, who immediately set off in search of the female...". The human female rump has a similar effect on human males. Some of the lower animals who have little more than a brain stem, such as certain fishes, can be fooled into a mating frenzy by a block of wood painted the same color as a female full of unfertilized eggs.
Despite the many and huge variations between cultures in almost every aspect imaginable, there is a remarkable agreement on what constitutes female beauty, which has become a polite euphemism for sexual attractiveness. In a study of 1159 cultures, the physical characteristics deemed beautiful were more consistent than any other characteristic. And in all cultures these characteristics corresponded to the physical attributes of a woman in her peak child bearing years, 15 - 25. These are the women that men will respond to from a purely biological perspective.
This is not to say that men do not, will not, or cannot find an older woman attractive, they certainly do, but the attraction is based on other characteristics than pure sexual attraction, a point which very few women understand. Most women become addicted to the sexual power that adolescent women have over adolescent men and, like the dinosaurs, do not realize that enviromental conditions are changing and adapt to them before it's too late. The power of a woman to provoke a purely instinctive sexual response in men dimishes rapidly after the late 20s, both because women are no longer as effective a vehicle for transporting a man's genes to the future, and because males of that age have generally already done their reproductive duty and turned their attention to other matters, such as supporting and providing for the progeny they have already sired. Women who are arrested adolescents expect men to continue to respond in the same way that 15 - 25 year old males respond to 15 - 25 year old females. The frequency and intensity of this type of reaction progressively diminishes as a man matures and, when it is present, guess what? It tends to be toward a woman between the age of consent and the late 20s.
In addition, men are fully aware that women typically use sex as a means to jump-start a romantic fantasy which will be entirely to her benefit and at his expense. In addtion, women have learned that men are perfectly capable of controlling their sexual impulses when they realize that the woman is looking for something totally different than they are and that to proceed is going to get somebody hurt. If a man is not ready to dive headfirst into trying to build a long-term relationship with a particular woman, he is not likely to dive into bed with her either. Women's strategy to deal with this for the past several years has been to lie about their expectations and indicate that they are only interested in immediate sexual gratification and that the man need feel no obligation to pay for it with a committed relationship. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." It generally only takes one occurance of finding out that he has been lied to, and has just incurred an emotional debt he could spend the rest of his life paying off, for a man to learn that he cannot believe a woman who says this.
The normal reaction by these women is to escalate their cues and begin to beat on the neural responses of men to try to get a rise (literally) out of them. In other words, they DO sometimes ask for it. Some women are unaware that they are doing this, seeking only the attention of males and having successfully deluded themselves into thinking that the attention is based on something other than a purely instinctive response to sexual cues of receptivity. They are terribly surprised when they get an unexpected response out of a man. On the other hand, many are fully aware and are pissed as hell when they DON'T get the desired response out of a man and can get really ugly about it. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
Either way the man is the loser. If he responds and the woman decides he is not what she is looking for in a mate and shuts him down, he is confused, hurt and more than a little bit angry. Camile Paglia makes some very interesting statements about this aspect of male/female interactions. She says first that "Rape is male power fighting female power." Women, on the one hand, love the power they can exert over men to make them perform for love and affection; while on the other hand they fear, detest, and criminalize it getting beyond their control. She also said that what used to be called "unbridled passion" is now called "date rape". Men have come to bitterly resent being manipulated by using their sexual needs against them, a process that Barbara DeAngelis terms "pathetically easy". I know that many women will want to crucify me for this next statement. Many rapes are the result of a man experiencing just one too many times the anger and humilation of being led on, used, manipulated, and exploited based on the promise of having his sexual needs met, only to have the woman change her mind or raise the price at the last minute. In two celebrated rape trials of a few years ago, those of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith, both instances were rich and powerful men who invited beautiful young women to their quarters and provided them with expensive entertainment with the predictable expectation that they would be rewarded with sex. When they called the debt, the women cried "foul".
On the other hand, if the man does NOT respond, women often respond in an escalating pattern that begins with trying to argue the man into bed and often ends with vicious verbal abuse and sometimes even physical violence. Often men will avoid the issue by giving the expected responses to avoid the emotional violence, or will end up avoiding that woman.
A particularly distressing aspect of this occurs due to the mistaken notion that love and sex are the same thing. Many men have had the experience of having a friendship with a woman destroyed when she would not take no for an answer and persisted in trying to coerce him into a sexual/romantic relationship he did not want, based on the mistaken belief that if he cared for her he would express that sexually.
The futility of trying to argue a man into bed is driven home to them if they succeed in wearing down the man's resistance and he gives in. It is pretty much guaranteed that the experience will be miserably unsatisfying and humiliating to them both. Men may sometimes think with their dicks, but they sure as hell cannot dick with their think. If men could will their erections to come and go on command, both men and women would be a lot happier, but then they would cease to be men and become flesh and blood vibrators. Sadly it seems that is what women want men to be these days.
Men, for their part, do not think that much differently although they respond and act very differently. Men are often bewildered and upset by their own reactions and cannot understand why they are so at odds with the values they believe to hold. They buy into the romantic nonsense as much as women do and are often angry at themselves for not reacting the way they "should" according to society's script. Men are just as culturally indoctrinated as women and often just as unaware of the foundation mechanisms of their responses. They try to do what they "should" but, like the dinner guests served a dish they detest but gag down out of politeness and a desire to not offend the hostess, if their own needs are not being met the best they can do is to mechanically go through the motions.
Like driving, passion is a priviledge, NOT a right. Men respond passionately to women who are willing to understand, honor, and help them meet their real needs. Men respond mechanically, if at all, to women who demand that the man meet her needs while denying his and attempting to shame him into changing them to fit her bullshit notions of what he "should" be.
Both men and women need to understand that the sexual force of a mature man comes not from having a penis, but rather from that adventurous juncture of ego and courage which Norman Mailer talks about. To this I would add optimism. Deep within the heart of every man I know resides the persistent belief that sexual joy IS a great gift, that shared sexuality represents the union of the highest aspects of men and women, their finest moral products, the God and the Goddess, and the fervent hope than he will one day meet a woman who will regard it that way also. All the men I know are still waiting. Most of them are not very optimistic.
Women who have a sincere desire for a sexual relationship with a mature man had better start waking the fuck up and realizing that building his ego is going to get them somewhere, while continuing to indulge themselves in their infantile man-bashing tantrums and doing everything they can to destroy it is going to get them a lot of lonely nights. Feminism is murdering men's desire for women, and women are its willing, nay enthusiatic, accomplices. Contempt for men, denial and negation of their needs, and abdication of responsibility for their own actions is, for some unknown reason, very satisfying to women, but the only men who fall for it are the ones who are arrested in their own adolescence. I hope you bitches are having fun playing with these emotionally deformed children.
Sex is the most bonding activity between 2 human beings that there is. Certainly it is fraught with anxieties, confusion, and risk, but only the most pathological males can have even marginally satisfying sex with a woman and not experience deep warm and tender feelings toward her which will persist for the remainder of his life, unless the woman does something to destroy them, which all too many women do. Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D, in a book written 25 years ago put it this way regarding men's turn-ons: "he will love you more the more skillfully you sense and use it". A woman who understands a man's releasers and incorporates them into lovemaking with anything resembling subtlety will have the man eating out of her hand for life.
This relationship between sexual satisfaction and emotional bonding holds equally true in reverse. Unsatisfying sex will breed deep and subtle resentment. The worse the sex, the greater the resentment. There is only one thing more bewildering and upsetting to a man than a woman who thinks her part of sex is done when she shows up, and that he both owes her satisfaction from the experience and after the fact owes her for the opportunity to provide her satisfaction. This one thing is the woman who shows remarkable skill and subtlety in finding and using a man's turn-OFFS, offending and disgusting his every sensibility, then blames his lack of response on some defect within him. There is a special kind of hatred that men reserve for such women.
It is evidence of the power and persistence of the male sex drive that men will return to such women just to get their rocks off, and in fact this is less due to sexual desire than to an inability to believe that anyone could possibly be THAT stupid and insensitive. Many men are also so confused and conflicted about their own sexuality, and have so much shame tied up with it, that they do not realize how pathological the experience was. Men who are clearer about it simply never call back. Only now, in the 1990s, this has become a criminal act.
Male sexuality is extremely undervalued, just as female sexuality is extremely overvalued. In this culture men are conditioned to believe that their only source of intimacy and love is the woman who is their mate and the only means they have to get female sexuality, intimacy, and love is to purchase it with their performance and their economic assets. This impoverishes both men and woman because it destroys the trust and faith in each other that is essential to intimacy. Men need to reclaim the value of their sexuality, if necessary by refusing to have sex with any woman who does not value his as highly as he values hers and by making it an absolute condition that she respects and honors his needs, rather that telling him what they "should" be.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Thursday, April 14, 2005
EOTM: The Biological Foundations of Sexuality
Sexuality by itself is a very simple process which is easy to observe objectively. There are a great many other aspects which are very complex, difficult to observe, and prone to much distortion due to their subjective nature. No one spends much time worrying about why human beings don't eat rocks, the reasons are pretty obvious to anyone with an IQ above single digits. No one applies moral concepts to the fact that we don't. However, human values, desires, and vague concepts of "morality" cloud most peoples' ability to regard sexuality with any degree of objectivity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I suspect that you came here looking for answers in one of the topics in the table above. If you are one of those people who always reads the last page or chapter of a novel first, there is nothing I can do to prevent you from skipping over the contents of this page to "get right to the meat". However, if you do, you will have wasted your own time as well as mine because an understanding of these basic concepts is fundamental to understanding their expression in human behavior.
Second, since this is a web page and not a graduate school textbook, some definitions to explicitly narrow the topics to ones which can be productively deal with in such a brief forum:
Sex - (from the latin secus, division, the same root that gives us section and segment.) A general term covering all aspects of the form of biological reproduction which involves two separate packages (or cells) of genetic material, gametes, uniting to form a composite cell, a zygote or embryo, which has the capacity to develop into a mature member of the same species. Virtually all multi-celled organisms reproduce sexually. It is nearly universal in the animal kingdom and one of several reproductive strategies in the plant kingdom.
Sexuality - having sexual characteristics, ie. differentiated into one of 2 genders and possessing the attributes characteristic of that gender which allow differentiation.
Male - the gender whose role in reproduction is limited to handing over its genetic material to the other gender, called female. The male package of genetic material is generally called a sperm.
Female - the gender whose role in reproduction is to receive genetic material from the male, provide the environment for joining of the 2 gametes, and provide the food source and environment necessary for the zygote or embryo to develop to the point where it can survive outside that environment. The female package of genetic material is generally called an ovum or egg.
Humans, like all animals, are divided into male and female. ("male and female they were created"). Each plays a specific role in reproduction which is essential to survival of the species. You are here to read this because thousands of generations of humans have engaged in sexual reproduction to keep our species from dying out. As eating (something other than rocks) is essential to survival of the individual, reproduction is essential to the survival of the species.
All this seems so simple and obvious that it seems ludicrous to have to state, like explaining that people don't eat rocks and why. But, in a culture where some emotionally ill individuals are able to classify ALL sex between human beings as a violent crime (and be taken the LEAST BIT SERIOUSLY!) and women feel compelled to paint their faces with an amalgum of animal waste products and toxic pigments in order to attract the attention of men, it is obvious that a return to the basics is long overdue.
An individual member of any species is the result of the joining of an ovum and a sperm. These are specialized cells within a multi-celled organism made up of many types of differentiated cells. Blood cells carry the oxygen we need to live, bone cells make us different from jellyfish, muscle cells allow us to move, gamete cells allow us to reproduce. Every warm blooded creature on the face of the earth is the result of the union of one egg with one sperm, how in the world did the mechanics of bringing this about get so incredibly confused?
Every living thing has a life cycle. Nothing lives forever. New life starts, grows, reaches reproductive maturity, ages, and dies. There is a, often brief, time window of this cycle when the conditions which will allow successful reproduction prevail. In order to avoid extintion, males of the species must deliver a sperm cell to unite with an ovum cell within that window. Human females often speak of this phenomenon as their "biological clock".
At this point the female element of the pair takes over, retaining posession of the ovum+sperm composite and adding or providing nourishment to it which allows it to develop beyond the single cell stage. The male element is now done with his part of the process and is totally superfluous. In many species he dies. This is true of all flowering plants, many insects (and their relatives the arthopods or spiders), and some fish (salmon being the most familiar example). In the reproductive sense, males are utterly expendable once they've done their sperm donor duty.
There are several key concepts within this which need to be highlighted. First, if the male delivers the sperm either too early or too late the whole process is wasted. The egg will die unfertilized. Second, and this is extremely important, since the egg is the gamete that will eventually develop, nature significantly favors it when allocating biological resources. It generally contains many times the amount of cellular material that the sperm does so it has the energy to develop once fertilized. Third, it stays in place while the sperm is mobile so the amount of cellular material does not hamper its ability to play in the reproductive olympics. Sperm, on the other hand, would have their mobility hampered by excess weight so they are lean and mean. Many simply do not have the energy to make the entire journey and die en route. If there were an equal number of sperm and ova produced, this would mean that many ova would also die unfertilized. Therefor sperm are produced in numbers far in excess of the number of eggs. The ratios are millions to one. This also goes with the second point, because the amount of cellular material required to produce one sperm is only a minute fraction of the material required to produce an egg. Mother nature is pretty efficient. Given the same amount of raw material she can manufacture either one egg, or multiple thousands of sperm. Given two loads of the material she manufactures one egg out of one load, and millions of sperm out of the other. The vast majority of sperm are simply discarded. As long as one gets to the egg at the right time, everything is copacetic.
The right time is the key phrase here. An ovum is receptive to fertilization for a very brief time. Thus any male element of a species which delivers the sperm at the wrong time will have its genetics drop out of the gene pool by the process of natural selection. Only those males who manufacture and deliver their sperm at the same time the egg is ripe get their genes to play in the next round of the evolution sweepstakes. In plants, the bloom contains both the male and female elements so that the pollen (male) and the ova (female) develop and ripen concurrently. (To all you hay fever and allergy sufferers, I hope you find it humorous that all your suffering is caused by leftover plant sperm.) In animals, there is a condition or state known as estrus, or heat, which the female enters when she is fertile. Like her distant plant relatives' condition of blooming, this state is clearly distinguishable from her normal state of infertility. And like their male counterparts in the plant world, the stamens of the bloom, male animals are stimulated to let loose their sperm at that time.
That, in a nutshell, is MALE sexuality.
Now I seriously doubt that you came here looking for Biology ½. You were probably curious about the sexuality of human males and explantions of their sexual behavior in the 1990s. Unfortunately, it is precisely the ignorance and denial of the role of the biology of maleness which is causing so much pain, confusion, and animosity these days. If this were fully understood and accepted, there would be little more discussion of it than of eating rocks. Misconceptions regarding Love, Romance, Marriage, and Human Behavior dominate the public discourse. It is to these topics we now must turn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Biological Context of Sexuality and Mating
Sexual Psychology
The Nitty Gritty of Male Sexuality
Romance
Love
Shocking! Simply Shocking!
The Socio-Cultural Context of Sexuality and Marriage
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I suspect that you came here looking for answers in one of the topics in the table above. If you are one of those people who always reads the last page or chapter of a novel first, there is nothing I can do to prevent you from skipping over the contents of this page to "get right to the meat". However, if you do, you will have wasted your own time as well as mine because an understanding of these basic concepts is fundamental to understanding their expression in human behavior.
Second, since this is a web page and not a graduate school textbook, some definitions to explicitly narrow the topics to ones which can be productively deal with in such a brief forum:
Sex - (from the latin secus, division, the same root that gives us section and segment.) A general term covering all aspects of the form of biological reproduction which involves two separate packages (or cells) of genetic material, gametes, uniting to form a composite cell, a zygote or embryo, which has the capacity to develop into a mature member of the same species. Virtually all multi-celled organisms reproduce sexually. It is nearly universal in the animal kingdom and one of several reproductive strategies in the plant kingdom.
Sexuality - having sexual characteristics, ie. differentiated into one of 2 genders and possessing the attributes characteristic of that gender which allow differentiation.
Male - the gender whose role in reproduction is limited to handing over its genetic material to the other gender, called female. The male package of genetic material is generally called a sperm.
Female - the gender whose role in reproduction is to receive genetic material from the male, provide the environment for joining of the 2 gametes, and provide the food source and environment necessary for the zygote or embryo to develop to the point where it can survive outside that environment. The female package of genetic material is generally called an ovum or egg.
Humans, like all animals, are divided into male and female. ("male and female they were created"). Each plays a specific role in reproduction which is essential to survival of the species. You are here to read this because thousands of generations of humans have engaged in sexual reproduction to keep our species from dying out. As eating (something other than rocks) is essential to survival of the individual, reproduction is essential to the survival of the species.
All this seems so simple and obvious that it seems ludicrous to have to state, like explaining that people don't eat rocks and why. But, in a culture where some emotionally ill individuals are able to classify ALL sex between human beings as a violent crime (and be taken the LEAST BIT SERIOUSLY!) and women feel compelled to paint their faces with an amalgum of animal waste products and toxic pigments in order to attract the attention of men, it is obvious that a return to the basics is long overdue.
An individual member of any species is the result of the joining of an ovum and a sperm. These are specialized cells within a multi-celled organism made up of many types of differentiated cells. Blood cells carry the oxygen we need to live, bone cells make us different from jellyfish, muscle cells allow us to move, gamete cells allow us to reproduce. Every warm blooded creature on the face of the earth is the result of the union of one egg with one sperm, how in the world did the mechanics of bringing this about get so incredibly confused?
Every living thing has a life cycle. Nothing lives forever. New life starts, grows, reaches reproductive maturity, ages, and dies. There is a, often brief, time window of this cycle when the conditions which will allow successful reproduction prevail. In order to avoid extintion, males of the species must deliver a sperm cell to unite with an ovum cell within that window. Human females often speak of this phenomenon as their "biological clock".
At this point the female element of the pair takes over, retaining posession of the ovum+sperm composite and adding or providing nourishment to it which allows it to develop beyond the single cell stage. The male element is now done with his part of the process and is totally superfluous. In many species he dies. This is true of all flowering plants, many insects (and their relatives the arthopods or spiders), and some fish (salmon being the most familiar example). In the reproductive sense, males are utterly expendable once they've done their sperm donor duty.
There are several key concepts within this which need to be highlighted. First, if the male delivers the sperm either too early or too late the whole process is wasted. The egg will die unfertilized. Second, and this is extremely important, since the egg is the gamete that will eventually develop, nature significantly favors it when allocating biological resources. It generally contains many times the amount of cellular material that the sperm does so it has the energy to develop once fertilized. Third, it stays in place while the sperm is mobile so the amount of cellular material does not hamper its ability to play in the reproductive olympics. Sperm, on the other hand, would have their mobility hampered by excess weight so they are lean and mean. Many simply do not have the energy to make the entire journey and die en route. If there were an equal number of sperm and ova produced, this would mean that many ova would also die unfertilized. Therefor sperm are produced in numbers far in excess of the number of eggs. The ratios are millions to one. This also goes with the second point, because the amount of cellular material required to produce one sperm is only a minute fraction of the material required to produce an egg. Mother nature is pretty efficient. Given the same amount of raw material she can manufacture either one egg, or multiple thousands of sperm. Given two loads of the material she manufactures one egg out of one load, and millions of sperm out of the other. The vast majority of sperm are simply discarded. As long as one gets to the egg at the right time, everything is copacetic.
The right time is the key phrase here. An ovum is receptive to fertilization for a very brief time. Thus any male element of a species which delivers the sperm at the wrong time will have its genetics drop out of the gene pool by the process of natural selection. Only those males who manufacture and deliver their sperm at the same time the egg is ripe get their genes to play in the next round of the evolution sweepstakes. In plants, the bloom contains both the male and female elements so that the pollen (male) and the ova (female) develop and ripen concurrently. (To all you hay fever and allergy sufferers, I hope you find it humorous that all your suffering is caused by leftover plant sperm.) In animals, there is a condition or state known as estrus, or heat, which the female enters when she is fertile. Like her distant plant relatives' condition of blooming, this state is clearly distinguishable from her normal state of infertility. And like their male counterparts in the plant world, the stamens of the bloom, male animals are stimulated to let loose their sperm at that time.
That, in a nutshell, is MALE sexuality.
Now I seriously doubt that you came here looking for Biology ½. You were probably curious about the sexuality of human males and explantions of their sexual behavior in the 1990s. Unfortunately, it is precisely the ignorance and denial of the role of the biology of maleness which is causing so much pain, confusion, and animosity these days. If this were fully understood and accepted, there would be little more discussion of it than of eating rocks. Misconceptions regarding Love, Romance, Marriage, and Human Behavior dominate the public discourse. It is to these topics we now must turn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Biological Context of Sexuality and Mating
Sexual Psychology
The Nitty Gritty of Male Sexuality
Romance
Love
Shocking! Simply Shocking!
The Socio-Cultural Context of Sexuality and Marriage
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
EOTM: The Socio-Cultural Context of Sexuality and Marriage
Human beings have the longest period of dependency of any form of life. Many animals reach the level of maturity to be self-sustaining within the social unit within a year. A few may require as long as 4 to 5 years, with sexual or reproductive maturity several more years after that. Humans are the only species which reaches reproductive maturity significantly before reaching social maturity.
Animals have evolved a wide variety of strategies for assuring that the young are cared for until they can feed and fend for themselves: from the many varieties of fish where the male carries the young in his mouth, and may actually hatch them there, through birds who usually share the burden of feeding the hatchlings because it takes both of them to fill those endlessly hungry mouths, to mammals who most often tend to develop mostly matriarchal social groups (herds or packs) where the general responsibility of protection is shared among the social unit even if the provision of food is still up to the mother, a precedent established by nursing. Humans are essentially social, or herd, animals. Social groups always have a concept of status and hierarchy.
As the human race made the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturally based permanent domiciles, the human herds (tribes or clans) began to congregate in larger permanent encampments called cities. The size and complexity of these cites began to demand a greater degree of specialization of skills and introduced the concepts of commerce or trade, money as a universal medium of exchange because barter would not work if one party already had a surplus of the offered commodity, and property or wealth. People moved from the shared living quarters of the lodge to individual residences. While they still tended to live in multi-generational groups, these groups were usually based on kinship and there was an increasing degree of separation between families. New methods of defining the social hierarchy were required since it is much easier to understand the status distinctions among a group of 30 people than it is among 30,000. Thus were born the concepts of class or caste and the accumulation of surplus wealth as a measure of status. Kinship became very important in making decisions regarding distrubution of that surplus wealth. While the rigidity of the physical infrastructure made mobility of the clan as a group less easy than previously, it also decreased the interdependence of individual clan members as it transferred the dependence onto the culture as a whole. Thus new means of social controls had to be developed. Laws and punishments began to replace totems, taboos, and the threat of being an outcast as a means of controlling individual behavior. The drawback to laws is that they require enforcement by group of specialists called "police" and administration by another group of specialists called "the court system". This was very expensive and required taxes to support, so organized religion evolved as a primary means of social control, with legality as a second level of recourse.
All this had a great effect on lengthening the period of dependency of the young. The concept of a state called "childhood" as separate from adulthood developed. Aboriginal cultures generally do not have adolescence. Once sexual maturity is reached, the child is treated as an adult, albeit an immature one. The transition is marked by the onset of menstruation in girls and by a culturally significant rite of passage for the boys. At that time they were recognized with full adult status. However their responsibilities did not change significantly since they had been gradually being integrated into the culture and were expected to make increasing contributions as they matured. The only thing like this which exists in our culture today is the family farm. At the turn of the century 98% of the population lived on farms while 2% lived in cities. Today those percentages are reversed. In urban environments, there is an extended period of childhood dependence, sometimes even twice as long as before if the child pursues higher professional education, and the transition is usually abrupt and discontinuous. Until that time it is the responsibility of the parents to "provide" for the child. In many cases the period of dependency now is equal to or greater than the normal human life span for most of the time humans have been on this planet.
This period of dependency is rigidly enforced by the social control mechanisms. In most jurisdictions it is illegal for persons below a certain age to hold jobs, which are in an industrilized society are the only means of providing for basic needs. The vast majority of "education" is simply a process of indoctrination in cultural concepts of how things "should" be and largely ignores the fundamental skills necessary to take care of oneself and others and conduct relationships. At some arbitrary point these children are dumped out into the "real" world and expected to be financially, emotionally, and personally successful. If they fail, society regards it as a failure or flaw which resides completely within them rather in society's perparation of them for the task.
Since the average puboid is functioning mostly from instinct and totally unprepared to assess the full consequences and burdens of being fruitful and make "rational" decisions to oppose their urges to do so, elaborate mechanisms of social controls have developed. It is far easier to isolate the flowers than to reign in millions of bees, so the control mechanisms generally concentrate on controlling access to the sexuality of the female. It is essential that NO bee pollinate her until SOME bee is both prepared and willing to partner with her in creating a suitable child rearing environment and sustain it for the next 18 to 25 years. Again, it is important to remember that during the time these cultural traditions were being developed most people did not live to see the age of 40. Children reached sexual maturity close to the end of their parents' life span. If the child were allowed to reproduce without a support system in place it was likely that the parents would die leaving the child and the grandchild to fend for themselves. This, of course, was intolerable since the probability is low that they would be able to do so without the support systems built into the clan or tribe. Since the biological imperative is to SURVIVE, all human cultures are built around the preservation of life of their members which is essential for survival of the species.
Since this is a discussion of male sexuality, so far we have largely ignored the influence of active female sexuality, concentrating on the passive attracting aspect. This is ludicrous because male sexuality doesn't exist without female sexuality. The word sex itself comes from the latin secus, to divide, the same root which gives us the words section and segment. The sexuality of each gender exists only in relation to the sexuality of the other. If it were not divided it would not be sex and would be just another behavior. The only thing which distinguishes masturbation from scratching is that masturbation produces sensations similar to those produced by sexual intercourse.
In the sociocultural context of agriculturally induced and supported urbanization some means of fertility control is required to prevent the population from rapidly outgrowing the food supply once the normal control mechanisms of mortality are removed. In the absence of mechanical (including chemical) means of fertility control, the next best thing is to control the behaviors that lead to fertility, ie coitus. The reason that these behavioral controls concentrated on the female and not the male are easy to understand from the mechanics of reproduction. If we take a population of 100 women and 100 men and apply behavioral controls to one gender which are 99% effective, we have very different results based on which gender we control. Applying the controls to men, leaving 1 man and 100 women with their sexuality unrestrained could potentially produce 100 babies. We've gotten nowhere. On the other hand, applying the controls to women and leaving 1 unrestrained woman to 100 unrestrained men would produce at most 1 baby and 1 very tired woman. Problem solved.
In addition, the consequences of unrestrained coitus fall disproportionately on the woman. The male "bee" can immediately be off looking for other flowers to pollinate while the woman has just incurred a responsibility which will consume most of her time and energy for the next several years. In this light it is not difficult to understand why women seem much less willing than men to engage in coitus. It is actually surprising that they are willing to engage in it at all, regardless of the pleasure it produces. In order to understand why they do, we must realize that the neat and clean division between the fruit bearer and the pollinator completely breaks down when we enter the animal kingdom.
Sex is a physical phenomenon. Babies are "assigned" a gender at birth based on physical characteristics. Even at this level there is a great deal of ambiguity. Thousands of babies are born each year with ambiguous genitals. Yet the need to divide, assign, categorize is so great that a baby not easily classified is usually surgically modified to assure that they fit into one category or the other. The results are often diastrous for the child.
In the behavioral arena, things are even worse. Aside from the actual specific mechanics of coitus which involve insertion of one part of the anatomy of the one called the "male" into an orifice of the one called the "female", there are absolutely no behaviors which are gender specific. There is an attribute of humanity that we all share which transcends the artifical distinctions we try to make. Part of this humanity is the tie to the natural world and the desire to reproduce and to engage in the behavior, coitus, which leads to reproduction. In the absence of social controls it is likely that females are as compelled to seek coitus when they are fertile as males are. We see this everywhere in the animal kingdom.
What distinguishes human females from most other mammals is the frequency of their fertility cycle and the fact that they may be sexually receptive even when not fertile or may become fertile at unexpected times. Thus the human female is potentially receptive to coitus at all times and may often seek it. This is the active aspect of female sexuality which is the target of the social control mechanisms. Closing the gateway to the womb is the most effective means of population control.
This is much easier said than done, since the biological imperative is driving every member of the species to contribute to its survival by reproduction and mother nature has provided a powerful carrot in the form of the pleasure of sexual orgasm. In general, the closer a population is to exceeding the limits of its food supply, the more extreme the measures used. In western culture, the so called "developed" nations, these controls tend toward the social and psychological. In the less developed nations, and particularly those where the prevailing religion is Islam, the controls are more extreme and grisly. A set of practices, collectively referred to as Female Genital Mutilation or FGM, are common in many cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Masked under such polite terms as "circumcision" or "excision" and justified by a bunch of lame excuses about health and religious traditions, all these practices amount to holding little girls down and chopping off their genitals. In the most extreme form the insides of the outer labia are cut away and the resulting wounds sewn together in such a manner that the woman must be "opened" surgically before coitus is possible.
And people accuse pagans of sacrificing babies.
What is amazing is that the vast majority of these practices are perfomed by women, who are often the most adamant about the need to continue them. What is disgusting, enraging, and tragic is that the continuation of this horrible practice is justified by the lame excuse that men want it. The power of the social controls and conditioning is so great that no matter how much opposition and resistance there is, this horrible practice is continued and that girls will often submit to it willingly knowing in advance exactly what is involved. Alice Walker refers to this as the "sexual blinding" of women.
Before the reader gets his/her racial prejudices up and starts self-congratulation on how much more "civilized" or advanced western culture is, a bit of thought about nose-jobs, boob-jobs, collagen injections, liposuction, electrolysis, and fake fingernails would be in order. On the male side, those utterly ridiculous looking little plugs of hair implants reflect the same drive to conform to society's ideal.
Even worse, the sex-negation practiced in the name of religion deprives the young woman of any joy from her sexuality, depriving her of the use of her genitals almost as effectively as removing them from her. Women in western culture are just as effectively "blinded" to the ability to see men as kind, gentle, and caring lovers by shame and by indoctrination with a hatred of sexuality, men, and maleness. Instead they see them as meal tickets, self-esteem providers and, paradoxically, as oppressors when they find that men simply are not able to provide enough to fill the emptiness that women feel. So women get angry and start bashing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Animals have evolved a wide variety of strategies for assuring that the young are cared for until they can feed and fend for themselves: from the many varieties of fish where the male carries the young in his mouth, and may actually hatch them there, through birds who usually share the burden of feeding the hatchlings because it takes both of them to fill those endlessly hungry mouths, to mammals who most often tend to develop mostly matriarchal social groups (herds or packs) where the general responsibility of protection is shared among the social unit even if the provision of food is still up to the mother, a precedent established by nursing. Humans are essentially social, or herd, animals. Social groups always have a concept of status and hierarchy.
As the human race made the transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturally based permanent domiciles, the human herds (tribes or clans) began to congregate in larger permanent encampments called cities. The size and complexity of these cites began to demand a greater degree of specialization of skills and introduced the concepts of commerce or trade, money as a universal medium of exchange because barter would not work if one party already had a surplus of the offered commodity, and property or wealth. People moved from the shared living quarters of the lodge to individual residences. While they still tended to live in multi-generational groups, these groups were usually based on kinship and there was an increasing degree of separation between families. New methods of defining the social hierarchy were required since it is much easier to understand the status distinctions among a group of 30 people than it is among 30,000. Thus were born the concepts of class or caste and the accumulation of surplus wealth as a measure of status. Kinship became very important in making decisions regarding distrubution of that surplus wealth. While the rigidity of the physical infrastructure made mobility of the clan as a group less easy than previously, it also decreased the interdependence of individual clan members as it transferred the dependence onto the culture as a whole. Thus new means of social controls had to be developed. Laws and punishments began to replace totems, taboos, and the threat of being an outcast as a means of controlling individual behavior. The drawback to laws is that they require enforcement by group of specialists called "police" and administration by another group of specialists called "the court system". This was very expensive and required taxes to support, so organized religion evolved as a primary means of social control, with legality as a second level of recourse.
All this had a great effect on lengthening the period of dependency of the young. The concept of a state called "childhood" as separate from adulthood developed. Aboriginal cultures generally do not have adolescence. Once sexual maturity is reached, the child is treated as an adult, albeit an immature one. The transition is marked by the onset of menstruation in girls and by a culturally significant rite of passage for the boys. At that time they were recognized with full adult status. However their responsibilities did not change significantly since they had been gradually being integrated into the culture and were expected to make increasing contributions as they matured. The only thing like this which exists in our culture today is the family farm. At the turn of the century 98% of the population lived on farms while 2% lived in cities. Today those percentages are reversed. In urban environments, there is an extended period of childhood dependence, sometimes even twice as long as before if the child pursues higher professional education, and the transition is usually abrupt and discontinuous. Until that time it is the responsibility of the parents to "provide" for the child. In many cases the period of dependency now is equal to or greater than the normal human life span for most of the time humans have been on this planet.
This period of dependency is rigidly enforced by the social control mechanisms. In most jurisdictions it is illegal for persons below a certain age to hold jobs, which are in an industrilized society are the only means of providing for basic needs. The vast majority of "education" is simply a process of indoctrination in cultural concepts of how things "should" be and largely ignores the fundamental skills necessary to take care of oneself and others and conduct relationships. At some arbitrary point these children are dumped out into the "real" world and expected to be financially, emotionally, and personally successful. If they fail, society regards it as a failure or flaw which resides completely within them rather in society's perparation of them for the task.
Since the average puboid is functioning mostly from instinct and totally unprepared to assess the full consequences and burdens of being fruitful and make "rational" decisions to oppose their urges to do so, elaborate mechanisms of social controls have developed. It is far easier to isolate the flowers than to reign in millions of bees, so the control mechanisms generally concentrate on controlling access to the sexuality of the female. It is essential that NO bee pollinate her until SOME bee is both prepared and willing to partner with her in creating a suitable child rearing environment and sustain it for the next 18 to 25 years. Again, it is important to remember that during the time these cultural traditions were being developed most people did not live to see the age of 40. Children reached sexual maturity close to the end of their parents' life span. If the child were allowed to reproduce without a support system in place it was likely that the parents would die leaving the child and the grandchild to fend for themselves. This, of course, was intolerable since the probability is low that they would be able to do so without the support systems built into the clan or tribe. Since the biological imperative is to SURVIVE, all human cultures are built around the preservation of life of their members which is essential for survival of the species.
Since this is a discussion of male sexuality, so far we have largely ignored the influence of active female sexuality, concentrating on the passive attracting aspect. This is ludicrous because male sexuality doesn't exist without female sexuality. The word sex itself comes from the latin secus, to divide, the same root which gives us the words section and segment. The sexuality of each gender exists only in relation to the sexuality of the other. If it were not divided it would not be sex and would be just another behavior. The only thing which distinguishes masturbation from scratching is that masturbation produces sensations similar to those produced by sexual intercourse.
In the sociocultural context of agriculturally induced and supported urbanization some means of fertility control is required to prevent the population from rapidly outgrowing the food supply once the normal control mechanisms of mortality are removed. In the absence of mechanical (including chemical) means of fertility control, the next best thing is to control the behaviors that lead to fertility, ie coitus. The reason that these behavioral controls concentrated on the female and not the male are easy to understand from the mechanics of reproduction. If we take a population of 100 women and 100 men and apply behavioral controls to one gender which are 99% effective, we have very different results based on which gender we control. Applying the controls to men, leaving 1 man and 100 women with their sexuality unrestrained could potentially produce 100 babies. We've gotten nowhere. On the other hand, applying the controls to women and leaving 1 unrestrained woman to 100 unrestrained men would produce at most 1 baby and 1 very tired woman. Problem solved.
In addition, the consequences of unrestrained coitus fall disproportionately on the woman. The male "bee" can immediately be off looking for other flowers to pollinate while the woman has just incurred a responsibility which will consume most of her time and energy for the next several years. In this light it is not difficult to understand why women seem much less willing than men to engage in coitus. It is actually surprising that they are willing to engage in it at all, regardless of the pleasure it produces. In order to understand why they do, we must realize that the neat and clean division between the fruit bearer and the pollinator completely breaks down when we enter the animal kingdom.
Sex is a physical phenomenon. Babies are "assigned" a gender at birth based on physical characteristics. Even at this level there is a great deal of ambiguity. Thousands of babies are born each year with ambiguous genitals. Yet the need to divide, assign, categorize is so great that a baby not easily classified is usually surgically modified to assure that they fit into one category or the other. The results are often diastrous for the child.
In the behavioral arena, things are even worse. Aside from the actual specific mechanics of coitus which involve insertion of one part of the anatomy of the one called the "male" into an orifice of the one called the "female", there are absolutely no behaviors which are gender specific. There is an attribute of humanity that we all share which transcends the artifical distinctions we try to make. Part of this humanity is the tie to the natural world and the desire to reproduce and to engage in the behavior, coitus, which leads to reproduction. In the absence of social controls it is likely that females are as compelled to seek coitus when they are fertile as males are. We see this everywhere in the animal kingdom.
What distinguishes human females from most other mammals is the frequency of their fertility cycle and the fact that they may be sexually receptive even when not fertile or may become fertile at unexpected times. Thus the human female is potentially receptive to coitus at all times and may often seek it. This is the active aspect of female sexuality which is the target of the social control mechanisms. Closing the gateway to the womb is the most effective means of population control.
This is much easier said than done, since the biological imperative is driving every member of the species to contribute to its survival by reproduction and mother nature has provided a powerful carrot in the form of the pleasure of sexual orgasm. In general, the closer a population is to exceeding the limits of its food supply, the more extreme the measures used. In western culture, the so called "developed" nations, these controls tend toward the social and psychological. In the less developed nations, and particularly those where the prevailing religion is Islam, the controls are more extreme and grisly. A set of practices, collectively referred to as Female Genital Mutilation or FGM, are common in many cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Masked under such polite terms as "circumcision" or "excision" and justified by a bunch of lame excuses about health and religious traditions, all these practices amount to holding little girls down and chopping off their genitals. In the most extreme form the insides of the outer labia are cut away and the resulting wounds sewn together in such a manner that the woman must be "opened" surgically before coitus is possible.
And people accuse pagans of sacrificing babies.
What is amazing is that the vast majority of these practices are perfomed by women, who are often the most adamant about the need to continue them. What is disgusting, enraging, and tragic is that the continuation of this horrible practice is justified by the lame excuse that men want it. The power of the social controls and conditioning is so great that no matter how much opposition and resistance there is, this horrible practice is continued and that girls will often submit to it willingly knowing in advance exactly what is involved. Alice Walker refers to this as the "sexual blinding" of women.
Before the reader gets his/her racial prejudices up and starts self-congratulation on how much more "civilized" or advanced western culture is, a bit of thought about nose-jobs, boob-jobs, collagen injections, liposuction, electrolysis, and fake fingernails would be in order. On the male side, those utterly ridiculous looking little plugs of hair implants reflect the same drive to conform to society's ideal.
Even worse, the sex-negation practiced in the name of religion deprives the young woman of any joy from her sexuality, depriving her of the use of her genitals almost as effectively as removing them from her. Women in western culture are just as effectively "blinded" to the ability to see men as kind, gentle, and caring lovers by shame and by indoctrination with a hatred of sexuality, men, and maleness. Instead they see them as meal tickets, self-esteem providers and, paradoxically, as oppressors when they find that men simply are not able to provide enough to fill the emptiness that women feel. So women get angry and start bashing.
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Back to “Gender War, Sexuality, and Love”
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
EOTM: Sexual Psychology - Part 3 - 40 to Closing Time
Part 1 Part 2
The 40s hold a variety of gifts for the man who has matured enough to savor them. Like the man whose taste buds have developed enough to be able to appreciate the subtlety and fullness of a dark beer or a rich red wine over the shallow sweetness and empty fizz of soda pop which children prefer, the mature man now sips life rather than guzzling it. He finds and appreciates all the subtle nuances of each mouthful before moving to the next instead of seeing how many bottles he can consume.
He has reached the point in his career where he has "made it", whatever "it" is going to be for him. He is on the track to wherever he is going, having passed many forks in the road and closed off many possible futures. Gone are the days of suffering under the burden of hearing "you can be anything you want to be if you just apply yourself" and having to figure out what to do with all this potential that he isn't living up to.
"After they've tortured and scared you for 20-odd years,
then they expect you to pick a career,
when you can't really function, you're so full of fear."
-- John Lennon, "Working Class Hero"
There are a great many things he can simply no longer be unless he is already well along the track to being, no matter how diligently he applies himself: sports hero; president of some country; world renowned scientist, statesman, humanitarian. In short, he is what he is and is likely to remain so.
His second "coming of age" has erased age differences between himself and all men who are not younger than he. Certainly, he may still seek the counsel of an older "elder" but he has enough experience of his own that he can immediately tell wisdom from nonsense. Unlike the days when he didn't know shit from shinola and was so desperately looking for answers and uncertain of himself that he would substitute the judgement of anyone who seemed more certain for his own, more and more he keeps his own counsel.
Aware that the average male does not live much beyond his early 70s, he realizes that it is now definitely 3rd quarter. He has already spent more time than he has left. As any wise investor reviews his investments periodically and makes adjustments to those which are not performing up to his satisfaction, he looks back at the way he has spent his time and energy and the other resources they have brought him. He begins to cut his losing investments and free up those resources to shift them into investments which have been paying off better for him.
Society calls this a "mid-life crisis". And a crisis it is, but not for the man as society tells him. Rather for society itself. This man represents a serious threat to the social order and must be intimidated back into his old ways, lest others see how free he has become and begin to follow the same path.
If too many step off the "work! earn! spend! achieve! succeed! conform! consume!" treadmill which powers consuming society, it will slowly grind to a halt. The dedication and drive which come from his great heart and love of life are what society lives on, what it consumes in order to support its own cancerous existance. If too many become unwilling to continue to let consuming society loot them for all their best, the looters will eventually starve to death. So society spits on him and tells him that his best is actually his worst, but oh-by-the-way he has to produce even more of it to atone for his ability to produce it in the first place. "From each according to his ability, to each according to her need."
The competition has become not who can demonstrate the greatest ability, but rather who can claim the greatest need, or who can claim their need the loudest. Everywhere he turns, he hears people screaming how they have been victimized by not being given to, enough. He hears how they are "oppressed" by the man's ability to produce, to do, to act; by his very ability which feeds, and clothes, and shelters them and makes them mobile. And they demand restitution for this horrible wrong in the form of more giving and providing. Thus, the restitution of today becomes the oppression of tomorrow, which will require restitution the day after, becoming the oppression of the next day, and so on.
The magical status of victimhood and the fact that we simply can NEVER blame a victim, never examine the role the victim played in creating their claimed victim status, never once hold them accountable for their own actions, completely absolves them of any responsibility. If the man cannot produce faster than they can consume and destroy, then the failure and fault lies entirely within him, NOT in their actions.
The flexible, soft, and fragile young seedling man; terrified by the specter of the shame of failure; tortured by physical and emotional pounding; trained to deny his own needs and pain in order to be of service to and produce for others; trapped by his own values and sense of honor into fulfilling responsibilities and living up to commitments coerced out of him before he had any possibility of understanding what they meant; driven half crazy by impossible and constantly changing expectations; forced to purchase every bit of love and approval he has ever received with his performance; has now grown into a tree. He has solid roots. Breezes do not bend him, they only stir his leaves. Only by chopping him down and sawing him into lumber can he truly be harmed.
The 40s hold a variety of gifts for the man who has matured enough to savor them. Like the man whose taste buds have developed enough to be able to appreciate the subtlety and fullness of a dark beer or a rich red wine over the shallow sweetness and empty fizz of soda pop which children prefer, the mature man now sips life rather than guzzling it. He finds and appreciates all the subtle nuances of each mouthful before moving to the next instead of seeing how many bottles he can consume.
He has reached the point in his career where he has "made it", whatever "it" is going to be for him. He is on the track to wherever he is going, having passed many forks in the road and closed off many possible futures. Gone are the days of suffering under the burden of hearing "you can be anything you want to be if you just apply yourself" and having to figure out what to do with all this potential that he isn't living up to.
"After they've tortured and scared you for 20-odd years,
then they expect you to pick a career,
when you can't really function, you're so full of fear."
-- John Lennon, "Working Class Hero"
There are a great many things he can simply no longer be unless he is already well along the track to being, no matter how diligently he applies himself: sports hero; president of some country; world renowned scientist, statesman, humanitarian. In short, he is what he is and is likely to remain so.
His second "coming of age" has erased age differences between himself and all men who are not younger than he. Certainly, he may still seek the counsel of an older "elder" but he has enough experience of his own that he can immediately tell wisdom from nonsense. Unlike the days when he didn't know shit from shinola and was so desperately looking for answers and uncertain of himself that he would substitute the judgement of anyone who seemed more certain for his own, more and more he keeps his own counsel.
Aware that the average male does not live much beyond his early 70s, he realizes that it is now definitely 3rd quarter. He has already spent more time than he has left. As any wise investor reviews his investments periodically and makes adjustments to those which are not performing up to his satisfaction, he looks back at the way he has spent his time and energy and the other resources they have brought him. He begins to cut his losing investments and free up those resources to shift them into investments which have been paying off better for him.
Society calls this a "mid-life crisis". And a crisis it is, but not for the man as society tells him. Rather for society itself. This man represents a serious threat to the social order and must be intimidated back into his old ways, lest others see how free he has become and begin to follow the same path.
If too many step off the "work! earn! spend! achieve! succeed! conform! consume!" treadmill which powers consuming society, it will slowly grind to a halt. The dedication and drive which come from his great heart and love of life are what society lives on, what it consumes in order to support its own cancerous existance. If too many become unwilling to continue to let consuming society loot them for all their best, the looters will eventually starve to death. So society spits on him and tells him that his best is actually his worst, but oh-by-the-way he has to produce even more of it to atone for his ability to produce it in the first place. "From each according to his ability, to each according to her need."
The competition has become not who can demonstrate the greatest ability, but rather who can claim the greatest need, or who can claim their need the loudest. Everywhere he turns, he hears people screaming how they have been victimized by not being given to, enough. He hears how they are "oppressed" by the man's ability to produce, to do, to act; by his very ability which feeds, and clothes, and shelters them and makes them mobile. And they demand restitution for this horrible wrong in the form of more giving and providing. Thus, the restitution of today becomes the oppression of tomorrow, which will require restitution the day after, becoming the oppression of the next day, and so on.
The magical status of victimhood and the fact that we simply can NEVER blame a victim, never examine the role the victim played in creating their claimed victim status, never once hold them accountable for their own actions, completely absolves them of any responsibility. If the man cannot produce faster than they can consume and destroy, then the failure and fault lies entirely within him, NOT in their actions.
The flexible, soft, and fragile young seedling man; terrified by the specter of the shame of failure; tortured by physical and emotional pounding; trained to deny his own needs and pain in order to be of service to and produce for others; trapped by his own values and sense of honor into fulfilling responsibilities and living up to commitments coerced out of him before he had any possibility of understanding what they meant; driven half crazy by impossible and constantly changing expectations; forced to purchase every bit of love and approval he has ever received with his performance; has now grown into a tree. He has solid roots. Breezes do not bend him, they only stir his leaves. Only by chopping him down and sawing him into lumber can he truly be harmed.
He looks at the fruit he has borne, the shelter he has provided to the small creatures who have nested in his branches, the way his roots have secured and held the soil and kept it from washing or blowing away, and realizes how little he owes the looters. He looks at the weeds which have been screaming that his roots have robbed them of the opportunity to seek nourishment and realizes that the truth of this accusation does not change the weeds into food crops and no longer feels any compassion for the weeds. He looks at the insects which have been boring into his trunk for years trying to weaken him and realizes that, though they have hurt him, they have not weakened him enough for his trunk to break. He looks at the squirrels who have died in his branches because they were too weak and sick to survive, or made a fatal error in judgement and fell to their deaths, and realizes that he neither killed them nor could have saved them. He realizes that all that has been expected and demanded of him he has done to the best of his ability, limited by his own nature and the richness of the soil in which hapstance placed him.
He realizes that if another tree next to him grew in soil so poor that his roots could not gain solid hold, or the insects had eaten away the trunk or the roots, and than tree had fallen over and crushed someone's house, or car, or even killed someone, that there was absolutely nothing he could have done to prevent it. He no longer feels guilt about that which he did not cause and could not have prevented. He thinks about all those who have shamed him over the fact that he only produced one kind of fruit, no matter how abundant, and tried to shame him for the fact that he did not produce apples, and peaches, and pears, and berries, and corn, and cauliflower, and T-bone steaks, and diamond rings, and new cars, and expensive tennis shoes; and he feels no shame because no tree on earth produces all those things. Only trees in the fantasies of people who have lost touch with reality. He looks at the people who have sawed off his branches and been angry that they were not as strong as oak, at the same time they were not as soft and light as balsa, at the same time they were not as beautiful as walnut; because nothing can be simultaneously both what it is and its opposite.
He looks at all the creatures which have been fed and sheltered and provided useful things by him while providing no nourishment to him except for their shit which fell on the ground above his roots, and realizes that he owes them NOTHING!
So he turns his attention back to his roots which do provide him with nourishment, and to the sun which powers everything that lives with its energy, and his purpose for living, which is to gather that energy and use it and convert it into solid form through a transformation process that is as close to real magic as any human will ever see; and becomes deaf to their lamentations.
Men in their 40s who manage to escape the trap of arrested adolescence, which society desperately tries to keep them in, look for something entirely different in a woman than they did when they were 13 or 17 or even 25. He is too deeply rooted to be transplanted, trying to do so would kill him. As a seedling or even a sapling, he could be uprooted and moved and still able to grow new roots. No more. Besides, it would take a monstrous crane to rip him out of the ground and the process would probably break him into pieces. He no longer tolerates the process of chopping off pieces of himself to make him look "prettier". He has assumed his mature form and this is the way he looks. His job is NOT to look pretty, his job is take nourishment from his roots and energy from the sun and bind that energy into something which would not exist if he had not lived, through a magical process that only he can do. Anyone who tries to chop off a piece of him now and hide the destructive nature of the chopping under the polite euphemism of "pruning" is seen as the liar she is.
If a year comes when the soil has grown too poor, too exhausted for him to have the nourishment to bear fruit, and she comes out to scream at him that she isn't getting her needs met and is hungry, he doesn't reach down within his own cells for the raw material to create fruit to feed her, eating up his own guts and destroying himself for her, he lets her go hungry and is deaf to her victim's lamentations.
If she poisons the soil he grows in, and therefor him, by dumping the most toxic vicious poisonous substances she can find on his roots, he stops growing and fruiting and puts out minimum leaves, just enough to keep himself alive and hopes that he can wait her out and that she will stop poisoning him before she kills him. If they are lucky and he has chosen well, she will wake up to her insanity and pour clean fresh water on his roots to wash away the poisons. If she doesn't, he and his love and wish to provide for her will eventually die, and she will be left to find a young sapling to try to shape. Or perhaps another tree of the same age, but without such deep roots so it has never grown into an adult tree, but has remained stunted. If she has learned from her mistakes, she can help the young tree or the stunted adult grow into a mature and productive tree. Sadly for both her and the trees, that is not very likely.
Women today had better wake up to just how little they have to offer a man these days. There is an endless supply of arrested adolescents, because they are the ones obsessed with the objects which are sold for the money which buys the stuff that is stored in the house that Jack built. Society cannot allow boys to grow into men, because men will not feel so inadequate that they have to "prove" they love her by buying her completely useless chunks of transparent carbon. Men don't drive their ego around on 4 wheels and are not impressed by women who are impressed by men who do. Men detest the look, smell, and most of all the taste of that shit that women keep 60 different varieties to paint on their faces to make them attractive to arrested adolescents.
Men eventually outgrow their need to buy love, because they realize that all the love they've bought doesn't taste like love. It tastes like shit. And one day they get sick of eating shit.
The greatest gift that nature gives men in their 40s and beyond is that they are no longer ruled by their testicles and their testosterone. They no longer have mother nature shouting in their ears "Slacker! Get busy! I didn't give you life to sit around making money, I gave it to you so that you would carry it on. Now get with it and do your part to carry on the species!" They no longer have to live on a diet of shit that they try to see as "love" because that's what people tell them it is. They no longer have to view the fact that what they are being fed tastes like shit as their own failure to not make it taste like love, instead of realizing that it really is shit. They no longer have to be genetic groupies. They do, however, need to stop thinking of themselves as broken vibrators.
The sad truth is that young men in their 20s and 30s can do this too. All they need is an older man who knows it to show them the way. The way is not easy, and it will be very lonely. But no more lonely than the way they are doing it now. Perhaps it is necessary to wander those 40 years in the wilderness to realize how little women are willing to give today compared to how much they expect to receive. Perhaps it is necessary to sleep with several horrible women to realize that sex can be so demeaning and downright unpleasant that living without sex is far better. Perhaps it is necessary to spend a significant period of time alone to realize that you are far less miserable alone than with someone whose major joy in life seems to be how much poison she can pour on your roots and how many creative ways she can find to deflate your ego, which she knows exactly how big it "should" be.
A firm erection on a delicate fellow REALLY IS the adventurous juncture of ego and courage. Courage men have in abundant supply. Men are generators of life and love, and nothing takes more courage than that. Women are out to murder men's egos, and men's desire for those women dies with them.
I part on these admonishments.
To men:
Begin to apply the "one strike, you're out" rule. The first time a woman tears you or any man down in your presence, walk away and don't look back. You are not the terrible creature they are trying to convince you that you are. You are a source and generator of life. Do not demean that gift anymore by being party to its slander. Start by learning to think of yourself as a divine being, a representative of the creative force on earth. Learn to recognize the divine creative force in women, as well as the hag and THE BITCH. Let the bitches fall on each other and consume themselves, do not let them feed on your body, mind, soul, emotions, and the fruits thereof. Feed only those who feed you. Leave the arrested adolescents and looters to perish from their destruction of each other. If you were conditioned before you could walk, talk, or control your bowels to think of yourself as an object, find a way to let go of that. If you think of other people as objects, find a way to let go of that too. You are the steward of life, it is your responsibility to protect it for all the children. Don't fuck it up.
To Women:
Get over your silly selves. Grow up. No man alive owes you a goddamn thing for something that some man did to some woman hundreds of years ago. Only insects demand that there is no individuality, only the hive. You are not the designated recipient of restitution for every wrong done every woman by a man for the entire history of the human race. No man who has not harmed you directly has harmed you at all. If he is guilty of anything by living in a culture where someone has been harmed, you are no less guilty. Look to the example of Dr. Martin Luther King, who spoke for a people with far worse grievances than women's. By following a path of non-violence and refusing to indulge infantile tantrums of revenge and hatred, Dr. King showed us how to put the animosities behind us. He brought us much farther than all the burning and shouting ever will. Your panties are not gold lined, and what's in them is getting less valuable every day because you wrap it in the toxic waste of your own self-pitying bullshit. Men cannot shove power down your throats, we can hand it to you and pour it on your heads and you still will not have it until you believe that you have it. The secret of power is that it belongs to and automatically happens to anyone who is willing to pick it up and use it. No one can ever GIVE you equality. As long as you are waiting for someone to "hand it over" you will sit mired in your helpless victim bullshit, for it is the very waiting and dependence on someone to hand it over that makes you powerless. The power is right in front of you, pick it up and shut the fuck up. This part of the audience to your histrionic melodrama of victimhood is bored with this plot and wants to see something new. If the only power you have is the power to destroy, and you are so helpless that you cannot do even that unless you exploit the emotional bond of a man trying to love by by being a vicious bitch, then you are a cancer in the midst of life and do not deserve to live. You are a looter and a thief, and no longer will be allowed into my emotional world to steal and destroy.
To All:
Read "Atlas Shrugged" and see how nothing today is really any different than it was 40 years ago when a brilliant and insightful woman chronicled the inevitable results of a society addicted to destructive consumption. Decide whether you are a creator or a looter, and whether you can commit to the Pledge:
"I swear, by my life and my love for it, that I will never live my life for the sake of another, nor ask another to live for mine."
If you can, then: Harm none, do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law.
This is John Galt speaking, I WILL end this if I can.
- Zed -
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