Sex & Sensibilities

I’ve just about made it through Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, at long last, as it’s been on my bucket list for awhile. It has arguably the greatest opening line of any novel, which has always made me want to continue with it, but apart from the odd nice observation or turn of phrase here and there, it’s been a bit of a slog.

I’ve been trying to withhold judgement or limit my expectations, since it’s a relatively ‘early’ novel (1813), but as with another highly regarded book from roughly the same period, Wuthering Heights (1847), I found it to be extremely limited in accomplishment and amateurish in execution: with both books I had the problem several times of not knowing who was talking to who on the page, which would seem to me a very elementary mistake to make when writing a novel. And then realizing this was taking place going on a hundred years after Gulliver’s Travels, which suffers from none of these deficiencies.

Most of all it’s been making me think about the differences between male and female art - Austen, after all, is perhaps the highest regarded female author there is, and especially in Britain is always mandatorily listed in the ‘top tens’ of great writers.

But why? Her strengths are few - mostly just an ear for, and wry observation of, middle-class life and gossip. Whereas, in terms of invention, originality, drama, plot, tension, sustained humour, concision, and most of all scope, she is nothing at all to write home about.

Nothing exists for her outside the comfortable drawing rooms and pleasantly-kept gardens of her world. The book was written - and set - during a time of enormous upheaval and drama and death - the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars - and yet the only flicker of acknowledgement of this is the occasional mentions of the young army officers, newly stationed in town, who are of interest only as potential marriage prospects. There is an absolute absence of curiosity about the wider ramifications of the war, the political changes daily taking place, about the horror those men are heading to or coming from - let alone the experiences of the ordinary footsoldiers. Her vision is microscopic: all that matters to her are the internal frettings of a woman in search of a marriage.

Austen made light of this herself, even writing of one character. “without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object”. But though Austen recognizes how deeply cringey and unpleasant this is, her avatar in the book, Elizabeth, is shown to be no different from the rest of the womanfolk: when the protagonist of Pride & Prejudice improbably ends up at the country home of her love interest Mr Darcy, the long, loving descriptions of the grounds and the estate, the decoration of the house, even the furniture, are all an integral part of the changeover of her feelings, all plus points and incentives on the growing list of advantages to bag him. Essentially saying ‘soon, all this will be yours’.

This is another profound difference between the sexes, for if a man - then or now - was writing about a woman he had met, and began listing all her wealth and shiny objects, about how she has a swimming pool that he looks forward to swimming in every day once they are married and she’s taking care of his every want and whim forever…. everybody, woman or man, would simply think him a heartless cad or a ridiculous gigolo. The idea that such material covetousness would be a fundamental part of his ‘love’ for her would be unthinkable in any sympathetic male character. It would not, in fact, be recognized as ‘love’ at all. And yet this fetishization of wealth and/or status is still the rule for female-written women characters in practically every ‘Romance’ novel there is, from Jane Austen right up to 50 Shades Of Grey.

To return to my original point: Austen is widely held to be the greatest female author, and yet her objective accomplishments are few. In this she illustrates in microcosm a general disparity between the sexes in ambition and achievement and, well… genius.

For example, in literature there is no female equivalent to Shakespeare, Joyce, Tolstoy, Dickens, Milton….. There’s no female Tolkien - a woman spending decades building a world for which she wrote dictionaries in an invented language and long books of political history and mythology before even publishing a word. The nearest female equivalent would probably be J.K. Rowling, a mediocre and derivative hack who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. The former is the product of an all-consuming obsession, a drive to break new ground no-one has walked before, to do what previously would have been thought to be impossible. The latter is a nice, safe, part-time hobby that paid well.

On the other hand, and to be fair, there’s no male equivalent I can think of to, say, Anaïs Nin, but then she herself is perhaps the most extreme example of the solipsism I’m addressing: the subject of almost all famous female writers is the internal feelings of a single woman.

This lack of vision, the lack of ability or inclination to rise up above and out of oneself, attempting to reach far beyond one’s grasp, is largely why there are no great female composers - no female Bach, or Mozart, or Debussy or Mahler or Beethoven or Wagner or Stravinsky or so many others. Even though all you need to write a symphony is some paper, a pen and a piano, the middle class women of the 19th century, who had more free time and piano lessons than anybody else alive, came up with precisely nothing, not one orchestral work of any note.

I already (unintentionally) made a lot of people angry by pointing out awhile back the incontrovertible fact that there are no great all-female rock & roll bands - yes, a few good little cult acts like The Slits or The Dixies Chicks or The Go-Gos or whoever, but none that achieved anything like the universally recognized (and recognizable) body of work of The Beatles, The Stones, Black Sabbath, The Clash, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Sex Pistols, The Smiths, R.E.M., U2, etcetera etcetera etcetera…

Now, part of that is simply because of how hard it is to keep an all-girl band together, when at least half the band will want to quit and become a mother instead within the first 5 years. But it’s also just because of the lack of shared technical excellence and overwhelming drive to eclipse everything by everybody (male or female) that has come before them. There ARE very important female figures in the history of rock & roll, like Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Carole King, Nina Simone, Laurie Anderson and others: my point has always been simply that either they worked alone, or almost 100% exclusively with men. Any great female singer you can think of, the entire musical architecture built around and supporting her singing was constructed pretty much exclusively by fellas. Just as in every other medium.

Even female magicians: right now I’m hooked on watching Penn & Teller’s Fool Us, and every time a woman appears onstage, I instantly know what I’m going to see: an old trick, performed at an amateur level, dressed up in an appealing and well-thought out presentation. The focus is always much more on the colours, the clothes, the backdrops, the character she is playing, rather than actual technical ability. The female magician simply refuses to spend decades sitting in front of a mirror practising with cards, or cups and balls, at the expense of all else, or obsessively designing and building device after device after device to reach towards some new standard of greatness.

And that’s a perfectly sensible position to have - to want a well-rounded, pleasant life instead of one of mania and single-minded obsession. But that’s also why no woman got to the North Pole, or the top of Everest, or up in an aeroplane, or down to the bottom of the sea, until long after the first man bit the bullet and made the trip.

5 Reasons 'No-One Is Born Gay Or Straight' Is Horseshit

This is a response to E. Jane Ward's article "No-one Is Born Gay Or Straight Here Are 5 Reasons Why". You'll probably want to take a look at it first so the following makes sense: 

FIVE REASONS THIS IS HORSESHIT:

1. The 'reasons' it offers up AREN'T 'reasons at all, only opinions, and opinions hugely coloured by a single, specific ideology at that.


2. Science. There IS no science. Its entire argument hinges on the idea that the body of scientific evidence that exists is there only because the scientists - ALL of them - found only what their society had somehow tacitly instructed them to look for. But of course no science is offered to back up this contrary position. The one source offered in the WHOLE THREE-THOUSAND WORD ARTICLE is a bit of pop culture fluff 'Brain Storm' - which I dimly recall getting out from the library and reading myself - that the author has ransacked for her 'arguments' here. My recollection of the book is that it does precisely the same thing: because it has no evidence of any kind whatsoever, the entirety of the book is simply spent trying to make you doubt the intentions, honesty and results of the thousands of scientists who actually DID experiments and came up with results that make her tiny brain feel uncomfortable.

The best she can manage is to say 'People like to cite “the overwhelming scientific evidence” that sexual orientation is biological in nature.  But show me a study that claims to have proven this, and I will show you a flawed research design.' But of course she has no studies to prove the opposite, and cherry picks a trivial example (the length of women's fingers?) which you've never heard anyone seriously put forward as any kind of final, conclusive proof in the real world.


3. Argument from authority. This is circular thinking: 'Feminists tell us that feminism is correct because feminists tell us that feminist theory is correct'. IF you already believe the radical feminist theory that gender (along with just about everything else) is a social construct (for which, again, there is no empirical evidence) THEN what is being said here MAY make some semblance of coherent sense to you. You'll be able to follow the crazed logic, anyway. If you DON'T already believe what we say.... well then you're simply wrong. AND a bad person.

4. The assumption of a conspiracy to suppress the non-existent evidence to the contrary. Again, no reason to believe this whatsoever. The argument is purely ideological.

Couple random examples of her flawed reasoning:

a)'We may find (as Simon LeVay did) that men who identify as gay share a certain trait—a larger VIP SCN nucleus of the hypothalamus, for instance.  But how do we know that this “enlargement” is a symptom or cause of their homosexuality, and not, say, a symptom or cause of their general propensity for bravery, creativity, or rebellion? '

Well, because there are plenty of brave, creative and rebellious men out there who are not gay. That's why. Again, no evidence OF ANY KIND to the contrary is presented. The entire case for the prosecution is worthy of OJ Simson's lawyer: 'all evidence shows us that this is the case, but HOW CAN WE BE SURE? If there is ANY doubt, of ANY kind, about ANY THING, then obviously OUR version of events (for which we have no proof at all) is correct!"

b)'When young college men stick their fingers in each other’s butts while being hazed by their frat brothers, we don’t call this gay — we call this “[b]oys gone wild!” '

Um, no... I think most people would call that pretty damn gay.


5. The argument throughout is that science has found only what it was looking for and ignored or refused to believe any evidence to the contrary. But she shows no awareness of any kind that this precisely is what the entire article she has written is doing. She is, for instance offering up the argument that gender is a social construct, when that itself is an IDEOLOGICAL construct, with (once again) no actual evidence to back it up.

By her own admission, she is a girl who used to like men, went to university, got into feminism, took a women's studies class which taught her she should be repulsed by the men she previously desired and so now FOR EXPLICITLY POLITICAL REASONS is living as a lesbian(!) (go look - I'm not making this shit up).

Now, the number of people who can identify with THIS particular experience of sexuality is statistically very, very, very small, but she is insisting HER (current) experience is not only valid for her but the objective, fundamental reality for everyone else ('Don't you see it's SOCIETY that is telling you don't want to go to bed with me?!!')

The only thing this article demonstrates is how political ideology can fuck your head up and prevent you from acknowledging what is observably happening right in front of your face. It certainly would be fascinating to come back in 20 years and see how this woman is living then.

5 ½. What is most repugnant about all of this is you would think any sane, compassionate person in favour of gay rights would welcome ANY evidence that people are born gay or lesbian: you can't, after all, send your child away for electroshock treatment or off to a Christian camp to be 'made normal' again if it is widely understood that your child simply is born the way they are, the same as if they are autistic, or dyslexic or lactose intolerant or whatever the hell else.

It's perplexed me for some time why anyone would be making these arguments - they seem so backwards, cruel and nonsensical - It makes sense only when you realize this has nothing to do with gay rights at all, that the position is being argued only for political reasons: to concede any biological realities of sex would weaken and run contrary to what I guess Marxist feminists would term 'Social constructionism of gender differences' (though I confess I do not know the ins and outs of their arcane gobbledegook terminologies).

If I were gay I would find it deeply insulting to have someone tell me that I desired people of my own sex only out of personal choice, and that I could CHOOSE to be different if I only tried. Just as much as I find it insulting to be told my desire for women is societally created too.

The whole sorry business is couch-jumping crazy, and in my humblesque opinion it is only because of the aggressively maintained insanity of Marxist-derived PC culture that this kind of thinking hasn't been laughed out of every discussion of sex the past 40 years, the same as talk of succubuses and the aphrodisiacal effects of ground rhino horn.

Ye gods!

Cowpatriarchy

A rock-climbing trip to the countryside and a wander through its verdant fields of bovine ruminants led me to reflect once again upon a great truth about life, sex differences, men and women:

Put one bull into a field full of cows; come back a year later and you’ll find a field full of calves (and one very happy bull).

Put one cow into a field full of bulls and a year later you’ve only got one calf (and one very unhappy cow).

This seems to me a very good illustration of the differences between how the male and female of our own and other species came to be valued and treated: Eggs are costly; sperm is cheap. Women are valuable commodities; men are expendable utilities. This is the deepest and most fundamental reason we all - women and men - innately care for women more than we do men.

As a man, it certainly would be nice if women cared for and sought to protect every man they see more than other women - heavenly, in fact - but reality is what it is. And we are what we are. Men and women aren’t ‘equal’ because the sexes are - by definition - different. Those differences are necessarily strongest the closer we get to any matter related to reproduction (and hence sexual behaviour, experiences and expectations), but also when it comes to anything related to the survival and protection of the offspring such coupling begets: to protect the children, one has to also protect the women from which the children are borne, to put their safety and survival first, too.

And so this is why there is not now, nor has there ever been, any human society which sends its women down the mines and out to hunt and into war while the men stay at home and play with the children. If, hypothetically, there ever was a society that tried to exist that way, then clearly they died out (or were wiped out) without leaving a single trace of their existence anywhere (and for pretty obvious reasons).

This is not ‘patriarchy’ or ‘male privilege’ or any other ideological entry in the feminist lexicon: the universal division of labor between the sexes is something we evolved over millions of years because that’s how we best survived in a hostile natural world. As civilizations sprung up and cities appeared, the hunter/gatherer roles of man and woman rapidly became more abstract, complex and sophisticated: the man went out to work in an office instead of going out to hunt, and the woman kept house and cooked food in increasingly comfortable kitchens instead of tending the campfire in the rain.

It was only in the 20th century, with the rise of industrialization and the safety and simplicity of factory and office work - along with the introduction of the pill in the 1960s - that women could actually begin to enter the modern workforce on something like an equal footing to the men already there working to provide for their wives and families at home. But because of simple biology (men can’t bear children, so every human being must be carried and nursed by a woman) men are still going to have to work more hours and provide more resources than the women (which, of course, goes a long way to explaining much of the purported ‘pay gap’ in men and women’s lifetime earnings).

Anyhow, the point is: we didn’t invent our fundamental gender roles, any more than the birds or the bees or the zebras or the aardvarks or the cows or the bulls did theirs. Hence, human beings today gravitating towards these roles is no evidence of a secret conspiracy to keep the women down - indeed, the universally-practiced division of labor was introduced by society - and mother nature - only to put the needs and safety of women first.

And that, class, is the main reason the fundamental tenets of all feminist theory are so perplexingly wrong. I know you've been wondering.

Babyface Nietzsche

And so, the world's first feminazi was born.... :)

No, I'm kidding. I don't really know why this (previously suppressed) scene from 1933's 'Baby Face' speaks to me so much, it just seems to touch on so many raw realities of life, outside of all ages, such as woman's unchanging power & elevated position over man, & the unvarnished venality & greed of hungry human beings.

It seems also to freeze a moment in time that would be gone almost as soon as the scene was over: once the second world war began, only a few years hence, a friendly German character stridently plugging the philosophy of Nietzsche would be unthinkable right up to pretty much the present day, tarred with its new fascist associations. And all the references to a woman using her body to manipulate men to her will would also become a thing of the past once the Hays Code was passed the following year.

This scene was never actually shown anywhere until the uncut film's discovery & restoration in 2004. In 1933 it was instead overdubbed with the following feeble propaganda:

"A woman, young, beautiful like you, can get anything she wants in the world. But there is a right way and a wrong way. Remember, the price of the wrong way is too great. Go to some big city where you will find opportunities! Don't let people mislead you. You must be a master, not a slave. Be clean, be strong, defiant, and you will be a success."

And that's the way another age, another history, another world began.

The Skatepark

I walk past it most days.

On sunny days sometimes I stop & I sit & watch the BMXs & skateboards hurtling around. There are always at least 15 or 20 boys there, any time of the day, practising their moves. On the sunniest days I guess 50 or 60, & it's seldom I've seen the same face twice.

It's a weird little world I'm not really a part of, & I wonder sometimes where they all practice, because in all the years I've wandered by I've never seen a bad fall, a cut, a broken wrist. I guess it must happen, just not here.

The age of the park's inhabitants can vary anywhere between the under-10s to I guess the late 30s, from little kids to tattooed men with salt & pepper in their beards. But the one thing they all have in common is they are all male. Unlike, say, the children's playground that sits beside it, which is always half & half, there are never any girls in the skatepark.

True, mothers & girlfriends sometimes stand around or sit off to the side on the benches & watch their boys soaring through the air like birds in flight, but in 15 years or so of walking past & taking note, I can only remember one time seeing two little pre-teen black girls riding a scooter, very slowly & methodically making their way over a mound. Then one would stop & hand it over & the other would climb aboard, & cautiously ride it back over the same hump. No-one was teasing them or laughing, or rolling their eyes. They were treated just the same as everyone else.

I've seen photographs of skater-girls, so I know they exist, but in my life, in this country, I can honestly say I've only seen maybe three? Four? The disparity is so great it seems to me an estimate of anywhere up to even a thousand-to-one might not be far off the mark.

Now, nothing is stopping the girls from coming & riding about on the ramps - the skatepark never closes, there's no fence around it, it sits there open in the park, day & night. I've even ridden around it myself of an evening. There's plenty of space, & the boys are friendly & considerate of one another & those around. And I bet you, if a teenage girl turned up who could skate anywhere near as good as they can, those boys would flock around her like honeybees to a dandelion. Nothing is preventing the girls from taking part anymore than anything is preventing them from playing with Lego: they simply choose not to. They'd rather ride ponies, go to ballet classes, & play with hula hoops.

Why should this be? Every girl I know rides a bike, so it can't be through lack of knowledge or opportunity. They all ride bikes, they just don't ride them through the air. They don't do stunts on them. They don't ride around on them with no hands, the way I do. Similarly, I've probably in my life seen more girls in rollerskates & rollerblades than boys, but again: they don't use them to do anything dangerous or extraordinary: they're not the ones doing somersaults & jumping through the air on them, or competing to be the best at all costs.


It's begun striking me lately what a great microcosm of male/female differences & preferences all this is. Just as the perceived 'pay gap' between the sexes can be best understood by looking at the differing goals & priorities men & women at large have & the choices they therefore make - rather than believing in some mythical 'glass ceiling', & a universal conspiracy to keep women 'in their place' - many other pronounced differences between the sexes likes & dislikes can best be understood not through 'patriarchy theory' but by focusing on the choices the majority of us make due to innate, biological imperatives.

It's been established that one of the ways in which male & female brains differ is in spatial awareness & abstract thinking. The latter is responsible for all the great mathematical theorems, the great symphonies & architecture of the world, whereas the former explains the greater male attraction to football, cricket, guns, golf, martial arts, parkour... - the fascination in passing objects (or oneself) through the air with skill & precision.

On top of this, males higher testosterone makes men naturally more heroic, competitive & prepared to take risks. Men's perception of, & relationship to, their own bodies is much more one of utility & acceptance of self-sacrifice: all over the world males evolved to be stronger so as to better take care of the women & the children. Men had to evolve a disregard for their own safety or else we simply wouldn't be here now: our great great+ grandfathers would have simply abandoned the incapacitated pregnant women & tiny tots when the tigers turned up & saved their own skin. But they didn't, or at least the ones we are descended from didn't. And there still is no culture today where the women are sent off to war while the menfolk stay home & play with the kids, where the women go out to hunt while the men tend the fire. So, males are both societally & biologically conditioned to care less about their own immediate safety & well-being than a woman, or a dream, a cause, a higher ideal.

This is, incidentally, why there will never be a female 'Jackass' on TV, showing videos of girls hurling themselves off buildings into bushes & kicking each other in the genitals. Women's innate drive for self-preservation makes such behaviour incomprehensible to them. Women move away from possible harm because instinctively they know that to risk damage to their bodies means to damage the ground from which the next generation will be grown.

But boys, everywhere in the world, love doing shit like that, it goes across all time zones, all societies. And 'The Patriarchy' didn't make us this way, only Mother Nature.

So the skatepark is a little, solitary island of maleness, where the boys there are left alone to feel the power & capabilities of their own bodies, doing something crazy & dangerous & sometimes sublime. Where they are left alone to just be boys. And there are so few places like that left, they go there in their thousands, & keep on going back, even once their hair turns grey.

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Viva Chavez

The death last month of Hugo Chavez, much beloved president of Venezuela, has been playing on my mind awhile. I know he was - in America at least - a very controversial figure, but the little I know about him I've always found most inspiring. Whether you want to think he was a triumphant demonstration of true democracy winning out over capitalism, or just a communist dictator, the one thing I'm sure we can all agree is that he was a man in possession of a pair of brass balls so big he must have had to carry them around in a wheelbarrow.

He was, as they say, A Real Man: a man who fought - literally fought, with a gun in his hand - for what he believed in, laying his life & freedom on the line to work towards what he believed was a better world for all. You would have to go back to at least Castro (or perhaps a young Mandela), if not Napoleon, to see the leader of any prominent country so hands on an action hero.

And I started thinking about my own society, & what it would actually take for a revolution to happen here, or in America, whether we even have men like that anymore, or whether they've all been bred out of existence, or locked away in jail. And I can't help but wonder if the wholehearted embracing of feminism by both communist & capitalist states is not at least in part to weaken any possible resistance against their control.

Because face it, women (for the most part) can't fight. Or at least women can't fight against men: an army of women vs a same-sized army of men would not be much of a fight, I think we can all agree on that without having to see the sorry spectacle played out in horrifying colour. An army of women ganging up on ONE man... well, that's much better odds, & you can see that any day of the week, in any country in the world, sometimes without any bloodshed at all.

But the point is, all great political change has overwhelmingly depended upon men, upon men being prepared to band together & accept the risk of their lives in working against the few who otherwise decide their fates. If you weaken the men - & if you demonize them especially, if you make women (& a large number of the men) believe that men themselves are 'The Enemy' - you weaken all chance of resistance & revolution. No country divided in half like that can ever rise up as one against oppression. The same goes for race, religion, political affiliation, sexuality, disability... The ever-increasing focus the past hundred years on 'identity politics' has succeeded principally in keeping us apart, down, & subdued.

Can you imagine the French, American or Russian revolutions happening if the women had refused to support & work alongside their husbands, fathers, brothers & sons? If they had in fact blamed all the problems that led to those revolutions ON their neighbours, their husbands, fathers, brothers & sons?

In the old days this was more honestly referred to as "Divide And Conquer". Now we get to call it "empowerment". But in plain terms it simply means everyone looking out only for themselves.

Everyone knows the world is not the way it should be. We disagree only on where we think the problem most pressingly lies. Meanwhile, the rich get richer & the poor stay poor, the earth is poisoned & ruined. So long as the decision making remains at a higher level, no fundamental change can come. This is why feminism's 'revolutionary' status is so ill-deserved: everything that movement ever asked for has been handed over gladly, because at root it changes nothing, & only strengthens the control of the state.

State-supported programs will never bring about change to the state itself. Revolution is not something that will be allowed. The revolution will not be subsidized. The revolution will not be authorized. And no, in all likelihood, it won't be televised.

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"The gangs & the government, they make me 1%" 

 - Jane's Addiction

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Adam

Yes, for someone who doesn't own a working television set, I sure am watching a lot of TV shows.

It all began about 10 years ago, first with Buffy, then The Sopranos & The Wire, when a small number of TV shows started - for the very first time - to be as well-written & played out as just about any movie, free from the obviously commercial motives & accompanying censorship that had always cheapened that activity before. There were the first signs that television as a medium had the possibility of genuine artistic expression. Recently those early hopes have been flowering with the likes of Breaking Bad, Louie, Enlightened & Lena Dunham's Girls, which I am at this moment in time thoroughly hooked on.

Girls is, for the most part, a comedy, & a very funny one at that, but its greater value is in its refusing to flinch from showing the results of young 21st century women's choices, as well as all the raw realities of modern relationships in a post-feminist world. It's also perhaps the only TV show made for women that genuinely likes men, depicting their lives as something greater than accessories & utilities for women, their experiences & emotions as important as those of their female counterparts. Like a Miranda July movie told in 25 minutes, Girls is brave & thoughtful & original & always has something new to tell me. Tonight I saw the latest episode & one scene in particular is really haunting me right now.

For the uninitiated, the back-story is that Adam, a very strange, very intense, antisocial loner, fresh out of being dumped by the show's main protagonist Hannah, has met & started having sex with this amazing, perfect - perhaps too perfect - new girl & all is going swimmingly for the first week. Then at a party Adam bumps into Hannah again & old feelings of longing, hurt & betrayal are stirred up. He takes his new girlfriend back to his place for the first time & this happens:

Now, I don't know how much of this can be understood without the context, without a familiarity with the many different facets of this particular character but in any other show - even one written by a man - this would be the point where you are meant to realize that this fellow is The Bad Guy, the villain unmasked, perhaps even a murderer or a serial rapist. Some kind of perverted creep, anyway. But that isn't what's being shown here.

Adam had a relationship in which his unvarnished animal nature was accepted & appreciated & his compulsive sexuality gave pleasure to the woman he was with. He is testing Natalia, the new girl, to see if she will turn away from him when she sees him in all his grimy imperfection, if she will leave him too the moment her rose-tinted spectacles slip from her eyes.

There is a scene earlier on, when they first fuck, where she tells him in an oddly precise way what she 'wants', what her 'rules' are (him on top, no soft touching, & come outside of her body). So here, later on, he fucks her in a very cold, selfish way, pushing at her boundaries, yet still managing to not break her rules. Do you see? Something in him needs to rebel, to be free, to fuck her the way he is being driven to in that moment, trying to fuck the pain away, but he is still trying to be a good dog, to work within her wishes even while straining at the leash. He is pushing her away & pulling her to him all at the same time. He doesn't even know himself why he's doing what he's doing, he just knows something is compelling him to do it, & as soon as it's over, his confusion & despair is overwhelming. At the end he is both challenging her to leave him & terrified she will.

I recognize a part of my fundamental male self in Adam, & I found this scene very, very moving, in ways I cannot really explain. There is something being said there about a particular emotional need that is fulfilled when a men 'takes' a woman that we still really have no language for, & in our society is kept entirely shrouded in shame.

I've always found the language of relationships largely female anyway (I have a theory interpersonal language was mostly developed by women 'round the firepit while the men were all out at the hunt) & men end up being forced to use Oprah-friendly terms that (apparently) make sense to women to try describe biological drives & experiences that really lie outside of anything most women can understand or even want to acknowledge exist. In our present society, if that essential part of men is acknowledged to exist at all, it is only to triumphantly hold it up as proof that 'all men are rapists'. No human being wants to be told that their deepest, most private, central core is at heart a sick, dirty criminal beast, so almost all men work their hardest to hide their natural desire, & the acceptance of it they so badly crave, in hopes of proving they are 'good' after all.

Halfway through writing this I looked online to try find the name of the Natalia character & found - to, I'm sorry to say, very little astonishment - that the net is aglow with rabid discussion as to whether the scene is 'really rape' or only 'grey rape' - you know, that kind of Rape they can't lock you up for, yet. That's really sad. I don't think that was Dunham's intent at all, but then you know the world is crammed full of crazy as much as I do. Some days the bullshit is so thick the best you can do is put your foot down as hard as you can & turn the windscreen wipers on.

Like I say, I've come up against that wall of expression & I don't really have the words for any of this, but the show & this scene in particular somehow managed to make some of what needed to be said take visible form outside of language altogether. So I want to thank Lena Dunham for making it. It sucks being a man in this day & age but the future seems a lot less scary with voices like hers in it.

Destroy All Nice Guys!!!

Another classic from the ever-classy GirlWritesWhat: 

One Shade Of Grey

Neoteny

Even by GirlWritesWhat's largely incomparable standards, her new transmission is a doozy, covering her thoughts on the ramifications of neotony - the evolutionary retention of certain childlike features into adulthood. As usual, the video takes a little while to get going, as she defines her terms & generally lays her wares out, but the last 10 minutes or so she really gets those engines turning. Sublime.

The Woman Racket

An extract from chapter one of The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon (2008). I hope to post further samples from this excellent book in the next few weeks.

We're told that men and women are the same. Or, rather, some of the time we're told this. At other times we're told that men and women are essentially and irrevocably different. We're further told that although men and women are different, this is really just something to do with the way we are at the moment, albeit that we have been that way for a long time, living in the sort of society we do. In time, we keep being reminded, all will revert to how supposedly it should be and how it used to be in times of yore: i.e. men and women are the same after all. Even so, it's then insisted that actually, in the end, no matter what we do, men will never get to be truly the same as women: men and women are forever and totally different (except when it's more convenient to regard them as exactly the same).

We're also told that women are disadvantaged, and that they've got this way because of oppression by men. We're never told how or why this could be. We're not told why—especially if men and women are supposedly the same — there would be any point in one sex oppressing the other. We're not told how it can be—if indeed men are different to women and oppress them— that by most measures it is not women who are disadvantaged but men (or, at least, a large sub-group or even the majority of men). Nobody tells us why men are maligned as if they're at one with the very few at the top of the pile, whereas all women are championed irrespective of who they are, what they have done, or how they have lived their lives.

Confused? You certainly should be. The notion that males and females —or some essence of what is male or female —are the same or different, oppressed or actually advantaged, is like a juggler with two balls up in_ the air. He never gets hold of either of them but is constantly palming each upwards and across the path of the other. Eventually the whole spectacle has to come crashing to the ground. That's what is about to happen to what we currently think about men and women.

The contradictory madness about men and women in which we wallow is not shallow. As I will be explaining in depth, it arises from the most pro-found prejudices we have; prejudices that are currently denied, being invisible to us. We are too close to them, so we can't see the wood for the flees, even though they are the very basis of our politics. They are what the philosopher R.G. Collingwood called ‘absolute’ presuppositions. They come from the hidden heart of what we are, in the fundamental difference—and complementarity—between men and women. These hidden prejudices are against men and in favour of women. It is because of this that astonishing nonsense about men and women can hold sway, hanging unsupported from the political sky. The general consensus about human social behaviour — at least the chattering classes - is the most plainly false in history. In no other culture— and at no other point in the history of our own culture—have people got things so spectacularly wrong.

The real story of men and women, that cuts through all of this, has only fully crystallised the last few years with a deluge of new science. It will be a revelation to almost all, having been merely scratched on the sur-
face in self—help titles like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. It is not merely that men and women are different. We all knew that. And ordinary people, at least, admit it. It is that they are different in ways far beyond what anyone had thought. Men and women are also unequal, but it is not women at all, but men-not all men, but the majority — who make up the biggest disadvantaged sub-group in every society. Women by contrast are universally and perennially privileged: over-privileged. This unconditional favour has no counterpart for men, who have to meet certain criteria even to be afforded the most basic consideration.

Even so, you won't find me suggesting adding men to the ever-expanding list of "victims'. As it stands there's but a minority of people who aren't already on this list. It really would be the case that ‘we're all victims now’. Instead, the real story of men and women is the key to tearing up the entire list and throwing it away.
The revolution that we are supposedly undergoing towards an androgynous, unisexual world is all but dead. Revolution has always been a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ (as The Who's Roger Daltrey sang back in 1971), and the revolution regarding men and women is very much a case in point. We've merely been chasing our own shadows, perpetuating the same old attitudes in disguise. The benign consequences of wising up to see this can hardly be over-stated. We're set now for what really is a revolution: a science—inspired revolution of understanding. This is a book of popular science, intended to explain the psychology that underlies the prejudice that in turn reveals why politics manifests in the way that it does. Of necessity I tackle political issues, and I'm aware that this is an awkward mix, but such is the nature of the project.

Politics is in the end a matter of conjecture, but its manifestation and the social psychology that underlies it can be informed by science. Never before has there been a time when political debate was more in need of this than today.

Female Self-Interest Vs. The Pursuit Of Wisdom

There's a subject I've been wanting to look at & write on for awhile now, though it's something that is hard to put into words, & is such an emotional minefield to try speak openly in, I'm not sure I ever will, or maybe this is me doing that right now.

Loosely speaking, it concerns the differences between women & men & their differing approaches to the larger truths - & of the drive to follow those truths at the expense of all else, & regardless of the cost to the self & for no other reason or reward than itself.

And how it is that women, as a general rule, have little inclination to do that, which is why women (again, as a general rule) don't start religions, or write symphonies, or start revolutions in art or science or philosophy, & the only political movement begun by women in the history of the world is feminism, by far the most selfish, short-sighted & dishonest political philosophy ever devised by humankind, demonizing one whole half of the human race while pandering to the herd instinct of the other & shamelessly lying to them both.

The need for group identity seems to me to be stronger as a rule women, which does raise troubling questions when thinking politically, (whoah! here we are at that minefield I was telling you about!) as it may be that women are, as a demographic, more easily manipulated by those looking for power - as historically they have been - by appealing to their own self-interest & immediate concerns of themselves & their children rather than higher, selfless ideals for the good of all.
 
Men have always been manipulated too, as demonstrated by all the rape propaganda used by every side, for every cause, in pretty much every war there's ever been. Through their innate concern for women, men can be made to go die in a trench, start fights, organize lynch mobs, risk their own lives & safety, & vote for policies which have directly adverse effects upon themselves & put their own interests last.

But the same does not work in reverse: women will not risk their lives for those of men they don't know. Women will rarely risk their lives for anyone but their own children. This, of course, is simply nature, just the way we evolved to be, & women's innate drive for self -preservation (& hence the preservation of their offspring) is one of the things that has made humanity the most dominant species on earth.

The point is, there's a difference, & a double standard. And it's one I don't actually mind being there at all - like most men, it is innate in me to want to put the women & children first, but we live in a society where that noble imbalance is ignored & even shouted down every single day. We are instructed to act like there are no differences between men & women, even though we all know that there are. We act like it is a sin to even acknowledge this double standard, & keep giving even more help & assistance & special treatment to women than we were doing already, all the while acting as though the opposite is true, that women are oppressed & held back by that black nightmarish fantasm the feminists dreamt up & called 'The Patriarchy'.

What the feminists call 'Patriarchy' is, of course, to all intents & purposes simply 'civilization' - all civilization - as there has never been found any society either now or in all recorded history, anywhere in the world, any society in which men did not hold the majority of the positions of responsibility. Given our differing biological make-ups & requirements, it has always made the most sense to most peoples to configure their societies that way.

If men really were the greedy, heartless oppressors of women depicted by feminism, they would surely never have voted for the enfranchisement of women in the first place. But the important point is, since then, women - the entire female demographic - have never used that vote even once to aid 'men' as a group. Men are still popularly seen by perhaps the majority of women to be The Enemy, even the men they live & work alongside. This sexism is considered healthy, harmless, even funny, & all society encourages it.

Women never vote against their own self-interest. And, because of how much men innately want to both please & protect them, they have never had to.

I'm not saying women en masse can't be noble or self-sacrificing or whatever, only that those muscles may perhaps have atrophied over time through lack of use. Evolutionarily, they became inessential for women to survive, & besides, they had men to do all that hard work, & make all those hard decisions, for them.

Justice, Liberty, Equality - civilization - these are all male creations, borne out of male modes of thought. On the other hand, Comfort, Kindness, Consensus decision-making, Community... society (the social world).. these may well be less easy to define, undervalued female contributions, along with perhaps even language itself, or at least the language of personal relationships. All these are a much-needed tempering force to balance out the strict, ascetic male principles that created working human civilization, but when left unchecked, or even encouraged, as they have been the past hundred years  - & especially the last 40 - they can themselves become a detrimental & destructive force.

Getting back to the point - such as it is - there are innate, clearly observable, evolutionary-based differences between men & women that skew much rational dialogue between them. Every now & again I am reminded that we really might be from Mars & Venus, though sharing the same language. Repeatedly, I think I'm having a nice, reasonable discussion, pooling resources, sharing ideas on politics or philosophy, & suddenly a woman stands up, face white with fury & tears in her eyes, marches out of the room & slams the door, goes off to break things in the kitchen & never talks to me again. This shit really happens to me. I remember one woman, the girlfriend of a friend of mine I gently questioned about some of her (frankly hateful) feminist statements, pushed herself back in her seat, crossed her arms & said (to her man) "okay, I'm not saying any more until your mate gets his gender politics put right".

And I thought: 'That's genius! What she is saying is: "I REFUSE TO ARGUE WITH YOU UNTIL YOU AGREE WITH ME!" What a perfect method of debate! No-one could ever make you feel even the littlest bit uncomfortable in your beliefs ever again!'

Anyway, the maddening thing is the women that do this usually don't realize, or refuse to realize that they are even doing it, often vehemently denying they are becoming emotional while in the same breath attacking personally & ending all discussion. On the internet, especially, I find girls continually derailing reasoned discourse to interject ad hominem attacks, use shaming language, & appealing to others around to come to their aid. Making the impersonal personal. Women often seem to have a harder time than men seeing that there could be a difference between the wider truth of a situation & their own felt experience, or what their particular group mind has told them they should believe.

I never used to think this way. I used to do my very best to believe women & men were interchangeable units & that the only reason women as a group hadn't been able to create anything much of great or lasting value was because of a universal conspiracy against them to keep them down.

I know! Crazy, right? Well, I was young.

I do see some extraordinary women who seem to me possessed by genius but there's not a lot of them, & every single one of them is working in a field opened up by men, within a conceptual framework invented by men. Genius is male, & the initial spark of creativity, courage & invention emanates almost exclusively from the masculine.

The first person to get to the North Pole, for instance, or even the moon, or to sail a balloon around the world, was always going to be a man. Later, once it had been shown it could be done, repeatedly, & in relative safety, then a woman would climb into the cockpit of a plane, or fly a hot air balloon, or go up into space. The Wright sisters getting that crate off the ground was never going to be a possible future, regardless of differences in opportunity or the structure of society. And if we try to look rationally & objectively at the weight of evidence throughout history, we must recognize that as a simple truth, beyond any conspiracy theories of women's oppression. I'm not trying to rub anyone's nose in it by saying this, I guess all I'm wanting to do is try get women & the men in western society to consciously acknowledge these complimentary halves of the whole & to factor them into their models of the world. We need to be able to speak openly of the things we can see with our own eyes to be manifestly true.

*

There's an Australian YouTuber, Kelly Jones, who has gone into some of this in a few of her pieces recently, usually from the perspective of a psychological analysis of religious experience - which is of course interesting in itself, but this video in particular I felt went some way in expressing much of what I've been thinking myself on these things. Check her out, she has soothing voice & a sharper mind than mine:

And this one addresses matters even more bluntly:

Lord Shiva & Parvati

"The inseparability of the male and female entities in the Universe was recognized by Indians as early as the Vedic times. This beautiful sentiment is manifested through the representation of Goddess Parvathi (Uma) and Lord Siva (Maheswara), known as “the parents of the Universe”, as UmaMaheswara or Ardhanareeswara (half-man, half-woman). This representation indicates that while both the female and male forms have their own individual identities and strengths, they are still interdependent. They complement each other and, it is only by combining their individual strengths that they are able to create and nurture life in the Universe. This divine couple is considered by Indians as an example to be emulated by all human beings.

"Import of Western thought on individualism over the last few centuries has led to the erosion of many wonderful Indian values, including the one of male-female unity. Equating individualism with independence has caused many cracks in the much-envied Indian family structure. Radical feminist ideas, which are based on anti-male, anti-family ideologies, have resulted in a gender war. Consequently, divorce rates, numbers of fatherless children, violence against men and numbers of men committing suicides are all on the rise. The time has come to remind ourselves of our pride-worthy Indian values and to restore stability in the society by promoting harmony between men and women."


-  Uma Challa, https://uchalla.wordpress.com/. 

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

My book of the year. 

Two bold young neuroscientists have initiated a revolution in the scientific study of sexual attraction. Before Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, the only researcher to systematically investigate sexual desires was Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed 18,000 middle-class Caucasians in the 1950s. But Ogas and Gaddam have studied the secret sexual behavior of more than a hundred million men and women around the world. Their method?  They observed what people do within the anonymity of the Internet.

There is so much in this book I want to say to the world that it makes it impossible to give a decent synopsis: you really do have to read it all. It speaks to both sexes equally, is extremely funny, & there are no dull bits - every chapter is a highpoint. I only wish I had a crate of them so I could hand them out to everyone i met. I may post more about this in the future but for now just a tiny (& woefully inadequate) sample:

The Biological Imperative Of Female Self-Preservation In Action Movies

Something I’ve been musing on lately is how all the ‘girls kick-ass!’ movies so common today are almost entirely created by men – Buffy, Dollhouse, Kick-Ass, Kill Bill, Salt, Sucker Punch (most misandric film of the year), all the superheroey ones... All are repeatedly sold to us as ‘empowering role models’ etc for girls & yet the strange thing is it’s not women that are writing & directing them, it’s men. These films are predominantly watched by males, too - women may like the propaganda that they can 'do everything as well as men' but for the most part would much rather be home watching Sex And The City & Twilight.

So I've been puzzling over why this should be & the conclusion I have come to is that, under the system we have had the past 30 years or so, which denigrates masculinity to such a horrific degree, male creators have resorted to using female protagonists to play out their heroic ideals, ideals which, in the real world women would not think to carry out - think of the differing expectations of women in the police, the army, the fire service, for instance.

In the classic Alien films, Ripley – the first real female action hero – sacrifices herself to save the human race in a very chivalric, Christ-like (greatest hero of western society) way. I find it hard to imagine a female author coming up with that, a woman laying down her life for strangers. It just wouldn’t occur to them. And in the past it would never have occurred to a male writer either. Women’s bodies are a precious rare resource to be protected at all costs by the men, even at the cost of the mens own lives. That sacrificial role is a male burden, & a male fantasy, but one is now rather strangely being projected onto a female canvas.

Feminism has really messed with our heads.


Although some women might be consumers of heroic violent action movies with female protagonists, they don’t choose to create them themselves. It’s not like Jane Campion or Miranda July (two directors I hold in some esteem, by the way) are working on writing & directing a female Die Hard.

I mentioned the military, fire service & police earlier not to say that no women serve in such capacity, only that they are not serving under the same expectation to sacrifice themselves in the way their male counterparts are. Around 20% of the US armed forces are female, yet 97% of the troops that died in Iraq were male, & of the 3% of the troops that died that were female, more than a third of them died from other causes than combat. It has been said (with only a little exaggeration) that serving in Iraq is one of the safest places for an American woman to work.

Same happens in the police force. Female police officers overwhelmingly take the safer day shifts & on the beat, particularly in less safe areas, are almost always accompanied by a male officer, who’s unspoken role is to protect her. This has been looked at with concern in the past as it doubles the danger for the male officer, who has no one along for the ride to protect him. Of the 4000 deaths of police officers in the UK, 3956 of them are male, while only 44 are female, even though women now make up 25% of police officers on the beat & 62% of staff.

In the fire service, again, there are female firefighters, but hardly any. In the U.S. it’s about 2%. Women are not attracted to dangerous work generally, jobs in which they daily run the risk of death. Which is why, even though women now hold the majority of all jobs in the USA today, over 95% of all deaths at work, across the board, are male.

To restate my point perhaps more clearly, I am not addressing ‘strong female characters’ but rather female characters carrying out the traditional male heroic role of willingly sacrificing themselves for the tribe, for the greater good, for everyone else.

These figures, to pretty much all intents & purposes, don’t exist (as I say, the only one I could think of was Alien's Ripley), but when they do they are written exclusively by men, who are, it seems to me, projecting their own innate set of heroic values & behaviour somewhere where they do not occur in real life. Women in the real world do not, as a very strictly observed rule, sacrifice themselves for a bunch of strangers.

There’s a case to be made about how this is because of the females greater biological imperative for self-preservation {"MustSaveMyself&MyChild"}. If there are any instances of a woman writer portraying her female protagonist sacrificing herself it will almost certainly be for an immediate family member, a younger sibling or child most likely, rarely for her husband or lover & never for the greater good of all, for wider society. This is not a condemnation, it’s just the way things are: Neither men or women see women as being expendable in that way.

The only exception to that rule I can think of is a Thelma & Louise type story where (spoiler!) two women would rather drive off a cliff than live in a world with men in it. This, however, is obviously ideologically driven & shows only how ideology can make us perform strange, unhinged, fanatical acts. Thelma & Louise’s actions are essentially self-serving – the best you could say is that they are a personal protest about how they feel about their situation in the world – they are not done to save anyone else, the people of their tribe or the world. Even their staunchest defenders would have to admit that Thelma & Louise are not sacrificing themselves to save the men of their community.

This seems to me a fundamental natural difference between the sexes, but one which, due most likely to present day PC teachings of the interchangeability of the sexes, is increasingly obscured, giving us wildly unrealistic expectations of each of the sexes roles, motives & capabilities that aren’t based upon anything in nature or our daily reality.

Two Utopias

An extract from an excellent essay by F. Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia In Power. I recommend reading it in full, the text of which can be found here.

 Let us consider what a sexual utopia is, and let us begin with men, who are in every respect simpler.

Nature has played a trick on men: production of spermatozoa occurs at a rate several orders of magnitude greater than female ovulation (about 12 million per hour vs. 400 per lifetime). This is a natural, not a moral, fact. Among the lower animals also, the male is grossly oversupplied with something for which the female has only a limited demand. This means that the female has far greater control over mating. The universal law of nature is that males display and females choose. Male peacocks spread their tales, females choose. Male rams butt horns, females choose. Among humans, boys try to impress girls-and the girls choose. Nature dictates that in the mating dance, the male must wait to be chosen.

A man's sexual utopia is, accordingly, a world in which no such limit to female demand for him exists. It is not necessary to resort to pornography for examples. Consider only popular movies aimed at a male audience, such as the James Bond series. Women simply cannot resist James Bond. He does not have to propose marriage, or even request dates. He simply walks into the room and they swoon. The entertainment industry turns out endless unrealistic images such as this. Why, the male viewer eventually may ask, cannot life actually be so? To some, it is tempting to put the blame on the institution of marriage.

Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there would be twice as much of it as formerly. They imagined there existed a large, untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between "consenting adults." Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter. Traditionalists who disagreed were said to want to "put a policeman in every bedroom." This was the age of the Kinsey Report and the first appearance of Playboy magazine. Idle male daydreams had become a social movement.

This characteristically male sexual utopianism was a forerunner of the sexual revolution but not the revolution itself. Men are incapable of bringing about fundamental changes in heterosexual relations without the cooperation-the famed "consent"-of women. But the original male would-be revolutionaries did not understand the nature of the female sex instinct. That is why things have not gone according to their plan.

What is the special character of feminine sexual desire that distinguishes it from that of men?

It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. Such a belief is often implicit in the writings of male conservatives: Women only want good husbands, but heartless men use and abandon them. Some evidence does appear, prima facie, to support such a view. One 1994 survey found that "while men projected they would ideally like six sex partners over the next year, and eight over the next two years, women responded that their ideal would be to have only one partner over the next year. And over two years? The answer, for women, was still one." Is this not evidence that women are naturally monogamous?

No it is not. Women know their own sexual urges are unruly, but traditionally have had enough sense to keep quiet about it. A husband's belief that his wife is naturally monogamous makes for his own peace of mind. It is not to a wife's advantage, either, that her husband understand her too well: Knowledge is power. In short, we have here a kind of Platonic "noble lie"-a belief which is salutary, although false.

It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female "sexual orientations" are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.

Women, in fact, have a distinctive sexual utopia corresponding to their hypergamous instincts. In its purely utopian form, it has two parts: First, she mates with her incubus, the imaginary perfect man; and second, he "commits," or ceases mating with all other women. This is the formula of much pulp romance fiction. The fantasy is strictly utopian, partly because no perfect man exists, but partly also because even if he did, it is logically impossible for him to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him.

It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d'état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power. Aristophanes had a better understanding of the female mind than the average husband.

Hypergamy is not monogamy in the human sense. Although there may be only one "alpha male" at the top of the pack at any given time, which one it is changes over time. In human terms, this means the female is fickle, infatuated with no more than one man at any given time, but not naturally loyal to a husband over the course of a lifetime. In bygone days, it was permitted to point out natural female inconstancy. Consult, for example, Ring Lardner's humorous story "I Can't Breathe"- the private journal of an eighteen year old girl who wants to marry a different young man every week. If surveyed on her preferred number of "sex partners," she would presumably respond one; this does not mean she has any idea who it is.

An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males. Women are not so much naturally modest as naturally vain. They are inclined to believe that only the "best" (most sexually attractive) man is worthy of them. This is another common theme of popular romance (the beautiful princess, surrounded by panting suitors, pined away hopelessly for a "real" man-until, one day.etc.).

This cannot be objectively true, of course. An average man would seem to be good enough for the average woman by definition. If women were to mate with all the men "worthy" of them they would have little time for anything else. To repeat, hypergamy is distinct from monogamy. It is an irrational instinct, and the female sexual utopia is a consequence of that instinct.

Hogamus Higamus: Polyamorous Addendum

A part I realize I didn't fully address in the last post was polyamory, which I mentioned but didn't expand upon. Polyamory is another brave & respectable attempt to find a workable model for men & women to be together. If anything, I feel much closer in my personal life to that as an ideal than either polygamy or monogamy, as it is more thoughtful & open-ended, & actively looking for a better solution than just the accepted norm, but in its present form it is fundamentally flawed in that it refuses to acknowledge the differences between the sexes. The party line is still that both sexes are essentially the same, & whatever works for one will work for the other: if you don't agree you just need to work on yourself some more.

This leads to some obvious imbalances straight-off: men generally have greater need for sexual variety but also experience greater possessiveness & revulsion at their partners having sexual contact with other men. Women, on the other hand, feel more uncomfortable with their partners building emotional ties with someone else. In addition to that, encouraging women to be as promiscuous as men want to be is asking women to do something that will in the long run lower their SMV (sexual market value) & so their chances of getting what they more often want, a long-term committed relationship in which to raise a child. I don't see a way of making it work on a wider scale until these ideological positions are overhauled.

Still, as I say, I feel closer to that than what we have at present, & any system in which private morality is not driven by religious or political manipulation to be what you aren't seems to me a good thing.

Hogamus Higamus

Hogamus higamus

Men are polygamous
Higamus hogamus 

Women monogamous

-Ogden Nash

A little while back, over at Hooking Up Smart, there was some debate over advice being offered to a college girl when the 19 year old boy she was kind-of-seeing-but-not-sleeping-with got caught out kind-of-seeing-but-possibly-sleeping-with someone else. Well, it happens. The boy was branded a 'player' (!) right from the get-go, a ghastly predator practising his 'toxic' dark arts on this sweet virginal child [of the same age], & some of the female commenters ( I may be exaggerating a little here) seemed just about ready to organize a lynching there & then. On the other side of the fence, most of the men tended towards a groan & a sigh & a shake of the head & a 'been-there-done-that-God-doesn't-the-desire-for-pretty-women-make-us-do-some-stupid-things-sometimes' stance. They weren't as ready to judge & demonize the boy for urges & actions they knew they could just as easily have had & carried out themselves.

The point is that it split into two camps quite quickly, with the women growing increasingly hostile & in some cases openly insulting of the men, who kept on trying to make their points in different ways but weren't being heard. Now, if you've ever been to HUS, you'll know that this is a rare occurence - the commenters there are smart, thoughtful, original, generally open-minded & constructive, & I've never found a group of women more empathetic towards the problems men face in modern society anywhere. So this was a little odd. It got kind of ugly & I've not been back since. I'm sure I will eventually, I think I just need a break to absorb it all. But since then I've been trying to figure out what happened & why it happened & if there is a way to not make it happen in the future. How do you talk between the sexes about the differing experiences of sex?

For the most part, the wonderful women of HUS are highly-advanced in their thinking about the workings of male/female relationships (the marvellous men too, of course). Regular topics of discussion there include evolutionary psychology & Game Theory, so the ability to step out of ones own personal narrative & emotions & attempt to observe the human situation objectively & dispassionately is present. Feminism is looked at very critically & it's largely understood there that men & women are necessarily different in matters relating to reproduction & therefore sex. But once this sore point was touched on, practically all the women rounded up their wagons & all that theoretical thinking went out the window. And in my life, pretty much every woman I've ever spoken to has reacted in the same way, with the exception of a few polyamorous types (but they generally haven't cleared the feminism hurdle yet, & apply all discussion about sexuality to both sexes interchangeably, so they're not much help either).

It seems to me the women got hostile because to acknowledge the essentially polygamous drive of men, to recognize that it is necessarily different to womens, that that is their nature, cannot help but threaten the (also necessary) female biological need for stability, i.e. that the man, who is needed to provide for the female while she carries her child & later nurses it, will be there to stick around.

It's become common, the past 40 years or so, to hear women talking quite openly about their experiences & requirements of sex, & as a result we as a society know quite a lot about the preferences & desires of women, which we see largely without judgement. Men's desires, on the other hand, although so overwhelmingly strong (men on average have between 20 to100 times more testosterone, the hormone which governs sexual desire in both sexes, than women), are still shrouded in shame. Female fantasies (which we call 'erotica') are considered benign. Male fantasies (which we call 'pornography') are still considered harmful & wrong. This moral judgement & imbalance makes men & women's experience of sex even harder to explain to each other. As Bill Maher said, "There are no such things as mutual fantasies: yours bore us, ours offend you."

Pornography simply doesn't interest most women, & so is off their radar - it doesn't really exist for them. Conversely, 'romantic' tales of rich surgeons/sheiks/oil barons/princes whisking barmaids/florists/typists up & off into the sunset on their yacht/mercedes/pony bore almost all men silly too, so the entire 'Romantic' aisle in the bookshop is something they don't ever really think of either.

But our sexual fantasies tell us an awful lot about how different we are from each other. Men & women may well be as much as 99% the same, but then again, we're told that the DNA of the human race & chimpanzees are about 99% the same, too. It's that 1% that makes all the difference. And the places the sexes differ the most are the areas closest to reproduction, & so sex.

Gay culture is a very interesting barometer of this, I find. Men are men, after all, & Gay men are very much the same as straight men sexually, as Sai Gaddam & Ogi Ogass' recent A Billion Wicked Thoughts has shown - it is simply the direction in which male desire is pointed that differs. What we see when we look at gay culture is men without women - more precisely, men living outside of the societal compromises they otherwise would have struck with women.

And what do we see when we look at gay culture? By a rather huge margin, the people self-reporting having the most sex in the world are single gay men. The people self-reporting the lowest amount of sex in the world are lesbians in long-term relationships. On a grossly simplified level, we have there the male/female polarity. Promiscuity is not a gay trait, it's a male trait. But it's treated with far more understanding in the gay world than in the straight world, because there everyone is male, so they all know how it is to be male, what that reality feels like, inside.

"Considering our true wishes & longings, our daily lives are pretty ridiculous"

- Dieter Duhm

It must be great to be gay, in this day & age. So simple. Can you even imagine it? If I could go to a bathhouse, pick up a different woman every night for the rest of my life & then perhaps never see her again, I would. Gladly. Wouldn't you? It doesn't have anything to do with falling in love - which I also love to do but experience as a largely seperate thing - as Lenny Bruce told us earlier, 'men detatch - not consciously but they do detatch.' There's the day-to-day need to be met - food/water/sex - & then there is romance on top of that, an additional sweet taste on top. That is the male reality stripped down the best I can. Women are different in this, or at least healthy women. A woman compulsively engaging in anonymous sex would be seen by others & herself as unhappy & damaged in some way. Yet every male is like this, to a greater or lesser degree, healthy & happy or not. Most men would feel biologically fulfilled by this: they would be doing what life has told them to do. Whereas women would be going against their own best interests in doing this, mating with whoever crosses their path.

When you bring this subject up, some women always have to tell you about that one girlfriend of theirs with a sex-drive as big as any man, who goes out every weekend picking up one-night stands. Every girl, it seems, knows at least one girl like that. And it's true, there are girls like that out there. But she's not telling you how all her male friends would like to be doing that too, if they only had the chance (which they don't). It's likely that she doesn't even know that, because that's something the men & boys she knows most likely don't tell her, for fear of being shamed or judged. And if you asked that friend of hers if she see herself doing what she's doing now at 55, 60 years old, it's highly unlikely that she will tell you 'yes'. No woman dreams of a future which consists of them simply fucking a different man - or several men - every single day for the rest of their lives until they die. No riding off into the sunset, no marriage, no children, no settling down... Just new, different, sweaty faces, day in & day out for the rest of your life.

To almost any woman that's a nightmarish vision of white-slavery-crackwhore hell. But to most men, that's veritably an all-areas pass to the Hall of the Gods.

Men are biologically driven to be with as many sexual partners as they can be: Quantity Matters. Women are instructed by their own bodies to find the best male they can find & be with them at least long enough to raise a child out of infancy. Quality matters.

This isn't rocket science - We all know this. Stand-up comedians make their living from talking about the differences between the sexes on stage every night. They can do this only because their audience already recognizes those differences & knows them to be true. Women know that men are born different, that they "think with their dicks", that they are "only after one thing". All their jokes & advice & wisdom rely upon that ancient knowledge. But there is no understanding or kindness accompanying it.

The change I see that needs to come is for the different male experience of sex to be accepted [it is], without judgement [it isn't].

19 year-old boys do not start out 'toxic players'. They start out being the male of their species whose bodies are instructing them - in the prime of their youth - to go spread their seed with as many females as possible in order to enable the survival of the human race. They make many mistakes & blunders along the way, chiefly because no-one, least of all their mothers - who are now primarily raising them - is instructing them in the best way to strike the balance between what their society expects of them & what their body demands of them. They receive no instruction on how to be male in the present society as being male runs contrary to female goals & expectations.

In the society we live now,  men's needs & concerns have for some time been overlooked & downplayed, as any truly objective observer would have to agree. Mainstream society - if not civilization itself - is always a compromise between male & female concerns. If we believe in equality - or at least fairness - then we have to make sure that one sex is not promoted at the expense of the other. We cannot apply identical expectations to both men & women, as men & women are, by definition, different. If you have a law or a morality that is very easy for 50% of the people to live under & very hard for the other 50%, it isn't a fair law, & it isn't a healthy morality.

Instead of shaming male sexuality, we could instruct teenage boys about some of the realities that accompany sex out there - we could tell them that if they make a girl pregnant, they will be in legal servitude to that girl for many years, & have to work to provide for a child they weren't ready for.We could tell them that unprotected sex with a promiscuous partner can result in STDs. This, after all, is basically the message we give to girls. But we could do it without judging & shaming the boys naturally polygamous urges. We could tell them if a truly exceptional woman comes along, he may want to commit to her, to build a life together & start a family, but in the meantime not to confuse the sex he will have with love. That won't end happily for anyone. 

So anyway. The fundamental point I have been trying to make in this somewhat meandering monologue is this:

Until there is a widespread recognition of male sexuality being innately different, without judgement, there can never be a truly fair, honest dialogue between the sexes.

And I guess it's in service of that that I am writing this.

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There's more to be said on this, but it's starting to get on a little. I'll pick it up again next post.